How Google Is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – and Why | Hacker News Reader

How Google Is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – and Why

justapack.com

An assumption of the article is that in addition to getting readers, bloggers want to make money from their blogs via advertising, brand endorsements, etc. That's fair and true for the author in this case, but not necessarily true of all bloggers, especially the tech type that are on hacker news.

This.

He even mentions the "Blogging Apocalypse" and follows with a downwardly sloped graph titled "bye bye traffic" with no units or further explanation.

    I shortened my sentences. I used keywords that Google could identify easily. I wrote in a way that allowed Google to understand our content,[...] If I wanted people to find our article on Prague in a Google search I had to call it something Google understood. And then I had to repeat what the article was about in the first 100 words. And then do it again and again in the content. It led to some less than stellar paragraphs occasionally, [...]

If the "blogging apocalypse" can rid us of SEO spam, then perhaps it's not a bad thing?

I'm not sad about Google ad-driven blogs disappearing, good riddance.

I'm not positive about the new web either. I'm sure it'll be worse and surveillance will only increase.

I used to publish some of my edge use case and home lab networking experiments. I had about 150 pages on L3 switches, Wireguard, IoT connectivity.

No ads, no SEO, just sharing information. By the beginning of the year, my only requests were bots. The only referrals were from someone on Reddit linking to a page.

I took it down. Google extracted the value of my work, they are doing the same to everyone else.

Sorry, why was someone linking from Reddit not a valid reason for keeping it up? You already made it, why lose it? Hosting fees?

Isn’t that obvious? They are a misanthrope. People forget corporations act on behalf of their consumers (and democratic governments on behalf of their people). It’s not something to moan and whine about, but seems like HN is a haven for that attitude.

Fascinating, I missed a lot of that in the comments before you, but when you say They are thinking the Bad Thing for a bizarrely specific ideological reason...the straightforwardness of your reasoning gives me ability to shut my brain off. And that makes me feel very comfortable, and finally, if it feels good, it's true

this was sarcasm I'm hoping?

The axiom: AI allows wealth to access skill, while denying skill access to wealth, ringing especially loud from this story.

I have a small blog. I don’t run it for money and I like to tell myself I’m the only audience that matters. (It’s not entirely false, I frequently check it to reference how to do something.) But I empathize with people trying to navigate the shifting waters of the Google algorithm.

One thought I had: is there any plugin to rerank Google results by the number of ads on a site? For the top 10,000 domains we could count the average number of ads on a page and give each one an “annoyingness score” which would be used to downrank spammy garbage.

No because google makes money selling ads

Kagi downranks sites with many ads and also with many tracking scripts. It's not perfect but it is, in my experience, a better search service.

  > Oh, and by the way, here’s how you can ditch Google and switch to DuckDuckGo.

The closing sentence is... well... seems futile?

DDG is Bing, and if you say that Google is all about AI-generated crap, then Bing turns it up to 11...

(Don't read it as schadenfreude. I couldn't be more depressed about it)

Have you tried https://search.marginalia.nu ?

If you thought ".io" domains were unstable, you ain't seen nuthin' yet!

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

Of course. But they (well... he) intentionally avoid crawling mainstream internet, and also, the results are censored (just like with other engines) - it's not exactly what I'm looking for.

I'm afraid that the real future is Kagi and the like. Kagi in particular is pretty good, but the point is that it's paid by users, not by advertisers. It's rather hard to stay user-aligned because large commercial operations hich depend critically on their web sites will tempt a search engine with sweet, sweet lucrative deals for slight rigging that "nobody would even notice".

Last I saw Kagi was highly dependent on Google for their search results and seemed much more interested in LLMs and other side features than in replacing that core part of their search stack.

FWIW, my understanding is that there just isn’t a real drop in replacement for the Google Index. Kagis focus on LLM seems targeted to me, and I wonder if they’re trying to figure out how to put it to work indexing for themselves, more than providing the search results to the user.

I believe Kagi uses most major search indexes as well as its own.

Additionally, I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s more interested in LLMs than focusing on search. I think it’s fair to say they’re interested in ensuring they’re offering a better, non ad-based search replacement.

Disclaimer: Not affiliated with Kagi in any way, just a long time happy user.

