Last year a friend and I made a website about the Nurburgring. It provided basic info for first time visitors that we were missing on our first visit. My friend spent a lot of time creating a UI with a custom map for displaying locations and routes. I wrote a bunch of content that was thoroughly researched.
At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could work together. They invited us because the content was incredibly useful for their visitors and they preferred our calendar over the official one for ease of use.
So clearly, our site was adding value for the target audience we had in mind. We were also consistently getting visitors through different search engines that were looking for the info we provided. The number of visitors was growing consistently and pretty much all the feedback we got was positive.
In March, Google rolled out a new algo which all but completely removed us from search results. Out visitors dropped about 80% and growth has disappeared. What was a fun project that we spent many hours on is now a waste of computing resources.
We have a single list with affiliate links on there. Which happened because a company proactively approached us to share their link on our site because they liked the content.
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.
To the parent commenter - have you set up google search console and reviewed what pages and keywords were affected? There could be other reasons why your pages aren't being indexed properly. If it's a small site, it could have been something as simple as changing an image or page title.
But this isn't about “images of X”. Nor is it, likely, about whatever "listicle" links OP's site has[1]. It's about people serching for info about, say, "Day at Nürburgring". And OP didn't remove that, now did they? And I bet most of them don't specify either with or without listicles.
So if people were searching for "Day at Nürburgring" and used to find OP's site, then Google changed their algorithm, and now when people search for "Day at Nürburgring" they don't find OP's site, how is that not Google’s fault?
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[1]: And Bog knows Google serves me up enough sites with those on...
You can't say what it's about without seeing exactly where the traffic and rankings decreased and looking at the Google search console. I'm happy to take a look out of curiosity if the OP wants to share.
I agree with your general point that it should not be the responsibility of the website to change to make a search engine happy.
I disagree with your specific point that Google should fix anything. Google can choose their own behaviors and motivations. Users can choose to rely on Google or trust them at all, or not.
Remember when Google was a successful business competing against the likes of Yahoo and AltaVista? Back when it was ok to be a successful small business? When you didn't count a millions users as a failure?
Nobody seems to believe anymore that you can operate a successful search company without having a trillion dollar war chest. Few people are willing to give alternative engines a try. They'd rather stick to Google like glue.
I'd like to declare the 28th as "Try something different day." On the 28th of each month people should try a different browser for the entire day. Or a different search engine. Or a different tooth paste. Every month, one day a month, take a different route to work, or maybe even a different mode of transportation. Use a Colemak keyboard. Go to a different church. You don't have to do the same different thing each month. Just start building some experience with shaking up your routine.
When you try something different and it turns out ok, share your positive experience with others.
I have not used Google search or Bing for years and it has worked out pretty well. I started with DDG, but have had good experiences with other search engines, too. Some may argue that DDG is not different enough. So perhaps next month I should try qwant.com for a day.
I have never found search console useful for anything other than random 404's and one-off server errors.
When a site is hit by an algorithmic penalty there is never any clue as to why.
This is my experience as well. If someone could mention how to examine the console to improve a site after an algo change, I would absolutely love to hear it .
I also find it mystifying and I’m not a SEO expert, but one way I use it is to compare ranking positions over time for specific pages and queries. That will help you identify where exactly the traffic came from and where you lost it. A lot of times this has to do with gaining or losing the #1 spot to a competitor.
If you don’t see a ranking change, it could also indicate seasonality in your visitors or external events. If your website is brand new, this could be hard to detect otherwise. For example, recently I saw a traffic spike for a random blog article, and search console help me see that people were searching for that topic because Elon Musk tweeted about it the day before.
Another helpful feature is to inspect particular URLs and make sure they are indexed—sometimes if you have multiple similar pages and set the canonical URL incorrectly, Google will try to de-dupe the results.
> could have been something as simple as changing an image
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.
This reminds of "Bidding Rank" from Baidu decades ago (and I think it pretty much still applies for Baidu) - Google was not only better technologically, but ethically because their search results were not that profit driven as "Bidding Rank" which was (and still is) very much despised. Now it seems Google only cares about profit and started to do things more or less the same way.
Sick.
Disclosure - I was so pissed by the degration of quality (an money-thirstiness) of the search results from Google that I switched to a non-profit search engine as my default for both desktop and mobile. The daily search experience doesn't have much noticible change to me. I do admit sometimes the Google search result could be better sometimes, but those occasions are quite rare for my needs, like maybe once a week.
Investigating and prosecuting anticompetitive behavior simply takes to long to investigate and prosecute. And by the time this happens, the fast-moving nature of the tech industry usually means the issue is not nearly as relevant as it was when the issue arose. Then the company strikes a mea-culpa deal with the appropriate governing body and makes changes that don't actually matter any more.
How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?
I've been through this thought-process many times.
1. Google isn't working well any more.
2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages.
3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload.
4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.
5. Forget it.
---
Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoever can solve the underlying problem of trust on the internet -- as in, you're definitely a human, and supported by this system I will award you a level of trust -- could be the next Google. :)
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.
Yeah, DDG quality seems abysmal for many of my searches now. I'll then switch to Brave, which sometimes finds what I'm looking for. I rarely ever check Google or Bing as a fallback, but when I do it feels like a screenful of ads and it isn't any more helpful (except Google Image search).
Part of the problem seems like a recency bias in search results. I notice sites frequently update pages with new timestamps, but nothing of substance appears to have changed (e.g. a review of something that was released 4 years ago, but the page was supposedly updated last week). So if I do pretty much the same search that succeeded two months ago, but repeat it today, I might not find the useful result I remember coming across.
I'm sure there are a bunch of other issues related to search and SEO that are affecting search quality. It seems insane that the major search providers don't combat this trend by arming users with more tools to tailor their search, but rather steadily degrade the user experience with no recourse.
Honestly, I think if Google was wise, they'd have a skunkworks team rethinking search from scratch (not tied to AI/LLMs) that starts their own index and tries to come up with an alternative to the current Google Search. Maybe they have that already, though I doubt it. I'm sure if they do have such a team, it's intricately tied to existing infrastructure and team hierarchies which effectively nullifies any chance it has at success.
I would be happy with an even simpler solution. Give me a blacklist domains or sites. There are 50 or so sites that I never want to see posts from. It’s not one or two that I can add an exclusion in my searches.
Second, give me a way to express semantic meaning of something. If I’m searching for rust, let me choose programming language for example. I find myself adding various one word tags to limit the search results.
Personally I have one use case left for Google: Product Search.
If I'm looking to buy something, I will frequently end up using Google. The engine that matches my product search to a relevant ad is excellent. Basically anytime you need to search for something that could lead to a purchase of a physical product, Google will be extremely useful. For services and software you can't use Google, you will get hustled by fake review or top 10 XYZ for 2024 sites.
I can't believe how terrible product search is on Instacart - I place orders on there pretty frequently for my mom, and Petco is the worst.
I will search for "wellness chicken cat food" - and wellness has chicken cat food in a few different textures, so it seems like those should at least be on the page of search results, if not the top results. Not always so! At the very least I will have to scroll a ways down the page to get anything even wellness.
And sometimes the top results aren't even cat food, they will be random other pet supplies.
Or she wants a few different flavors of the food, and I find one and then the other flavors I have to search a few different ways to pull them up and they don't show up on any "similar" displays.
It's painful. I hope Google doesn't go the same way - I think with Instacart it's because they want to promote whatever it is they put at the top, but even that doesn't explain how terrible some of the search results are.
Meijer (grocery store) is the same. Until a short while ago, you even had to match the capitalization of the product you were searching for. And we are not even talking about different writings of the same Unicode characters (ê etc.) with different bytes.
I use it for deterministic things. If I’m looking for something specific or a well known thing, it simply gets me the results I’m looking for.
For anything that’s indeterministic, it just brings me garbage. The same with YouTube as well. I’m searching for a specific thing about a particular library and it’s showing me stupid definition blogs or useless garbage. I apologize for my crudeness but no other words can describe it.
Google used to work closer to verbatim mode but would get common synonyms to give you comprehensive results. Now it stretches synonyms and alternate spellings to the point of uselessness.
I think the solution to this is both unique and trivial: you cannot trust something that is freely expandable,or did not require some amount of stake from the other party. That stake can be anything, time, work or money.
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.
I like your thinking, but there's a middle ground before full automation: when humans are incentivized, one way or another, to provide the biased reviews. This might be via straight-forward employment of people in lower-cost places (e.g. via Mechanical Turk) or other incentives. For example, note how a proportion of Amazon reviews are gamed and unreliable.
At the moment, the only tasks (that I can think of) that come close to the 'time-consuming-enough to not scale, but not quite annoying enough to put off committed individuals' are the various forms of CAPTCHA - which is unsurprising, given that we're discussing a form of Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. (And of course, there are CAPTCHA-solving farms.)
But would people invest time in a review system that required them to complete a form of CAPTCHA regularly?
> That stake can be anything, time, work or money.
I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.
This clearly isn't true, since if you dress and make a rich person smell homeless, they simply won't be trusted in most parts of civilization.
No, what you're talking about is POWER and AGENCY. Rich people have the power to override trust through the fact that they can operate with near impunity; so you have very little agency to not trust them. If you choose to not show trust, you may invoke their wrath.
Here's the thing. A sovereign nation can "generate" as many "unique" humans as it wants (via printing "fake" but official identities). No one would be on to them until there were more users than probable people in the country.
> 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload.
> 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!
IMO it's how all moderation should go: you subscribe to some default moderators' lists initially and then mutate those subscriptions and their trust levels. Mod actions are simply adding visibility options to content and not actually removing anything.
Obviously the solution is to create a centralized system to electronically ID every human on the planet, and track what they post, talk, think, which medications and food they consume, who they are friends with, who they fuck, how much of this decade's evil chemicals they exhale, where they spend their money, and their real-time location.
Or, you know, just make your own open-source search engine, with blackjack and hookers.
Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.
I don't think that's necessarily required. Google has always done well, even without pushing ads as hard as they are now. The problem is that Google / Alphabet has become to reliant to the money from ads to finance other non-/less profitable products.
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.
Webrings were a lot of people doing work for free or with little return. Nobody has time to do this anymore, and the only way to support such project would be paid membership (hard to gain traction) or ads (back to square one).
By every measure don't people have more time than ever before? I think it's more a dramatic shift in how people use & view the internet. The (unfortunate in a lot of ways) answer is probably create something new and exclusive, but universal enough for the target audience that's going to do all the work to align incentives, try to pull along the good and leave behind the bad. There has been and will continue to be a lot of false starts & failed attempts. If successful it will eventually be co-opted and ruined too. So it goes.
Thank you for the question. It really needs an explanation.
Times have changed. While there are significantly more open-source projects, online communities, and all kinds of available help than ever before, the proportion of active contributors relative to the number of people online has decreased. Consequently, the time required for each volunteer to process input for a project like a "webring" has increased significantly.
I also feel that it's become harder to motivate people, but not because they've become lazier. Rather, the tasks have become more demanding, so "nobody seems to have the time for them anymore".
The scale of the internet is too large for individual consumption search engines and word of mouth are the methods I see for distributing access. Search engines need individual Judgement to evaluate results and word of mouth provides context clues and trust.
Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.
IDK; the sites I regularly visit nowadays are all either one-off personal projects I learned about through word of mouth or user-centric portals like HN where I get that word of mouth. I guess it's kind of what digg used to be.
The fix is a decentralized search network with nodes linked to people or legitimate businesses. You manually distribute trust to friends and businesses you like, and you can manually revoke that trust, with some network level trust effects occurring based on spammy/malicious behavior.
Decentralized communication absolutely works, and we have plenty of decentralized tools now. Decentralized search is a legitimately hard problem, both because it needs strong protocols (which are getting there but still WIP) and user adoption (which isn't really happening).
That’s not the reason email has re-centralized. It’s because big-tech companies provide it for free in order to bind users to their services, and at least in the case of Google, also to collect data and drive ads.
As someone who administrates their own email server and works at an SMB who administrates their own email servers, it works quite well and doesn’t require centralization.
"When mice march with elephants it's in the mices best interest to be cautious"
I've done a lot of a lot of email administration over the years, servers with 100,000s of accounts, and you walk a very fine line in being able to communicate with the rest of the world. Your IPs must exist in certain blocks (or at least not be in banned blocks). You must block outgoing spam messages at a much higher rate and quality than google/hotmail do. Get yourself blacklisted for any reason and expect to disappear from the internet, meanwhile no one is going to block the largest services.
Mail servers aren't real people or real businesses.
50 year old decentralized protocol has problems, so decentralized protocols can't possible work. Just like 50 year old computer can't play doom, so doom doesn't exist.
