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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

Which is hilarious because the reason I can't switch The New Yorker website to HTTPS is because of ads - which I'm getting from Google DFP which allows non-secure ad assets.

In short; Google will penalize me because I use Google.

The universe has a sense of humor.

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Similarly, Google claimed they would start penalizing websites that showed full-page ads for mobile apps instead of showing you the website. But every single time I try to get to Gmail, or Drive, or Calendar, or any Google service on the web using a mobile device, I'm shown a full page ad for a mobile app. Google has been doing this for years, and it seems like it's also been a year since they said they'd punish all sites that do that. But Gmail still turns up as #1 in search results for email, so does calendar, etc. It seems to me that they have whitelisted themselves and choose not to punish any Google property that breaks the Google rules, despite claiming to do so.

Edit: Typically, when a service tells me "no you can't use this service until you view a full page ad" I just give up and not bother continuing to the service. But the same is not true for Google. I reluctantly click through the full page ad every single time. It's incredibly annoying that I let them get away with this and still use the services. They are so outrageously arrogant about it and it bothers me greatly, but still, I don't change.

Edit 2:

Going to calendar.google.com: http://i.imgur.com/fNRhhYx.png

First results for searching 'calendar': http://i.imgur.com/l3A5Wlh.png

They also sell full page ads now: https://support.google.com/adxseller/answer/6068103?hl=en

You are right. I think Google want people to get annoyed with this vignette ads if he or she uses google calendar. The user should install Google calendar the APP to be fully controlled by google. Then Google can just sends the user any ad what google like...

They all prefer user using apps rather than web pages. Google and others want to get fully control of users and make money...

> First results for searching 'calendar': http://i.imgur.com/l3A5Wlh.png

Well in your screenshot it seems like you scrolled down on the "calendar" search results. I get some other random thing ahead of Google Calendar, in incognito or not.

It is really annoying (I too hate those things, I would have installed the app if I wanted the app), but the click through thing only happens once in my testing. Are you clearing your cookies regularly?

I scrolled down because the top of the page was a Google Ad for Google Calendar. I chose to show the first organic result. Here's the top of the page: http://imgur.com/cO84ogZ.png

How about using a software to get rid of google ads?

I can erase google ads from DNS level. Users can never reach any google ad at all.

What you think?

Adaway was already invented ;)

The fact is they did penalize themselves for couple of times in history.

Mostly when obliged to do so.

They also said not to "penalize" websites based on user agent. Yet they do it and have been doing it for years.

They also said to use valid html/etc while they didn't do it for cost saving/performance reasons. Not sure this one is still true.

My guess is that this list of preaching water and drinking wine is pretty long for Google. I think their view is they know what they are breaking so it is OK in that particular case. The rest of us has to suck it up.

Yahoo shows YMail. Bing is the only one shows Gmail as first, although Yahoo technically uses Bing. You can pretty much say Yahoo actually "put herself above others" and more guilty than Google. In fact, I don't think Google is doing anything wrong. After all, Gmail is popular, and if you are doing a Google search, the user may be interested to know Google also offer email and most likely the user is already a Google user.

> You can pretty much say Yahoo actually "put herself above others"

Do you mean `itself`? Since when are tech companies assigned genders?

Parent poster might not be from an English-speaking background.

I am not, sort of. You can refer to a country by "she", so why is it inappropriate for a company? I don't see any issues. You can view a company as a mother too.

That's an archaic and half-valid use, so stretching it to apply to a company makes it pretty much invalid.

You could try to convince people to use the word that way, but at present it's just not done. Companies are 'it' or you can talk about the people that make up the company as 'they'.

given that they are not a native speaker this seems over the top. Also maybe consider Sapir–Whorf before stating universal rules..

What? I'm talking about English, not universal rules. The non-native speaker is the one that shouldn't be making assertions about what phrases do or do not have 'issues'.

Also Sapir-Whorf is dumb.

If you try to dictate how language must be used you're just being ignorant of how she constantly evolves through her use by different speakers.

So, there.

I'm not. I'm merely pointing out that such a use is going against the way English has been changing over time.

English as she is spoke does this?

One of the reasons a country has feminine gender is the association with the motherland (ie. one's native country).

Not all countries have feminine gender, just check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland

I never thought about the question of whether, in languages that require nouns to have grammatical gender, particular countries may have a different grammatical gender from others, but on reflection I already know examples where they do in Portuguese: o Brasil, o Canadá (amusing to me because of the national anthem), but a Argentina, a Alemanha.

I wonder if this also happens in German; the only examples I'm thinking of offhand are feminine (die Schweiz, die Türkei) but now I'm not at all sure that there isn't a masculine one too!

