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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

donkeyd
112 replies
10h45m

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.

I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.

pyinstallwoes
69 replies
10h27m

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?

mft_
20 replies
9h37m

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. :)

itopaloglu83
8 replies
6h50m

1. Google isn't working well any more.

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.

rendall
4 replies
6h15m

I'm curious. Why do you use Google if you don't like their results?

ynniv
1 replies
6h4m

PageRank isn't working well anymore. I use DDG, but it its quality is also flagging.

nsagent
0 replies
3h42m

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.

mrweasel
1 replies
4h29m

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.

orangevelcro
0 replies
3h56m

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.

layer8
1 replies
4h39m

Have you tried verbatim mode? I use it by default.

cma
0 replies
2h52m

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.

throwaway743
0 replies
4h4m

Try using kagi. The results are so much better.

Galanwe
5 replies
8h19m

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.

withinboredom
3 replies
7h19m

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.

sambazi
1 replies
6h43m

You cannot buy trust with simple money.

yet rich ppl are granted more upfront trust. maybe because we assume less incentive to rob.

withinboredom
0 replies
6h28m

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.

kubanczyk
0 replies
6h48m

Then web of trust. Means SSO (as a way to link the review to the trust).

In order to prevent hacking trust the SSO again must ensure:

- unique human, or

- resource spend

mft_
0 replies
7h25m

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?

jorvi
1 replies
5h4m

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!

rustcleaner
0 replies
3h32m

Freenet FMS; more specifically: Web of Trust.

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.

PaulHoule
0 replies
6h12m

The really obvious thing to avoid is DMOZ which got captured by spammers immediately.

Galatians4_16
0 replies
6h14m

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.

CuriouslyC
11 replies
6h10m

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.

pixl97
10 replies
5h27m

You know why you don't see systems like this at any scale

Because they don't work.

CuriouslyC
6 replies
5h0m

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).

Kalium
4 replies
4h41m

Ask an email administrator how well decentralization works at scale.

It should be concerning that email has re-centralized to deal with all the problems that come from federation and decentralization.

layer8
1 replies
4h30m

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.

pixl97
0 replies
3h29m

"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.

CuriouslyC
1 replies
4h32m

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.

Kalium
0 replies
4h12m

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.

marginalia_nu
0 replies
4h29m

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.

Twisell
1 replies
5h23m

Except the whole fediverse... ahem...

zaphar
0 replies
4h46m

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.

rustcleaner
0 replies
3h21m

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.

elorant
10 replies
8h52m

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.

hosteur
9 replies
7h46m

How do you build a community if google prevents users from finding it?

FullstakBlogger
3 replies
7h4m

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.

CuriouslyC
1 replies
6h8m

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.

skeeter2020
0 replies
5h4m

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.

HPsquared
0 replies
6h43m

That's exactly it, the people are different now. They don't have the same time or energy as before.

sambazi
0 replies
6h42m

it's not really a community if it relies on an influx of random strangers

nxicvyvy
0 replies
7h37m

Same way people built a community before google?

j16sdiz
0 replies
7h36m

facebook/twitter ads still works.

I know what you gonna say, but... ya... you knew.

elorant
0 replies
6h5m

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.

egeozcan
0 replies
6h26m

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.

isodev
7 replies
9h59m

I don’t know, webrings?

egeozcan
3 replies
6h27m

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).

Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.

rendall
1 replies
6h10m

Nobody has time to do this anymore

Can you say more about that?

egeozcan
0 replies
18m

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".

skeeter2020
0 replies
5h9m

> Nobody has time to do this anymore

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.

smetj
1 replies
9h54m

Yes.

detourdog
0 replies
7h57m

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.

prmoustache
0 replies
9h44m

we definutely need a return of webrings AND curated links page on decent internet pages.

turtles3
4 replies
9h12m

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.

ohcmon
2 replies
7h58m

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

turtles3
1 replies
7h42m

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

withinboredom
0 replies
7h11m

Google still gives consistently better results

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).

j16sdiz
0 replies
7h29m

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.

perlgeek
4 replies
5h33m

How might you see solving this problem?

Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.

layer8
2 replies
4h35m

How would the search division make money? Serious question.

perlgeek
0 replies
4h26m

Search can still serve ads on their own pages (which Google calls "AdWords"), and (iirc) makes the most revenue for Google.