Search systems aren't real people or real businesses either. Never mind details like how you define and enforce "real" in a decentralized way across N legal systems with wildly varying ideas of what it means to be a "legitimate" business. There is no system or ledger you can query to find out if a given person is real or a business is legitimate. This is exceptionally unlikely to change on a useful timescale.
The basic problem with email is that it assumed good-faith participation from the parties involved. It was assumed that only legitimate actors would have the resources to participate and they would always be well-behaved. This, it turns out, was flawed on several counts. For one, it assumed legitimacy could be assured. For another, it assumed legitimate users would be well-behaved and would never abuse services for gain. For a third, it assumed account takeovers or other impersonation attacks wouldn't happen.
Every de-centralized system that aspires to not have email's problems needs to take them seriously.
Decentralized communications may work, but decentralized internet search is probably always going to be impractical.
The actual logic involved in search is itself pretty simple and almost trivial to shard, the problem is dealing with a mutable dataset that is of the order of a hundred terabytes.
Search gets enormous benefits from data locality, such that distributed approaches are all significantly more expensive.
I think they would work fine if the surveillance and advertising industry were overnight christened criminal enterprises and users had to start paying for what was once '''free''' (cost of entry: pieces of your soul, bit by bit).
Decentralized has a small convenience cost and the crime of surveilling everyone to advertise to them (among other uses) is too cheap for decentralized to come out on top. Note I am Atheist when I say this: if law doesn't hammer the scourge, those who get religious about this stuff are the ones who'll enjoy any modicum of sovereignty.
Yep, create a small closed off community that shames outsiders and you can have what you want. Everything in it will be local and very much a bubble. It won't have the failure modes of a Google or Facebook though. So I guess pick your poison.
You’re writing this comment on a site with an upvote/downvote based algorithm.
The answer is simple, allow some level of user feedback from proven real users (for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret) and apply it mildly as a ranking signal.
As long as it doesn’t become the only factor in ranking, you still retain strong incentives to do all the old SEO stuff, yet with a layer of human sanity on top.
Google Maps reviews are working like that and are often gamed.
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.
> for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret
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
Then you quietly change the rule, and get years of success until it's widely gamed again.
The point is, there's experimentation that could be done and there's absolutely solutions that could be found.
Early Google did tons of experimentation with the search algorithm to maintain the integrity of the results. There was definitely an active game of cat and mouse back then that Google actually cared about staying on top of.
But as a decades entrenched monopoly, Google lost all incentives to tinker with anything anymore. The "operational" folks took over and any change to the search algorithm is now a multi-year endeavor involving thousands of stakeholders.
This was already solved in the past. Don’t just build a web site, build a community. This way the community will advertise the site and attract more users.
You go to the myriads of car communities and systematically promote your content for Nurburgring. It’s a niche site, and by the OP’s description we can safely assume that it’s quite usable since he’s been already approached by a sponsor. And since this is a site about a specific car circuit you just go to the actual place, or make an arrangement with the organizers to promote your site. Give a leaflet, or build an accompanying mobile app.
I'm not saying that circumventing Google is the easiest thing in the world, or the cheapest, but it's not mission impossible either. I didn't find Hacker News from Google, not the dozens of other tech communities I'm following.
The existence of meatspace never stopped the early web from flourishing, so why should the existence of the modern web stop anybody from making a second web? The only reason that Google was useful is because it tapped into the trust network that already existed before it.
I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't like than doing something awesome themselves.
Before people knew the web was vast and required digging through. Now people think google is the web, so if it doesn't come up by the third search it might as well not exist.
You're not wrong, but this is also a great acid test. We need to work to help people understand google is most definitely not the internet, and where we fail or don't get through leave them behind. I don't know what comes next, but there's not room for everyone, and I include many here (and likely myself) in those who won't make the transition. We love to imagine people physically leaving Earth for Mars and beyond, but what follows the internet is going to happen far sooner.
Start local. With actual people. Advertise with posters on utility poles (oh well they do not exist anymore in most places so replace with a suitable alternative and go to your local church/mosque/dance club/whatever relevant). I'm not saying this will work, but it is how it used to work.
Honestly I think Google needs to be broken up. It's not a novel idea but the more I think about it the more I like it.
So, Google becomes two orgs: Google indexing and Google search. Google indexing must offer its services to all search providers equally without preference to Google search. Now we can have competition in results ranking and monetisation, while 'google indexing' must compete on providing the most valuable signals for separating out spam.
It doesn't solve the problem directly (as others have noted, inbound links are no longer as strong a signal as they used to be) but maybe it gives us the building blocks to do so.
Perhaps also competition in the indexing space would mean that one seo strategy no longer works, disincentivising 'seo' over what we actually want, which is quality content.
I’m afraid the problem is not indexing, but monetization. Alternative google search will not be profitable (especially if you have to pay a share to google indexing) because no one will buy ads there - even for bing it is a challenge
The hope though is that by splitting indexing that puts search providers on an equal footing in terms of results quality (at least initially). Advertisers go to Google because users go to Google. But users go to Google because despite recent quality regressions, Google still gives consistently better results.
If search providers could at least match Google quality 'by default' that might help break the stranglehold wherein people like the GP are at the mercy of the whims of a single org
How sure are you about that? I find them to be subpar when compared to Bing, especially for technical search topics (mostly, PHP, Go, and C related searches).
Not a bad idea, but there are lots of details need to be fill in and, you know, devils is in the details.
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.
A friend of mine owns _the_ best website by far on how to become a student in Czech Republic. 15 years of effort, hundreds of excellent articles, all the content is regularly updated, etc. Google's ranking for "education in Czech Republic" (in Russian)? Not even in the top 100.
The #1 website in Google's ranking belongs to a company that significantly overcharges future students and has outdated/incorrect information on their website.
I'm being a bit contrary, but: it sounds like 80% of your traffic was coming, for free, from Google. Is the claim here that if you killed SEO, some more equitable, consistent method of content propagation would spring up to take it's place? Because I have a feeling people - especially young people - are abandoning Google, but for more opaque, less equitable algos (like Tiktok).
Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.
That would have been a good excuse/explanation in the days before Chrome existed. But since Chrome is THE browser, users have a hard time escaping Google.
So, GP is right.
Windows is still the most popular desktop / laptop OS, and while it might come with a Chromium browser it defaults to Bing. Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search).
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.
I've been using chromium and firefox side by side at work and play all day for abt 3 years now. Indistinguishable except chromium uses more memory and crashes and hangs. I get hundreds of tabs open in firefox for weeks and months. I reach about 50 before chromium gets lethargic.
I used to do this under ubuntu 18 and 20 with 32GB ram, now under win11 w 64.
I don't understand the Chrome reality distortion field.
I think that's a slightly orthogonal issue - I'm talking Google Search vs other search providers. I doubt there's a significant gap between Chrome and Chromium.
> Users who want Google search need to either change their browser settings, or install a new browser (two things this community claims that no average user would ever do on a platform where the default was Chrome and Google web search).
Did you miss the part where Google would directly advertise and ask if you wanted to use Chrome instead on Google's search page? Or how it would be bundled with every installer under the sun? Chrome isn't the most popular browser because we collectively decided it's the best. It's because they leveraged their position as the world's search engine and advertiser.
I've worked with tons of your average PC user. They don't even know what a browser is or what a search engine is. If Google asks them if they want to install Chrome, they will always answer yes because why not. It's Google.
Bing on windows does the exact same thing. M$ and Google have roughly equivalent resources and audience reach to push their product. Google still comes out on top because via both reputation and average use case it's quality is better than bings.
This is not likely to change unless OpenAI finds a way break the monopoly. It's the only currently existing search that can claim to be better than Google. Which is why Google is pushing Gemini so hard.
Even with the latest update blogspam from India still dominates my niche. Welcome to the internet of the 2020s where investing in your product means jackshit because wordpress idiots can press a button and yoast an article.
If you're a creator-type why on earth would you ever build a web product in this type of environment? Join a corp or create trash and ride the wave -- at least then you'll have some semblance of a normal life instead of a living like a starving artist into your 30s
You can write a web site about Coca Cola if you want. If it's just factual information that's all within fair use.
As long as we don't use the trademarked name 'Nürburgring' or their logo or an outline of the track in branding, it's all fair game. If we were to start selling t-shirts it would be a bit more tricky and we'd have to be pretty careful.
Can you mention the word "Nürburgring" anywhere on yout site, but just not in the website name/url? Please dont be angry, I am honestly trying tonumderstand the limits of what I can do on my own field of interest.
Absolutely real. I want to know because there are large privately owned infrastructures in every country. Can one set up a website discussing it, and can one show pictures, maps, venues, tickets, etc., without being sued? (Or is only text and numbers permitted).
To what? Search engines or using the Internet in general?
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.
I've been using DDG for years, works just fine. My remaining usage of Google as a search engine for sport results, cause they have that nice widget to see matches/tables, and on mobile.
It's been a long time since I thought about any of this, but last time I did, social media traffic was some of the worst quality. Search traffic was seen as golden because it came with intent. Social media traffic was wandering and aimless, so converted poorly even if it was 1000x search. Search still got more conversions and it was no contest. Did something change?
Commercially I agree with you, search traffic is much better than social media traffic.
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.
We made this site for people who search. We were those people, searching Google for where to watch cars racing on the Nürburgring and then getting nothing but cryptic route descriptions on forums.
So we created a map with actual walking routes and people were finding them. Now they're not finding them and they're back to lots of searching.
We get some traction on social media too. But it's people who already go there and know a lot of what we provide already. People don't search Instagram for walking routes to POIs.
This situation is made even worse by us. Yes, us. Inbound links used to be a good quality signal: the more people link to you, the more important your site is. And there were always link farms and SEO lowlives that abused the system. But these days it is nearly impossible to get any legitimate inbound links, because people don't have web pages and web sites anymore, instead entering all the information into silos like Twitter, Facebook, etc. These tag your links as nofollow/ugc, so they don't count towards SEO.
The net effect is that pretty much the only link signal is from link farms and paid media. If you don't crap over the internet with shady tactics, you will not appear in search results.
Are you sure that search engines don’t count nofollow links at all? I know that’s kind of the purpose but I would be surprised if they would really completely ignore them.
It's not nofollow links. It's content behind a login wall. If the content can't be found with a crawler it might as well not exist. So sites like Facebook and Xitter that block a significant amount content for non-logged in users are the problem.
A SEO company represents a plastic surgeon. They offer money to a news site to publish an advertorial. How's that spam? And that article about how to properly wash your clothes that suggests a few washing machines is also paid. That's how news media works for ages. So by your definition all these legitimate companies are spammers? Would you care to inform me how should PR be performed then?
You seem to have misunderstood the difference between an advertising agency and a SEO company. What you're describing is what advertising agencies do, SEO companies are spammers that sell access to their spamming tools. It's similar to the difference between an agency practicing law and having them send a cease-and-desist, and buying a DDoS.
Not that I'm particularly fond of any of that, though I have lawyers practicing in another area as customers.
A plastic surgeon is a legitimate business. How on earth would a business like that promote its site and gain visitors? By paying exuberant fees on keyword auctions on AdWords? It's way more affordable to just pay a PR firm, or a SEO company to publish an advertorial on a news site. And no, not all companies that sell SEO are spammers. Grow up, please.
Some of you guys need to get your heads out of your butts and realize how the real world works. It's not just black and white all the time.
Personally I don't think for-profit surgery, or for-profit medicine generally, is a legitimate business. It might open up as a possibility when every person has access to the medical care they need, but that seems far off.
Email spam is cheaper than news paper adverts, does that make it "legitimate"? Because that seems to be your argument here.
I suggest you read the following. Because it's pretty obvious that a lot of you guys live in some parallel universe where things are just black and white.
You should refuse for the simple fact that this company is unlikely to be only contacting you. They will have a large footprint that you don't want to be part of.
This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.
This isn't even the worst example, since it does at least have the correct info buried amongst tons of Ai generated garbage, but I can't use this for reference, since it tells me 4 different drill sizes. I've had to switch back to a paper copy of the machinist's handbook, since I can't trust the internet to give me accurate information anymore. 10 years ago, I could easily search for the clearance hole for a 10-24 fastener, now I get AI junk that I can't trust.
How have we regressed to the point that I'm better off using a paper book than online charts for things that don't change?
Half of web in Russia is blocked. Literally, powers that be think of Russian tech companies as of their servants and nothing more. Yandex basically sold their main asset, domain name to other entity.
This, I am a terrible note taker. For years a huge part my knowledge and skills relied on "if I found that information once, I'll find it again". My brain compressed the information by memorizing the path to retrieve it again.
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.
For queries like that I now turn to Gemini / ChatGPT first. Of course, this is only a good idea if I have some way of sanity checking the answer. If I doubt the answer I get back I try Google search instead.
