Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

https://theluddite.org/#!post/google-ads

by MrVandemar • 2 years ago

1112 518 2 years ago

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.

codetrotter2• 2 years ago

Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic?

Yes, tragicomic.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tragicomic

nier• 2 years ago

There’s a song for that, too. Tragic Comic by Extreme. https://youtu.be/_44jokODfzM

petepete• 2 years ago

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

beretguy3• 2 years ago

tragicomic - of, relating to, or resembling tragicomedy

——

I hate it when i see such useless explanations

__s• 2 years ago

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

tuukkah2• 2 years ago

How tragicomic of you to say that ;-)

globalnode• 2 years ago

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

rurban• 2 years ago

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

gretch• 2 years ago

“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 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

MatthiasPortzel• 2 years ago

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.

superb_dev• 2 years ago

Everyone in the world should be excused from paying bills

xcdzvyn• 2 years ago

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.

hosteur2• 2 years ago

I just see:

Loading... if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn't exist.

lelandfe• 2 years ago

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

seattle_spring• 2 years ago

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.

bcrosby952• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

fdavison• 2 years ago

Now I want Apple Crisp

tonyarkles4• 2 years ago

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...

carl_sandland3• 2 years ago

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?

hotstickyballs• 2 years ago

Safari has ad blockers now too

carl_sandland3• 2 years ago

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.

ffpip• 2 years ago

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.

mondobe• 2 years ago

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

bogwog• 2 years ago

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 years ago

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

Tempest1981• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

soneca• 2 years ago

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

rustcleaner6• 2 years ago

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, ...

teaearlgraycold2• 2 years ago

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

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

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.)

bcrosby952• 2 years ago

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

teaearlgraycold2• 2 years ago

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.

gpm• 2 years ago

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...)

bigthymer• 2 years ago

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

zulban• 2 years ago

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.

thiagoharry• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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).

raincole• 2 years ago

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.

behringer2• 2 years ago

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

sumedh2• 2 years ago

When you set an arbitrary cap

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

wpm• 2 years ago

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

ganzuul• 2 years ago

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.

EasyMark3• 2 years ago

That's why compromise happens. It's clearly superior to "let this company grow to an unlimited size, have all the power in the market, and tell customers to go pound sand because we're too big to fail". It would be a great start to set a cap or market percentage (assuming the market is huge, which obviously online marketing is).

brg• 2 years ago

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.

bruce51124• 2 years ago

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?

jdewerd• 2 years ago

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

Dylan1680711• 2 years ago

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

konstantinua002• 2 years ago

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

EasyMark3• 2 years ago

The point is that if google ads were busted up into more corporations it would be more competitive and there would be other ad companies that would offer superior options.

daedrdev• 2 years ago

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

worewood• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

"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.

dools3• 2 years ago

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!

VelesDude6• 2 years ago

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.

majani• 2 years ago

That and acquisition of a direct competitor who has beat a larger company. If you lose a competition, you should fall behind. Losing a competition and then forking out cash to make the leader switch teams before he crosses the finish line is a complete perversion of the game

Eiim• 2 years ago

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.

vitus• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

noobermin2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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..

tored• 2 years ago

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

LtdJorge2• 2 years ago

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

squidbeak3• 2 years ago

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

vitiral• 2 years ago

borg controlling the internet

Not sure if this was an intentional pun or you are more right than you realize...

Nevermark3• 2 years ago

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.

dylan6045• 2 years ago

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.

Nevermark3• 2 years ago

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.

bruce51124• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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_sandland3• 2 years ago

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?

bruce51124• 2 years ago

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.

Brybry• 2 years ago

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.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

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

icehawk2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

Repulsion95134• 2 years ago

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?

bruce51124• 2 years ago

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.

dools3• 2 years ago

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.

albru123• 2 years ago

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.

keepamovin4• 2 years ago

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! :)

bruce51124• 2 years ago

> 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?

jonahx2• 2 years ago

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.

blargey• 2 years ago

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.

bruce51124• 2 years ago

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...

sundvor• 2 years ago

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).

bruce51124• 2 years ago

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

datascienced• 2 years ago

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.

nitwit005• 2 years ago

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.

bruce51124• 2 years ago

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.

antihipocrat2• 2 years ago

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.

7734128• 2 years ago

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

yau8edq12i2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Google paid them for making the changes.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

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

dylan6045• 2 years ago

"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.

shagie• 2 years ago

"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."

