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Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search

by zaroth 6y ago

Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisting political sites, and feature hyper-partisan political infighting as a core tenant of their employee training and advancement practices. GoodCheapFast alleges they have a 7% conversion rate from visitors to purchases. That’s insanely high, and indicates Google should be sending them as much traffic as possible if their goal is serving the end-user. But since the site doesn’t advertise with Google, and in fact fosters a beautiful ad-free experience, its essentially an indictment of everything Google stands for and therefore must be eliminated.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
suppose google was reducing traffic to websites that are not using their analytics and add network. How would we know, and how could we get recourse? The algorithm is secret and does what it wants.
mullingitover 6y ago
> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly.
- type0 6y ago
  > Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly. The other case to be made that people doing this sort of decisions should loose their jobs.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Why?
- zaroth 6y ago
  I meant end-user switching costs, but you raise good points. Barrier to entry and startup costs to a competitor have never been lower. I believe recent court wins make “unauthorized” scraping more openly available, and anti-trust regulations should look at allowing competitors to ignore a Google-only robots.txt as long as reasonable throttling is enforced.
  - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    Is it not already legal?
- Guest19023892 6y ago
  I blocked a number of non Google search bots on one of my smaller sites the other day, increasing the number of bots I have blocked from about 20 to 30. That reduced the load on my database server by over 80%. It's a small site that only generates about $5/day from AdSense, so I need to keep the expenses down on it, and I don't want all of the revenue paying for bots that don't bring in any significant traffic. If I didn't block any search bots, I bet the bots would make up at least 95% of the traffic. On my larger sites I don't mind serving a million page views a day to random search bots, but on that smaller one it doesn't make sense.
- escape_goat 6y ago
  Web crawling is a natural monopoly, and perhaps should be treated as such. That's easily compartmentalized from search itself.
marcinzm 6y ago
>And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. As others have pointed out this site is nearly indistinguishable from crap to a human much less a crawler. Thus Google trying to clean up the crap get's yelled at by you for hitting other sites (which is unavoidable). And if they didn't try to clean up the crap you'd yell at them for that.
billllll 6y ago
> Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility I'm not quite sure what Google's "core responsibility" here is, besides to make money while meeting some bare minimum threshold for not harming society. They certainly don't owe you a perfect search service for free, just like you don't owe it to them to use their search service.
- fsckboy 6y ago
  you jumped in to make your laissez faire argument (only tool, hammer), but if you reread what you are responding to, he's making a free market argument himself so in this case he's turning a screw and you can put your hammer away.
johnwdefeo 6y ago
I agree with this sentiment: https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/google-is-ruining-the-internet https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/google-is-ruining-the-in... That 7% conversion rate is legit (and was equally surprising to me). On top of that, my return rate is lower than typical. I know that my site isn't for everyone, but the people who do happen across it seem to get value from it.

by zaroth 6y ago

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

suppose google was reducing traffic to websites that are not using their analytics and add network. How would we know, and how could we get recourse? The algorithm is secret and does what it wants.

mullingitover 6y ago

> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly.

type0 6y ago
> Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly. The other case to be made that people doing this sort of decisions should loose their jobs.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Why?
zaroth 6y ago
I meant end-user switching costs, but you raise good points. Barrier to entry and startup costs to a competitor have never been lower. I believe recent court wins make “unauthorized” scraping more openly available, and anti-trust regulations should look at allowing competitors to ignore a Google-only robots.txt as long as reasonable throttling is enforced.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
  Is it not already legal?
Guest19023892 6y ago
I blocked a number of non Google search bots on one of my smaller sites the other day, increasing the number of bots I have blocked from about 20 to 30. That reduced the load on my database server by over 80%. It's a small site that only generates about $5/day from AdSense, so I need to keep the expenses down on it, and I don't want all of the revenue paying for bots that don't bring in any significant traffic. If I didn't block any search bots, I bet the bots would make up at least 95% of the traffic. On my larger sites I don't mind serving a million page views a day to random search bots, but on that smaller one it doesn't make sense.
escape_goat 6y ago
Web crawling is a natural monopoly, and perhaps should be treated as such. That's easily compartmentalized from search itself.

marcinzm 6y ago

>And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. As others have pointed out this site is nearly indistinguishable from crap to a human much less a crawler. Thus Google trying to clean up the crap get's yelled at by you for hitting other sites (which is unavoidable). And if they didn't try to clean up the crap you'd yell at them for that.

billllll 6y ago

> Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility I'm not quite sure what Google's "core responsibility" here is, besides to make money while meeting some bare minimum threshold for not harming society. They certainly don't owe you a perfect search service for free, just like you don't owe it to them to use their search service.

fsckboy 6y ago
you jumped in to make your laissez faire argument (only tool, hammer), but if you reread what you are responding to, he's making a free market argument himself so in this case he's turning a screw and you can put your hammer away.

johnwdefeo 6y ago

I agree with this sentiment: https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/google-is-ruining-the-internet https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/google-is-ruining-the-in... That 7% conversion rate is legit (and was equally surprising to me). On top of that, my return rate is lower than typical. I know that my site isn't for everyone, but the people who do happen across it seem to get value from it.