AdSense is serving ads on third-party websites, which is very different.

don_esteban
0 replies
4h20m

Does it need to? How large does it needs to be? Can it be treated as 'essential infrastructure'?

mrweasel
0 replies
4h22m

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.

pembrook
4 replies
8h43m

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.

shotnothing
2 replies
6h49m

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

pembrook
1 replies
3h32m

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.

kadoban
0 replies
1h41m

Then you quietly change the rule, and get years of success until it's widely gamed again.

You won't though, unfortunately. Too many people know the rules to keep it a secret, especially given that corruption exists.

rvnx
0 replies
8h24m

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.

swarnie
0 replies
4h41m

Pivot to paid search engines where you are the customer not the product.

Thanks @Kagi - I attribute three solutions last week directly to you.

flipbrad
0 replies
9h13m

Plurality of search engines?

sharpshadow
17 replies
5h43m

Google be like: this website performs well on the ranking, does it have AdSense, no, downrank.

jacobsimon
8 replies
4h42m

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.

croes
3 replies
4h24m

If something simple removes a useful site from the search results Google should fix its algorithm not the otheway around.

jacobsimon
1 replies
4h13m

Not saying that’s what happened here, but if people are searching for “images of X” and you remove your image of X, how is that Google’s fault?

croes
0 replies
3h36m

Google's USP once was not falling for content farms and their word lists.

Are we back to the early days of search engines?

bruce511
0 replies
2m

I presume when you say "remove from the search results", you mean removed from the first page or top n spots or whatever.

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.

dazc
2 replies
4h0m

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.

dotancohen
1 replies
3h28m

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 .

jacobsimon
0 replies
1h36m

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.

Hope that helps!

gofreddygo
0 replies
3h7m

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.

ibic
2 replies
4h34m

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.

amarcheschi
1 replies
3h38m

What's the search engine?

notyourwork
0 replies
2h41m

DuckDuckGo works great in my experience as of late.

wyldfire
1 replies
4h1m

If this were really the case, wouldn't it be a painfully obvious anticompetitive move?

math_dandy
0 replies
2h59m

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.

thih9
0 replies
4h38m

Are there reasons to believe this is what actually happens? Did anyone document this?

sct202
0 replies
4h24m

OP's website is heavy with affiliate link listicles, which have been recently heavily downranked in favor of forums and content like Reddit and Quora.

dazc
0 replies
3h58m

If this were true then every site would implement adsense. Most don't.

entropy47
8 replies
9h30m

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.

darkwater
5 replies
9h17m

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.

entropy47
4 replies
8h58m

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.

chillingeffect
1 replies
6h19m

outperforms the competition.

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.

entropy47
0 replies
6h7m

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.

Sakos
1 replies
6h3m

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.

zaphar
0 replies
4h39m

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.

criddell
1 replies
8h40m

Are you saying that people would search for congressional apportionment on TikTok?

entropy47
0 replies
8h25m

Probably not, but I reckon they'd have a crack for Nürburgring holiday planning.

steve1977
4 replies
7h49m

To be fair, it’s not Google who is gatekeeping the Internet, but the “dumb masses” who are using Google.

Google is just gatekeeping Google.

pineaux
3 replies
6h41m

Do you have a god alternative? I am interested.

steve1977
0 replies
4h42m

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.

riffraff
0 replies
6h4m

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.

bityard
0 replies
6h26m

I've had some luck with excessive consumption of alcohol

gcbirzan
2 replies
9h12m

I'm curious now, can you give me a link to the site?

spookie
0 replies
5h13m

Love the slanted design, works great given the context

carlosjobim
2 replies
6h11m

I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.

They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.

neocritter
1 replies
4h55m

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?

carlosjobim
0 replies
4h21m

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.

dsq
1 replies
3h13m

Did you any problem building a site on a proprietary subject like Nurburgring? Its private. Dont they have copyright, etc.

Did you get an agreememt with them or is it not an issue in Germany?

ThePowerOfFuet
0 replies
2h36m

Are you for real? Honest question.

xnx
0 replies
4h42m

What type of site took your place?

p3rls
0 replies
4h6m

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

rustcleaner
63 replies
17h4m

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, ...

bruce511
21 replies
16h30m

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?

konstantinua00
8 replies
14h14m

if Google didn't make site more appealing, Google2 or Google3 or Google4 or SomeOtherCompetitor5 might

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

bruce511
7 replies
13h56m

Ok, theres only one option.

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?

fauigerzigerk
2 replies
8h39m

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.

bruce511
1 replies
4h33m

All the risks of basing your income on a single supplier are true.

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?

fauigerzigerk
0 replies
3h30m

>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.

a_dabbler
1 replies
12h3m

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

bruce511
0 replies
4h29m

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.

