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Here's a recent mirror if the site's still getting hugged to death: https://web.archive.org/web/20220612225118/https://www.gwei.org/index.php https://web.archiv

by jffry 4y ago

Here's a recent mirror if the site's still getting hugged to death: https://web.archive.org/web/20220612225118/https://www.gwei.org/index.php https://web.archive.org/web/20220612225118/https://www.gwei.... The short description from the page itself is: "We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it!"

KennyBlanken 4y ago
Huh. I thought it was commentary on how Google will grow to become such a large organization that it cannot function effectively. Seems to me we're well past that. There isn't a single google product I'd recommend to anyone. They seem pathologically incapable of innovation. A trick pony hasn't come out of the barn in a decade, they've killed off or left to stagnate numerous products, and they're driving youtube into the ground. Their core user-facing feature, search, is arguably the worst it's ever been. Garbage results thanks to over-thesaurus-ing your search terms and "quick cards" that are laughably terrible accuracy-wise. The risks of relying on Google for anything are enormous. Even if you're a 1,000 seat organization using their products, stories abound about how they don't care what happens to you. Even at 10,000 seats they still don't seem to care.
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  None? I know a lot of products which I could recommend: Go, Android, Maps, Youtube w Adblock, Search (for the average joe, I prefer using kagi). Of course products such as yt and search are far from being perfect, but they are still in a commendable state.
  - dvt 4y ago
    > yt and search are far from being perfect My thesis is that YouTube and Google Search are in an almost perfectly optimized position, where ±5% product quality would not make anyone switch to another service (this is why DDG isn't taking over, for example), but ±10% (or higher, in the + case) is probably around an order of magnitude more difficult to achieve. In other words, no one other than Google can make a better Google.
    - snek_case 4y ago
      DuckDuckGo is pretty far from Google in terms of search result quality, unfortunately. I would use it if the results were better.
      - pmontra 4y ago
        I'm using DDG a default on my laptop but I end up adding !g in a lot of searches. Google usually finds what DDG doesn't or places it closer to the start of the page.
        corrral 4y ago
        I mainly keep it as my default because of the "bangs". Which I could configure my browser to do (and did... oh, when did Firefox add that feature? 15 years ago? More?) but setting DDG as my default saves me having to do that. Plus, sometimes, I can get useful ordinary search results without having to look at Google's trashy results page.
      - april_22 4y ago
        I have been using You.com the past couple of weeks and am really enjoying the search results I am getting there.
    - mccorrinall 4y ago
      They are optimized for ad revenue, not for having a pleasing user experience. :)
- utopcell 4y ago
- Kstarek 4y ago
  This is such a tired take, they're doing plenty of innovation in AI and bringing them to consumers with innovative products like Google Home. I really love my Google smart home speaker and it's been extremely useful day to day. Being able to just say "Google set an apartment in my calendar to meet John for coffee next week at 3pm" is infinitely more convenient than opening my phone or laptop and clicking through the UI to do so. Or "Google remind me to cancel my subscription in 10 days" or "Set a timer for 10 minutes" etc etc. Likewise Firebase has made it infinitely easier and smoother to deploy a web app. Google Domains is probably the most seamless way to purchase and register a domain. Waymo is innovating like crazy and possesses the most advanced autonomous driver agent. Wing is innovating drone delivery in rural and suburban areas. They are innovating to the highest degree and anyone who claims otherwise is deluding themselves. (I'm not affiliated with Google in any way, but I do hold stock)
