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Perfect world:

User: Hey Gateway, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9 APR?

Gateway: Here's your calculator, already prefilled with the data taken from your query.

Done.

The problem with all these little sites is, besides bloat, that the "Oh, neat, they can hook me up with lenders. Let me take a look." ends up with user getting malware and/or scammed. The problem with Google is that they can hardly be trusted at this point to do things like this in the interest of users. They want to be the frontend through which you access the Internet.

I used the word "Gateway" in my example as a placeholder; my imaginary perfect world recognizes that things like "currency conversion", "song lyrics" or "mortgage calculator" are data[0], which should be separate from the frontend used to access it. I dream of the Internet where things like these are API-driven and do not involve loading anything other than what's requested - neither ads, nor "value-adds", and definitely not all the rest of the webpage surrounding a mortgage calculator, which is bloat obstructing requested functionality.

--

[0] - yes, even mortgage calculator; it's a mathematical model, an algorithm, and code is data.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what%27s+the+monthly+p...

You're dreaming of what wolfram alpha is trying to build.

Edit: funnily enough, they parsed the input slightly wrong but you can quickly get to your answer.

works perfectly if you put a percent sign after 3.9

Perfect world:

User: I can afford a livable four walls and a roof from a small amount of savings, without needing to mortgage decades of my future. Brilliant.

Are you arguing that everyone should be able to buy a house, that they can live in forever, with cash they have with little savings?

The problem with that is that if a poor person can afford a house with cash, then a slightly richer person would just go, "wow, I can buy a really big house! Or two!", and suddenly there is no more space.

That would be nice, wouldn't it?

Maybe they wouldn't be allowed to buy two, because in "a perfect world", a place to live is a necessity, not a profit vector. Keeping housing supply limited to boost house prices, to appeal to house-owning voters and wealthy landlords, to extract six figures of money from normal people over decades, is nothing like "perfect".

Some houses are still going to be more desirable than others... how do we determine who gets which?

This sounds a lot more like inviting a trolling argument than any kind of genuine inquiry.

Here I say "landlord epxloitation, profiteering from necessities, houses left unlived in as investment vehicles for the international super rich, NIMBYism and entrenched residents voting against housing stock, AirBNB, broken zoning incentives" and then you say "FREE MARKET it's rich people's right to buy up everything and if you disagree you're dumb, free market is best market". And then we disagree to agree and both leave unhappy. Is that an approximately good summary?

We don't need to determine who gets which for this comment chain, we only need to question whether a 30 year mortgage should be the default way for a normal person to keep the rain off their bed, someone who isn't thinking of a beach condo in Malibu or a NYC penthouse, whether that is the best possible "perfect" world. I think it isn't.

It's not even malware/scams - it's just "Person who wants a mortgage calculator" is "person who is interested in getting a mortgage", which is some seriously high-value data. There's a lot more profit in selling you on to mortgage lenders (with a lot of data, like your budget, pre-filled) than selling you to scammers.

And surprise surprise... That's what DoubleClick (= Google) does, they'll sell your cookie ID as "interested in mortgage" audience to advertisers.

While in the interest of "privacy" Google limits the amount of data the banks and others you interact with get from any competing solution, they will sell all of it in Ads Data Hub which is a Google Cloud product. So not so much in the interest of privacy but much more in the interest of Google selling more cloud products.

User (spoken): Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage of $500k with 3.9% APR?

Google Assistant (aloud): $3,004

Seems pretty straightforward, no need for a web page.

Actual current results: "Sorry, I don't know how to help with that yet"

And yet if you type in a mortgage-related query, the first few entries Google will show you are ads. Not the calculator you're looking for.

Even then, mortgages aren't something Google can realistically calculate because lenders don't structure loans that simply. There is a fixed rate period, and a variable period after that.

First-time searchers may get suckered in by a personal finance site that relies on ads just as Google itself does, but after that, they'll be using the calculators that are on lenders' own sites when it's time to comparison shop.

The ads in search results are a utterly, completely different character to the on-site garbage parent is talking about. They are simple text entries that are clearly marked.

The majority of US home mortgages are 30 year fixed rate with no variable period.

The majority of UK home mortgages are 25 year with fixed rate for 2-4 years followed by variable rate(which if course no one ever goes on, you simply remortgage as you're about to go on the variable rate instead).

Canada is the same. Nearly impossible to find a mortgage where the fixed term is longer than 5 years.

Funny thing that usually "BUY THIS PRODUCT" is also a Google Product (Ad)

>MortgageSite: HEY! It looks like you're new to this site. Want to get on our mailing list?

Dear every web developer in the world who makes no effort to fight your employers' marketing department on this: I hate you.

I'm not related in any way to that scene, but what would you tell to marketing when they tell you that that while the mailing list pupup is obnoxious and annoying, it results in X users enrolling and later on Y of them actually ends being customers?

There does seem to be a sizeable number of people who take any request on a webpage as a command, and comply with the email popup. Which would then generate leads.

But, this popup harassment is just going to turn away experienced users. Many of whom will be the educated, well-compensated demographic the site most wants to cultivate. And a subset of that group will have the ability to create or edit blockers, which will then be turned against the offending site. Thus making it more difficult for that company to reach the more desirable users.

That's what I would tell marketing. That wouldn't work for all companies. Some will be thrilled to get a boatload of inexperienced or naive users. But would be nice if the others would start to get worried about what they're losing with their bounce rate.

Are you asking for a hypothetical scenario where I was the web developer in question having to stand up to some marketing drone?