8n4vidtmkvmk
1 replies
10h14m

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.

bruce511
0 replies
4h32m

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.)

jdewerd
5 replies
15h47m

The complaint was about Google's "talk to the hand" onboarding/feedback process, not the preferences of advertisers.

bruce511
4 replies
13h52m

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.

MadnessASAP
3 replies
11h31m

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?

lostlogin
0 replies
10h57m

They could be a monopoly, then the equation works.

bruce511
0 replies
4h36m

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.)

auggierose
0 replies
10h57m

It seems in Google's case, a lot of value.

Dylan16807
5 replies
14h51m

Google thinks the value is zero, which is definitely wrong, and yes competition would help with that.

bruce511
4 replies
13h51m

Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser, and how that value might be unlocked?

Dylan16807
3 replies
13h34m

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.

bruce511
2 replies
12h52m

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.)

jfoster
0 replies
12h32m

"No value", meaning $0 CPM? Not really plausible unless the site has barely any human visits.

fauigerzigerk
0 replies
8h0m

>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.

zulban
15 replies
16h55m

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.

raincole
4 replies
16h40m

Legal age of drinking is arbitrary and people accept it.

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.

cyanmagenta
2 replies
15h26m

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.

kortilla
0 replies
11h34m

estimation of when most people are mature enough to handle the consequences.

This is bullshit. 18 is when consequences start, because that’s when you’re treated as an adult by the legal system.

Dylan16807
0 replies
14h46m

If that's your definition of arbitrary versus imprecise then a company size limit is also imprecise.

lostlogin
0 replies
10h56m

Legal age of drinking is arbitrary and people accept it.

Do they? I thought it was ignored everywhere.

sumedh
2 replies
14h40m

When you set an arbitrary cap

You can join the US military at 17, why this arbitrary number, why not 16, why not 20?

bitnasty
1 replies
6h49m

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.

iraqmtpizza
0 replies
6h18m

If the orbit of the earth were slightly smaller then the enlistment age would be lower. That's not arbitrary?

behringer
2 replies
16h33m

The solution is much simpler than all that. Just make the idea of the public corporation illegal.

ben_w
1 replies
11h0m

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).

behringer
0 replies
1h58m

And yet out planet will be destroyed, the rich are richer than ever off of the hard work of the poor.

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.

wpm
0 replies
14h31m

Wow, I can’t be believe an off hand HN comment might not actually be comprehensive political policy, gee whiz!

thiagoharry
0 replies
16h49m

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.

swores
0 replies
16h45m

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).

ganzuul
0 replies
2h45m

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.

bcrosby95
4 replies
17h1m

I assume they would just pull some shenanigans to stay under the cap.

teaearlgraycold
2 replies
16h57m

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.

ghodith
0 replies
14h14m

Sounds like a power that would be ripe for abuse in it's own rite.

PoignardAzur
0 replies
10h22m

That's like saying "I wish cops could arrest people everybody knows is guilty and leave innocent people alone".

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

gpm
0 replies
16h54m

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...)

worewood
2 replies
15h34m

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.

Beware of that while reading the responses.

drstewart
1 replies
14h45m

"I'm right and you're wrong and anyone who tries to say otherwise proves that I'm right" is some kind of take.

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.

Dylan16807
0 replies
14h26m

"anyone who tries to say otherwise proves that I'm right"

It's super obnoxious when someone says that.

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

vitus
2 replies
13h25m

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.)

Scarblac
1 replies
11h13m

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.

iraqmtpizza
0 replies
6h13m

Definitely don't move to Singapore or Switzerland, then. You're going to want to look at places like Eritrea and Bolivia

dools
2 replies
15h34m

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!

VelesDude
1 replies
7h37m

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.

dools
0 replies
4h10m

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.

teaearlgraycold
1 replies
17h2m

Yes, 100%. It would be better for the economy, the workers, and the users.

slowmovintarget
0 replies
14h7m

What evidence do you have for that?

Automatic breakup based on stock price is a terrible idea. (Market capitalization is total value of stock in a publicly traded company.)

noobermin
1 replies
11h26m

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?

matsemann
0 replies
11h12m

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..

LtdJorge
1 replies
7h27m

But who are you (or me) to decide if they should exist at that size?

squidbeak
0 replies
7h19m

Not you or me, but you and me and everyone else collectively, in the way that's typical for regulation.

tored
0 replies
10h36m

Assume this is doable, but who would legislate that? US congress that is already bought and paid for by the very same companies?

daedrdev
0 replies
15h42m

It is possible that a policy like this makes society worse off.

brg
0 replies
16h46m

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.

bigthymer
0 replies
16h56m

The NSA prefers getting all user data at a one-stop shop.

