42 ms·

Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

• cpill 2y 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?
• richieartoul 2y 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.
  • codetrotter 2y ago
    > Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic? Yes, tragicomic. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tragicomic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tragicomic
    • nier 2y ago
      There’s a song for that, too. Tragic Comic by Extreme. https://youtu.be/_44jokODfzM https://youtu.be/_44jokODfzM
    • petepete 2y ago
      I've never heard that word, perhaps it's more of an American expression? In the UK we'd probably say bittersweet.
      • Tommix11 2y ago
        Tragicomic is used often in Swedish (Tragikomiskt). There is a nuance difference between tragicomic and bittersweet. Bittersweet is when you daughter moves out to her own place,it's sad that your kid grew up but also great, it's bittersweet but not tragicomic. Tragicomic is when something is so screwed up that the only thing you can do is laugh at it.
        • aragonite 2y ago
          Right. Bittersweet is about something that affects you personally, some experience that blends joy and sadness. Tragicomic is about some external going-on that you observe and react to like an audience member. There's also the laugh-cry emoji, which can be used for both situations, I think.
          • tuukkah 2y ago
            There is no laughing and crying emoji: there are two emojis about laughing so hard that tears come out of your eyes (no sadness implied). For bittersweet, there's one about smiling with a tear. For tragicomic, I don't know. It's not a feeling. Maybe the upside-down smiley or the smile with sweatdrop?
        • xandrius 2y ago
          Exactly this, well put.
      • Biganon 2y ago
        It's used a lot in French
    • beretguy 2y ago
      > tragicomic - of, relating to, or resembling tragicomedy —— I hate it when i see such useless explanations
      • codetrotter 2y ago
        I’m referring to the second definition > manifesting both tragic and comic aspects
        • beretguy 2y ago
          Yes, i understand, just pointing out how useless the first one is.
      • crashmat 2y ago
        I think it's so they can have one main definition for each base word and then derivatives just link to that
  • __s 2y ago
    might not be exactly what you're thinking, but schadenfreude
    • tuukkah 2y ago
      How tragicomic of you to say that ;-)
      • Tarsul 2y ago
        the correct German word that applies here is Galgenhumor :)
  • globalnode 2y ago
    its funny how at the highest levels and in assorted ways the world is completely bonkers.
  • rurban 2y ago
    I thought only of hilarious when I read it. Not so much tragic.
• probably_jesus 2y ago
  [dead]
• gretch 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
      Useless content entirely separate from the ads themselves, that is.
    • MatthiasPortzel 2y 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 2y ago
    Everyone in the world should be excused from paying bills
  • xcdzvyn 2y 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.
• hosteur 2y ago
  I just see: > Loading... if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn't exist.
  • lelandfe 2y ago
    Same, on iOS. I had to turn off my ad blocker for the post to load.
• fdavison 2y ago
  Now I want Apple Crisp
  • tonyarkles 2y 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...
• seattle_spring 2y 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.
  • bcrosby95 2y 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 2y 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.
• carl_sandland 2y 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 2y ago
    Safari has ad blockers now too
    • carl_sandland 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    Lol, the exact same thing happened to me. I was about to leave a very confused comment.
  • bogwog 2y 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/ https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)
• Tempest1981 2y 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 2y ago
    It's what you choose. I assume OP chose maximum option with all the "I want these ads" toggles checked.
• soneca 2y 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
• rustcleaner 2y 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, ...
  • teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    Yes, 100%. It would be better for the economy, the workers, and the users.
    • slowmovintarget 2y 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.)
  • bcrosby95 2y ago
    I assume they would just pull some shenanigans to stay under the cap.
    • teaearlgraycold 2y 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.
      • ghodith 2y ago
        Sounds like a power that would be ripe for abuse in it's own rite.
      • PoignardAzur 2y ago
        That's like saying "I wish cops could arrest people everybody knows is guilty and leave innocent people alone". If you figure out a system where that happens reliably, you've basically solved civilization.
• p3rls 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Nevermark 2y 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.
  • dylan604 2y 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.
    • Nevermark 2y 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.
      • dylan604 2y ago
        You’re ignoring the part about numbers of visitors and the lack of actual numbers. While the author may feel they are decent, Googs may think they are not.
        • Nevermark 2y ago
          > For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic. What does not enough traffic mean? As a measure? As a rationale? What threshold was not achieved here that makes actual sense? High quality links to pages with Google ads are all Google should care about at its most self-interested. There is no “too small” because it is all incremental. Why send someone somewhere and not have an ad there? If they got more traffic due to the intentional crap additions, what does that tell you about Google Search? This is an example of full failure of Google to even take care of their own interests.
• bruce511 2y 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.
  • datascienced 2y 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.
  • lupire 2y 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_sandland 2y 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?
• matheusmoreira 2y ago
  Remember to do your part by using uBlock Origin. It's essentially a moral imperative at this point.
• dylan604 2y 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 2y 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-is-forks-so-dry-they-couldnt-film-twi/ 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."
  • VelesDude 2y 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.
    • dylan604 2y 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.
• oakashes 2y 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.
  • tonyarkles 2y 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 2y 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 https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
    • mitemte 2y ago
      I generally use https://www.taste.com.au 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.
      • justinclift 2y ago
• pcloadletter_ 2y 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 2y ago
  Google is hot trash, but the saddest part is that there's not even anything that's less bad.
• zeroCalories 2y 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.
  • Repulsion9513 2y 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 2y 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.
    • zeroCalories 2y 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".
