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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

This is the subtle truth that I've seen a few folks on Twitter talking about for the past year or so: That Google has slowly but steadily reduced both the outbound clicks to other websites, but also the portion of their revenue that's based on ads hosted by other websites, while bringing both the "results" and the ad placements in-house, where they no longer have to pay out a share to site owners.

Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue to itself.

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The increasing sprawl of non-search widgets invading the search result page reminds me of the AOL years where "the web" was funneled through a narrow portal controlled by one entity.

Having to scroll down past ads, unrelated news, unrelated youtube videos, and ever more of these info boxes has pushed the actual content I'm looking for out to the second page. It's made it much easier to use ddg as default and use the !g flag only when absolutely necessary.

And the downfall of AOL was Google because Google had a better product. In order for google to fall, you need a product that's better (or more of what people want; you need to give them a reason to change their search engine).

I have no trouble believing Google is going to fall.

Their results have gone into the toilet - I ragequit Google search about once a day and do something else like forum searches.

Same. I cant tell if my questions are just getting more specific and technical, but Google search results have been getting pretty useless in the past year or so

Same here. It seems the websites that show up top are become more and more spammy and less relevant to my query. I keep seeing all sorts of one sentence hipster 2.0 sites that want me to believe they are a credible source of information.

I love how google likes to completely ignore what I'm trying to search for. I wish I could think of an example because it happens to me often, but I can't so I'll make one up.

Imagine you're searching for tail lights for your car or something, but you don't know the size, so you search "Astra tail light size". This might bring up headlights. Wrong but no matter, you'd go on to google "Astra tail light size -headlight -head" or something.

What Google seems to have been doing to me recently is ignoring those negated terms, ignoring quotes, and just giving me the same results again and again. It's really getting annoying. Google seems to assume it knows what I'm looking for, and that my search query is just completely wrong and not what I want.

Note that the car stuff is just an example, I'd expect Google to not give you headlights the second time. It generally but not exclusively happens to me when searching things that are more technical. ESPECIALLY when it's a consumer level thing I'm trying to get info on, Google likes to assume it's giving you errors and you're trying to fix it. Which makes sense for most users, but god it's frustrating when every combination of advanced search parameters you try does nothing!

Google search needs a checkbox or something to turn off it's cleverness and just do an actual search.

Absolutely. I was trying to figure out something to do with timeouts in an SMT solver called Yices, so I had search strings about signals and alarm and Yices - of course. Google decided that this was a generalized programming question and displayed a lot of stuff about signals and alarm handling that didn't relate to Yices.

How likely a search time is "Yices", ffs? Feels like something that exotic ("statistically unlikely") probably is meant to be in the results by default.

I had no idea what Yices is. So I Googled it - the first link is SRI's Yices SMT solver. I tried "yices alarm" "yices signals" "yices timeout", and all of them showed only links related to Yices in the first result page (various manual pages, types, etc). So my attempt at reproducing your experience has failed.

The top Google hit for "yices alarm" is currently the exact Hacker News comment you've replied to. I wonder if Google adapted its search results based on that very comment? Maybe their algorithms shrewdly give more weight to fixing search results when the context mentions Google ("I googled for...", "Google didn't work when...", etc.) and the site is high profile (like HN). That would be very crafty.

I am kind of happy and sad in the same time to know that it is not just me.

This is SO annoying.

I stick with Google but increasingly try to tweak my searches to hit forums. They're just that much less likely to be made-for-AdSense content by a copywriter paraphrasing other information from the web.

Do you have any tips for this sort of search tailoring? It's something I try for, but I've yet to find any particularly good keywords to leverage.

Usually I add "reddit" to the search phrase and try to find threads / user-generated and hopefully more organic content this way.

reddit is good, and so is just "forum" which will turn up specialty forums that haven't been absorbed by one of the Borgs yet.

I often just add "whirlpool" which is a fairly reliable Australian forum that started covering telcos but these days will have things about cars, home maintenance, personal health, etc. Or I add "forum" and that can be enough to tilt the results.

I usually add site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com etc. Actually google had a way to search discussion gruops, but they removed this feature as forums don't pay for their adds I suppose.

... and that product will likely repeat the cycle again, on some schedule of another. Might be the 20+ years of Google, might be the few years that Medium was only modestly annoying, might instantly go to shit.

The problem is the business model breeds for this, and we end up replacing one abusive monopoly with another, until we can break that cycle.