VelesDude6• 2 years ago

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.

dylan6045• 2 years ago

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.

Quarrelsome• 2 years ago

Did you write the replika stuff? I'm currently chewing through the two parter and its an enjoyable read. It seems like there is quite a lot of interesting content on that site and I'm extremely happy it has presented itself to me. If not, which articles did you write? I want to read them.

oakashes• 2 years ago

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.

tonyarkles4• 2 years ago

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".

fancy_pantser• 2 years ago

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

mitemte• 2 years ago

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.

throwup2382• 2 years ago

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.

devsda• 2 years ago

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...

Lazare• 2 years ago

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.

itsoktocry• 2 years ago

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.

barbariangrunge3• 2 years ago

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

pcloadletter_• 2 years ago

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

wly_cdgr• 2 years ago

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

zeroCalories6• 2 years ago

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.

Repulsion95134• 2 years ago

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?

j33zusjuice• 2 years ago

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.

zeroCalories6• 2 years ago

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".

VelesDude6• 2 years ago

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.

AlienRobot3• 2 years ago

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.

zeroCalories6• 2 years ago

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.

Dylan1680711• 2 years ago

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.

zeroCalories6• 2 years ago

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.

diffeomorphism• 2 years ago

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)

yau8edq12i2• 2 years ago

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

Tommix112• 2 years ago

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.

AlienRobot3• 2 years ago

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.

some-natalie• 2 years ago

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).

keepamovin4• 2 years ago

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

madcoderme2• 2 years ago

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 years ago

Funnily enough some Google resellers are paying more than Google.

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

chillfox3• 2 years ago

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

unkulunkulu• 2 years ago

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

gregw134• 2 years ago

Doesn't Microsoft have an ad network?

madcoderme2• 2 years ago

Yes, but not as distributed as adsense

conradfr• 2 years ago

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.

Timwi• 2 years ago

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

throw156754228• 2 years ago

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.

Jiro• 2 years ago

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.)

samdung• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

lostlogin3• 2 years ago

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.

tim333• 2 years ago

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

geraldwhen• 2 years ago

I find myself using yandex more and more. They’re like old Google, but obviously based in Russia.

https://www.americanfastener.com/tap-and-drill-size-chart/

That was the first result.

speleding• 2 years ago

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.

sambazi3• 2 years ago

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'.

noobermin2• 2 years ago

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

larodi• 2 years ago

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.

wildrhythms3• 2 years ago

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.

reddalo• 2 years ago

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.

VBprogrammer• 2 years ago

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

rainonmoon• 2 years ago

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.

gU9x3u8XmQNG• 2 years ago

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.

VelesDude6• 2 years ago

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.

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

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.

barbariangrunge3• 2 years ago

Try kagi

miohtama• 2 years ago

The earlier 2019 discussion about how Google deliberately worsened search results to make people see more ads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40138486

wslh• 2 years ago

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

navane• 2 years ago

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.

IshKebab2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

SushiHippie• 2 years ago

https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking

bmacho• 2 years ago

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.

Nemo_bis• 2 years ago

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

ploum2• 2 years ago

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)

cess116• 2 years ago

Why?

shiomiru• 2 years ago

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.)

baobabKoodaa• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

ploum2• 2 years ago

Well, you would be surprised to heard that, actually, the vast majority of text websites (blogs, news, etc…) works pretty well without javascript (I’m browsing in offpunk by default).

In fact, they often actually work better: I can read the text without any other annoyance.

There are rare exceptions like this one and some personal blog from developers who insists on not putting the text in the HTML but through Javascript.

It is not only annoying, this is a total misunderstanding of what the web should be and, TBH, borderline stupid when done on purpose. (because it is more complex, it breaks most accessibility and it doesn’t add anything.)

hsnice16• 2 years ago

"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.

sumedh2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

wickedsight4• 2 years ago

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.

pyinstallwoes3• 2 years ago

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?

isodev• 2 years ago

I don’t know, webrings?

mft_2• 2 years ago

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. :)

flipbrad• 2 years ago

Plurality of search engines?

turtles32• 2 years ago

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.

elorant9• 2 years ago

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.

pembrook2• 2 years ago

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.

