Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Google search killed the web. Links went from how you shared content to how you spam page-rank which promoted spammers swarming any popular site not because humans would click links but because dumb algorithms would do so.

Further simply linking to interesting things became less useful so simply sharing link collections stopped being a thing.

View on HN

I remember a time when it was actually possible to rank on the top 3 by writing quality content on your own blog.

But then I remember Google giving "trusted" domains such as digg and reddit extra weight and it was quite depressing seeing the top result for the exact title of one of my blog posts going to the digg and reddit page that merely pointed to my article.

Nowadays it seems practically impossible to get good rankings even for unique phrases and you have to buy advertising and backlink services unless you want to wait 2-3 years. And a lot of blog posts here automatically get accusations of blog-spam even though some of them actually aren't.

Your comment has me interested. What years are you describing?

Any time before 2007-2008, not sure the exact year.

That's still possible. At least if Wikipedia doesn't have an article on it.

Google results aren't static, so you may see something different, but when I search for /dev/urandom, I get the German and English Wikipedia first (getting past that is nigh impossible, reddit is nothing compared to that), then my essay, then(!) the man page, then tptacek's blog post, then one of Pornin's fantastic Stackexchange answers.

Actually, digg and reddit don't feature anywhere in the first twenty results.

It is still possible but it is very difficult.

Google will show results by changing the ranks a little bit for random people to see which one has better CTR but mostly they are unchanged. It also probably knows that you would prefer your essay so it shows it higher than normal.

And digg/reddit/hn results were manually de-emphasized by a google update, I think it might have been the Panda update or before that, so starting a link aggregator is also much harder than before.

Google has given these websites a free moat.

From personal experience, creating content now is 20% creation, 80% promotion.

This is off putting to most content creators.

The internet went from a world of content creators to a world of salesmen.

Sounds a bit like the US, which went from a nation of inventors to a nation of salesmen.

Hah. I think it's only mildly controversial to assert that Google search created the web.

IMHO the golden age of the web was in-between the points where pagerank started having a major impact (leading to the rise of indepenent blogs as easily discoverable sources of writing and thought) and before they got crushed between the scylla and charybdis of spam blogs and over-optimized big content sites.

Google started drowning in spam and began to tweak it's algorithms in favour of big content. Simultaneously Twitter/Facebook/Instagram and god knows what else captured the mainstream eyeball.

There's still great independent content out there - but somehow it now feels like it's a side-channel rather than a vanguard.

It is? Google was created in 1998 and didn't hit it big for a few years thence. There was a vibrant web for several years before that, and other search engines (Lycos, AltaVista) did a perfectly fine job of doing what Google does now. Sites like Slashdot and Geocities existed long before Google came around. Google was a better search engine, but it hardly created the web.

Agreed. In my memory, the years before were superior. Almost no commercial presence, what felt like more informed and less emotive opinion, small websites run for the love of them, the birth of Wikipedia and the growth of Linux, etc.

I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment but Wikipedia was born after Google search appeared.

The original Wiki / WikiWiki / WikiWikiWeb started way before Google, in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb

Even Wikipedia used that software in the beginning, as did many other projects. As MediaWiki and Wikipedia got more well known, many sites upgraded their Wiki to MediaWiki.

Lycos (ha!) and Altavista certainly did NOT do a perfectly fine job. They were more-or-less dreadful if you actually tried to use them to find anything.

Actually, AltaVista was a good search engine, if you knew how to use it. What Google did was deskill search, so that you got good (or sometimes better) results from very simple queries, rather than complex search strings.

By the time Google was available Altavista wasn't a good search engine.

I was intimately familiar with using it - indeed, I started using it when it was good, as http://www.altavista.digital.com (in those days we had to type both the http:// and the www).

The search itself was ok in the sense that it indexed things correctly. However, the ranking was very naively implemented and used basic TF-IDF style ranking of pages that matched the query, with strong bias towards the META tags (remember them?).

That meant that meta-tag stuffing was a thing, and very simple keyword stuffed pages ranked very highly.

I was one of the earliest users, and if you could construct good Boolean searches, you could get good results. The thing about Google was that dumb searches worked very well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com