Apparently Iraq, Iran, Yemen, the Congo, Lebanon, and Chad are masculine in German: https://german.yabla.com/lessons.php?lesson_id=409

Actually I can't think of many cases where German would use pronouns with countries. The reason these are masculine is because they are typically referred to using a definitive pronoun (literally "the Iraq", "the Iran", etc). It's more common with names of regions -- which may indicate that these countries used to be mere geographical regions (rather than sovereign nations) when the names entered the German language.

It also happens with countries like the UK, the US, the Czech Republic and so on, but obviously for the same reasons as in English.

I can't actually think of a country that's feminine in German. The "die" you often see is actually indicating plural (e.g. "die vereinigten Staaten", the United States; or "die Niederlande", "the Netherlands").

When you use pronouns for anaphora, would you use "es" for all countries, or is it plausible to imagine "er" or "sie", as with common nouns?

For example: Vor drei Monaten waren meine Mutter und ich in der Schweiz; wir haben _____ wirklich schön gefunden.

Would you accept "sie" here as a reference to Switzerland (because it was referred to as "die Schweiz"), or "es", or both? My intution is "es", but I'm not not a native speaker and non-native German speakers notoriously over-apply "es" to inanimate things.

I'd use "es" because it refers to the experience of being in Switzerland rather than the country itself.

But Switzerland is another example of a country that is typically used with an article. Consider the sentence "Ich fahre nach ____" with a country name. It doesn't work for countries like Switzerland ("nach Schweiz" sounds wrong, you'd instead say "in die Schweiz" -- same as "nach Kongo" vs "in den Kongo").

Thanks! Can we force the sentence to be about the country itself?

- Was meinen Sie über die Schweiz?

- ____ ist schön. / Ich finde ____ schön.

Several countries have articles in German, most don't. Plural countries (USA, UAE) have the plural article, which in the standard form is the same as the feminine article ("die") which makes for even more confusion, but when used in a case changes differently ("in den USA" vs "in der Schweiz") :)

Some feminine countries: Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, Mongolia, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, Central African Republic.

Male, in addition to your own list: Niger (!= Nigeria), Sudan, Vatican.

Neutral: UK (because kingdom is a neutral noun in German), potentially others

In their native tongues, sure. But we're not talking about Afrikaans or French, we're talking about English. And since Britannia is feminine, English would have developed with the word "motherland" representing the native country.

But if you have a child company, wouldn't you expect to associate the parent company with a feminine gender before a masculine gender? That's what I am getting at. An organization has that "motherland" feel in some way.

Not really, no. Motherland is a very specific term that's been ingrained into English most likely because of the close personal relationship between people and their native countries, which would have been Britannia for many English speakers when the language was developing. There isn't really that same deep and universal connection when talking about organizations, so a similar term probably wouldn't develop anytime soon.

Sure, but what about ships? If you've read any sci-fi, the term "mothership" should spring to your mind. Or "motherboard" in hardware.

The concept of "some larger entity that spawns smaller entities" seems to generally lend itself to the mother/daughter terminology if you want to be poetic about it.

That said, whatever happened to artistic liberties?

In Portuguese we also say motherland. I doubt it's a Saxon thing, given Portuguese is a Latin language.

This. I would've written the same by mistake.

No offense meant but why not get the app?

I understand not wanting an application for a news website or something like that but something you use often like google calendar it would seem like the application would be better than the mobile page.

I do have the app. And that fact makes this double-annoying. When trying to visit a website, I'm told not to do that. That would be annoying on its own, and in fact it was for the first few years that it happened. But that's not at all what is frustrating me right now. What's super annoying is that Google claimed last year that they would penalize websites that do this, because they find it annoying too. Except they have done no such thing. I'm calling out Google's hypocrisy on who gets to show full-page ads without being penalized - Google does and nobody else?

If they want to show full-page ads and be super annoying, then fine, I'll deal with it. But don't pretend to be against it when you do the same practice yourself.

> I do have the app. And that fact makes this double-annoying.

It really just shows the sad state of mobile advertising when they're showing you ads for an app you already have.

On the other hand, I like that websites are unable to query my phone to find out what apps I have installed.

Yes I agree with you, I don't want any random website to be able to query my phone to find out what apps I have installed either.

However, if I'm on a specific app publisher's website, I wouldn't mind letting them know (through some mechanism) that I've already installed their specific app.

Sad state?

How do you expecet them to know all the apps installed on your phone? And if they DID know this information, people would be up in arms about privacy or lack there-of.

It's google. They know that you downloaded the app from the Play Store and used the app to connect to their servers directly. They already have plenty of information.

Yes, showing you an advertisement for an app you've already installed is bad UI/UX, regardless of the reason why. On the publisher side, it's also a wasted ad impression.

I don't expect them to know all the apps installed on my phone, nor do I think they need that much information to solve this particular problem.

If they don't know it, they shouldn't make assumptions.

Why do you assume they're not being penalized?

