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From the blog comments: > Good luck man. I had an app removed because someone did a review of it and their review had screenshots of my app and Google banned t
by quickthrower2 8y ago
From the blog comments:
> Good luck man. I had an app removed because someone did a review of it and their review had screenshots of my app and Google banned the app for copyright infringement siting them as the source. No appeal, one strike, never got through to a human.
If true that’s laughablly insane.
- antocv 8y agoYou, still using google for anything, is insane. OK, harsh word, but really, your behaviour is modified by the search results/ads/suggestions you see. Every search you do, leans you to continue using Google in the future, and looking at the web through their eyes.
- quickthrower2 8y agoTrue. Although I mostly use google for [Technical Keyword] not working with [Technical Keyword], rather than [Who should I vote for]. I actually use hn.algolia.com more often when I want an opinion on something important to me :-)
- r_singh 8y agoI use hn.algolia.com as a more reliable source to look for info & opinion on a lot of things a lot more than I use google. I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoWith all their efforts to block copyrighted stuff their engine has really gone downhill I swear, and this was years ago. I hardly ever find anything I'm looking for, that or we've hit a stage on the internet where people don't ask any questions on Stack Overflow and just google and monkey patch it all together.
- stefkors 8y agoA lot of the stack overflow questions are moved to domain specific slack/discord/spectrumapp communities. Effectively making them harder to search, more gated and incrowdy than regular websites
- giancarlostoro 8y agoAnother invaluable reason for IRC log bots. Maybe we need Discord logbots too? I am no fan of Slack for open source projects / free communities though.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y ago> I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy. I switched to DDG on my phone and it’s good. Recommend it.
- weberc2 8y agoI’ve been using DDG full time everywhere for a year and it was really good but has become pretty bad in the last few months. I begrudgingly have to open Google more and more. Not sure what is up.
- justtopost 8y agoYup, it keeps treating all search terms as optional. My searches all "look" "like" "this" now, and it still omits stuff. Infuriating. Respect my search query.
- Kaiyou 8y agoDDG isn't a competitor, it's a meta search engine, that just uses Google and Bing under the hood.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoThat’s not true?
- jerf 8y agoThe history of search engines is more complicated than most people realize. There's nothing weird about a search site using a different engine than you expect. Someday it could use different ones, or someday it may deploy its own. I think other than Google that pretty much every site has had engines change over the years. IIRC Microsoft had a search site before Bing, for instance, and IIRC AltaVista changed search engine quite often as it struggled to retain relevance. In general, it's not really the engines that people are upset about, it's the parasitic stuff attached to it at the gate entrance. Also I'm pretty sure it doesn't use Google. Last I knew Bing is used.
- icebraining 8y agoHow is that any different than literally any other way of discovering information?
- xyN10 8y agoI no longer find interesting things in the top results like 10 years ago. Some search terms only return about 100 results when there should be many more. Academic websites seem to have nearly vanished from the results. Perhaps the results get better if you pay Google by allowing them cookies, but I think that wasn't necessary 10 years ago either. So the difference is that in a non-biased library you find many more and interesting sources.
- onemoresoop 8y agoGoogle has an interest into generally narrowing your results so it's easier to shove you through their hoops (advertisers, etc) and this behavior is becoming more common and a frustrating experience for me as well.