I really like Kagi's approach to this, which is to give a list of references. There's still no guarantee that the answer is correct, but you can at least check the references :).
You can ask a model to provided an analysis of its answer including a probability that it is correct as part of the prompt, helps with doublechecking a lot.
They're consistent to the model, particularly if you ask the model to rationalize its rating. You will get plenty of hallucinated answers that the model can recognize as hallucinations and give a low rating to in the same response.
Models can get caught by what they start to say early. So if they model goes down a path that seems like a likely answer early on, and that ends up being a false lead or dead end, they will end up making up something plausible sounding to try and finish that line of thought even if it's wrong. This is why chain of thought and other "pre-answer" techniques improve results.
Because of the way transformers work, they have very good hindsight, so they can realize that they've just said things that are incorrect much more often than they can avoid saying incorrect things.
Does that extra information come from a separate process than the LLM network? If not then, assuming the same output is not guaranteed from the same input as per usual, then all bets are off correct?
Sorry for the late reply, but if you read this, there is research that shows that prompting a LLM to take variety of perspectives on a problem (IIRC it was demonstrated with code) then finding the most common ground answer improved benchmark scores significantly. So, for example if you ask it to provide a brief review and likelihood of the answer, and repeat that process from several different perspectives, you can get some very solid data.
> How have we regressed to the point that I'm better off using a paper book than online charts for things that don't change?
because products that require iteration lend themself to subscription models which in turn mean a recurring revenue which is deemed superior to onetime payments for a 'finished product'.
We need to collectively stop using Google, but the alternatives are just not as good for some things.
The best one is probably Kagi, but let's be real: "normal" people would never pay for a search engine service. Well, "normal" people don't even know the difference between Google, Google Chrome and probably the internet.
I say this as someone who doesn't yet use Kagi but is increasingly warming to the idea: I think normal people may pay for a search engine, one day. People used to think the bottom had irrevocably fallen out of paying for media once internet piracy became a thing. Streaming services may be in an unappealing state now, but they at least showed that people can be persuaded to pay for something if it makes access to the things they love easier. We might be years away from it, but I wouldn't say never. And $10 to find things on the internet again seems like a more persuasive offer than what people are currently paying for streaming.
I wonder if there is a market for search engine where sites pay to be listed. Not a substantial amount like they would for ads. But a small compute fee for the spider plus a contribution for being indexed.
People will pay for clicks. If a small search engine with pay per list sends a lot of visitors website owners will for sure pay. The key I think is to have verified and unverified listings, and give people a free trial of being verified before bumping them out so they know what they're paying for.
My default is Duckduckgo but in the recent weeks they have massively upped how abrasive their ads are. Nothing wrong with there being search related ads but the sheer volume is getting out of control.
Hi, I work at DuckDuckGo - thanks for the feedback. Nothing much has changed in the past few weeks on our side, and so would love some more info so we can investigate. Do you mind sharing what country you are searching from, and whether you noticed on desktop or mobile? Also just FYI — you can turn ads off completely in settings if you want.
I am based in Australia. I am not sure if it is the quantity has increased, but their size definitely has. I usually have to scroll a full screen down before I start seeing non-paid results. I am on a desktop machine, mobile has been absolutely fine.
Also didn't know you could turn them off. I don't mind ads to support businesses when it is reasonable and DDG is a decent business. I just hope you folks don't try to keep up with the giants by playing their game. ;)
Got it, thanks for the follow-up, and for your support! It should be pretty rare that you would see no organic content above the fold. But we'd like to take a closer look, and if you have any particular queries where the ads are surprisingly tall, it would be useful to know.
With the forthcoming winter of synthetic content, we may easily find ourselves, in the coming few years, forced to resort once again to directories a-la AltaVista and Mozilla's. I really see no way Google would stop their ads activities, as these provide the financial backbone.
In a sense we resorted to the searchable message board, once an university homework assignment, in the form of HN here.
Rest assured the existing tech monopolies who are flooding the internet with hallucinated AI garbage will be there to sell us our own "Verified Human-Written Content" back to us.
Mind you this is then before the recent article that alleges Ben Gomes was pushed out of Google[0]. This was my feeling regarding that post, that search had been getting worse from before 2019.
It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect:
> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.
At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.
The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.
I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter.
The recipe looks good (chickpeas, olive oil, salt, spices, oh shit I stole her blog post). I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".
The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once all the SEO vampires figured it out, everyone started to pile on prologues to all their content, not just recipe sites. In my experience that was the beginning of the end.
Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.
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!
One idea, but people will probably hate me for it:
If you return to e.g. the google search site (hence: when the long click metric would be triggered) have a dialog on top saying ‘result great / OK / bad-or-confusing’.
Can probably be gamed (bot nets trying to destroy the reputation of others) but at least a long time would not automatically mean ‘great result’. (In the arms race to combat destruction, it could be so that a ‘bad-or-confusing’ click would not actually push a value down, just not make it go higher).
> if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?
Why do you care as a search engine? This is a natural human problem that can't be solved with technology, only by humans.
It used to be, that I went to page 5 of Google instantly, because that was where the real results were. The first few pages were people who knew more SEO than sense.
These days, that doesn't work since "semantic search" because now it appears to be sorted by some relevance metric and by about page 5 you start getting into "marginally related to some definition of what you typed in but still knows too much SEO to be useful."
The point is, this was already a solved problem if you knew to go to about page 4-5. Then people started trying to use a technical solution to a very human problem.
Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?
Granted, there are a lot of search engines that sell themselves on other metrics ("it's fast!" or "it uses AI!" or "it's in the cloud!") but any serious search engine player strives to learn how good it is -- in practise -- at helping the user find what they are looking for. That's ultimately the purpose of a search engine.
> Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?
While a useful metric, it's an unknowable metric.
1. You have no idea if the user even knows what they are looking for, so how would you know that they found it?
2. You have no idea if the user found what they are looking for, maybe what they are looking for isn't on the internet?
3. You have no idea if the user is even looking for something, maybe it was just a cat running across the keyboard?
The only way to learn the answer is to have humans talk to humans. You can't game your way through it by using metrics.
It reminds me of this one time the CEO asked our team to add a metric for "successful websites" (we were a hosting provider) and we rebuffed with "define successful." They immediately mentioned page views, which we replied "what about a restaurant with a downloadable menu that google links to directly?" and back and forth with "successful" never being defined for all verticals and all cases. It just isn't possible to define using heuristics.
I disagree. It's unfortunate that some users don't know what they want, some want things that don't exist, and that some are cats. But most users are humans with a rough idea of an existing thing they are looking for. It's worth it for a search solution to find out how good it is at helping them. The cats add noise to that measurement, they don't invalidate it.
Do you philosophically agree there are websites that are more successful than others? If yes, then there are tangible qualities that distinguish this group from the other. They may be subjective, fuzzy, and hard to pin down, but they're still there. If no, a success measure is irrelevant to you but other people might disagree, and once thoroughly investigated, you sort of have to agree the measurement coming out of it reflects their idea of success.
In none of this am I saying it's simple or easy (I started this subthread by saying it's difficult!) but fundamentally knowable.
Yes, humans talking to humans is definitely the start. But then I'm posivistically enough inclined that I think with effort we can extract theories from these human interactions.
I didn’t go into all the problems with “successful websites” but it really is impossible to measure. For me, my business site is successful when I capture leads, my blog is successful when I write posts, a restaurant is successful when people show up to eat. There’s no way of knowing what variables and metrics constitute success without asking the person.
I had a CEO who searched for the related business search terms every morning. No clicks, he just wanted to see the ranking. The other day, I was searching for an open NOC page that I knew existed but couldn’t remember the search terms. Eventually I gave up, but I’m 90% sure I left the tab open to a random promising search result that had nothing to do with what I was really searching for. There’s a pdf that archive.org fought over and simply mentioning it results in a DCMA, you can find it now, but for nearly 20 years, you could only find rumors of it on the internet and a paper copy was the only way you could read it.
Even when I know what I’m looking for exactly, I sometimes open a bunch of tabs to search results and check all of them, (This is actually the vast majority of my non-mobile searches) especially because the search results are often wrong or miss some important caveats — especially searching for error messages.
The only way you could find out these searches were unsuccessful (or successful) is to ask. There’s no magic metrics to track that will tell you whether or not my personal experience found the search successful.
I honestly don't think it's possible to have a QA team large enough to handle the gajillions of websites that come up and disappear every day. They just have to come up with better and better metrics until they find one that approximates the human experience the best.
Google also massively reduced AdSense payouts over the years as well.
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.
There are SEO industry nerds that scour Google patents for clues (this long click metric was an early 2010s patent that was granted in 2015), and Google lets information slip from time to time, either officially or unofficially.
The first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't.
After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.
[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.
[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.
Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.
That's pretty depressing. I don't really do any kind of content marketing work these days and haven't really been around that industry for a decade, but I can only imagine how disappointing it must have been to start seeing your traffic drop off, seeing which results were winning in search compared to your own site, seeing how they were winning, and then having to add more and more shit to your own site in order to climb back up the rankings.
I got so fed up with this that I made a browser extension for it. It's in the Chrome Web Store and Firefox as well, but you'll have to build the xcode project in the Safari directory if that's your preferred browser.
The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
When it looks and acts like the spam sites, then what difference is there really? If I have to scroll 4 pages to find the ingredients and then scroll around like crazy to find the instructions (then scroll back and forth while cooking/baking) then it does not matter how good the recipe is, the page killed it for me.
I'd argue that most web users have a higher tolerance for ads than HN users, so they put up with the scrolling. And if it results in a tasty recipe, then they'll do it next time too, since that's seemingly the (tolerable) price to be paid for good food.
But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is a pain, shortcuts for low-tolerance users seems like a good compromise.
Look it's not OK to milk humans like this. It's manipulative and rapey. Just because the NPC meme is true does not mean you get to hack their programming for a buck and call yourself a good community member and businessman.
Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.
But they can also have a separate job that doesn't ruin the internet and produce out of generosity, like some of us, free content that is not span ridden.
Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind.
And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
While it is admirable that you are willing to produce content out of your own generosity, it seems a little optimistic to assume that everyone making content on the internet is both willing and able to share it for free.
I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
We need to find a metric for anti-profitability. I think that index could yield much higher quality results.
Detect sales/commercial language and structure,* and specifically target that for removal from results as if sales-oriented sites were hardcore porn and the child safety filter is turned on.
*Buy and cart buttons/functions, tables containing prices with descriptions but don't look like long-form reviews (which would be it's own filterable tag), etc, and domains trying to obfuscate are blacklisted permanently.
Really just removing all sites with ads would be a huge improvement. Regular old websites trying to sell you something are usually not nearly as bad as those that want to monetize you while pretending to be free.
The thing is, even if you don't put ads on a page or tool, Google will sometimes not index it because it doesn't think there's 'enough' content, no matter how little sense that makes. At least half the issues with recipe sites and company sites come from them trying to get a site that doesn't need reems of text content indexed by a search engine that seems to blindly value the quantity of content and time spent on the page over all else.
The people who have bad content are the ones to get money, while those who have good content are not. Logical result is that people with good content stop producing that content while the people with bad content continue producing it and being rewarded for it.
Look I hate these SEO-laden pages just as much as the next guy, but I think the binary classification of "good content" and "bad content" lacks nuance. I would refer to it instead as "bad packaging" of (often) good content. As much as I loathe having to hunt for the "jump to recipe" button on my phone each time I open one of these pages, I also appreciate being able to freely view recipes which I enjoy and cook regularly.
I just stopped looking for receipts online if I can avoid it. It became literally faster and easier to search in old school cook book. And there was period when I considered those completely outdated.
>I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".
This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours?
Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.
You should try viewing the site without your ad blocker turned on. Here's a preview: https://imgur.com/a/FDI0L6i. The red arrow is where ad #4 was when I checked it out last night.
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.
I suspect you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.
FWIW, I tried a few recipes too and they came out just fine, without the usual clutter. I further anticipate that this is the direction we'll be going in general, "search" as we know it was a ~30 year period where Google reigned supreme. The world since moved on.
Yeah, but the new gatekeepers and tech are going to be worse. Ai companies, where you never see original human content any more. Just what the company’s ai shows you
I generally use https://www.taste.com.au. No bullshit prologue about how a distant relative used to make the recipe in question. Just and overview, photo ingredients and steps. Everything else is secondary and usually worthless.
"Just Learn To Read" adds nothing to the sentence that precedes it. The point was already made correctly and well. You should avoid when possible starting a comment you want to actually be read with an insult or ending it with a snap. It degrades the quality of the conversation.
