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>Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies" Again, your list of complaints revolved about the
by kylevedder 4y ago
>Yeah, I'll get right on voting for the candidate that has "limit the tracking of data by internet companies"
Again, your list of complaints revolved about the government getting their hands on all this data and using it for purposes you don't like. If you're upset about that, there's plenty of people interested in civil rights.
But if digital privacy is such a niche issue, how come Europe and the United States have GDPR?
>This is a Google issue... ...the FBI...
Again, you're upset with the behavior of the FBI, not Google. Vote for people who restrict the FBI's ability to request this data instead of getting mad at the existence of tracking ad data.
>I did, in fact, suggest an alternative business model, ads without tracking. One that was particularly popular throughout the internet right up until google took things over with doubleclick.
And the fact that Google captures information about what sites you've been to in order to make ad auctions more efficient is so odious to you that you want to move everyone back in time to a demonstratively less efficient business model which hurts ad buyers (other businesses) at least as much as it does Google? You must know your proposed business model isn't nearly as good, but you've yet to articulate what exactly we're getting for it that makes the cost worth it.
>duck duck go appears to be doing fine even though they aren't tracking users like crazy.
DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.)
- skummetmaelk 4y ago> DuckDuckGo uses Bing search under the hood, and they're not making nearly enough money to do R&D on things like making the next BeRT. If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse (which is bad because SEO is by definition adversarially optimizing against the ranking algorithm in order to get a page to rank higher than it naturally would, thereby imputing noise into the natural relevance signal. Google is aggressively innovating on this front and still struggling.) If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO. Most SEO just drags people onto ad spam sites with vapid auto content. Your argument about DDG is equivalent to saying "look at this natural cyclist, he's not making any prize money compared to his doped rivals". Yeah, duh. You have to remove the doping to see how he really fares against the others.
- kylevedder 4y ago>If you couldn't make money from ads like now, there'd be way less SEO This is just nonsense. If there were no ads, hyperoptimized SEO would only be more important because it's the only way for you as a web admin to surface your content in people's searches.
- skummetmaelk 4y agoOkay, and that's going to benefit blogspam and auto generated content how exactly? That's the SEO that people complain about. Not being able to search for reviews for products because the results are all spammy "BEST VACUUM IN 2022" type results. Googling tech support questions leads you to auto generated mirror sites that only exist to scam you into viewing ads. etc. etc. Anyway, you conveniently ignored the rest of the post.
- ephbit 4y ago> If only DuckDuckGo existed, search algorithm quality would stagnate and then get worse ... You appear to be one of the people who surprisingly still get good results from google. There are dozens if not hundreds of discussions here in HN where people complain about exactly the opposite. Google search results have become worse and worse in recent years, mostly except for search queries that involve finding buyable products anyway. Many other searches where the goal is to simply find a text containing the search terms in a common context (simple retrieval of information) have become consistently worse, is my impression. The results for these searches are typically littered with non sense sites that contain ads for related products and random collections of key words.
- wizofaus 4y ago> You appear to be one of the people who surprisingly still get good results from google Add me to that list. Google results are invariably superior every time I've tried out alternatives. I wish it weren't so, as there's still a lot of room for improvement with Google but they have such a monopoly they're unlikely to invest heavily in further advances if there's any risk it reduces their ad revenue. Do you have some specific examples where an alternative web search returned better results than Google?