Eiim
0 replies
14h18m

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.

bruce511
49 replies
16h47m

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.

lupire
14 replies
16h43m

What's wrong with telling Google or whoever what you think your demographic is, and letting them place ads against it and optimize based on metrics.

Why are words so important?

carl_sandland
6 replies
16h36m

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?

bruce511
3 replies
16h33m

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?

kuschku
1 replies
14h27m

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.

bruce511
0 replies
13h21m

Cool, so sell to any one of those directly. I mean, the revenue from the site now must be terrible anyway.

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....

jonathankoren
0 replies
15h23m

Temu.

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.

ajross
1 replies
16h29m

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.

dylan604
0 replies
15h50m

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

bruce511
3 replies
16h36m

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.

8note
2 replies
15h15m

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

bruce511
1 replies
13h26m

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.

bitnasty
0 replies
6h19m

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.

Brybry
1 replies
15h29m

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.

bee_rider
0 replies
15h17m

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.

renewiltord
0 replies
13h19m

Because these ads are less effective than targeted programmatic advertising so you'll get bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.

keepamovin
9 replies
14h53m

Interesting take on the backstory. Also,

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! :)

bruce511
5 replies
13h43m

> 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?

WarOnPrivacy
2 replies
12h42m

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.

bitnasty
1 replies
6h39m

Advertisers are the ones paying to have their ads shown. Google is not an advertiser in this context.

WarOnPrivacy
0 replies
52m

You are correct. And your observation is useful.

It helps clarify that Google is lying - by pretending advertisers actively desire webpages that are unreadably overloaded with pap.

antihipocrat
1 replies
13h13m

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.

bruce511
0 replies
12h45m

> Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers?

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.

jonahx
2 replies
13h29m

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.

bruce511
1 replies
12h50m

I completely agree as a general statement.

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

jonahx
0 replies
1h59m

No, I was replying the general principle.

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."

blargey
5 replies
14h34m

Quite who uses this site is unclear.

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.

bruce511
4 replies
13h36m

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...

oneeyedpigeon
1 replies
6h16m

a few cars a day

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.

bruce511
0 replies
4h23m

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.

bitnasty
1 replies
6h32m

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.

bruce511
0 replies
4h21m

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?

antihipocrat
3 replies
13h37m

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.

yau8edq12i
0 replies
8h45m

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.

Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.

LeonB
0 replies
8h42m

Google paid them for making the changes.

7734128
0 replies
9h44m

It's not only Adsense. Things which are not visible on Google search do not exist, these things are of course tied together.

nitwit005
2 replies
13h44m

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.

bruce511
1 replies
13h29m

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.

RoyalHenOil
0 replies
11h10m

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.

icehawk
2 replies
16h3m

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.

magicalist
1 replies
15h58m

You literally have to sign up and do extra work to confirm ownership to get those emails in the first place.

icehawk
0 replies
14h44m

Yeah and I did that 10 years ago when the math worked out differently. 'Recently' is doing some work in that comment.

Repulsion9513
2 replies
16h2m

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?

bruce511
1 replies
13h17m

Do you think this site gets enough traffic to make that sort of advertising appealing to any actual advertisers?

Plus, the auction value for spots on that site must be beyond tiny.

Repulsion9513
0 replies
5h30m

If it doesn't get enough traffic to make advertising appealing to any actual advertisers then how is Google advertising on it?

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

sundvor
1 replies
14h16m

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.

See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).

bruce511
0 replies
13h16m

He got it -approved- did it actually make any revenue?

dools
0 replies
15h38m

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.

datascienced
0 replies
13h51m

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.

albru123
0 replies
15h17m

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.

oakashes
46 replies
16h30m

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.

tonyarkles
44 replies
15h51m

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".

Lazare
14 replies
12h16m

That's not entirely fair.

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.

jopsen
9 replies
11h0m

Nobody forces you to put ads on anything.

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.

8n4vidtmkvmk
5 replies
10h20m

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.

prmoustache
2 replies
9h40m

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.

rustcleaner
0 replies
30m

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.

cole-k
0 replies
9h14m

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.

xigoi
0 replies
9h34m

Nowadays, there are numerous free hosting services for static sites.

echoangle
0 replies
9h29m

Websites are practically free to build and run (if you treat it as a hobby and don’t count your time). I agree on the rest though.

watwut
1 replies
10h13m

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.

cole-k
0 replies
9h7m

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.

