Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.

If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand without missing it (so that barrier of review is low), while being prohibitively expansive if an actor want to cheat the system and generate millions of reviews.

This is so true. It’s pain to search for anything undeterministic with nowadays. I usually find myself putting double quotes on every single word I’m interested in and Google still brings unrelated results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Areddit.com&tbs=qdr...

Or, you know, just make your own open-source search engine, with blackjack and hookers.

> 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.

These are solved by being transparent and surfacing the agent (maybe even the sub-agents) for ranking, and allowing us to choose.

This way, if someone/something is gaming the system, I can just say "this recommender is garbage", and consequently it and all its sub-choices are heavily downranked for me.

This'll make filter bubbles even worse, but that ship has sailed. And I'm sort of a progressive-libertarian-centrist (in the classical sense, not in the American sense). If I get put in a bubble with people who have similar balanced tastes: yes please!

Of course Wikipedia is way smaller than the internet, but still one way to go could be by having themed "human curated niches"

Google's index is so large that it's physically very hard to transfer out while being updated. Bandwidth cost is non negligible outside google's data centre. In terms of data structure, i can imagine it is arranged in a way that make google search easy.

If you pay close attention, you can spot fake reviews because they usually come from “Local Guides” (so supposedly the most trusted users).

Reddit is somewhat better at ranking and filtering spam, due to local mods, like there were in the times of web directories and webrings.

One of the former bosses of Google search explained that the key metrics they follow to consider the success of “Search” are the number of page views and the total revenue.

So if a user doesn’t find what he needs but keeps coming back it’s a win for them.

tbh this is just a bandage, its just going to get botted once people discover the pattern (a lot of premium bot farms do offer mature or hacked gmail accounts anyway) and its going to be worse for legitimate discovery

Because they don't work.

We've seen Google sell a profitable business, Google Domains, because it didn't make enough money for Google to bother with. For some reason Google believes that it is entitled to make some insane profit, rather than being content with having a reasonably profitable ad supported search business.

Google Search sucks because of the current financial model they, and most of society works under.

I know it's imperfect, I know it's getting worse, I know it's an obscenely profitable money making machine. But a lot of people seek it out because it's a functional product that (at least for me) is free and still outperforms the competition.

I don't want to like Google, but I'm not going to pretend the product sucks just because I'm unhappy with the business model and the decline in quality.

You know there is this nice idea of hyperlinks. These don't have to come from Google. Just as an example, I use HN as a source of new sites to discover quite often.

But people are reaching huge audiences through social media without even having any domain that can be indexed by Google. That is also the world wide web.

Or something nefarious like Google skewing their algo to favor websites with more placeholders for google's ads.

You know the consistent allegations against Google on this topic from long time insiders and my personal experience of terrible search results does not allow me to apply Occam's razor at all. Instead its the inverse of assuming malice.

Edit: I do see how it may have seemed like we had a lot of referral links due to the setup of outgoing links. Changed that now, so there is pretty much just the one left.

I think mine is a relevant question.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Now that does not work anymore. You know some information is out there, you found it once when google worked, now it's lost in the noise.

I'm learning to take notes again and organize them so I can search them easily.

https://kagi.com/search?q=what+is+the+tap+size+for+a+5%2F16-...

https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5x...

> When the weather starts to finally cool down and the evenings ...

Just No.

Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?

If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up?

The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for a while) is a better metric, but also not ideal: did they stay because they found what they were looking for, or was the result just that confusing they had to stay to comprehend whether it was the right thing? Most often it's because they found what they were looking for, but the pathological cases hide in the middle: many similar correct results, winner is the one that makes the user a little slower.

(This has nothing to do with tabs or back buttons, by the way. It happens any time they can detect subsequent clicks on the search result page.)

I've worked in the search space (though on less evil projects than Google) and I still struggle with the question on how to evaluate search. If you have ideas, let me know!

Result? Adsense-based websites started jamming in more ads per page to maintain their old revenue levels. Pages became longer so that more ads could be thrown in.