Showing that they rank above "timeanddate.com" doesn't mean a lot.

Being ranked #1 in a Google search for 'calendar' does mean a lot. Also, let's say they are penalizing themselves, but the penalty isn't enough to change their ranking. Why, then, would they claim that they are making this change because it's better for users to not have these ads but to still run these ads themselves?

> Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the Web page.

https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/09/mobile-f...

This would imply that they know the experience is bad for users, they know that the penalty won't hurt their ranking, and so they will continue to show the bad experience regardless? That's just as bad as them not penalizing themselves for the full page ad.

A penalty that doesn't knock down one of the largest sites on the internet can still be a big deal to everyone else.

I assume different departments run calendar and search.

Not if you want to allow attendees to edit your event.

This is missing from the android app. So you have to browse to the calendar on the web and ... this.

Google DFP allows it because publishers (e.g. the New Yorker) aren't ready to switch all their traffic HTTPS. If they wanted to they could turn the switch and be HTTPS and tell DFP to only serve secure creatives.

One of the larger difficulties for publishers is that many of the 3rd party SSPs aren't ready to go full HTTPs and so publishers are reluctant to make the switch because it reduces demand sources.

Disclaimer: Work for Google in advertising

  One of the larger difficulties for publishers is that
  many of the 3rd party SSPs aren't ready to go full HTTPs

Right, but Google can motivate or improve the third-party advertisers to update much more effectively than publishers can - just Google hasn't chosen to do that yet.

It would be easy to proxy http-only ads from through a CDN that added encryption. Or to charge a premium to http-only ad networks, and ramp the premium up over time.

How do you think Google can motivate 3rd party advertisers? I'm talking about the Rubicons, Pubmatics, etc. Google doesn't have any real leverage over them. Other than the fact that as publishers do move to SSL (because of the SEO penalty that non SSL sites have) they won't use the SSPs that don't demand or can't insure 100% SSL for their buyers. So in effect Google is putting pressure on them to do it.

I don't understand your next part at all. Who would charge a premium to http only networks? Those sites don't actually rely on Google for delivery.

This is also effectively true for the more broadly used Google Adsense (not just DFP). They do support displaying adsense, but then screen out all non-https ads. Which, of course, results in a lower CPM.[1]

[1]https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10528?hl=en

>>In short; Google will penalize me because I use Google

+++

To be fair, sites without ads are a better experience than sites with ads.

Sure. I like free things as well.

I dunno. Sites that can't pay the bills tend not to give good experiences, due to not being able to do things. Like exist.

Depends on what the bills are for. Most sites that don't have content-production staff need twenty bucks a month for hosting, plus an occasional prod from a sysadmin.

Are there some types of content where the author, photographer, etc will produce it without direct compensation? Sure.

Are there others where that's not practical? Also, yes. Maybe not things that you need, but this problem does exist.

At the moment, there's not a model, outside of ads, that works very well for that sort of thing. There are some subscription/micropayment schemes that seem promising, but nothing that works as well as ads do.

I didn't say it was supposed to work for all sites, just that st3v3r is ignoring a huge swath of the internet by implying that nonprofessional sites don't exist.

They're trying to nudge their customers for a while. It is just a little difficult when that's one's biggest source of income.

For example, https://support.google.com/dfp_sb/answer/4515432?hl=en

Also funny, because for many sites that run DFP or Adsense...that's their biggest source of income.

So, G is rationalizing their slow pace with the same reason that's not good enough for others :)

Google is a large company, with multiple branches.

I can't remember what services it is now, but there was some Google service that was deranked because it broke some Google search ranking policy.

It shows some integrity for the company that they're (sort of) operating their search engine objectively.

I presume that google doesn't uprank sites that specifically use Adsense versus other competing ad services?

It was Chrome.

http://readwrite.com/2012/01/03/google_forced_to_punish_itse...

I have a page hosted on Google Sites. It seems that Google Sites doesn't support HTTPS on custom domains either.

That is interesting. The Ads team is the same group that recommended turning off Transport Security in iOS 9 so you can run your Google's unencrypted Ads stack[1]. I'm sure there are two different departments that are fighting two totally separate wars. I've definitely seen this pattern in huge companies where one team is trying to push an agenda that forces another team to reshuffle their priorities.

[1] - http://googleadsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2015/08/handling-app-...

It is really hard for DFP to not allow non-secure creatives as long as you can create 3rd-party creatives. They do try to detect non-secure assets though, so they won't run on secure pages. See: https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/4515432?hl=en

I'm jealous that you get to work for the New Yorker website. Any openings?

http://condenast.avature.net/careers/SearchJobsTechnology

Yes! Send me an email to discuss: donohoe@newyorker.com

Reminds me of PageSpeed Insights bitching about assets loaded from Google (fonts, scripts, css).

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