In 1998, the Web was incomparably smaller. Google could put their whole infra into a dozen boxes, and then grow along with the Web, gradually. Modern competitors don't have this advantage.

By now, crawling and indexing is a herculean task, and also quite expensive, due to the sheer size. There is Common Crawl [1]; at 400 TiB it is huge, but at 60 days refresh interval it's far from being very comprehensive or very fresh. Good for research, but likely not good for a commercial search engine.

[1]: https://commoncrawl.org/

It really is a shame how bad the quality of google search results has gotten. The user experience today feels adversarial.

Well, Google's search results are still the best among its competitors. Bing's results are terrible and have a hard to understand UX. So it's not Google's results, it's the practices they use to dominate the market.

Most Bing results are actually much better today than Google's.

I don't know your use case, but nah, it's worse. It forces news snippets down your throat instead of relevant results. Plus the results page is hard to navigate, and the edge browser is the biggest alien like what the fuck is this shit kinda experience. Everything they changed in their browser just hinders your work. Microsoft long lost its mind and feels like it is commandeered by some strange AI entity. Google also is close to losing their mind altogether.

Lol. Agreed. The result weren't too bad (compared to Google) but everything else is a total nightmare. Makes you wonder if the folks building it are actually using it, or if they've already surrendered to AI and fled the place.

It depends on what you're searching for. If I'm looking for programming info, Google still seems to be much better, but for more non-technical stuff, DDG's Bing default seems better.

> Plus the results page is hard to navigate,

Are there different Bings? I double checked to make sure and without looking at the URL or logo at the top I wouldn't be able to differentiate Google results page vs Bing results page.

Virtually every time I feel like I'm not getting good results with a particular query in DuckDuckGo, I switch to Google to try it (I otherwise never use it), and 90% of the time now I get nothing better. That did not happen in the past—Google was a reliable backup plan. Now my expectations are quite low.

I have no idea about Bing because I never use it, though my understanding is DuckDuckGo uses Bing as one of its data sources.

Yeah, I have DDG by default on my phone and the only times I use Google is for business pages.

DDG is using bing as index. Though it tweaks its algorithm a bit. Using it instead of Google for this purpose is not something I'd advise. Duck duck go's goal is not to improve the search results but to make the experience more private.

> You may have noticed, sometime around September 2023 that your Google search results were starting to include a whole lot of Reddit. And a bunch of Quora. For those of you who love Reddit, great. It can be a valuable tool. For those of you who prefer to get information from verified sources it became just another result to skip over.

I guess everyone has the same feelings about Quora and there isn’t even a need to waste the characters on calling them out.

Quora content is a bit of a horror show in my experience. I think I’d rather have blogspam.

> This was back in 2014, when a Google search result looked very very different than it does now. We were gaining traction and we wanted more. We saw the possibilities and it was a red-hot inspiration. Our dreams of being like the travel bloggers we looked up to seemed possible.

I’m impressed they even managed to become successful travel bloggers in 2014+.

SEO and being a travel blogger were both well trodden paths already.

I remember some friends saying they wanted to become travel bloggers ~2013 and I laughed because of the degree of saturation. Was already difficult to get an edge and a niche.

And in my experience, Google was well on its path of deranking blogs in favour of more corporate content in 2014.

It's all built on advertising revenue. The blogs & their rise and fall - all based on ad revenues that Google created as they perverted the Internet to make everything content a platform for the advertising - all with the willing and complicit support of the bloggers and content creators.

I don't see advertising on the Internet so I don't really understand the value. Some people use Google to access the Internet apparently... they see lots of ads.

It is not just google, people "prefer video content" like instagram's CEO says. So, some traffic lost because people just find the same stuff on tiktok/ig. Oh, and accidentality google has youtube.

But the main issue is that just googling stuff and checking the results is a pretty miserable experience, because of quality of search results (they would give you CEO optimized trash 90%).

DuckDuckGo and Bing is the same cesspool. People need to wake the fuck up and support each other instead of these behemoths.

I think we need decentralized search engines because big companies control too much of what we see.

I have started using chatgpt to generate my searches as it does a better job than me.

Reminder that Google owes you nothing. No one is entitled to free traffic from Google.

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