I laughed out loud at this. You haven’t looked up many recipes in the last few years, have you? 95% of recipe results are nonsense and ads. It can take a few minutes of searching just to identify ingredients sometimes. My wife and I have been improvising recipes lately to avoid digging through all the junk. I actually recommend this: you can sort of make stuff up based on prior experience and things turn out pretty well sometimes.
Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen
Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe
Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public).
Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site?
You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
Sure, I think we can agree that at Google scale the business interactions with me as a potential supplier are automated and soulless.
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.
I cannot tell you how much I despise this idea that a company can be too big to talk to their customers/partners/products.
If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
In this situation it's not "google providing the site owner with value."
It's the site owner providing Google with value (that they want Google to pay for).
It's not incumbent for companies to interact with every person who thinks they _should_ be a supplier to said company. I get people cold calling me every day wanting to be my supplier. I absolutely ignore most of that.
In this case Google's algorithm did not ignore the potential supplier. It evaluated the site and sent a reply saying basically "thanks, but no thanks".
Now, I understand your gripe - an algorithm did this, not a human. But this has been the Google way since long before they were a fifth of this size. So it's not like a competitor changes Google's way of doing business.
And Google's way is not a secret. If you don't like it, then don't have a business relationship with them (as a supplier or customer.)
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?
Having only one ad network means that the monopolist holds all the cards. They can extract huge margins from advertisers while passing on very little to websites. And they can make all the rules. Websites have to comply no questions asked. If the monopolist closes your account it may be the end of the road for your business.
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.
>The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".
No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.
Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.
>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.
Their point is that if there were more ad companies then the chance they would have allowed the site to go up as the original. Not to 100% of course but drastically higher than 0%
The new unneeded content doesn't make the site more appealing to advertise on, instead it exists purely to satisfy arbitrary standards set by Adsense. I feel you've missed the point of the article
I get it. The unnecessary content games the Adsense algorithm, convincing it that the site now has value as a "place for adverts".
That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.
There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.
A calculator sounds like a pretty good place to advertise actually. Any tool where a user spends a lot of time instead of rapidly scrolling through it could be decent ad space.
Sure, a calculator. But this isn't really a general purpose calculator. It's a simple question/answer of "number of votes in this district". How long honestly are you going to spend on a site like that? It sounds to me like a very long-tail question. (Admittedly, I've never even felt the urge to ask the question much less search for a web site to answer it.)
> Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser,
Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.
But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?
And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.
> how that value might be unlocked?
Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.
I don't know what you're asking here.
Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.
I think that if you had 5 advertising networks, they'd all operate the same.
I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.
You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)
>I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view [...] You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table
What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.
If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.
The point is that if google ads were busted up into more corporations it would be more competitive and there would be other ad companies that would offer superior options.
I don't think market cap is the right signal, but vertical integration. The worst monopolistic behaviour almost always involves one company controlling multiple parts of a supply chain. That's obviously why vertical integration is so popular!
This was something that was always seen as inspiration in Apple, while they were small. Once a company of that nature gets to a certain size, it becomes far to powerful as any movement in the core business, intentional or otherwise, can influence multiple industries simultaneously.
This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
Yeah, so I think that the issue isn't that Apple does several things well, it's that they do something well and then only consume that product themselves.
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.
That and acquisition of a direct competitor who has beat a larger company. If you lose a competition, you should fall behind. Losing a competition and then forking out cash to make the leader switch teams before he crosses the finish line is a complete perversion of the game
When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary.
Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
Isn't that true for many if not most laws? We don't not have taxes just because lots of people will argue they're too high or too low, we don't not have a criminal justice system because people will argue sentences are too harsh or too lenient.
Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
I agree that the solution is unrealistical. But not for this reason: the "no limit" is also arbitrary and people do not agree if this is right. Moreover, lots of people do not agree with regulations and norms in society, but society creates these things and people learn to comply to live in society.
I think it’d be more accurate to say “imprecise” rather than “arbitrary.” For example, the legal drinking age is set to 21 (or whatever) based on politicians’ estimation of when most people are mature enough to handle the consequences. It’s true that there is no way to exactly specify a perfect age limit, but that doesn’t mean the limit was set randomly without any reason or basis, i.e., arbitrarily. Sorry if I’m being too pedantic; it’s just one of those nights I suppose.
If the value of "GDP of all African countries" is a numerical value then it is simplistic. If the value is informed by the functions which result in such numbers then it is perhaps too complicated.
If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.
That’s not what arbitrary means. The age is set as low as possible while still being reasonable as to not send kids to war. Maybe the distinction between the ages 16-17 and 17-18 seems “arbitrary” but there is a reason the age is 17 and not 71. Hence, not arbitrary.
That's why compromise happens. It's clearly superior to "let this company grow to an unlimited size, have all the power in the market, and tell customers to go pound sand because we're too big to fail". It would be a great start to set a cap or market percentage (assuming the market is huge, which obviously online marketing is).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
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).
> I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Could be. There's a reason we don't see aliens in the sky.
A the same time the "miracle" of collective action that you want to get rid of — because everything corporations do wrong is also done by other kinds of co-operations — isn't really just corporations, it's everything that makes us primates.
That's why you need to be more precise than "just ban them all", why the simple and obvious solution is wrong.
Nvidia is a great example of why a flat rule like this wouldn't work. Nvidia pretty much just does one, pretty specialized thing (GPUs) and trying to break it up into >10 pieces worth <$20B each (approximate median GDP of African nations by IMF) would be completely unnecessary. Just their gaming GPUs had ~$6B in profit in just the last year alone, and we know that their market cap comes much more from the AI market. We definitely could use stronger anti-monopoly laws, but market cap limits aren't the way to do it.
I wish this preference applied to governments as well. No government should have dominion over more than either a a certain percentage of people nor a certain percentage of production capacity.
So, I'm generally aware how monopolies form but given I'm not a web developer, what are the difficulties in starting a competing ad revenue company in the world today beyond the typical difficulties facing starting companies/startups?
If what you make is an ad platform, you have the normal chicken egg problem that without your ad network existing on many pages, no one wants to buy ads from you, and opposite way that without lots of ad buyers no one wants to reserve room for your ad network on their site.
But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts:
- they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them.
Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
> If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries
What does this mean?
In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.
Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.
The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.
Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?
(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
I assume he picked some ridiculously high number as a starting point.
In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies.
That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
Announcing GoogleSquared, it's an entity which is entitled to precisely half of Googles profit (or loss) in any year before stock buy backs and dividends. It will buy back exactly as many shares of stock as Google does every year, issue exactly as many stocks as Google does every year to exactly the same entities, and issue exactly the same dividends, and do nothing else.
Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.
(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
I wish there was a way to turn “I’m pretty sure this business is pulling some BS” into “Just shut them the fuck down already”. But that would probably require the Justice system to work.
What you're saying is heresy in a capitalist world.
It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.
> I looked into a half-dozen or so alternatives, but all the other companies were either simply Google ads re-sellers, which is an ecosystem I don't quite understand, or were extremely sketchy, and had reviews complaining about how they trick people into downloading malware and such.
This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actually crazy how there is literally no quality alternative.
If you only want your ads next to quality content or on sites that are not drowning in ads so your ad is more impactful, then Google won’t help. But a third party can provide that through their curated list of sites.
Basically they are in the business of providing human curated targeting parameters instead of the algorithm based that Google supplies.
Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic? I laughed out loud multiple times. Kudos to the author for making such a depressing topic so hysterical.
Tragicomic is used often in Swedish (Tragikomiskt). There is a nuance difference between tragicomic and bittersweet. Bittersweet is when you daughter moves out to her own place,it's sad that your kid grew up but also great, it's bittersweet but not tragicomic. Tragicomic is when something is so screwed up that the only thing you can do is laugh at it.
Right. Bittersweet is about something that affects you personally, some experience that blends joy and sadness. Tragicomic is about some external going-on that you observe and react to like an audience member.
There's also the laugh-cry emoji, which can be used for both situations, I think.
Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them.
Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.
But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.
Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.
To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.
> Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did.
That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!"
Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too.
If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
> Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...
There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.
At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."
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! :)
>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.
Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.
The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers?
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.
> No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
> Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers."
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.
I'm surprised no one commenting has really got this point. The truth is Google has a choice about the model it uses, Google has created the advertising industry online.
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.
Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site.
However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.
The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.
Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?
The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program.
Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.
On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.
I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
It's really hard to know what a "steady stream" is without useful quantification. I mean to you or me a steady stream might be 100 people a day. Or a million. It's hard to say. (And clearly that would be useful knowledge in the context of evaluating the value of the site.)
On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.
If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.
Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?
Funnily enough, tools are best monetised as SEO enhancers. His tool would have incredible page rank, and by linking to a "Made with love by congressblog.com" from that tool (and all the others he has made) and then populating congressblog.com with lots of content about like, congress, he could monetise THAT site with ads. He didn't have to ruin the calculator.
EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation.
Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.
Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".
Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
Google has a monopoly though. Multiple monopolies even.
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
Tell me more about the advertising potential an alternative advertiser would see in this site?
Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
I would think this tool is useful for students or journalists. Grammarly and other writing tools would be relevant. Obviously, people who are interested in government or politics, so political ads are hugely relevant.
Cause then everyone tells Google that their demographic is the one that shows ads that pay the best.
Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.
I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
If everyone that wants to scam Google just says they have whatever audience pays best, that should result in lots of slots for that audience. Somehow that should tank the price, right?
Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but (1) we did once[1], because you're right that it seems like an obvious fit. But in practice (2) it got absolutely crushed in the market performance-wise by more sophisticated algorithms like Facebook's and Google's (Amazon plays in this world too, though they have an easier space to search). It turns out that the fundamental game in the ad world isn't serving ads that site administrators and content creators think their users want to see, it's figuring out what the users of that content actually want and showing them that instead.
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.
It wasn't just the meta tags that were abused. People were adding text into invisible elements, or text as the same color as the background, etc. This was the precursor to SEO and ads really, and just people trying to get listed higher in search.
As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created
We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible.
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?
> Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
Political ads? Campaign ads?
Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?
People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it.
But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
Google has been sending me emails about how things are preventing them from indexing my websites,and recently I've stopped caring.
My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
> Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.
My point is that Google has sensible motives, and that people with perfectly good sites will butcher them in the hope of making a buck, and then blame Google.
Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.
The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.
The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
Google has sensible motives but, undoubtedly owing to a lack of strong competition, they are not very good at serving these motives.
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.
Google knows who the visitor is, what ads they clicked before and so on. They also know the search terms the site ranks for. What is on the site is just one clue as to what to serve.
Point here though is that author shouldn't have had to add the extra stuff.
There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?
By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.
This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.
Have you thought about alternative monetization methods like Buy Me A Coffee? A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji" message can get you some decent cash. Maybe selling your site to someone that can monetize it is your best bet. Yeah your site isn't what Google Ads wants, that's a shame, but then that's on you to come up with an alternative.
Google is selling surveillance not ads. Getting a static ad just like a magazine would be the natural fit for such a website.
Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)
Wouldn't the surveillance work just fine on that site?
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.
Fair, ads should be viable, but OP really didn't try very hard on that front. There are plenty of ad networks that could be a substitute, but I understand that they're not as good as Google ads, and OP is lazy.
Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.
I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls, but that's pretty far off.
if there was an apple pay button i would have given him a dollar but instead there's "buy me a coffee" which i've never heard of, stripe which im not filling out, and liberapay which iirc is for crypto nerds
i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)
Why does it have to be on them to come up with an alternative instead of... like... acknowledging that monopolies and businesses approaching them are harmful to both consumers and businesses?
This was made more as an example of how much power Google has. While Google is not technically a monopoly, using any alternative is most likely going to hurt your potential reach. Essentially, damned if you do, damned if you don't with no middle ground.
Look no further than Google fucking around either third-party cookies every year to demonstrate how overpowered they are.
Think whatever you want of the ad industry, but Google flipping on that every year changes the project roadmap for every competitor in the adtech world. And when they flip again mid-year, it can invalidate months of work that teams have done.
In the end, all adtech companies are happy to see third-party cookies survive, so no one complains when Google backs out of killing them, but the point is that Google’s decisions change the project roadmaps for every competitor because no one is actually competing with Google. They have entirely too much control over the way the internet runs.
Because if there are alternatives, then it isn't a monopoly. Even if we're restricting ourselves to ads, there are other ad networks, and you can find your own sponsors. The OP is a self-admitted lazy commie and just wants to say "Google bad".
>A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji" message can get you some decent cash
Source?
As far as I know you will need to put banners so users know you accept donations (as OP accepts donations in their support page and you literally missed that), and most people don't donate, so what tends to happen is you replace banners that everyone hates but that pays money with banners that everyone hates that don't pay money.
I know from work I've done with voluntary contributions that you can get near the amount that ad sense will give you, but that's on the high end, and will depend on the type of content and how you push it. But it would have at least been worth trying, given the public service nature of the content. Certainly enough to cover the costs of the domain name and hosting.
