Dear Google, I'm Blocking You from My Website

To build an anti-monopoly case you would have to do more than show that Google was the only good ad vendor. Are they the only ones that can give you clicks because they are smarter and better at their jobs than every other ad vendor, or are they the only ones that can give you clicks because of underhanded market tactics? If I was the best shoemaker in town, to the point where buying shoes from anybody else was a waste of time, that wouldn't be illegal. You'd have to show I was doing more to stop competition.

And charges and payments have become suspiciously opaque. Things like CPM swings (for adsense) in the exact same audiences. As for adwords, luckily i can afford to forgo all mobile traffic.

I don't know what shit google is going through, but it seems to be pretty bad.

> Only thing I don't tried yet is more traditional ads, but I don't have money for that (for example TV ads)

I think we should try a webring-like structure , there is a lot of inventory that can be shared between small publishers (and they are underserved/plain ignored by google)

Fraudulent clicks make clicks worth less, so presumably the price already takes this into consideration?

It doesn't take much imagination to see how governments and what is arguably the most effective spying apparatus on the planet have developed mutually beneficial relationships.

https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-white...

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

When people think "advertising" they often think TV first. But you might be surprised how reasonable some advertising rates can be for radio (especially classical radio sponsorships and news radio), regional and local newspapers, and certain magazines.

A web site I used to own advertised with AdSense for a year. The second year I put the money into local public radio sponsorships and a single magazine ad, and the quality of the responses was much better.

The company is more parasite than a partner. It'll punish you severely without remorse for not following its rules. Good luck trying to open any kind of dialog.

That would be truly something. After all your market is what, 200mln people?

Google and you are no more partners than the fox and the lamb are partners. That’s your main problem. Do you know how many high profile companies have gone belly up because of a Google algorithm change?

That's nonsensical. Google already has their content.

If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every link aggregator that implements an AMP cache (including Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo Japan, etc.) will be able to instantly load your pages for users. If I start my own link aggregator, I don't need to have the clout of a Facebook, Apple, or Google to get publishers to enable instant loading from my site — I can cache the AMP pages they have already published.

It's the same as publishing bus routes according to Google Maps's standard feed format (https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/) . I publish once in that format, and not only do my bus routes show up better in Google, but they also show up in all other mapping applications that ingest that format, without me having to do any integration with them.

The hosts file is easily added to something like PiHole, uBlock Origin, or Steven Black's hosts project. Many other tools also accept host formatted block lists.

I'll be the first to admit that the list is lacking, but I would love to accept pull requests if anyone else has an interest in contributing their list of known AMP domains

Probably not a threat yet, but it is rotting. In the internet age everything happened so fast and in most ppl's mind google is still the Do no Evil company. But , everything is faster in the internet age, and so is the rot.

> engineers still sign up i

A major reason: They have bought up every viable competitor. Their services (search, videos, adwords, adsense, amp, mail) are building a fort around their search income. Others, e.g. Social networking was not needed for their fort so it died.

The difference is trust:

These AMP rants invariably look to the use of Google's CDN, or to the "google.com" domain in the address bar, and infer malintent. I presume the team had good intentions, particularly for end users.

The AMP team saw a problem (websites take a stupid amount of time to load on mobile, even on nice phones/networks) and devised a solution: "Google has one of the best network infrastructures on the planet. It serves things quickly. Let's cache pages that don't do slow things on that network, so they're fast for users." They devised some criteria for what they mean by "don't do slow things," and wrote tooling to assert it.

I don't believe the intent of the AMP team is to strongarm developers into using their framework, or to funnel all traffic through Google. I trust that they are well-intentioned people who are trying to do the right thing. They're not proud of the limitations of their original solution, and are making progress on fixing them: for instance, they pushed forward a new web standard (packaging) to fix the address bar problem:

https://blog.amp.dev/2018/05/08/a-first-look-at-using-web-pa...

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Many words have been written about the ramifications of echo chambers on our political discourse. Those same ideas apply here on HN too.

The more I see hyperbolic comments presuming everyone/thing is evil/bad/stupid, the less interesting this place becomes for me -- the less likely I am to come here. As that culture drives people like me away, the ratio of conspiratorial-armchair-quarterbacking:reasonable-discourse tilts further towards the negative. It drives even more people away, leaving a concentration of negativity. "Don't read the comments" starts to apply here too.

That's not a reaction to your comment, in particular: it's how I've started to feel about a lot of Hacker News, especially when my employer is the topic. When people presume the absolute worst -- in spite of more reasonable (and more likely) alternatives -- there's nothing fun to read or interesting to learn. I lose reasons to keep coming back.

I suspect people didn't moralize about working for the monopolistic phone company when working at Bell Labs. They probably thought about the amazing environment of pure research and the top-notch people they would be working with.

It's the same thing as startups that automate jobs away. Sounds helpful to companies...but it might just piss off the people that are laid off.

I wonder, how do we solve this general problem as a human civilization? Tech people can get together and make tech, without anyone asking, that changes the world and negatively affects people even if the authors have totally moral intentions.