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    So, a speech-to-text and vice versa with a limited set of options, a website to buy domains from and "inovations", that you cannot buy yet, and might be cancelled before they ever come to consumer-ready completion? That doesn't sound like a lot. Google had an XMPP compatible chat client, that they killed of and revived with a new product every few years, so from gtalk, to wave, duo, alo, meet, chat, or whatever else it was called. Youtube stopped promoting independent producers, and is basically just a frontend to legacy media. Google apps was a great free tool for your own domain, but nope, not free anymore. Google maps started featuring ads everywhere and is a pain to try to find thing X with lidl logos everywhere. Google reader, great product, dead. Google cardboard... great, cheap VR "for the masses"... dead. Google fusion tables.. dead. Google search results are 50% pinterest, 50% unrelated. Google inbox, dead. The audio only chromecast.. dead. Google mytracks, great tool, killed by google (luckily an opensource replacement exists). Picasa. Google+ was a great idea... create bubbles, share stuff to only specific groups... too much forced integration everywhere, people hated it, dead. Google nexus/pixel phones were great in the nexus 4/5/5x era.. now they're expesive and "meh". Android privacy features are broken... no way to change unique ids, and most of the permissions are not granular enough, and people have been complaining for years about that. The only thing google is really great at, is taking a chat service, making a new one and killing the old one... everything else is building nice prototypes and killing them.
- spencerchubb 4y ago
  I still enjoy youtube, drive, translate, maps, android, android auto, and google login.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    Also Gmail and google photos are both amazing.
  - blagie 4y ago
    Of those, only Youtube feels like best-of-breed. The others feel legacy. For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. It's dumb. I remember streaming postage-stamp sized video on a 200MHz Pentium. You'd think that would work reliably in 2022. I can think of a half-dozen other sites which work okay, and many (including very well-resourced ones) which just fail a lot of the time.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      > For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. Scale. YouTube (Google) can encode an uploaded video into a number of codecs and store those encoded bitstreams all over the world in data centers. All the backhaul goes over their private backbones. Hot videos will stream from edge caches topologically close to clients. Because YouTube infrastructure is Google infrastructure it gets the same scale as the rest of Google. Other video hosts have similar technical architecture/topology but at vastly smaller scale than Google.
    - smeagull 4y ago
      Youtube is mostly best-of-breed due to being the incumbent with network effects. They couldn't even compete well with Twitch or Spotify for their respective niches. > For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. I can think of a market with say 6 or so major players that all stream video in HD and even 4K very well across the world.
      - corrral 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  I grumble about the state of search all the time (on HN, even), but the NLP is undoubtedly very helpful in the domains it's suited for. I regularly use it to answer queries that a few years ago would have needed to be a Q&A post on the correct site or subreddit followed by a substantial wait -- often when searching for some concept that I can partially describe but have forgotten the name of; within the first page (often impressively the first result) will be an official site, Wikipedia page, or forum post about the exact thing, without any words in common between query and result. Of course, there also needs to be some way to make sure that doesn't happen when not desired!
- kzrdude 4y ago
  What about Gmail? We take it for granted, that's also Google's curse, they are "infrastructure".
dheera 4y ago
"We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites" What does that mean? "Google text advertisements" Advertisements for Google.com? Advertisements on Google ads? "hidden websites" Authenticated websites? Websites that ban listing by google crawler? Websites that ban google crawler IPs? Can someone please explain how this makes money?
- boudin 4y ago
  That's the way advertisement works on the web. You have a website, you host ads, google pushes its ads via your website and you get paid for it. The phrasing text advertisement comes from the fact that this is quite an old initiative. Back then ads were a lot of really flashy blinking gifs or flash animations with sound. Google, in the don't be evil days, was promoting sober ads, just text basically. Edit: by hidden I think they mean that those are secret
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    I assume they don't want google to cancel their ads
  - andrewstuart2 4y ago
    I'm reading that as "unknown to you, the advertiser."
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  It was supposed to work through click fraud on Adsense, back when Adsense had text ads. (https://www.gwei.org/img/GWEI_SYSTEM.gif https://www.gwei.org/img/GWEI_SYSTEM.gif)