Also, people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
Also, the OP DOES NOT have a support page linked on the original, or meme page of apportionmentcalculator.com. Don't know why you're giving me snark when it seems you yourself didn't even look at their site.
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.
> 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'd guess that'd be true so long as what replaces ads is also annoying/distracting/intrusive, misleading, a security/privacy risk, gets in people's way, and/or prevents them getting to what they requested/came for. Hopefully, something intended to replace ads wouldn't be any of those things.
Ideally the ads wouldn't be replaced with anything at all. It seems unlikely that we'll go back to how things were when people published content online because they just wanted to share something cool or useful with anyone who was interested, but maybe it'll get to the point where it's easy and affordable enough that publishing a table of data, or a recipe, or a simple calculator doesn't cost a person enough to justify worrying about ads or whatever replaces them.
Here we all are on this website after all, typing up comments without demanding payment from anyone and everyone who reads what we have to say or putting flashing ad banners on them. It doesn't cost us much to do it, so we do, without any profit motive.
Yeah I know they have a donation button hidden away on their main site, on a different domain. That's not what we're talking about. The problem is that OP is so fucking stupid that they didn't realize they basically cut their conversation rate by several orders of magnitude with their design. It doesn't take a genius to make a large highlighted message at the top and bottom begging for a donation.
As for your hot take, I see no reason why I should take that seriously. Plenty of contribution requests exist today and have not been blocked, and they seem to drive okay conversation. Ads and contributions are not the same, and different strategies will emphasize them differently.
I ran into this as well about 2 years ago. I thought it’d be cool to create a site that’d algorithmically estimate the snowpack for mountains based on observations and elevation. It was a very rough estimate, but still better than using 1 square mile observations, which obviously could vary by 10k+ feet of elevation.
When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added long-form descriptions of the content. So instead of a useful chart and table, I ended up having long-winded descriptions of the location, algorithm, search, elevation’s effect on snowpack, and all that.
It was so fucking stupid I just up and deleted the whole project and never looked back. I’m sure I could have made the tool better and charged a subscription or something if it was actually useful, but it just kind of made me jaded on the modern web. I gave up and went hiking.
Ah so this is why recipe websites are straight out of some demonic fever dream where you have to scroll 1 mile past 30 blocks of text, video, ads to get to the ingredients, then 1 mile further to get to the instructions.
All of those sites should be banned - but now i see it's Google encouraging them - such an extreme downgrade in usability from a basic html site from 30 years ago.
Something has gone extremely wrong on a huge scale culturally and politically.
I wonder if you could DIY your own ads via an amazon affiliate account. I've used one in the past for actual product reviews, but now I'm wondering if you could hack it in in some way.
thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?
I had to pull out the ol' ungoogled chromium browser for this and for a moment I thought it was still a joke because of how absurd some of the ads were. One of them was a picture of an empty toilet paper roll holding up a toilet seat with the title "Put a Toilet Paper Roll Under the Toilet Seat at Night, Here's Why", and clicking it took me to a site[1] with a bunch of nonsense life hacks probably written by some AI. Surprisingly, the site itself has no ads, yet it does link to a bunch of scam products.
I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?
I keep safari "unblocked" just for this kind of scenario, as sometimes the blocking breaks stuff I want to see that doesn't work otherwise. It's becoming rarer for sure over time. Didn't mean to impinge on safari, it's a great browser that I use for work.
Even Edge has ad blockers to an extent. The only browser that doesn't natively block trackers, or does stuff to reduce the power of adblockers is Chrome. Coincidentally, they are owned by the biggest ad network on earth.
The craziest thing to me is that if you let Google manage the ads, it will create exactly the ad-infested website the article mentions, and that OP's website turned into, with vignettes and sliding ads from the bottom of the screen, and ads half the size of the screen above the fold. That isn't the result of the website's owner's hand. It's actually Google's autoads feature.
It's entirely possible that we have tons of people making websites that don't really know a lot technically, they just use Wordpress or something like that, and they add adsense and let Google manage it, and Google just does THIS every time. And if Google didn't have this autoads features, the entire web would have a lot less ads, because it's just more ads than a human being can manually place in a webpage every time.
“a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money.”
Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter.
They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.
That was the author's point, but I think it is undermined by the fact that the ads on the page are more obnoxious than the AI-generated content. The AI generated content is nicely hidden away underneath the huge banner ad and the full screen popup ad that the author wanted to include.
On the other hand, why do we need Google for recipes. Everyone eats multiple times per day. You only need to host text, really. How come the world hasn't come together to create this. How can the world ever come together if we can't even create this.
I don't really get why people have problems using Google for recipes anyway. Just search for recipes on BBC good food. They have recipes for everything, lots of ratings from real people; the highly rated recipes are really good.
Yeah, I don't get it. How else would you find recipes? Especially the random and rare ones. Especially if there is an incentive for people to make you find their stuff, and not the random and rare ones.
It happened to me too, with my simple site for generating acrostic poems [0].
It would only show the poems create. I tried Adsense, was rejected for lack of content (probably, because they are mysterious about the reason they reject you). Then I tried adding lists of words starting with the letters used as initials for the acrostics. Rejected again.
Then I gave up, and decided to use affiliate links.
I had to do a similar thing for my gif maker https://gifmemes.io when I've tried monetization through ads. Luckily for my users, the revenue was less than 10% of what it makes through watermark removal sales, so I've removed ads and dummy content all together.
The author has a very valid point about recipe websites. If you don't have a couple hundred words of prose and some multimedia, even if it's complete nonsense, it may as well not exist according to search engines. It's not just ad sales, though. It's also search rankings and even organic traffic.
I put some family recipes on my personal (mostly tech) blog under another category in my sidebar. Taking a verbatim couple words that should be reasonably unique from a recipe there doesn't show up in searches for it. I took a quick look at my traffic analytics and apart from myself, it gets an imperceptible (perhaps 1 or 2) unique visitors each week out of the average 500-ish. I'd imagine a few things are at play:
- most folks find my site looking for tech things, not recipes
- most websites have a "single theme" - I just don't want to follow that because it's mine and I have other interests :)
- I do not at all care how many people copy my recipe for grilled bread or whatnot.
- I also don't run pictures because I don't want to.
What I do care about is that I like the look of _my_ recipes when _I_ need them, much like the recipe sites that existed 10 or more years ago.
If there's any call to action here, please put some of your own recipes or hobby activities or game things or anything else on your site. You're an interesting whole human being and it's okay to be that (even if our search engine overlords don't reward that).
A website that does not display any of the article text without JS is not "perfectly good" IMO in the first place! Most inappropriate for a site called The Luddite!
I had a site that used to make me a useful side income. Its mostly lots of short pages explaining specific things, on average in a few hundred words. https://moneyterms.co.uk/
It lost its Google rankings many years ago.
It used to have adsense on it, but when I reapplied after moving countries they refused it on similar grounds to those mentioned in the article.
I am thinking of adding some fluff at the top of each page an seeing how it does.
We have in some respects done this to ourselves. We've created a funding model such that watching ads is the primary way we pay for the content and services that we consume. Then, our desire for privacy causes us to restrict the data that websites can collect about us, leading to less targeted and therefore less valuable ads.
So now we have to watch ever more ads which are ever less valuable.
For me, I'd rather that companies had better tracking and could therefore show me fewer, more personally relevant ads. And maybe some strong laws that prevent them from sharing my data with the government.
Honestly, the actual Luddite blog looks almost as AI-generated as the actually AI-generated blogspam he added.
>VW told law enforcement they would "not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen," according to the sherrif's office. Perhaps it should be unsurprising from a company that started during the Third Reich and used forced Jewish labor.
Wut?
(Seriously, they're trying to claim that there's some connection between two events that involved the same company but happened around 80 years apart on different continents and people speaking different languages, with an intervening war? Not to mention that the linked article says that Volkswagen has a process for cooperating with law enforcement and that this was just a mistake. And I do not believe they are lying about having such a process.)
I read through to the end, skipping swathes of GPT-3 nonsense, and I don't really want to use the wider internet anymore.
Of course I will for awhile yet, buy these feelings add up, I'm getting older, and I have the luxury of being able to go without it except in service to others (medical portals, work email and related websites). If I hadn't opened HN I'd be out preparing the garden that much sooner, but The Luddite looks resonant, and I appreciate learning about it.
Like quitting caffeine and related decaffeinated drinks (no coffee or tea is grown in WA that I know of, and I sleep better now anyway), and eventually chocolate (ditto, but much harder to let go of), quitting the internet is happening in fits and starts.
Going to put the next layer of compost onto our wee garden bed, longing for unfenced, ecologically-balanced land instead, with the massive centuries-old Douglas-fir still standing. I am reminded every day of our short-sightedness, by the huge stumps and fairy-ring encircled low spots.
Depressing. Would be interesting to see if once he'd established a record with Google for attracting users, if the site owner were to slowly drop the ruinous features, whether Google would turn a blind eye and in time it would be back to how it used to be (except with ads)
I know this is totally unrelated and probably won't see it, but I read your comment about German solar farms sometime ago and I was wondering if you could throw light on that. I can't find any email to contact you by except the one you shared like a year ago (hnr@webhome.de) which I figured belongs to your friend. Please, what's a good email where I can reach you? Mine's in my profile. Thanks and hoping to hear back.
If the presence of Google ads on a site is a negative signal then a search engine that down ranks sites with ads might be a good alternative? is this what Kagi does?
If you want to rank high (search, stores) you need to spend money on adwords and implemented adsense/admob. Approximately 30% on what you earn wiyh Adsense needs to be spend on Adwords. Only by completing that circle you can become part of the eco system.
Its very hard to rank high organically. Only if your name is Ronaldo or Coca Cola you have a chance. But otherwise you need to buy yourself in.
Hey holoduke, if you see this, would you kindly shoot me an email? I saw one of your comments from a while back and would like to ask you something. I'd appreciate it. Address is in my profile.
"Hey there, fellow political enthusiasts and furry friend lovers! We're Alex and Taylor, and we're on a mission..."
This really made me smile. It's one of the stupid phrases used in all of these types of sites that bothers me to no end. Iliza Shlesinger has a bit about two sisters doing a pitch to Shark Tank, and I read that whole "post" in the voice she uses. I always thought it was just me and my curmudgeon ways, but clearly if "AI" has picked up on it, then I see it as definite justification for my take.</rant>
i <3 this person for taking it this direction to prove a point. I've been known to do stupid stuff like this myself, and had the same ultimate point. It made a few people smile, but most people just rolled their eyes.
I routinely speak with said creator of website). I have let him know this thread is here to appreciate the wide conversation on here.
I do genuinely love that I write 13,000 words on issues with AI on the site to little response. But some of the more silly stuff like this is the higher traction stuff on the site. Just glad to see said author is getting the attention he deserves.
Did you write the replika stuff? I'm currently chewing through the two parter and its an enjoyable read. It seems like there is quite a lot of interesting content on that site and I'm extremely happy it has presented itself to me. If not, which articles did you write? I want to read them.
There’s currently so many words about AI everyday that I just don’t care any more. There’s a very obvious trend taking place with AI that the fanboys are willfully ignoring while contributing to it at the same time while those not drinking of the AI kool-aid sit back and watch history repeat itself.
So when things not related to AI are posted, it stands out and gains traction.
Is there a public resource recording past google search results?
Reason for asking is because even 10 years ago, I’d think the top recipe site results were like they are now, but there’s no way to actually know that without an archive.
What do you mean? The logical thing is $. That's it. Nothing hidden here. Google knows how many times it sends people there. I can't imagine that it's any significant numbers in Google terms of numbers. The author says it "gets a steady stream of traffic", but no definition of what that actually means. It's probably a rounding number of a rounding number to Googs. With that in mind, yeah, it's not worth it to Googs even if it magically returns this site when the very niche phrase "apportionment calculator" is used. I can say that until this article I had never seen those two words together.
If a simple useful site already gets a high percentage of clicks from Google Searches for its functionality, and wants to show ads, that’s $.
Right?
Why would PageRank rate a site highly, and funnnel people to it, while Adsense doesn’t want to monetize it?
I can’t come up with a sensible reason.
All I can think is Adsense is becoming so gamey, so sophisticated at monetizing spam and low quality content, that they are dropping the ball on engagement with simple quality, even when it leaves money on the table. I.e. this is an oversight.
You’re ignoring the part about numbers of visitors and the lack of actual numbers. While the author may feel they are decent, Googs may think they are not.
> For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic.
What does not enough traffic mean? As a measure? As a rationale? What threshold was not achieved here that makes actual sense?
High quality links to pages with Google ads are all Google should care about at its most self-interested. There is no “too small” because it is all incremental. Why send someone somewhere and not have an ad there?