      • Dylan16807 2y ago
        > Because if there are alternatives, then it isn't a monopoly. The definition of monopoly is not 100% market share.
• AlienRobot 2y 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 2y 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/ 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).
• keepamovin 2y ago
  Hahahaha! :) Oh this is hilarious. This is hilarious. And it's well written.
• crasshit 2y ago
  [flagged]
• fmy105 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • refulgentis 2y ago
    Flagged: this trips my internal GPT detector (patent pending) at 83% certainty and seems to be a lengthy meandering response to an article describing Google preventing ad blockers. The article is about Google asking for more content on the site before approving ads.
    • atorodius 2y ago
      Is this more sarcastic or do you actually have a classifier built that returned 86%? Genuinely curious.
      • refulgentis 2y ago
        Yes, sarcastic, poking fun at myself for having a gut feeling -- so no, no classifier, afaik it's impossible to reliably. Though I would like to take a test and see my recognition rate, I wonder if there's a site for that...
      • Starlevel004 2y ago
        You get a pretty good sixth sense for detecting GPT posts after a while. Nobody uses connectives that much.
    • jhugo 2y ago
      FWIW, I was certain this was GPT by the second paragraph.
      • refulgentis 2y ago
        Eerie..I looked at the account after I posted my comment...it made several other comments I noticed this week. Nearly every single comment I remember seeing and thinking it sounded like GPT, and yet, had enough content to be not-GPT, and I figured I was being cranky. Same vibe here except blatantly off-topic, and less content than the others Curious what you make of their other posts
• madcoderme 2y 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 2y ago
    Funnily enough some Google resellers are paying more than Google. I have no clue how, they must be burning investors' money
    • chillfox 2y ago
      They provide curation to the ad buyers. Basically the marketplace is broken for both sides.
      • fikama 2y ago
        Could you elaborate please ? You got me intrested but I can't make anything of what you mean by "curation".
        • chillfox 2y ago
          If you only want your ads next to quality content or on sites that are not drowning in ads so your ad is more impactful, then Google won’t help. But a third party can provide that through their curated list of sites. Basically they are in the business of providing human curated targeting parameters instead of the algorithm based that Google supplies.
          • fikama 2y ago
            Thanks :)
    • 2y ago
• Timwi 2y ago
  What happens if you just change the site back after it's approved?
• throw156754228 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  The internet is an SEO landfill (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 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 2y 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-5-16-tap 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?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • lostlogin 2y 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.
      • aulin 2y ago
        This, I am a terrible note taker. For years a huge part my knowledge and skills relied on "if I found that information once, I'll find it again". My brain compressed the information by memorizing the path to retrieve it again. Now that does not work anymore. You know some information is out there, you found it once when google worked, now it's lost in the noise. I'm learning to take notes again and organize them so I can search them easily.
• navane 2y 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.
  • IshKebab 2y 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-easy-steps https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/strawberry-cheesecake-4-... I've literally never needed another recipe site.
    • ant6n 2y ago
      We need search engines because not everyone knows every good website for every possible context.
      • IshKebab 2y ago
        Sure, but in this specific context there's just one website you need to know. It's like you don't need a search engine to find IMDb or Wikipedia.
  • SushiHippie 2y ago
    https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking
  • bmacho 2y 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 2y ago
• ploum 2y 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)
  • cess11 2y ago
    Why?
    • shiomiru 2y 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 https://theluddite.org/posts/google-ads.html But you will have to override the encoding if your browser doesn't default to UTF-8.)
      • cess11 2y ago
        Maybe you've gotten luddites and carthusians mixed up. A luddite is a socialist that refuses to allow the capitalist to use technology against the formation of self-organised labour, i.e. a person depriving the owner class of the means of production with the aim of the working class taking control over them. It's not a cloistered order or something like that.
  • baobabKoodaa 2y 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.
    • 2y ago
• hsnice16 2y 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 https://techinterviewexp.site. Google folks don't even see what the site is about.
  • sumedh 2y 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 2y ago
    Your content IS low quality. It's an attempt to out-search Google for tech interview data.
• wickedsight 2y 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.
  • pyinstallwoes 2y 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 2y ago
      I don’t know, webrings?
      • smetj 2y ago
        Yes.
        • detourdog 2y ago
          The scale of the internet is too large for individual consumption search engines and word of mouth are the methods I see for distributing access. Search engines need individual Judgement to evaluate results and word of mouth provides context clues and trust. Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.
• pwdisswordfishc 2y ago
  > It seems your Javascript is turned off. Maybe you'd prefer the RSS feed? Ruined indeed.
• jwr 2y 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.
  • echoangle 2y 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-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify 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.
  • elorant 2y 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?
    • cess11 2y ago
      No, you refuse because affiliating with spammers is a bad thing to do.
      • elorant 2y ago
        Who said they're spammers?
        • allendoerfer 2y ago
• graemep 2y 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/ 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 2y 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)
• ben_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
• not_me_ever 2y ago
  Google has been ruining the internet since 1998. So no news here.
  • churchill 2y 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 2y ago
  It appears to not exist.
• holoduke 2y 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 2y 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_ 2y ago
  I would avoid monetising using ads at all nowdays.
• ThePhysicist 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  I had to do a similar thing for my gif maker https://gifmemes.io 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 2y ago
  Could anyone please tldr this for me? Sounds interesting, but tldr
• asylteltine 2y ago
  [dead]
• meristohm 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• mannyv 2y ago
  Google turns internet into shit. News at qq.
• EchoReflection 2y 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 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.
• williamsruth121 2y ago
  [dead]
• account42 2y 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.