CM30
0 replies
5h54m

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.

calgoo
2 replies
9h46m

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.

albumen
1 replies
6h36m

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.

rustcleaner
0 replies
35m

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.

Enough has to be enough!

squidbeak
0 replies
7h23m

An earnest writer and spammer might reach the same method in different ways, but the result is still blogspam.

throwup238
13 replies
13h23m

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.

kqr
9 replies
11h11m

Yup. This is the Long Click metric.

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!

chillfox
3 replies
10h34m

I feel like the problem is trying to turn human experience into a metric. Probably the better approach would be to have a well staffed QA team.

agileAlligator
1 replies
9h26m

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.

sojournerc
0 replies
5h6m

You don't have to cover the long tail... Maybe just top 10% of topics would be a big improvement.

makeitdouble
0 replies
9h46m

We should be mad at Yahoo for having fucked up. If anything, they could have spun out the search part and be remembered for it,.

withinboredom
2 replies
7h2m

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.

kqr
1 replies
4h25m

Why do you care as a search engine?

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.

withinboredom
0 replies
2h34m

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.

plank
1 replies
11h2m

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).

Kind regards, Roel

squidbeak
0 replies
7h30m

This was tried with a +1 button around the time of Google Plus's launch.

rchaud
0 replies
3h20m

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.

oneeyedpigeon
0 replies
6h35m

Why did people continue to engage with such trashy sites?

barbariangrunge
0 replies
9m

Where do you find out about metrics like this?

rats
4 replies
10h25m

I created this simple site exactly for this: https://recipebotpro.com/

You enter the name of your desired dish and have a plain recipe with steps in 5 seconds. No ads etc

the_other
2 replies
10h14m

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.

stareatgoats
1 replies
9h22m

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.

barbariangrunge
0 replies
5m

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

alextingle
0 replies
8h19m

lol. "Cups"... No serious recipes there.

mitemte
4 replies
14h37m

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.

olddustytrail
1 replies
12h37m

That's not a recipe, it's a short intro to a list of recipes. Just Learn To Read.

michaelmrose
0 replies
10h51m

"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.

beretguy
0 replies
10h45m

Why when i try to click that link it links me to tags.news.com.ua ? My dns filters are blocking it.

itsoktocry
1 replies
5h36m

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.

tonyarkles
0 replies
1h30m

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.

devsda
1 replies
12h50m

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.

[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk...

[2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...

tonyarkles
0 replies
1h34m

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.

fancy_pantser
0 replies
15h34m

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.

https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

barbariangrunge
0 replies
11m

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

samdung
30 replies
11h47m

The internet is an SEO landfill (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764)

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.

zrobotics
14 replies
11h37m

Calling it a Landfill seems accurate. I just searched (on DDG) for the tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt. I got garbage like this:https://shuntool.com/article/what-size-drill-os-used-for-a-5...

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?

speleding
7 replies
7h49m

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.

CuriouslyC
5 replies
5h45m

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.

wildrhythms
2 replies
5h16m

Is there any evidence that these probabilities are based on any real calculated heuristic?

CuriouslyC
1 replies
5h2m

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.

sehro
0 replies
1h58m

If the model can properly and consistently recognize hallucinations, why does it return said hallucinations in the first place?

chasd00
1 replies
4h30m

You’re right back at square one hoping you can trust the analysis is correct.

CuriouslyC
0 replies
3h40m

No, you absolutely are not. It's like an extra bit of parity, so you have more information than before.

lostlogin
1 replies
11h0m

If there is any chance I’ll use some web content again, I generally copy and paste the bit I want into the notes app on iOS.

You know it’s bad when you trust Apple’s search function over Google.

aulin
0 replies
9h12m

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.

hamilyon2
0 replies
7h50m

Unfortunately, yandex is destined to fade into irrelevance for the reasons that has nothing to do with the tech.

tim333
0 replies
9h42m

Googling "tap size for a 5/16-24 bolt" gives the drill size in the first line of the results page.

sambazi
0 replies
6h38m

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'.

reddalo
9 replies
10h13m

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.

rainonmoon
1 replies
9h5m

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.

LtdJorge
0 replies
7h32m

I'd pay 10€ for DDG

hnlmorg
1 replies
6h15m

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.

CuriouslyC
0 replies
5h43m

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.