If they got more traffic due to the intentional crap additions, what does that tell you about Google Search?
This is an example of full failure of Google to even take care of their own interests.
"anticapitalist" complains about a capitalist company doing something that capitalist companies are obligated to do because their purpose is to serve their shareholders, not cater to every unique situation of every person that uses the Internet. "I want my website to show Google's advertisements and give me money, but if Google is going to make it difficult for me then I want to complain about it!" excuse me while I rub my thumb and index (haha, search engine play on words!) together to play a sad tune on the world's smallest violin. billions of websites work fine without having anything to do with soulless Google.
positive outlooks work better than negative ones, and embracing challenges with vigor rather than a sense of "injustice! here I am nailed upon a cross!" is the way to have a more spiritually rewarding life, imo.
I mean it's hard to keeping growing 10 % every year if you're already one of the biggest companies in the world, so I think it's unavoidable that at some point you will prioritise revenue over user interest if those are misaligned, which they seem to be for search. People using search engines and companies wanting search traffic have vastly different incentives, so it's even surprising to me that the system worked so well for such a long time. Recently it just seems that the whole thing starts to come off at the seams, there's just too much pressure from all sides that squeezes against user interest. The last 10-20 years were characterised by strong growth of the web and with that revenue per user icnreased as people did more and more stuff online, but maybe now we're reaching a saturation phase were revenue per user won't increase naturally anymore, so you have to start hacking user attention to squeeze out more revenue. Seems very similar to the streaming platforms, all was great when their growth was fuelled by user growth, but as that seems to saturate companies switch gears and monetise individual users more agressively as a growth driver.
You decided to ruin a perfectly good website by adding ads. Google did not force you to do that and the enshittification required to get Google to approve the ads is peanuts compared to the ads themselves.
> I'm willing to sell people unregulated erectile dysfunction medication or tell them about sexy singles in their area, but tricking people into downloading viruses is a bit too far.
"Legit" ads can have much worse outcomes on people's lives than downloading a virus.
Trying to read it and I find it quite ironic that a website called "the luddite" requires you to have Javascript (which I don’t have in my default browser)
If your default browser has JavaScript disabled, you have surely noticed that >90% of the websites you visit appear to be broken. And today you again visited another website which appeared to be broken for you with JavaScript disabled. You were so surprised by this incident that you decided to write a comment on the internet about it.
Well, you would be surprised to heard that, actually, the vast majority of text websites (blogs, news, etc…) works pretty well without javascript (I’m browsing in offpunk by default).
In fact, they often actually work better: I can read the text without any other annoyance.
There are rare exceptions like this one and some personal blog from developers who insists on not putting the text in the HTML but through Javascript.
It is not only annoying, this is a total misunderstanding of what the web should be and, TBH, borderline stupid when done on purpose. (because it is more complex, it breaks most accessibility and it doesn’t add anything.)
Most websites actually appear more broken with Javascript disabled. For example the Gluten-Free Apple Crisp recipe mentioned in this article - it's not as easy to read as with the recipe extractor, but it is significantly easier to read with Javascript disabled.
It is surprising that someone who complains about such things and understands them requires Javascript for a simple blog post.
Because JavaScript is the last thing you need to serve a blog post
consisting of plain text and a couple of images. Forcing more powerful
technology than necessary on readers is the polar opposite of what a
luddite would do.
It's almost as ironic as the author of an "anticapitalist tech blog"
complaining about the hoops they must jump through to sell their users'
attention to one of the largest corporations on Earth.
Maybe you've gotten luddites and carthusians mixed up.
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.
Flagged: this trips my internal GPT detector (patent pending) at 83% certainty and seems to be a lengthy meandering response to an article describing Google preventing ad blockers. The article is about Google asking for more content on the site before approving ads.
Yes, sarcastic, poking fun at myself for having a gut feeling -- so no, no classifier, afaik it's impossible to reliably. Though I would like to take a test and see my recognition rate, I wonder if there's a site for that...
Eerie..I looked at the account after I posted my comment...it made several other comments I noticed this week.
Nearly every single comment I remember seeing and thinking it sounded like GPT, and yet, had enough content to be not-GPT, and I figured I was being cranky.
Same vibe here except blatantly off-topic, and less content than the others
I don't think it is "pure GPT" because of the "As someone...". It seems more likely that this is someone who is using GPT to make their comments longer or "fancier". Or it might be a rare example of someone who actually talks like that.
At a certain point we ended up being invited by one of the largest rental companies to see whether we could work together. They invited us because the content was incredibly useful for their visitors and they preferred our calendar over the official one for ease of use.
So clearly, our site was adding value for the target audience we had in mind. We were also consistently getting visitors through different search engines that were looking for the info we provided. The number of visitors was growing consistently and pretty much all the feedback we got was positive.
In March, Google rolled out a new algo which all but completely removed us from search results. Out visitors dropped about 80% and growth has disappeared. What was a fun project that we spent many hours on is now a waste of computing resources.
I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.
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.
Are we back to the early days of search engines?
So if people were searching for "Day at Nürburgring" and used to find OP's site, then Google changed their algorithm, and now when people search for "Day at Nürburgring" they don't find OP's site, how is that not Google’s fault?
______
[1]: And Bog knows Google serves me up enough sites with those on...
But what if there are 20 good resources? They can't all be on the first page, or in the top spot.
Perhaps yhe other sites improved, or were better in some way?
Being on top for a while is no guarantee you'll be on top forever. It's precisely Google's business to change the algorithm.
I disagree with your specific point that Google should fix anything. Google can choose their own behaviors and motivations. Users can choose to rely on Google or trust them at all, or not.
Remember when Google was a successful business competing against the likes of Yahoo and AltaVista? Back when it was ok to be a successful small business? When you didn't count a millions users as a failure?
Nobody seems to believe anymore that you can operate a successful search company without having a trillion dollar war chest. Few people are willing to give alternative engines a try. They'd rather stick to Google like glue.
I'd like to declare the 28th as "Try something different day." On the 28th of each month people should try a different browser for the entire day. Or a different search engine. Or a different tooth paste. Every month, one day a month, take a different route to work, or maybe even a different mode of transportation. Use a Colemak keyboard. Go to a different church. You don't have to do the same different thing each month. Just start building some experience with shaking up your routine.
When you try something different and it turns out ok, share your positive experience with others.
I have not used Google search or Bing for years and it has worked out pretty well. I started with DDG, but have had good experiences with other search engines, too. Some may argue that DDG is not different enough. So perhaps next month I should try qwant.com for a day.
If you don’t see a ranking change, it could also indicate seasonality in your visitors or external events. If your website is brand new, this could be hard to detect otherwise. For example, recently I saw a traffic spike for a random blog article, and search console help me see that people were searching for that topic because Elon Musk tweeted about it the day before.
Another helpful feature is to inspect particular URLs and make sure they are indexed—sometimes if you have multiple similar pages and set the canonical URL incorrectly, Google will try to de-dupe the results.
Hope that helps!
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.
Sick.
Disclosure - I was so pissed by the degration of quality (an money-thirstiness) of the search results from Google that I switched to a non-profit search engine as my default for both desktop and mobile. The daily search experience doesn't have much noticible change to me. I do admit sometimes the Google search result could be better sometimes, but those occasions are quite rare for my needs, like maybe once a week.
1. Google isn't working well any more.
2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages.
3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload.
4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.
5. Forget it.
---
Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoever can solve the underlying problem of trust on the internet -- as in, you're definitely a human, and supported by this system I will award you a level of trust -- could be the next Google. :)
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.
Part of the problem seems like a recency bias in search results. I notice sites frequently update pages with new timestamps, but nothing of substance appears to have changed (e.g. a review of something that was released 4 years ago, but the page was supposedly updated last week). So if I do pretty much the same search that succeeded two months ago, but repeat it today, I might not find the useful result I remember coming across.
I'm sure there are a bunch of other issues related to search and SEO that are affecting search quality. It seems insane that the major search providers don't combat this trend by arming users with more tools to tailor their search, but rather steadily degrade the user experience with no recourse.
Honestly, I think if Google was wise, they'd have a skunkworks team rethinking search from scratch (not tied to AI/LLMs) that starts their own index and tries to come up with an alternative to the current Google Search. Maybe they have that already, though I doubt it. I'm sure if they do have such a team, it's intricately tied to existing infrastructure and team hierarchies which effectively nullifies any chance it has at success.
Second, give me a way to express semantic meaning of something. If I’m searching for rust, let me choose programming language for example. I find myself adding various one word tags to limit the search results.
If I'm looking to buy something, I will frequently end up using Google. The engine that matches my product search to a relevant ad is excellent. Basically anytime you need to search for something that could lead to a purchase of a physical product, Google will be extremely useful. For services and software you can't use Google, you will get hustled by fake review or top 10 XYZ for 2024 sites.
I will search for "wellness chicken cat food" - and wellness has chicken cat food in a few different textures, so it seems like those should at least be on the page of search results, if not the top results. Not always so! At the very least I will have to scroll a ways down the page to get anything even wellness.
And sometimes the top results aren't even cat food, they will be random other pet supplies.
Or she wants a few different flavors of the food, and I find one and then the other flavors I have to search a few different ways to pull them up and they don't show up on any "similar" displays.
It's painful. I hope Google doesn't go the same way - I think with Instacart it's because they want to promote whatever it is they put at the top, but even that doesn't explain how terrible some of the search results are.
For anything that’s indeterministic, it just brings me garbage. The same with YouTube as well. I’m searching for a specific thing about a particular library and it’s showing me stupid definition blogs or useless garbage. I apologize for my crudeness but no other words can describe it.
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.
At the moment, the only tasks (that I can think of) that come close to the 'time-consuming-enough to not scale, but not quite annoying enough to put off committed individuals' are the various forms of CAPTCHA - which is unsurprising, given that we're discussing a form of Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. (And of course, there are CAPTCHA-solving farms.)
But would people invest time in a review system that required them to complete a form of CAPTCHA regularly?
I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.
yet rich ppl are granted more upfront trust. maybe because we assume less incentive to rob.
No, what you're talking about is POWER and AGENCY. Rich people have the power to override trust through the fact that they can operate with near impunity; so you have very little agency to not trust them. If you choose to not show trust, you may invoke their wrath.
In order to prevent hacking trust the SSO again must ensure:
- unique human, or
- resource spend
Here's the thing. A sovereign nation can "generate" as many "unique" humans as it wants (via printing "fake" but official identities). No one would be on to them until there were more users than probable people in the country.
Of course Wikipedia is way smaller than the internet, but still one way to go could be by having themed "human curated niches"
> 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!
IMO it's how all moderation should go: you subscribe to some default moderators' lists initially and then mutate those subscriptions and their trust levels. Mod actions are simply adding visibility options to content and not actually removing anything.
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.
Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.
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.
AdSense is serving ads on third-party websites, which is very different.
Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.
By every measure don't people have more time than ever before? I think it's more a dramatic shift in how people use & view the internet. The (unfortunate in a lot of ways) answer is probably create something new and exclusive, but universal enough for the target audience that's going to do all the work to align incentives, try to pull along the good and leave behind the bad. There has been and will continue to be a lot of false starts & failed attempts. If successful it will eventually be co-opted and ruined too. So it goes.
Can you say more about that?
Times have changed. While there are significantly more open-source projects, online communities, and all kinds of available help than ever before, the proportion of active contributors relative to the number of people online has decreased. Consequently, the time required for each volunteer to process input for a project like a "webring" has increased significantly.
I also feel that it's become harder to motivate people, but not because they've become lazier. Rather, the tasks have become more demanding, so "nobody seems to have the time for them anymore".
Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.
Thanks @Kagi - I attribute three solutions last week directly to you.
Because they don't work.
It should be concerning that email has re-centralized to deal with all the problems that come from federation and decentralization.
As someone who administrates their own email server and works at an SMB who administrates their own email servers, it works quite well and doesn’t require centralization.
I've done a lot of a lot of email administration over the years, servers with 100,000s of accounts, and you walk a very fine line in being able to communicate with the rest of the world. Your IPs must exist in certain blocks (or at least not be in banned blocks). You must block outgoing spam messages at a much higher rate and quality than google/hotmail do. Get yourself blacklisted for any reason and expect to disappear from the internet, meanwhile no one is going to block the largest services.
50 year old decentralized protocol has problems, so decentralized protocols can't possible work. Just like 50 year old computer can't play doom, so doom doesn't exist.
The basic problem with email is that it assumed good-faith participation from the parties involved. It was assumed that only legitimate actors would have the resources to participate and they would always be well-behaved. This, it turns out, was flawed on several counts. For one, it assumed legitimacy could be assured. For another, it assumed legitimate users would be well-behaved and would never abuse services for gain. For a third, it assumed account takeovers or other impersonation attacks wouldn't happen.