- cr0sh 8y agoOne thing I hate a lot about Google - and I am not sure why they do it - I can't even sum it up in a word or sentence. Basically you search for something, and it returns (supposedly) 10,000 matches, and 100 pages to go thru (or whatnot). You look at the first page, check a few, then move to the second page. Suddenly, the number of pages drops in half or more. Within a few more pages, things narrow down to 5 pages or less, with the last page having only 2-3 links. I don't understand this "narrowing". I want to see every single damn result, I want to go to the "last page" and see those weird and obscure results. But nope, not any more. They do a similar thing with image search; you search for something that you know has tens of thousands of images (ie - cats), but you are limited to maybe a total of 1000 or fewer images (show more results...show more results...END). One last thing that occurs - and I am not sure how this is done; I don't think it is google - but how is it that I can do a lookup for something, and then in google's search results there will be exact matches for that something being searched for, but if you go to those links, invariably they forward you to some kind of spammy or worse "content" (usually doing nothing for me, because they assume everyone is using Windows - so they drop a link for a file that's an executable .EXE - yeah, sure). It is almost like sites are (somehow) generating search results on the fly for google based on your keywords, but that can't be possible (?) because that isn't how google does indexing (that wouldn't even work or be efficient). So I don't know how it is that sites have my exact keyword matches (unless due to sheer numbers, my searches aren't that unique - but I do often search for very obscure stuff, and even those things pop up). Meh...
- golergka 8y agoIf you're a mobile app developer, what choice do you have?
- Nextgrid 8y agoPublishing on the web or iOS is always a choice.
- realusername 8y agoIt's pretty much the same issue on iOS, we only have two crappy (and poorly managed) walled garden in the mobile world.
- golergka 8y agoIf you want to lose most of your audience, sure.
- hoekit 8y agoI've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year now and I've not noticed the difference. Stack Overflow, MDN are common search results while the occasional blog post also find its way into the result..
- golergka 8y agoDoes DuckDuckGo operate an app store that reaches most of mobile users worldwide? Why are you talking about the search engine?
- Dylan16807 8y ago> Why are you talking about the search engine? Because the grandparent comment was about the search engine.
- Tsubasachan 8y agoOn Android you can easily sideload apps. So there is a choice. I understand that 90% of people get their apps exclusively from the Play Store but that is not because Google is evil. Its because people prefer one store were they can find everything: the supermarket model.
- czechdeveloper 8y agoIt's feudalism, because you don't have a choice.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoYou have a choice, the choices are just worse. I tried using DDG for a long time, but it's just _terrible_ for technical queries.
- andreareina 8y agoI use DDG as my main engine and I find that to be true. Unfortunately even Google's become pretty bad, I never know when it's going to ignore one word of my two-word query.
- weberc2 8y agoI often find DDG will even ignore quoted terms altogether. It was really good for a while, but it has gone downhill and now I need to open Google a few times a day.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoNot as good as google, but it still makes sense to make it (or something else) your default search engine for those 99% of times it actually works just fine.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoBut it doesn't work fine 99%. I tried to find a short story I read awhile ago, so I DDG'ed for "Berryman Parrot". DDG helpfully suggests a bunch of unrelated videos - a Coldplay video, a Tyler, The Creator sketch from the Eric Andrew show, and something about a C-line fencing tool. The actual search results are vaguely related, since the first one is a youtube video about birds with someone named Berryman in the description. The next one is a bird rescue, and the third appears to be some sort of etsy shop. Compare to Google. The first result is the Wikipedia entry for the exact story I was searching for. The second result is the full published story. The third is a related story set in the same universe. Google then shows me some image results, and bam, the second one is actually related to the short story! Sorry, DDG. You just don't cut it for my needs.
- shawnz 8y agoBubbling (something Google does intentionally to make the user experience better) is a much different and much less serious problem than the fact that Google offers inadequate customer support and has a heavy-handed banning policy
- dTal 8y agoI'm not convinced it's less serious. Google's bad behaviour is serious precisely because it has total control of the memetic environment. I've never had a problem with Google that would have required customer support, but I am conscious that I make dozens of Google searches a day, and that my view of the web is exactly what Google wants my view of the web to be. That scares me more than the customer service I've never gotten.
- merpnderp 8y agoUse DuckDuckGo.
- shawnz 8y ago> and that my view of the web is exactly what Google wants my view of the web to be How so? As far as I know, the bubbling is based on your input only, not Google's. So their desires as a company are not involved in what you see.