CuriouslyC10• 2 years ago

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.

perlgeek2• 2 years ago

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.

swarnie• 2 years ago

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

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

corn13read2• 2 years ago

We are working towards this if you'd like to get in touch. I feel like "web3" as an interface/discovery platform is a very good topic.

entropy474• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

criddell• 2 years ago

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

gcbirzan• 2 years ago

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

xwat• 2 years ago

https://nring.info/

steve19772• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Do you have a god alternative? I am interested.

carlosjobim2• 2 years ago

I hate that Google gatekeeps the internet.

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

neocritter2• 2 years ago

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?

donkeyd3• 2 years ago

We made this site for people who search. We were those people, searching Google for where to watch cars racing on the Nürburgring and then getting nothing but cryptic route descriptions on forums.

So we created a map with actual walking routes and people were finding them. Now they're not finding them and they're back to lots of searching.

We get some traction on social media too. But it's people who already go there and know a lot of what we provide already. People don't search Instagram for walking routes to POIs.

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

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

jacobsimon4• 2 years ago

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.

thih9• 2 years ago

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

ibic• 2 years ago

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.

sct202• 2 years ago

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.

wyldfire• 2 years ago

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

dazc3• 2 years ago

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

xnx• 2 years ago

What type of site took your place?

p3rls• 2 years ago

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

dsq3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Are you for real? Honest question.

wickedsight4• 2 years ago

You can write a web site about Coca Cola if you want. If it's just factual information that's all within fair use.

As long as we don't use the trademarked name 'Nürburgring' or their logo or an outline of the track in branding, it's all fair game. If we were to start selling t-shirts it would be a bit more tricky and we'd have to be pretty careful.

nsokolsky• 2 years ago

A friend of mine owns _the_ best website by far on how to become a student in Czech Republic. 15 years of effort, hundreds of excellent articles, all the content is regularly updated, etc. Google's ranking for "education in Czech Republic" (in Russian)? Not even in the top 100.

The #1 website in Google's ranking belongs to a company that significantly overcharges future students and has outdated/incorrect information on their website.

pwdisswordfishc• 2 years ago

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

Ruined indeed.

jwr• 2 years ago

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.

echoangle2• 2 years ago

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.

elorant9• 2 years ago

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?

cess116• 2 years ago

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

layer85• 2 years ago

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

dazc3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

IX-103• 2 years ago

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.

graemep• 2 years ago

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.

nmstoker• 2 years ago

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)

not_me_ever• 2 years ago

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

churchill• 2 years ago

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.

numberless• 2 years ago

It appears to not exist.

holoduke• 2 years ago

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.

leobg• 2 years ago

Hey holoduke, if you see this, would you kindly shoot me an email? I saw one of your comments from a while back and would like to ask you something. I'd appreciate it. Address is in my profile.

mrnobody_• 2 years ago

I would avoid monetising using ads at all nowdays.

ThePhysicist• 2 years ago

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.

rudixworld• 2 years ago

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)

kebsup• 2 years ago

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.

kosolam• 2 years ago

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

meristohm• 2 years ago

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.

elicksaur• 2 years ago

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.

Nifty3929• 2 years ago

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.

mannyv• 2 years ago

Google turns internet into shit. News at qq.

EchoReflection• 2 years ago

"anticapitalist" complains about a capitalist company doing something that capitalist companies are obligated to do because their purpose is to serve their shareholders, not cater to every unique situation of every person that uses the Internet. "I want my website to show Google's advertisements and give me money, but if Google is going to make it difficult for me then I want to complain about it!" excuse me while I rub my thumb and index (haha, search engine play on words!) together to play a sad tune on the world's smallest violin. billions of websites work fine without having anything to do with soulless Google.

https://snigel.com/blog/top-adsense-alternatives

positive outlooks work better than negative ones, and embracing challenges with vigor rather than a sense of "injustice! here I am nailed upon a cross!" is the way to have a more spiritually rewarding life, imo.

cpill• 2 years ago

If the presence of Google ads on a site is a negative signal then a search engine that down ranks sites with ads might be a good alternative? is this what Kagi does?

account424• 2 years ago

You decided to ruin a perfectly good website by adding ads. Google did not force you to do that and the enshittification required to get Google to approve the ads is peanuts compared to the ads themselves.

I'm willing to sell people unregulated erectile dysfunction medication or tell them about sexy singles in their area, but tricking people into downloading viruses is a bit too far.

"Legit" ads can have much worse outcomes on people's lives than downloading a virus.

Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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