Every de-centralized system that aspires to not have email's problems needs to take them seriously.
The actual logic involved in search is itself pretty simple and almost trivial to shard, the problem is dealing with a mutable dataset that is of the order of a hundred terabytes.
Search gets enormous benefits from data locality, such that distributed approaches are all significantly more expensive.
Decentralized has a small convenience cost and the crime of surveilling everyone to advertise to them (among other uses) is too cheap for decentralized to come out on top. Note I am Atheist when I say this: if law doesn't hammer the scourge, those who get religious about this stuff are the ones who'll enjoy any modicum of sovereignty.
The answer is simple, allow some level of user feedback from proven real users (for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret) and apply it mildly as a ranking signal.
As long as it doesn’t become the only factor in ranking, you still retain strong incentives to do all the old SEO stuff, yet with a layer of human sanity on top.
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
The point is, there's experimentation that could be done and there's absolutely solutions that could be found.
Early Google did tons of experimentation with the search algorithm to maintain the integrity of the results. There was definitely an active game of cat and mouse back then that Google actually cared about staying on top of.
But as a decades entrenched monopoly, Google lost all incentives to tinker with anything anymore. The "operational" folks took over and any change to the search algorithm is now a multi-year endeavor involving thousands of stakeholders.
You won't though, unfortunately. Too many people know the rules to keep it a secret, especially given that corruption exists.
I'm not saying that circumventing Google is the easiest thing in the world, or the cheapest, but it's not mission impossible either. I didn't find Hacker News from Google, not the dozens of other tech communities I'm following.
I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't like than doing something awesome themselves.
I know what you gonna say, but... ya... you knew.
So, Google becomes two orgs: Google indexing and Google search. Google indexing must offer its services to all search providers equally without preference to Google search. Now we can have competition in results ranking and monetisation, while 'google indexing' must compete on providing the most valuable signals for separating out spam.
It doesn't solve the problem directly (as others have noted, inbound links are no longer as strong a signal as they used to be) but maybe it gives us the building blocks to do so.
Perhaps also competition in the indexing space would mean that one seo strategy no longer works, disincentivising 'seo' over what we actually want, which is quality content.
If search providers could at least match Google quality 'by default' that might help break the stranglehold wherein people like the GP are at the mercy of the whims of a single org
How sure are you about that? I find them to be subpar when compared to Bing, especially for technical search topics (mostly, PHP, Go, and C related searches).
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.
The #1 website in Google's ranking belongs to a company that significantly overcharges future students and has outdated/incorrect information on their website.
Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.
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.
I've been using chromium and firefox side by side at work and play all day for abt 3 years now. Indistinguishable except chromium uses more memory and crashes and hangs. I get hundreds of tabs open in firefox for weeks and months. I reach about 50 before chromium gets lethargic.
I used to do this under ubuntu 18 and 20 with 32GB ram, now under win11 w 64.
I don't understand the Chrome reality distortion field.
Did you miss the part where Google would directly advertise and ask if you wanted to use Chrome instead on Google's search page? Or how it would be bundled with every installer under the sun? Chrome isn't the most popular browser because we collectively decided it's the best. It's because they leveraged their position as the world's search engine and advertiser.
I've worked with tons of your average PC user. They don't even know what a browser is or what a search engine is. If Google asks them if they want to install Chrome, they will always answer yes because why not. It's Google.
This is not likely to change unless OpenAI finds a way break the monopoly. It's the only currently existing search that can claim to be better than Google. Which is why Google is pushing Gemini so hard.
If you're a creator-type why on earth would you ever build a web product in this type of environment? Join a corp or create trash and ride the wave -- at least then you'll have some semblance of a normal life instead of a living like a starving artist into your 30s
Did you get an agreememt with them or is it not an issue in Germany?
As long as we don't use the trademarked name 'Nürburgring' or their logo or an outline of the track in branding, it's all fair game. If we were to start selling t-shirts it would be a bit more tricky and we'd have to be pretty careful.
I think mine is a relevant question.
Google is just gatekeeping Google.
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.
They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.
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.
So we created a map with actual walking routes and people were finding them. Now they're not finding them and they're back to lots of searching.
We get some traction on social media too. But it's people who already go there and know a lot of what we provide already. People don't search Instagram for walking routes to POIs.
The net effect is that pretty much the only link signal is from link farms and paid media. If you don't crap over the internet with shady tactics, you will not appear in search results.
We lost our vote, by our own choice.
Edit: On this page https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-n... it even says that they use all links to rank websites, even if you set them to nofollow.
If you're offering me money to link you, then presumably you believe your content is not of high enough quality for me to link you otherwise.
You seem to have misunderstood the difference between an advertising agency and a SEO company. What you're describing is what advertising agencies do, SEO companies are spammers that sell access to their spamming tools. It's similar to the difference between an agency practicing law and having them send a cease-and-desist, and buying a DDoS.
Not that I'm particularly fond of any of that, though I have lawyers practicing in another area as customers.
Some of you guys need to get your heads out of your butts and realize how the real world works. It's not just black and white all the time.
Email spam is cheaper than news paper adverts, does that make it "legitimate"? Because that seems to be your argument here.
Sorry, but I'm not willing to have this discussion. As I said, you'd better grow up and face the realities of the world you live in.
At this point, the argument has lost good faith.
ADDENDUM: for comprehension, not plastic surgeons.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.
This isn't even the worst example, since it does at least have the correct info buried amongst tons of Ai generated garbage, but I can't use this for reference, since it tells me 4 different drill sizes. I've had to switch back to a paper copy of the machinist's handbook, since I can't trust the internet to give me accurate information anymore. 10 years ago, I could easily search for the clearance hole for a 10-24 fastener, now I get AI junk that I can't trust.
How have we regressed to the point that I'm better off using a paper book than online charts for things that don't change?
https://www.americanfastener.com/tap-and-drill-size-chart/
That was the first result.
You know it’s bad when you trust Apple’s search function over Google.
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-...
Because of the way transformers work, they have very good hindsight, so they can realize that they've just said things that are incorrect much more often than they can avoid saying incorrect things.
because products that require iteration lend themself to subscription models which in turn mean a recurring revenue which is deemed superior to onetime payments for a 'finished product'.
The best one is probably Kagi, but let's be real: "normal" people would never pay for a search engine service. Well, "normal" people don't even know the difference between Google, Google Chrome and probably the internet.
A family of four, two kids and two adults; 20 dollars ex GST (excluding tax) is.. gosh.
With the cost of living growing so quickly.. It’s quite a defeating experience.
So in conclusion; I expand your criteria above. Even “not-normal” people may not pay for a search engine, though for financial reasons in my case.
Also didn't know you could turn them off. I don't mind ads to support businesses when it is reasonable and DDG is a decent business. I just hope you folks don't try to keep up with the giants by playing their game. ;)
In a sense we resorted to the searchable message board, once an university homework assignment, in the form of HN here.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40138486
> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.
At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.
The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.
The recipe looks good (chickpeas, olive oil, salt, spices, oh shit I stole her blog post). I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".
Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.
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!
Kind regards, Roel
Why do you care as a search engine? This is a natural human problem that can't be solved with technology, only by humans.
It used to be, that I went to page 5 of Google instantly, because that was where the real results were. The first few pages were people who knew more SEO than sense.
These days, that doesn't work since "semantic search" because now it appears to be sorted by some relevance metric and by about page 5 you start getting into "marginally related to some definition of what you typed in but still knows too much SEO to be useful."
The point is, this was already a solved problem if you knew to go to about page 4-5. Then people started trying to use a technical solution to a very human problem.
Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?
Granted, there are a lot of search engines that sell themselves on other metrics ("it's fast!" or "it uses AI!" or "it's in the cloud!") but any serious search engine player strives to learn how good it is -- in practise -- at helping the user find what they are looking for. That's ultimately the purpose of a search engine.
While a useful metric, it's an unknowable metric.
1. You have no idea if the user even knows what they are looking for, so how would you know that they found it?
2. You have no idea if the user found what they are looking for, maybe what they are looking for isn't on the internet?
3. You have no idea if the user is even looking for something, maybe it was just a cat running across the keyboard?
The only way to learn the answer is to have humans talk to humans. You can't game your way through it by using metrics.
It reminds me of this one time the CEO asked our team to add a metric for "successful websites" (we were a hosting provider) and we rebuffed with "define successful." They immediately mentioned page views, which we replied "what about a restaurant with a downloadable menu that google links to directly?" and back and forth with "successful" never being defined for all verticals and all cases. It just isn't possible to define using heuristics.
Do you philosophically agree there are websites that are more successful than others? If yes, then there are tangible qualities that distinguish this group from the other. They may be subjective, fuzzy, and hard to pin down, but they're still there. If no, a success measure is irrelevant to you but other people might disagree, and once thoroughly investigated, you sort of have to agree the measurement coming out of it reflects their idea of success.
In none of this am I saying it's simple or easy (I started this subthread by saying it's difficult!) but fundamentally knowable.
Yes, humans talking to humans is definitely the start. But then I'm posivistically enough inclined that I think with effort we can extract theories from these human interactions.
I had a CEO who searched for the related business search terms every morning. No clicks, he just wanted to see the ranking. The other day, I was searching for an open NOC page that I knew existed but couldn’t remember the search terms. Eventually I gave up, but I’m 90% sure I left the tab open to a random promising search result that had nothing to do with what I was really searching for. There’s a pdf that archive.org fought over and simply mentioning it results in a DCMA, you can find it now, but for nearly 20 years, you could only find rumors of it on the internet and a paper copy was the only way you could read it.
Even when I know what I’m looking for exactly, I sometimes open a bunch of tabs to search results and check all of them, (This is actually the vast majority of my non-mobile searches) especially because the search results are often wrong or miss some important caveats — especially searching for error messages.
The only way you could find out these searches were unsuccessful (or successful) is to ask. There’s no magic metrics to track that will tell you whether or not my personal experience found the search successful.
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.
After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.
[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.
[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.
Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.
[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk...
[2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...
https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is a pain, shortcuts for low-tolerance users seems like a good compromise.
Enough has to be enough!
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.
Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind.
And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
Detect sales/commercial language and structure,* and specifically target that for removal from results as if sales-oriented sites were hardcore porn and the child safety filter is turned on.
*Buy and cart buttons/functions, tables containing prices with descriptions but don't look like long-form reviews (which would be it's own filterable tag), etc, and domains trying to obfuscate are blacklisted permanently.
This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours?
Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.
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.
You enter the name of your desired dish and have a plain recipe with steps in 5 seconds. No ads etc
I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.
https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5x...
> When the weather starts to finally cool down and the evenings ...
Just No.
That's exactly the point. It doesn't need to be there, doesn't add any value whatsoever, etc. ;)
Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen
Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe
Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
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.
If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
It's the site owner providing Google with value (that they want Google to pay for).
It's not incumbent for companies to interact with every person who thinks they _should_ be a supplier to said company. I get people cold calling me every day wanting to be my supplier. I absolutely ignore most of that.
In this case Google's algorithm did not ignore the potential supplier. It evaluated the site and sent a reply saying basically "thanks, but no thanks".
Now, I understand your gripe - an algorithm did this, not a human. But this has been the Google way since long before they were a fifth of this size. So it's not like a competitor changes Google's way of doing business.
And Google's way is not a secret. If you don't like it, then don't have a business relationship with them (as a supplier or customer.)
but the problem is that there are no "2,3,4,5' options - there's only one. And it has no incentive for "good people" to leverage
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?
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.
But that's not the real complaint here. The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".
As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.
Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.
>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.
That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.
There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.
Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.
But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?
And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.
> how that value might be unlocked?
Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.
I don't know what you're asking here.
Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.
I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.
You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)
What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.
If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.
This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
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.
Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
Hell, even legal age of consent is arbitrary (please don't argue this -- if it's not it won't vary across developed countries).
The absolute majority of legal lines we drew are arbitrary.
Do they? I thought it was ignored everywhere.
This is bullshit. 18 is when consequences start, because that’s when you’re treated as an adult by the legal system.
If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.
You can join the US military at 17, why this arbitrary number, why not 16, why not 20?
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).
The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Physically disassembled in its entirety by a paperclip maximiser.
> the rich are richer than ever off of the hard work of the poor.
And the poor are, too.
The natural state of our species: https://youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550?si=xUTMUkTdB3oT...
> The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
A legal fiction, but not exactly identical.
Countries too, "L'État, c'est moi" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'%C3%89tat%252C_c'est_moi
> I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Could be. There's a reason we don't see aliens in the sky.
A the same time the "miracle" of collective action that you want to get rid of — because everything corporations do wrong is also done by other kinds of co-operations — isn't really just corporations, it's everything that makes us primates.