Take a closer look at the key phrase in my post: "makes no effort". If a web developer who's trying to pay the rent makes even a single comment to the marketing drones about how email signup forms might not be a good idea, and asks if they're sure they want to do it, then that web developer has my sympathy and not my hatred. But if they just cheerfully say "Yes sir!" when the marketing drones make that demand, then I hate them just as much as I hate the marketing drones, because at that point they are marketing drones.

I was asking because I have been thinking if there are any convincing arguments or incentives for avoiding such tactics, besides moral and integrity. I'm afraid that if's all depend on moral and integrity it is unlikely we are going to win this battle.

Morals and integrity are foreign concepts to marketers. I used to think that marketing had a place, if properly used. After working with marketers for a decade, I just consider them and their whole wretched field a lost cause. I have no sympathy, no empathy, no compassion for any of them. Nowadays I make every effort to use only paid services whenever possible. (If any Fastmail devs are reading... I frickin' love you guys.)

This is great but it ain't gonna fix my internet

sometimes I try to mess with sites that ask for an email address for a mailing list by entering their own addresses: like "support@domain.com", "webmaster@domain.com", etc.

let them deal with their own spam, then they'll understand.

I like you.

That's a great idea. I'll try that next time. My version of petty revenge is to sign up with one of my throwaway Gmail accounts, and then mark them as spam as soon as the first newsletter rolls in. Hopefully, there's others doing the same and they'll be at least partially blacklisted.

My go to has been "ceo@example.com" for years.

Or various Five Eyes addresses.

>My go to has been "ceo@example.com" for years.

I think I may make the effort to learn how to make a Firefox extension to automate this. Scrape "about us", "contact", etc. page in background for first email address, then autofill it into the email spam form. Boom, done.

This is great! I usually just do something like bs@fake.com.

> employers' marketing department

In some places this a growth hacking/marketing tactic (that works), in others it isn't the marketing team but someone up high demanding it because they've seen it. Am still a marketer, but I've been in the latter and trying to fight the good fight.

You forgot:

MortgageSite: Please wait while we take 10 seconds to calculate an interest rate AND CHECK OUT THIS SPONSOR!

MortgageSite: Five more seconds. YOUR COMPUTER MIGHT HAVE A VIRUS!! DOWNLOAD THIS FREE SCANNER NOW!

MortgageSite: Your rate has been calculated! Click HERE to reveal it using a totally pointless JavaScript animation!

User: Finally, now I’ll just move my cursor up and close this tab.

MortgageSite: OMFG YOURE GOING AWAY! Please come back and click on me more!!!

also, "your rate is ready! just enter your email address and we will send it to you!"

Your second part is wrong. According to the data most users don't dig deeper, they just stop at the answer Google already gave. MortgageSite doesn't even get the traffic in the first place.

I was using that example to establish that the sites (that are losing the clicks) are just as scummy as (if not more than) Google for "stealing" the clicks. That, in turn, helps explain why users might be reluctant to dig deeper, showing that general scummy practices are at least as much to blame as Google "stealing" their content.

Those sites or sites like them made the content initially that google now steals.

I remember a world without lyric sites. These sites provide value. The top links google shows may not because of page layout or bloated sizes but those are the links google presents there are lyric sites with no javascript. Meanwhile tons of mortgage related calculator pages exist on most bank sites and other non-spamming pages.

Clicking a google search result takes seconds to load the link while clicking a ddg link feels much faster. The additional tracking and redirections start to make things feel sluggish.

It's a chicken and egg problem. Website owners are forced to monetize more aggressively as the traffic from search slows down. And as they monetize more aggressively, the user experience suffers, causing them to tank in the SERPs, fueling even more desperation.

Google could fix that if they wanted to.

I remember when Google used to push content developers to be better: no paywalls, no overlays, faster response times, no scammy ads, no content farms.

Those days seem to be over. Google is constantly sending me to content behind paywalls and under pop up content.

So you blame Google for paywalls and full screen ads on the pages... you demand they send you to in lieu of just hosting some content themselves? Seems like Google just can't win in that scenario.

FWIW: I agree that for a long time, the need to rank highly in Google's searches pushed content sites to be a better experience. And the equilibrium we've reached isn't as nice as it was 10 years ago. I just don't think "because Google" really captures the complexity here.

Google's whole value proposition is sending me to the best place on the web for a given query -- so yes, when they don't do that it's frustrating.

No, I don't blame them for hosting the content themselves for some queries. I never said that.

Just as Amazon holds some responsibility when I purchase a counterfeit item on their platform, it behooves both companies to have higher quality standards -- and both have the market strength to do it.

I agree that paywalls seem more common. But the early web had plenty of popups and scummy ads. Popup blockers were added to browsers quite a long time ago.

Content farms were huge before Google started kicking them out in 2011. Have they made a comeback?

Google's latest attempt to keep the crap under control (AMP) is very unpopular on Hacker News, but I guess it shows they are trying to do something?

> Content farms were huge before Google started kicking them out in 2011. Have they made a comeback?

Have they not? Content marketing seems as alive as ever, if not more.

> Google's latest attempt to keep the crap under control (AMP) is very unpopular on Hacker News, but I guess it shows they are trying to do something?

Because we - myself and many of those other HNers disliking it - believe that with AMP, making web more performant and less crappy is only an excuse, and one that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

It's hard to tell since there is little in the news about them, but it seems like once, content farms were fast-growing businesses, and now they are bottom feeders? Or maybe they're just boring compared to all the other threats nowadays?