VelesDude
1 replies
7h44m

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.

gtfiorentino
0 replies
6h36m

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.

gU9x3u8XmQNG
0 replies
8h3m

I’d love to go full Kagi. I feel the family pricing, as a new user, is just a little too high for me.

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.

barbariangrunge
0 replies
14m

Try kagi

VBprogrammer
0 replies
9h38m

Google was a decent search engine until the gold rush years.

larodi
1 replies
11h8m

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.

wildrhythms
0 replies
5h14m

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.

wslh
0 replies
3h22m

Seems like Larry Page and Sergey Brin should return to Stanford to do a postdoc. Irony intended.

noobermin
0 replies
11h34m

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

zeroCalories
25 replies
16h13m

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.

Dylan16807
9 replies
14h42m

that's on you to come up with an alternative

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.

zeroCalories
6 replies
14h26m

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.

Dylan16807
5 replies
14h23m

Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.

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

konstantinua00
4 replies
14h12m

it's a donation

the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others

jazzyjackson
2 replies
13h24m

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)

jmpavlec
1 replies
12h18m

Stripe also has apple pay these days I believe.

8n4vidtmkvmk
0 replies
10h6m

They do. Apple, Google and many other payment options. Plus Stripe Link so you can save your card and pay across many sites now.

Dylan16807
0 replies
14h5m

The point is to get donations from people that are willing to donate. Not people that are willing to put in pointless extra effort.

Extra effort is just a negative. So is needing relatively large donations to overcome transaction fees.

yau8edq12i
0 replies
8h44m

Why "should" ads be viable? Here or in any context?

diffeomorphism
0 replies
13h13m

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)

Repulsion9513
7 replies
15h58m

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?

zeroCalories
4 replies
14h58m

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".

Dylan16807
2 replies
14h41m

Because if there are alternatives, then it isn't a monopoly.

The definition of monopoly is not 100% market share.

zeroCalories
1 replies
14h32m

Yeah, it's also not having a high market share.

Dylan16807
0 replies
14h27m

It seems to me that google has an overpowering presence in the ad market.

Repulsion9513
0 replies
5h31m

and businesses approaching them

but it isn't a monopoly!!!11
j33zusjuice
0 replies
15h39m

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.

VelesDude
0 replies
14h43m

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.

AlienRobot
5 replies
15h58m

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.

zeroCalories
4 replies
14h36m

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.

AlienRobot
3 replies
13h49m

It's in the "support" nav button.

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.

zeroCalories
0 replies
13h26m

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.

cuu508
0 replies
13h0m

If the tracking and 3rd party cookies disappear, it makes sense that complaints about tracking and 3rd party cookies would also disappear.

autoexec
0 replies
12h55m

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.

Tommix11
0 replies
10h50m

Perhaps there's a way to do advertising the old school way. Contact a company directly and make the ad yourself. No need for a warped AI middleman.

jwr
21 replies
9h37m

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.

We lost our vote, by our own choice.

elorant
17 replies
8h44m

So if I have a content site and some SEO company offers me money to publish an article am I supposed to refuse for the well being of Google’s SERP?

cess11
12 replies
8h35m

No, you refuse because affiliating with spammers is a bad thing to do.

elorant
11 replies
8h26m

Who said they're spammers?

allendoerfer
10 replies
7h58m

You did. In your above post.

elorant
9 replies
7h52m

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?

cess11
4 replies
5h19m

What do you mean, "legitimate companies"?

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.

elorant
3 replies
4h40m

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.

cess11
1 replies
3h4m

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.

elorant
0 replies
1h17m

Personally I don't think for-profit surgery, or for-profit medicine generally, is a legitimate business.

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.

rustcleaner
0 replies
3h9m

A plastic surgeon is a legitimate business.

At this point, the argument has lost good faith.

ADDENDUM: for comprehension, not plastic surgeons.

yifanl
1 replies
5h16m

Correct.

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.

neocritter
0 replies
4h47m

It's not even hypothetical. I've seen these offers. Every single article is hot garbage.

wildrhythms
1 replies
5h17m

Never thought I'd see a pro-advertising industry "hacker" on this site.

elorant
0 replies
4h50m

I'm not affiliated with SEO in an way. I just understand how things work. Advertorial articles existed decades before the emergence of the web.

layer8
2 replies
4h23m

You refuse because visibility of an article shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most money to push its visibility.

elorant
1 replies
1h20m

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.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

layer8
0 replies
23m

I disagree about having PR other than on the entity’s own website, newsletters and such. There is nothing parallel-universe about that.

dazc
0 replies
3h51m

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.

stavros
0 replies
8h44m

I mean, if the only signal is from link farms, that's still pretty good correlation with crap content, just not the way Google thinks.

echoangle
0 replies
9h34m

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.

