Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The reason why there's more content on walled garden social media instead of personal websites is in no small part Google's fault and not just because of Facebook and Twitter.

Google released several updates (such as "Panda") that greatly lowers the rank of domains that aren't linked to by major domains they deem to be trusted, such as those with edu or gov TLDs or whatever whitelist of domains they decided to add. There have also been updates that specifically lowers the rank of websites that are running forum or blog software. This was probably done to fight spammers but it has effectively killed off the long tail of topics.

This is admittedly speculation since the inner workings of Google search are not released to the public. But these findings have been corroborated by others on the internet.

I used to have a blog and several forums that used to rank highly for some niche keywords and over the years the search rankings started to drop off the front page while a single reddit comment with no content mentioning the same keywords would be #1.

I'd say that Google is very much to blame for this situation as they took the easy way out to fight spammers.

> This is admittedly speculation since the inner workings of Google search are not released to the public.

No, no, Eric Schmidt openly said that "Brands is how you sort out the 'mess'" (in search). And he started prioritizing big brands in search results and disappearing everyone else.

Panda even wiped out individual webmasters or small software houses - they were adding small back links to the websites that they built for their clients, per google's OWN recommendations, for years.

Then google turned around and suddenly penalized all of those legitimate links while 'sorting out the spam'. millions of small businesses, developers, software houses found themselves with zero traffic within a day. their hard earned traffic coming from legitimate business clients. whose sites were also affected similarly.

This caused the rise in internet marketplaces. from amazon to elance, upwork. because the small businesses and individuals were now totally invisible in search results and instead 'brands' dominated. a side effect was killing of independent content in search results and forcing everyone to have to post in social networks for visibility, forcing content creators out of their own blogs into social networks. Which exacerbated the damages that algorithms because now everyone had to obey individual corporations' unaccountable algorithms.

So yes, google has created this mess to a very large degree. Their nonchalant, uncaring attitude towards their users, customers that plagues all of their products crippled search as well. By saying "Brands is how you sort out the mess" and enforcing it top-down, one single ceo single handedly decided the fate of millions of small businesses, blogs, professionals. In a totally unaccountable way with no input from anyone affected.

https://www.wired.com/2008/10/google-ceo-call/

Speaking to a group of magazine executives at the Google headquarters, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday that the Internet is becoming a breeding ground for false information, reports Ad age. But trusted brands help weed through the disinformation:

"Brands are the solution, not the problem... Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

https://battellemedia.com/archives/2008/10/cesspool_brands_e...

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired….It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com