by jffry 4y ago

KennyBlanken 4y ago

Huh. I thought it was commentary on how Google will grow to become such a large organization that it cannot function effectively. Seems to me we're well past that. There isn't a single google product I'd recommend to anyone. They seem pathologically incapable of innovation. A trick pony hasn't come out of the barn in a decade, they've killed off or left to stagnate numerous products, and they're driving youtube into the ground. Their core user-facing feature, search, is arguably the worst it's ever been. Garbage results thanks to over-thesaurus-ing your search terms and "quick cards" that are laughably terrible accuracy-wise. The risks of relying on Google for anything are enormous. Even if you're a 1,000 seat organization using their products, stories abound about how they don't care what happens to you. Even at 10,000 seats they still don't seem to care.

mccorrinall 4y ago
None? I know a lot of products which I could recommend: Go, Android, Maps, Youtube w Adblock, Search (for the average joe, I prefer using kagi). Of course products such as yt and search are far from being perfect, but they are still in a commendable state.
- dvt 4y ago
  > yt and search are far from being perfect My thesis is that YouTube and Google Search are in an almost perfectly optimized position, where ±5% product quality would not make anyone switch to another service (this is why DDG isn't taking over, for example), but ±10% (or higher, in the + case) is probably around an order of magnitude more difficult to achieve. In other words, no one other than Google can make a better Google.
  - snek_case 4y ago
    DuckDuckGo is pretty far from Google in terms of search result quality, unfortunately. I would use it if the results were better.
    - pmontra 4y ago
      I'm using DDG a default on my laptop but I end up adding !g in a lot of searches. Google usually finds what DDG doesn't or places it closer to the start of the page.
      - corrral 4y ago
        I mainly keep it as my default because of the "bangs". Which I could configure my browser to do (and did... oh, when did Firefox add that feature? 15 years ago? More?) but setting DDG as my default saves me having to do that. Plus, sometimes, I can get useful ordinary search results without having to look at Google's trashy results page.
    - april_22 4y ago
      I have been using You.com the past couple of weeks and am really enjoying the search results I am getting there.
  - mccorrinall 4y ago
    They are optimized for ad revenue, not for having a pleasing user experience. :)
utopcell 4y ago
Kstarek 4y ago
This is such a tired take, they're doing plenty of innovation in AI and bringing them to consumers with innovative products like Google Home. I really love my Google smart home speaker and it's been extremely useful day to day. Being able to just say "Google set an apartment in my calendar to meet John for coffee next week at 3pm" is infinitely more convenient than opening my phone or laptop and clicking through the UI to do so. Or "Google remind me to cancel my subscription in 10 days" or "Set a timer for 10 minutes" etc etc. Likewise Firebase has made it infinitely easier and smoother to deploy a web app. Google Domains is probably the most seamless way to purchase and register a domain. Waymo is innovating like crazy and possesses the most advanced autonomous driver agent. Wing is innovating drone delivery in rural and suburban areas. They are innovating to the highest degree and anyone who claims otherwise is deluding themselves. (I'm not affiliated with Google in any way, but I do hold stock)
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  So, a speech-to-text and vice versa with a limited set of options, a website to buy domains from and "inovations", that you cannot buy yet, and might be cancelled before they ever come to consumer-ready completion? That doesn't sound like a lot. Google had an XMPP compatible chat client, that they killed of and revived with a new product every few years, so from gtalk, to wave, duo, alo, meet, chat, or whatever else it was called. Youtube stopped promoting independent producers, and is basically just a frontend to legacy media. Google apps was a great free tool for your own domain, but nope, not free anymore. Google maps started featuring ads everywhere and is a pain to try to find thing X with lidl logos everywhere. Google reader, great product, dead. Google cardboard... great, cheap VR "for the masses"... dead. Google fusion tables.. dead. Google search results are 50% pinterest, 50% unrelated. Google inbox, dead. The audio only chromecast.. dead. Google mytracks, great tool, killed by google (luckily an opensource replacement exists). Picasa. Google+ was a great idea... create bubbles, share stuff to only specific groups... too much forced integration everywhere, people hated it, dead. Google nexus/pixel phones were great in the nexus 4/5/5x era.. now they're expesive and "meh". Android privacy features are broken... no way to change unique ids, and most of the permissions are not granular enough, and people have been complaining for years about that. The only thing google is really great at, is taking a chat service, making a new one and killing the old one... everything else is building nice prototypes and killing them.
spencerchubb 4y ago
I still enjoy youtube, drive, translate, maps, android, android auto, and google login.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Also Gmail and google photos are both amazing.
- blagie 4y ago
  Of those, only Youtube feels like best-of-breed. The others feel legacy. For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. It's dumb. I remember streaming postage-stamp sized video on a 200MHz Pentium. You'd think that would work reliably in 2022. I can think of a half-dozen other sites which work okay, and many (including very well-resourced ones) which just fail a lot of the time.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    > For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. Scale. YouTube (Google) can encode an uploaded video into a number of codecs and store those encoded bitstreams all over the world in data centers. All the backhaul goes over their private backbones. Hot videos will stream from edge caches topologically close to clients. Because YouTube infrastructure is Google infrastructure it gets the same scale as the rest of Google. Other video hosts have similar technical architecture/topology but at vastly smaller scale than Google.
  - smeagull 4y ago
    Youtube is mostly best-of-breed due to being the incumbent with network effects. They couldn't even compete well with Twitch or Spotify for their respective niches. > For reasons I don't understand, almost no one except Google can reliably stream video. I can think of a market with say 6 or so major players that all stream video in HD and even 4K very well across the world.
    - corrral 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mgdlbp 4y ago
I grumble about the state of search all the time (on HN, even), but the NLP is undoubtedly very helpful in the domains it's suited for. I regularly use it to answer queries that a few years ago would have needed to be a Q&A post on the correct site or subreddit followed by a substantial wait -- often when searching for some concept that I can partially describe but have forgotten the name of; within the first page (often impressively the first result) will be an official site, Wikipedia page, or forum post about the exact thing, without any words in common between query and result. Of course, there also needs to be some way to make sure that doesn't happen when not desired!
kzrdude 4y ago
What about Gmail? We take it for granted, that's also Google's curse, they are "infrastructure".

dheera 4y ago

"We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites" What does that mean? "Google text advertisements" Advertisements for Google.com? Advertisements on Google ads? "hidden websites" Authenticated websites? Websites that ban listing by google crawler? Websites that ban google crawler IPs? Can someone please explain how this makes money?

boudin 4y ago
That's the way advertisement works on the web. You have a website, you host ads, google pushes its ads via your website and you get paid for it. The phrasing text advertisement comes from the fact that this is quite an old initiative. Back then ads were a lot of really flashy blinking gifs or flash animations with sound. Google, in the don't be evil days, was promoting sober ads, just text basically. Edit: by hidden I think they mean that those are secret
- kzrdude 4y ago
  I assume they don't want google to cancel their ads
- andrewstuart2 4y ago
  I'm reading that as "unknown to you, the advertiser."
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
It was supposed to work through click fraud on Adsense, back when Adsense had text ads. (https://www.gwei.org/img/GWEI_SYSTEM.gif https://www.gwei.org/img/GWEI_SYSTEM.gif)