The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad.

Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it?

Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.

Edit: real cookbooks was basically my answer to this problem to be honest. Some of them actually have fun stories in them. Most of them have a standard-ish "recipe on one page, photo on the opposite page" format. But none of them have promo codes for shoes, supplements, or terrible Canadian coffee chains in them.

If you figure out a system where that happens reliably, you've basically solved civilization.

Do they? I thought it was ignored everywhere.

Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car.

We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole traders hiring someone directly for each thing without a corporate structure, partly because that too is a specialisation, and partly because that's way too fragile (every such thing either has a bus number of 1, or it's a mediocre reinvention of a corporation).

On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless.

Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.

But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on?

Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising.

Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving that value on the table? If so, why hasn't some other company taken advantage of this value?

It's super obnoxious when someone says that.

But the comment you're replying to does not say that.

To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on.

That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.

> manifesting both tragic and comic aspects

But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?

And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.

[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.

If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google

Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.

Oh right advertisers pay a price based on the amount of traffic so less traffic means even less cost for them.

My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent).

Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.

1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing?

In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from.

2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to extend their ad ~monopoly to his web page. A refusal that gets satisfied only after he loads his site up with useless, time wasting crap.

I'll grant the author did have a choice. The author could be denied access to Google's ad monopoly or he could crap up his web page.

Again, you disclaim Google of any responsibility for choice but hold the author to one? Doesn't that biased difference strike you as jarring?

That's the point here. Everyone seems to complicate it; it's pretty simple.

I'm not against you specifically, I just think this is a clear issue. Admittedly, not a lot of people grasp this right now.

Do you think it applies in this case? Do you think the incentive (a few $ at most) drove the author into a corner?

You do always have a choice. If you surrender that you become...inhuman...I think. Because you've said: "Now this thing I've done, is not my fault." Then you go around looking for other people to blame, which makes you a monster.

To be more clear (which is useful I think): it's not your choice what the world presents to you, but you choose how you respond always.

As long as you're not unconscious of course. If your mind is there, you're choosing.

But ultimately where you come down on that is up to you. I guess it comes down to: with how much integrity do you plan to live? :)

There could be some edge cases, but it's important to remember how valid that is for the majority of experience.

I didn't start it like this, but that got dark quick hahahah! :)

That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this:

> For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic.

Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.

The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business.

If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently.

Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.

The definition of monopoly is not 100% market share.

> but it isn't a monopoly!!!11

https://theluddite.org/#!support

I think I saw a banner when I scrolled to the bottom as well, but it isn't showing again for some reason.

I assume that they already had this page before they chose to monetize with adsense, which kind of implies that asking for donations hasn't been very effective for OP.

>people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.

I disagree. Do you want to know what my hot take is?

Imagine, for one moment, that we didn't have ads on the internet.

Instead, every page was full of banners begging for donations.

Instead of ad-blockers, everyone would be using donation-blockers.

All that "concern" I keep hearing about about privacy and tracking and long lists of partners in cookie banners would disappear in an instant, and everyone would show that what they really care about is just being mildly inconvenienced by distracting banners telling you to do things and nothing more.

That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.

I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.

Also my memory suggests 3x. But I'll go check.

Top result says 2.6x from ftc.gov but is from last decade.

Another result says "Targeted ads are twice more effective as non-targeted ads, and retargeted display ads encourage 1000 percent more people to search for a product." In response to that, I will note that even if google could not discern the site content at all, that would only affect targeting and not retargeting. So that suggests 2x at most in this situation.

Ads, as long as they have not been banished from the world, should be viable in some form on a small useful site.

There are ideas about how to get rid of ads entirely, but I wanted to be more grounded to the current state of things for the purposes of that comment.

A luddite is a socialist that refuses to allow the capitalist to use technology against the formation of self-organised labour, i.e. a person depriving the owner class of the means of production with the aim of the working class taking control over them. It's not a cloistered order or something like that.