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.

IX-103
0 replies
4h43m

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.

richieartoul
17 replies
17h38m

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.

petepete
5 replies
13h46m

I've never heard that word, perhaps it's more of an American expression? In the UK we'd probably say bittersweet.

Tommix11
3 replies
10h54m

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.

aragonite
1 replies
10h22m

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.

tuukkah
0 replies
9h24m

There is no laughing and crying emoji: there are two emojis about laughing so hard that tears come out of your eyes (no sadness implied).

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?

xandrius
0 replies
3h7m

Exactly this, well put.

Biganon
0 replies
5h27m

It's used a lot in French

beretguy
3 replies
10h40m

tragicomic - of, relating to, or resembling tragicomedy

——

I hate it when i see such useless explanations

codetrotter
1 replies
5h29m

I’m referring to the second definition

manifesting both tragic and comic aspects
beretguy
0 replies
1h35m

Yes, i understand, just pointing out how useless the first one is.

crashmat
0 replies
19m

I think it's so they can have one main definition for each base word and then derivatives just link to that

__s
2 replies
17h22m

might not be exactly what you're thinking, but schadenfreude

tuukkah
1 replies
9h13m

How tragicomic of you to say that ;-)

Tarsul
0 replies
2h15m

the correct German word that applies here is Galgenhumor :)

rurban
0 replies
8h24m

I thought only of hilarious when I read it. Not so much tragic.

globalnode
0 replies
16h55m

its funny how at the highest levels and in assorted ways the world is completely bonkers.

carl_sandland
8 replies
17h16m

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?

bogwog
3 replies
14h1m

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?

1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)

dwallin
2 replies
13h21m

Ironically, by linking to it you’ve probably vastly boosted it’s rank on Google.

utensil4778
0 replies
13h7m

Huh. I wonder how much effort it would take to have a noticeable effect on the AdSense algorithm by sharing select ad links like this?

avx56
0 replies
13h1m

HN uses rel="nofollow" for links in comments, for this exact reason.

hotstickyballs
2 replies
17h5m

Safari has ad blockers now too

ffpip
0 replies
16h39m

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.

carl_sandland
0 replies
16h46m

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.

mondobe
0 replies
15h26m

Lol, the exact same thing happened to me. I was about to leave a very confused comment.

navane
7 replies
11h45m

On one hand I totally agree with the Luddite.

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.

IshKebab
2 replies
11h34m

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.

Here's an example:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/strawberry-cheesecake-4-...

I've literally never needed another recipe site.

ant6n
1 replies
11h29m

We need search engines because not everyone knows every good website for every possible context.

IshKebab
0 replies
7h54m

Sure, but in this specific context there's just one website you need to know. It's like you don't need a search engine to find IMDb or Wikipedia.

evah
0 replies
7m

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

The Wikimedia Foundation is well-financed by donations. Food recipes is the sort of thing we can easily solve with a wiki. Those are reasons his cookbook should be better known and more frequently utilized. Using search engines for this stuff is incredibly silly.

bmacho
0 replies
11h30m

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.

madcoderme
6 replies
12h22m

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.

jokethrowaway
2 replies
11h51m

Funnily enough some Google resellers are paying more than Google.

I have no clue how, they must be burning investors' money

unkulunkulu
0 replies
10h40m

Why couldnt they be “sudsidized” by G to uphold monopoly? If they bring in clients that otherwise are not going there? they simply cost more

chillfox
0 replies
10h42m

They provide curation to the ad buyers. Basically the marketplace is broken for both sides.

gregw134
1 replies
11h1m

Doesn't Microsoft have an ad network?

madcoderme
0 replies
2h24m

Yes, but not as distributed as adsense

conradfr
0 replies
1h48m

AdSense also has semi-scams that trick people into subscription through their ceil carriers.

And they are hard to block as a site owner as they seem to constantly have new accounts.

ploum
5 replies
11h19m

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)

cess11
2 replies
8h23m

Why?

shiomiru
1 replies
6h19m

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.

(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.)

cess11
0 replies
5h24m

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.

baobabKoodaa
1 replies
5h39m

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.

lukeschlather
0 replies
1h38m

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.

gretch
5 replies
17h21m

“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.

shepherdjerred
2 replies
17h5m

I think the point is that Google is creating an incentive to have useless content on your website if you want to show ads on it.

kibwen
0 replies
16h55m

Useless content entirely separate from the ads themselves, that is.