- dTal 8y ago"Bubbling" per se is essentially defined as that portion of Google's ranking algorithm that incorporates its opinion of you. The rest of it, the generic part of Google's algorithm, can and does reflect Google's desires as a company. The EU even fined them billions for it (specifically, for promoting Google Shopping over competing comparison services).
- shawnz 8y ago> "Bubbling" per se is essentially defined as that portion of Google's ranking algorithm that incorporates its opinion of you. It's about incorporating Google's opinion of what you want to see, but you seemed to be implying that it is about incorporating Google's opinion of what you ought to see. I think that is somewhat misleading. > The rest of it, the generic part of Google's algorithm, can and does reflect Google's desires as a company. True, but what does that have to do with bubbling? Any sufficiently advanced search technology will have that problem whether it uses bubbling or not.
- thatoneuser 8y agoHad similar experience. Several years ago app with 6+ digit installs in the first six months. Got some generic excuse and our app was down. We could contest but then they threatened to take even more away. I don't like these platforms...
- netsharc 8y agoCloud feudalism... https://hbr.org/2013/06/you-have-no-control-over-s https://hbr.org/2013/06/you-have-no-control-over-s
- anyzen 8y agoI love this term, thank you! It is so fitting.
- thatoneuser 8y agoThat's so perfect. Never thought of the word feudal ism specifically but it fits. Were helpless. These companies run the world. Regulation needs to happen and I HATE regulation. But at this point Wed only be regulating like a dozen entities while giving citizens more freedom.
- neuronic 8y agoThis is precisely why EU antitrust strikes against Google are well deserved. I hope they are hit with much more.
- posterboy 8y agoWell deserved for the EU, not the programmer? Not really. Suppose the programmer could have sued, though.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoWhat's sad is the apps that do need to be removed (ie asking for way more permissions) never do, and the ones just trying to get into the ecosystem get punished for automated incompetence. The cutesy act of Google is really getting old. I rather just do progressive web apps as they become more common and not worry about their crappy app store.
- Svoka 8y agoI had similar issue, but, I was able to re-upload the app. App contained logo of my company, which was flagged as copyrighted material (with copyrights belonging to my company, but when Google cared).
- noitsnot 8y agoGoogle banned me for deceptive ads. I converted the app. to Objective-C and made it into iTunes with no issues.
- profalseidol 8y agoGoodluck!
- driverdan 8y agoApple isn't any better. They arbitrarily ban apps too.
- mbel 8y agoWell they seem to be slightly better with humans instead of bots, but yeah both stores seem to be awful.
- maxxxxx 8y agoSeems this will be our future. A lot of systems will be massive, automated and do mostly the right thing. But to cut cost there will be no way to fix errors so if you get caught up in such a situation you are just sorry, out of luck.
- majewsky 8y agoWhy so nihilistic? Systems are like that because people designed them this way. If it takes regulations to fix that problem, I'm all for it.
- Yizahi 8y agoRegulation is communism! Let the Free Market (tm) sort itself.
- HelloNurse 8y agoYou are not funny.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- jabo 8y agoThis sounds like a good story line for an episode of BlackMirror.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- howard941 8y agoKafkaesque, with a modern twist
- amelius 8y agoSince so little thought seems to have been put in the approval process, can't you just re-submit the same app under a different name or using a different account?
- NullPrefix 8y agoThat road leads to permaban from all of Google.
- petee 8y agoThere is definitely something missing from this story; app reviews including a screenshot are nothing new, nor is it infringement. And it would hurt their ecosystem to act like this, so, I seriously doubt this at face value. A theory- the app itself had infringing material, and the person who reported/banned it found that material via the review.
- sireat 8y agoThe automated response systems will eventually end up like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
- Natanael_L 8y agoThat's something you should be able to sue over (false representation)
- tomohawk 8y agoIts absolutely the sane result you get with an unregulated monopoly.
- wmeredith 8y agohttps://reddit.com/r/aboringdystopia https://reddit.com/r/aboringdystopia