For a time it seemed Free Software might ... free us ... from that, though as even that effort's biggest boosters (Eben Moglen, Bradley Kuhn, RMS) freely admit these days, we've been regressing of late, and at an increasing rate.

What's it going to take?

Searching symptom tracker, google tells me no no you mean symptom checker. No sorry I do need a way to track them not check them

Anecdotally, i am noticing a steady decline in adsense RPMs for the exact same audience over past 2 years, and adsense is now most of the time not filling the ad slot.

Also, it has gotten very hard to rank in google for new sites. SEO blackhat tactics rule, and even local businesses use them. Google went from win win to win-get lost.

Sadly, now that webmasters need it the most, investments in alternatives to search and advertising have dried up. There is almost nothing except G.

I feel the same way about ranking new websites. In high school, friends and I made a website for which we did zero search engine optimization (nor were we even aware of search engine optimization). We still ranked in relevant queries and easily got an audience of about ten thousand uniques a month.

Today, I struggle to get sites I make to show up on Google at all. For my most recent website, even searching for phrases that are unique to my website doesn't cause it to rank. This is more frustrating to me, because I have a Google ad for my website, which drives all of my traffic - so I know Google knows about my website and what keywords are relevant to it.

To your last sentence specifically though, I wouldn’t want Google to use ads data to influence non-ads rankings.

Google has turned an Ocean into a pond - I think we'll all be the better for it once they're gone.

Regularly cannot turn up results that I know exist - a modest change that has no relation to the query meaning and the results often turn up.

This is not the Google Search Engine I remember.

I had to google turn an ocean into a pond as I was not sure what the phrase entails. I got few images of small cars and your comment. QED

And googling it now brings up your comment!

I don't know how old you are, so it's hard to tell how long ago you're comparing. But how do you know if this isn't simply because there are a lot more content than it used to be ?

https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/ indicates the number of web sites is still growing at breakneck speed.

Somewhat dated but still relevant:

https://searchengineland.com/googles-search-indexes-hits-130...

says the growth rate for the number of pages to be still substantial.

> Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue to itself.

I wondered yesterday: if you provide microdata, Google scrapes it, and you later decide to remove your sites from Google - is Google allowed to keep the microdata and continue to publish it?

Removal is irrelevant because Google doesn't rely on a license for its index.

robots.txt is a courtesy, not a legal obligation.

If you once communicated the fact that 2+2 is 4 and Joe makes very good spaghetti you own the copyright to the text you published but neither the fact nor the opinion belongs to you in any meaningful way nor should it.

That's true, but a collection of facts ("a database") falls under copyright.

IANAL, but as long as google is only distributing the individual facts (not the database of facts) they would be in the clear, legally

https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html#data

This doesn't provide any protection for the underlying facts.

No, but if Google imports a database then they are still affected by the compilation copyright. It's too obvious of a hack to "just" claim that "yeah, we imported that entire database, but then we cracked all the facts apart and they're all separate now and it's just as if we never imported the database". That's not how the law works.

Even more interestingly, we've still never yet resolved the question of why Google gets to lift your entire site's contents and re-serve them in arbitrary ways to their own profit in the first place. It's really just a thing that happens on the internet because it was happening on the internet before the lawyers got there. I've said before and still believe that if there was no such thing as a search engine and they were just invented today, they'd be annihilated in court as nothing but one big copyright violation.

I'd rather give up copyright than search engines. Anyone who wants to push too hard ought to consider whether an entire nation might make the same choice.

Not sure why you are downvoted. In the EU databases fall under copyright, which indeed leaves the question how google legally deals with this (technically database right isn't copyright, but in this context that's a technicality).

Also, to quote from the Wikipedia article [1]: An owner has the right to object to the copying of substantial parts of their database, even if data is extracted and reconstructed piecemeal

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

> Not sure why you are downvoted.

Because they didn't say "in the EU", and it not being copyright is not just a technicality. Copyright is about creative expression, and utilitarian collections of facts aren't.

> Because they didn't say "in the EU"

They also didn't say "in the US". From context you can only assume "in some jurisdiction google cares about"

> Copyright is about creative expression

That's not true, or at least a very US-centric view. The Berne Convention, the international standard for copyright, reads:

"[...] shall include every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression, such as books, [...] works expressed by a process analogous to photography; works of applied art; illustrations, maps, plans, sketches and three-dimensional works relative to geography, topography, architecture or science."

also

"Collections of literary or artistic works such as encyclopaedias and anthologies which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such"

That's lots of things that are not exactly "creative expression" (even though exceptions for pure statements of fact do exist).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283698

"by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents"

If there was no selection or you make the original selection irrelevant, while also giving your own arrangement, then there's no violation of copyright.