MatthiasPortzel
0 replies
13h52m

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.

xcdzvyn
0 replies
7h19m

Not only did they choose to make their website worse for money, doing so encourages Google to continue doing this.

This all coming from "an anticapitalist tech blog" humoured me a little.

superb_dev
0 replies
16h37m

Everyone in the world should be excused from paying bills

dylan604
3 replies
16h30m

"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.

VelesDude
1 replies
7h28m

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.

dylan604
0 replies
4h34m

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.

shagie
0 replies
15h53m

"Hey there, fellow political enthusiasts and furry friend lovers! ...

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."

Nevermark
3 replies
16h56m

So Google Search sends people to this (originally simple popular) site, but it’s not ad worthy?

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.

dylan604
2 replies
15h44m

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.

Nevermark
1 replies
9h20m

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.

But it is a very dysfunctional oversight.

dylan604
0 replies
4h33m

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.

seattle_spring
2 replies
17h18m

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.

bcrosby95
0 replies
17h4m

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.

MyFirstSass
0 replies
16h30m

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.

hsnice16
2 replies
10h49m

"I don't have unique content, and/or my content is unoriginal. Or, my content is low quality."

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.

sumedh
0 replies
9h38m

To be fair your site just looks like a link aggregator.

If you think there is value then start charging money from your visitors.

philipwhiuk
0 replies
8h50m

Your content IS low quality. It's an attempt to out-search Google for tech interview data.

not_me_ever
1 replies
9h8m

Google has been ruining the internet since 1998. So no news here.

churchill
0 replies
2h21m

Hi @not_me_ever

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.

hosteur
1 replies
17h21m

I just see:

Loading... if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn't exist.
lelandfe
0 replies
16h31m

Same, on iOS. I had to turn off my ad blocker for the post to load.

fdavison
1 replies
17h17m

Now I want Apple Crisp

tonyarkles
0 replies
15h49m

I am honestly considering going to the grocery store and buying apples and vanilla ice cream. See? ADVERTISEMENTS WORK :D

But seriously, the craving is real...

Tempest1981
1 replies
17h10m

Wow, roughly 50% content, 50% ads.

Who controls this ratio? Is it configurable? I.e. could OP choose minimal ads and reduced monetization? Or does everyone always get the firehose?

debesyla
0 replies
10h55m

It's what you choose. I assume OP chose maximum option with all the "I want these ads" toggles checked.

wly_cdgr
0 replies
16h23m

Google is hot trash, but the saddest part is that there's not even anything that's less bad.

throw156754228
0 replies
11h58m

Now I understand why every time I look up a recipe now I have to scroll through a heart warming mini novel about the author's childhood dinners.

soneca
0 replies
17h5m

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.

[0] www.acrostic.ai

some-natalie
0 replies
15h42m

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.

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).

rudixworld
0 replies
6h16m

lot of manual labour is what I feel happening in the SERP's , the messier the algorithm , the better for google's business (paid ads)

pwdisswordfishc
0 replies
10h41m

It seems your Javascript is turned off. Maybe you'd prefer the RSS feed?

Ruined indeed.

pcloadletter_
0 replies
16h27m

Don't worry, soon enough their AI will harvest your site for training content and then downrank your site when it has what it needs

nmstoker
0 replies
9h15m

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)

mrnobody_
0 replies
7h19m

I would avoid monetising using ads at all nowdays.

meristohm
0 replies
3h12m

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.

matheusmoreira
0 replies
16h46m

Remember to do your part by using uBlock Origin. It's essentially a moral imperative at this point.

mannyv
0 replies
47m

Google turns internet into shit. News at qq.

kosolam
0 replies
5h50m

Could anyone please tldr this for me? Sounds interesting, but tldr

keepamovin
0 replies
15h0m

Hahahaha! :) Oh this is hilarious. This is hilarious. And it's well written.

kebsup
0 replies
6h2m

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.

holoduke
0 replies
8h29m

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.

graemep
0 replies
9h28m

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.

elicksaur
0 replies
2h53m

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.

Timwi
0 replies
12h13m

What happens if you just change the site back after it's approved?

ThePhysicist
0 replies
6h21m

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.

Nifty3929
0 replies
2h35m

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.

Jiro
0 replies
11h52m

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.)

Its_Padar
0 replies
8h47m

It appears to not exist.

AlienRobot
0 replies
16h8m

Yep, that sounds about right.

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.