How crazy is it, that I can write some kind of automation software tomorrow that I think will be really cool and helpful, sell it to businesses, and get thousands of people laid off?

1. Not every tech person agrees with you on the degree of evilness of Google. The set of such people is huge, despite what you read here on HN. Google employees are a mere tiny subset. I wish I could remember the name, but there's a fallacy that goes like this: "If everyone has the same information as I do, then they will have the same conclusion. If they do not, then it's likely they are deluding themselves or are malicious". Consider if you are falling for that fallacy.

(I too fall into that camp - my angst towards Google is not their monopolistic endeavors, but the fact that there hasn't been any good user visible thing from them for years. They're not innovating in that space any more).

2. Most people have to work 30-40 years to retire - even in the tech industry. The companies where you don't are the outliers. And in most non-Google companies, life is very mundane. The company/employee relationship often isn't good. There's always politics, and there are always problem people. Furthermore, if you're fairly smart, the level of incompetence you'll perceive elsewhere is large. I could make a rather large list of annoyances in the life in a typical company. Say you're working in one of those, and now see you have 30+ years to put up with this.

From what I've heard, Google has a lot fewer of these immediate, local problems. Overall, Google treats its people much better. I'm sure they have their own problems, but I suspect they're a much smaller subset than the problems at your average workplace.

The key thing to understand about human nature: Local factors will always play a much bigger role than global ones. In the long run (think decades), working for an employer who treats you better is a big gain. After about a decade at a mediocre company, it's hard to tell yourself that "Yeah the working life sucks, but at least I'm not a monopoly!" for 2-3 more decades.

I'll take myself as an example. I was recently asked if I wanted to interview for a company in an industry that had been my dream since childhood to work in. The work they do is changing the world in a way I advocate (as opposed to serving ads). In the beginning of my career, I would have said "Yes, sign me up!" But now that I've worked for a number of years, I know better and immediately turned them down. Yes, they're doing good for the world. But also yes, the work/life balance sucks, and although the salary is larger than mine, it's not near Google level (i.e. if I move there, I still have to work for decades to retire). The company has a reputation of being abusive to its employees.

Local effects matter more.

Now of course, there are companies out there with good employee satisfaction, and with a lot less pay than Google. I would wager most of their employees do not leave for Google.

The short answer to your question is simply apathy (no one cares) and/or mild psychopathy (completely in a bubble to a borderline pathological degree.) They're not evil, they are just people.

Here's a dark little anecdote of corporate social psychopathy:

One day I realized I hadn't seen Chad (not his real name) in a few few days. Checking email lists, I discovered that his last email was ten days earlier. I went to my immediate boss and asked him about it and it turns out Chad had suffered a stroke and dropped at his desk one evening after most people had already left.

No one mentioned it.

He eventually came back to work after a couple of weeks with as little fanfare as he had left and went right back to work.

I was pretty freaked out that a coworker having a stroke was treated as no more of a big deal than someone dropping their coffee on the floor.

That's not how they became the darling of the tech scene though.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users [..] we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. [..] we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

As a French I’m pretty glad in retrospect that my ancestors under Napoleon reign and the Bourbon restoration didn’t go like “I really think democracy would have been a nice feature but I feel like this ship sailed”

Specific results for niche search queries have been getting way worse over the last few years though. To the point where you have to actively try to trick the engine into giving you anything remotely meaningful.

Almost every time I try, I find pages and pages of generic, SEO optimized crap.

Just in case you weren't aware:

>On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would henceforth power Yahoo! Search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

People used to say this about Altavista and Dogpile and Lycos before Google. Change is possible, but it's slow and hard.

Google is also the best at searches.

I disagree with you on this one. It used to be the best tool for searching. Now it's hit-and-miss. I've found about 70% of the time DDG works, and I only use Google when DDG turns up nothing useful.

Along those lines, other search engines don't have to be better at search than Google. They just have to be "good enough" at search. Then the competing search engine has to being in some killer feature so that the average person loses allegiance to Google and makes the switch full-time.

That killer feature probably won't be privacy, though. That's too abstract a notion for the masses.

> Bing and Yahoo are treated as a joke.

i use bing or others like yandex for image search. google is a front for stock sites and pinterest.

Hmm, maybe bing should focus on image search , use that as a trojan horse to take on google.

What evidence do you have that it's only a small boost? That may be the case for very specific searches. But if you search anything where there is a lot of competition between publishers (coverage of major news stories, product reviews, etc), Google serves almost exclusively AMP results, with the exception of the odd result from Wikipedia or Twitter. Failing to implement AMP would be suicide for many publishers.

Very quickly, a strong selection pressure can establish a trait "at fixation", as biologists say. When this happens, AMP just is the web.

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

Googlebot looks for this meta tag.

I've been using DDG as my primary search engine now for several years, and using Google no longer "feels like the Web" for me. I imagine I have one hell of a case of observation bias in that, but it does seem like alternatives have been gaining some traction in recent years.