That's why you need to be more precise than "just ban them all", why the simple and obvious solution is wrong.
But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts:
- they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them.
Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
What does this mean?
In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.
Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.
The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.
Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?
(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies.
That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
Not sure if this was an intentional pun or you are more right than you realize...
Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.
(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
If you figure out a system where that happens reliably, you've basically solved civilization.
Automatic breakup based on stock price is a terrible idea. (Market capitalization is total value of stock in a publicly traded company.)
It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.
Beware of that while reading the responses.
Beware that you're a hypocrite and don't realize it so you will argue that you aren't, but it's proof that you are.
It's super obnoxious when someone says that.
But the comment you're replying to does not say that.
This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actually crazy how there is literally no quality alternative.
I have no clue how, they must be burning investors' money
Basically they are in the business of providing human curated targeting parameters instead of the algorithm based that Google supplies.
And they are hard to block as a site owner as they seem to constantly have new accounts.
Yes, tragicomic.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tragicomic
——
I hate it when i see such useless explanations
> manifesting both tragic and comic aspects
There's also the laugh-cry emoji, which can be used for both situations, I think.
For bittersweet, there's one about smiling with a tear.
For tragicomic, I don't know. It's not a feeling. Maybe the upside-down smiley or the smile with sweatdrop?
Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.
But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.
Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.
To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.
> Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did.
That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!"
Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too.
If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...
There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.
Do you think it applies in this case? Do you think the incentive (a few $ at most) drove the author into a corner?
At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."
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! :)
Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.
Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.
The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
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.
No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.
>> Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
Improvement in this case I assume meaning "identifying the site gamed the rules".
I suspect, but don't know, that Google spends a lot on trying to identify site quality. But the ones building spammy (gamey?) sites are winning.
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
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.
It helps clarify that Google is lying - by pretending advertisers actively desire webpages that are unreadably overloaded with pap.
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.
However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.
The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.
Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?
The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.
Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.
On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.
I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
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.
On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.
EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
Why are words so important?
Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.
Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".
Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
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
Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.
I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
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.
As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created
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?
Political ads? Campaign ads?
Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?
People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site.
Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....
But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads.
Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.
My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
Plus, the auction value for spots on that site must be beyond tiny.
Oh right advertisers pay a price based on the amount of traffic so less traffic means even less cost for them.
Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.
The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.
The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
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.
There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?
By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.
This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.
See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).
Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix.
And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers.
And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.
Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)
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.
Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.
I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls, but that's pretty far off.
I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.
the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others
Extra effort is just a negative. So is needing relatively large donations to overcome transaction fees.
i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)
Think whatever you want of the ad industry, but Google flipping on that every year changes the project roadmap for every competitor in the adtech world. And when they flip again mid-year, it can invalidate months of work that teams have done.
In the end, all adtech companies are happy to see third-party cookies survive, so no one complains when Google backs out of killing them, but the point is that Google’s decisions change the project roadmaps for every competitor because no one is actually competing with Google. They have entirely too much control over the way the internet runs.
The definition of monopoly is not 100% market share.
> but it isn't a monopoly!!!11
Source?
As far as I know you will need to put banners so users know you accept donations (as OP accepts donations in their support page and you literally missed that), and most people don't donate, so what tends to happen is you replace banners that everyone hates but that pays money with banners that everyone hates that don't pay money.
Also, people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
Also, the OP DOES NOT have a support page linked on the original, or meme page of apportionmentcalculator.com. Don't know why you're giving me snark when it seems you yourself didn't even look at their site.
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'd guess that'd be true so long as what replaces ads is also annoying/distracting/intrusive, misleading, a security/privacy risk, gets in people's way, and/or prevents them getting to what they requested/came for. Hopefully, something intended to replace ads wouldn't be any of those things.
Ideally the ads wouldn't be replaced with anything at all. It seems unlikely that we'll go back to how things were when people published content online because they just wanted to share something cool or useful with anyone who was interested, but maybe it'll get to the point where it's easy and affordable enough that publishing a table of data, or a recipe, or a simple calculator doesn't cost a person enough to justify worrying about ads or whatever replaces them.
Here we all are on this website after all, typing up comments without demanding payment from anyone and everyone who reads what we have to say or putting flashing ad banners on them. It doesn't cost us much to do it, so we do, without any profit motive.
As for your hot take, I see no reason why I should take that seriously. Plenty of contribution requests exist today and have not been blocked, and they seem to drive okay conversation. Ads and contributions are not the same, and different strategies will emphasize them differently.
When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added long-form descriptions of the content. So instead of a useful chart and table, I ended up having long-winded descriptions of the location, algorithm, search, elevation’s effect on snowpack, and all that.
It was so fucking stupid I just up and deleted the whole project and never looked back. I’m sure I could have made the tool better and charged a subscription or something if it was actually useful, but it just kind of made me jaded on the modern web. I gave up and went hiking.
All of those sites should be banned - but now i see it's Google encouraging them - such an extreme downgrade in usability from a basic html site from 30 years ago.
Something has gone extremely wrong on a huge scale culturally and politically.
I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?
1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)
The craziest thing to me is that if you let Google manage the ads, it will create exactly the ad-infested website the article mentions, and that OP's website turned into, with vignettes and sliding ads from the bottom of the screen, and ads half the size of the screen above the fold. That isn't the result of the website's owner's hand. It's actually Google's autoads feature.
It's entirely possible that we have tons of people making websites that don't really know a lot technically, they just use Wordpress or something like that, and they add adsense and let Google manage it, and Google just does THIS every time. And if Google didn't have this autoads features, the entire web would have a lot less ads, because it's just more ads than a human being can manually place in a webpage every time.
Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter.
They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.
This all coming from "an anticapitalist tech blog" humoured me a little.
On the other hand, why do we need Google for recipes. Everyone eats multiple times per day. You only need to host text, really. How come the world hasn't come together to create this. How can the world ever come together if we can't even create this.
Here's an example:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/strawberry-cheesecake-4-...
I've literally never needed another recipe site.
It would only show the poems create. I tried Adsense, was rejected for lack of content (probably, because they are mysterious about the reason they reject you). Then I tried adding lists of words starting with the letters used as initials for the acrostics. Rejected again.
Then I gave up, and decided to use affiliate links.
[0] www.acrostic.ai
Who controls this ratio? Is it configurable? I.e. could OP choose minimal ads and reduced monetization? Or does everyone always get the firehose?
I put some family recipes on my personal (mostly tech) blog under another category in my sidebar. Taking a verbatim couple words that should be reasonably unique from a recipe there doesn't show up in searches for it. I took a quick look at my traffic analytics and apart from myself, it gets an imperceptible (perhaps 1 or 2) unique visitors each week out of the average 500-ish. I'd imagine a few things are at play:
- most folks find my site looking for tech things, not recipes
- most websites have a "single theme" - I just don't want to follow that because it's mine and I have other interests :)
- I do not at all care how many people copy my recipe for grilled bread or whatnot.
- I also don't run pictures because I don't want to.
What I do care about is that I like the look of _my_ recipes when _I_ need them, much like the recipe sites that existed 10 or more years ago.
https://some-natalie.dev/recipes/grill-bread/ for easy grilled bread.
If there's any call to action here, please put some of your own recipes or hobby activities or game things or anything else on your site. You're an interesting whole human being and it's okay to be that (even if our search engine overlords don't reward that).
I had a site that used to make me a useful side income. Its mostly lots of short pages explaining specific things, on average in a few hundred words. https://moneyterms.co.uk/
It lost its Google rankings many years ago.
It used to have adsense on it, but when I reapplied after moving countries they refused it on similar grounds to those mentioned in the article.
I am thinking of adding some fluff at the top of each page an seeing how it does.
So now we have to watch ever more ads which are ever less valuable.
For me, I'd rather that companies had better tracking and could therefore show me fewer, more personally relevant ads. And maybe some strong laws that prevent them from sharing my data with the government.
>VW told law enforcement they would "not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen," according to the sherrif's office. Perhaps it should be unsurprising from a company that started during the Third Reich and used forced Jewish labor.
Wut?
(Seriously, they're trying to claim that there's some connection between two events that involved the same company but happened around 80 years apart on different continents and people speaking different languages, with an intervening war? Not to mention that the linked article says that Volkswagen has a process for cooperating with law enforcement and that this was just a mistake. And I do not believe they are lying about having such a process.)
Like quitting caffeine and related decaffeinated drinks (no coffee or tea is grown in WA that I know of, and I sleep better now anyway), and eventually chocolate (ditto, but much harder to let go of), quitting the internet is happening in fits and starts.
Going to put the next layer of compost onto our wee garden bed, longing for unfenced, ecologically-balanced land instead, with the massive centuries-old Douglas-fir still standing. I am reminded every day of our short-sightedness, by the huge stumps and fairy-ring encircled low spots.
I experienced it myself when I tried adding Google AdSense to https://techinterviewexp.site.
Google folks don't even see what the site is about.
If you think there is value then start charging money from your visitors.
Ruined indeed.
I know this is totally unrelated and probably won't see it, but I read your comment about German solar farms sometime ago and I was wondering if you could throw light on that. I can't find any email to contact you by except the one you shared like a year ago (hnr@webhome.de) which I figured belongs to your friend. Please, what's a good email where I can reach you? Mine's in my profile. Thanks and hoping to hear back.
This really made me smile. It's one of the stupid phrases used in all of these types of sites that bothers me to no end. Iliza Shlesinger has a bit about two sisters doing a pitch to Shark Tank, and I read that whole "post" in the voice she uses. I always thought it was just me and my curmudgeon ways, but clearly if "AI" has picked up on it, then I see it as definite justification for my take.</rant>
i <3 this person for taking it this direction to prove a point. I've been known to do stupid stuff like this myself, and had the same ultimate point. It made a few people smile, but most people just rolled their eyes.
I do genuinely love that I write 13,000 words on issues with AI on the site to little response. But some of the more silly stuff like this is the higher traction stuff on the site. Just glad to see said author is getting the attention he deserves.
So when things not related to AI are posted, it stands out and gains traction.
This reminds me when I was driving around the pacific coast one year when a particular movie came out...
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/oct/03/spin-control-i...
The other side (as you were leaving town) of the sign read (if I recall correctly) "Fangs for coming, be bite back."
Reason for asking is because even 10 years ago, I’d think the top recipe site results were like they are now, but there’s no way to actually know that without an archive.
> Loading... if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn't exist.
They would rather send people to large piles of crap?
So broken - I can’t even come up with an enshittification idiocratic economic game theory drunk CFO rationalization for that.
Right?
Why would PageRank rate a site highly, and funnnel people to it, while Adsense doesn’t want to monetize it?
I can’t come up with a sensible reason.
All I can think is Adsense is becoming so gamey, so sophisticated at monetizing spam and low quality content, that they are dropping the ball on engagement with simple quality, even when it leaves money on the table. I.e. this is an oversight.
But it is a very dysfunctional oversight.
What does not enough traffic mean? As a measure? As a rationale? What threshold was not achieved here that makes actual sense?
High quality links to pages with Google ads are all Google should care about at its most self-interested. There is no “too small” because it is all incremental. Why send someone somewhere and not have an ad there?
If they got more traffic due to the intentional crap additions, what does that tell you about Google Search?
This is an example of full failure of Google to even take care of their own interests.
https://snigel.com/blog/top-adsense-alternatives
positive outlooks work better than negative ones, and embracing challenges with vigor rather than a sense of "injustice! here I am nailed upon a cross!" is the way to have a more spiritually rewarding life, imo.
> I'm willing to sell people unregulated erectile dysfunction medication or tell them about sexy singles in their area, but tricking people into downloading viruses is a bit too far.
"Legit" ads can have much worse outcomes on people's lives than downloading a virus.
But seriously, the craving is real...
In fact, they often actually work better: I can read the text without any other annoyance.
There are rare exceptions like this one and some personal blog from developers who insists on not putting the text in the HTML but through Javascript.
It is not only annoying, this is a total misunderstanding of what the web should be and, TBH, borderline stupid when done on purpose. (because it is more complex, it breaks most accessibility and it doesn’t add anything.)
It is surprising that someone who complains about such things and understands them requires Javascript for a simple blog post.
It's almost as ironic as the author of an "anticapitalist tech blog" complaining about the hoops they must jump through to sell their users' attention to one of the largest corporations on Earth.
(FWIW, you can find the real post here: https://theluddite.org/posts/google-ads.html
But you will have to override the encoding if your browser doesn't default to UTF-8.)
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.
Nearly every single comment I remember seeing and thinking it sounded like GPT, and yet, had enough content to be not-GPT, and I figured I was being cranky.
Same vibe here except blatantly off-topic, and less content than the others
Curious what you make of their other posts