I am not sure there's a specific copyright applicable there. You can ask Google to remove your website's data from their index (primarily via robots.txt)... but of course, that also delists you from search. Essentially Google has left the impossible choice to either let them steal your data for free or accept not being findable in the primary search engine on the Internet.

Yeah, but if you don't get any clicks, that choice is no longer impossible: you're providing value without getting any in return.

Granted, it's still a while away to get into that territory, I think most sites still profit from Google.

I think most of my zero-click search are a quick question on something you can find at wikipedia.

Well, I don't see the problem at google providing a cache to save WP's bandwidth. I block ads anyway...

Honestly, the second google started owning and promoting their own properties on search results, anti-trust regulators should have jumped on it.

I'm really not sure how Google can be protected by Section 230 and at the same time control and publish so much directly. Last time I read an article on the topic, google controls 23% of the top 100 sites.

I've heard a decent amount of wrong takes on Section 230. But this is the most bizarre, yet.

Neither the CDA, nor section 230 specifically, create the sort of publisher/platform dichotomy people seem to be hung up on.

And Section 230 does exactly the opposite of what people commonly think it does. It's actually right there, in the text:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of (a) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable [...]

That seems really easy to understand: you can delete nazi propaganda, porn, bad jokes, or just random user content from your platform without running the risk of thereby assuming liability for the rest.

But the inherently problem is that they need to be held liable for the rest. Because the rest is often criminal activity of which those platforms are making a profit. Perhaps removing Section 230 isn't enough, by your definition, because we need a law that explicitly holds platforms liable for profits generated from illegal activity.

That is a curious definition of need. Are landlords liable in your world for renting apartments to people who run ponzi schemes?

When they get to know about that fact and do not take steps to end this behaviour, although it would be in their possibilities, they might be held liable, too.

So ocdtrekkies point stands, imho. Google is directly profiting from shady activities through their services and therefore has no incentive to control or stop that behaviour. That's a tricky thing.

Not in my world; planet earth is a large place.

But in the country I live in, the USA, landlords are liable for many things their tenants do.

A friend of mine is a landlord and he almost lost a house he owns because his tenant was cooking meth in it. I don't remember the exact details, but the liability was no joke.

P.S. I don't agree with this liability issue, I'm simply describing reality as it is.

Section 230 didn't prevent Google from being fined $500M for publishing ads for Canadian pharmacies selling drugs to US citizens. What kind of illegal activities are you talking about, exactly?

Google regularly distributes malicious websites and malware through ads, and refuses to delist reported malicious websites. (Google Ads is the primary distributor of Windows PC malware today, if my customer support experience is any indication.) And the problem is that Google has a perverse incentive: More bidders for ads means higher bids. Since malicious actors raise the prices, they benefit from bad actors selling ads.

And the problem is that even if someone finally comes in and shuts those actors down, Google kept all the profit from the malicious activity. In order to incentivize Google to police it's ad platform, we need to implement a requirement which seizes all revenue from malicious advertising, retroactively when a malicious account is flagged/reported.

If Google is losing revenue on allowing bad actors on their ad platform, they'll be incentivized to quickly respond to reports and remove them so that legitimate ads, which they make money on, can have those ad slots.

More clicks on ads that lead to malware also leads to fewer clicks in the future, though.

Have you published data about this anywhere, like a list of reported links that were ignored?

> More clicks on ads that lead to malware also leads to fewer clicks in the future, though.

I really doubt this works this way. There's 3 assumptions here, for your scenario to play out, people must pass the following funnels:

1- The person notices the malware

2- The person associates the connection between the ad and the malware.

3- After making the connection they install a non-dummy adblocker. Dummy adblockers like the one by Eyeo whitelist google's ads while actually harming the competition. It benefits them! Note: if I look up adblock on google, uBlock is only mentioned on page 2 of google and only because it's mentioned as a competitor to adblock on a zdnet article. The first whole page is dedicated to the Eyeo plug in.

I'd say very few people will get through that funnel. My experience is that when my family and friends actually seek out help with their computers, they have let it go for years until the computer is a slow mess of malware, self installed spyware in the form of browser add ons and other crazy stuff.

I've actually known a person who buys a computer every couple of years when it 'gets slow' simply to avoid maintenance. The few that I know from IRL relationships that do use an adblock, mostly use adblock by Eyeo, simply because of the domain and ranking on google.

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