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.
Edit: I do see how it may have seemed like we had a lot of referral links due to the setup of outgoing links. Changed that now, so there is pretty much just the one left.
Are we back to the early days of search engines?
So if people were searching for "Day at Nürburgring" and used to find OP's site, then Google changed their algorithm, and now when people search for "Day at Nürburgring" they don't find OP's site, how is that not Google’s fault?
______
[1]: And Bog knows Google serves me up enough sites with those on...
But what if there are 20 good resources? They can't all be on the first page, or in the top spot.
Perhaps yhe other sites improved, or were better in some way?
Being on top for a while is no guarantee you'll be on top forever. It's precisely Google's business to change the algorithm.
I disagree with your specific point that Google should fix anything. Google can choose their own behaviors and motivations. Users can choose to rely on Google or trust them at all, or not.
Remember when Google was a successful business competing against the likes of Yahoo and AltaVista? Back when it was ok to be a successful small business? When you didn't count a millions users as a failure?
Nobody seems to believe anymore that you can operate a successful search company without having a trillion dollar war chest. Few people are willing to give alternative engines a try. They'd rather stick to Google like glue.
I'd like to declare the 28th as "Try something different day." On the 28th of each month people should try a different browser for the entire day. Or a different search engine. Or a different tooth paste. Every month, one day a month, take a different route to work, or maybe even a different mode of transportation. Use a Colemak keyboard. Go to a different church. You don't have to do the same different thing each month. Just start building some experience with shaking up your routine.
When you try something different and it turns out ok, share your positive experience with others.
I have not used Google search or Bing for years and it has worked out pretty well. I started with DDG, but have had good experiences with other search engines, too. Some may argue that DDG is not different enough. So perhaps next month I should try qwant.com for a day.
If you don’t see a ranking change, it could also indicate seasonality in your visitors or external events. If your website is brand new, this could be hard to detect otherwise. For example, recently I saw a traffic spike for a random blog article, and search console help me see that people were searching for that topic because Elon Musk tweeted about it the day before.
Another helpful feature is to inspect particular URLs and make sure they are indexed—sometimes if you have multiple similar pages and set the canonical URL incorrectly, Google will try to de-dupe the results.
Hope that helps!
Or something nefarious like Google skewing their algo to favor websites with more placeholders for google's ads.
You know the consistent allegations against Google on this topic from long time insiders and my personal experience of terrible search results does not allow me to apply Occam's razor at all. Instead its the inverse of assuming malice.
Sick.
Disclosure - I was so pissed by the degration of quality (an money-thirstiness) of the search results from Google that I switched to a non-profit search engine as my default for both desktop and mobile. The daily search experience doesn't have much noticible change to me. I do admit sometimes the Google search result could be better sometimes, but those occasions are quite rare for my needs, like maybe once a week.
1. Google isn't working well any more.
2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages.
3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload.
4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.
5. Forget it.
---
Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoever can solve the underlying problem of trust on the internet -- as in, you're definitely a human, and supported by this system I will award you a level of trust -- could be the next Google. :)
This is so true. It’s pain to search for anything undeterministic with nowadays. I usually find myself putting double quotes on every single word I’m interested in and Google still brings unrelated results.
Part of the problem seems like a recency bias in search results. I notice sites frequently update pages with new timestamps, but nothing of substance appears to have changed (e.g. a review of something that was released 4 years ago, but the page was supposedly updated last week). So if I do pretty much the same search that succeeded two months ago, but repeat it today, I might not find the useful result I remember coming across.
I'm sure there are a bunch of other issues related to search and SEO that are affecting search quality. It seems insane that the major search providers don't combat this trend by arming users with more tools to tailor their search, but rather steadily degrade the user experience with no recourse.
Honestly, I think if Google was wise, they'd have a skunkworks team rethinking search from scratch (not tied to AI/LLMs) that starts their own index and tries to come up with an alternative to the current Google Search. Maybe they have that already, though I doubt it. I'm sure if they do have such a team, it's intricately tied to existing infrastructure and team hierarchies which effectively nullifies any chance it has at success.
Second, give me a way to express semantic meaning of something. If I’m searching for rust, let me choose programming language for example. I find myself adding various one word tags to limit the search results.
If I'm looking to buy something, I will frequently end up using Google. The engine that matches my product search to a relevant ad is excellent. Basically anytime you need to search for something that could lead to a purchase of a physical product, Google will be extremely useful. For services and software you can't use Google, you will get hustled by fake review or top 10 XYZ for 2024 sites.
I will search for "wellness chicken cat food" - and wellness has chicken cat food in a few different textures, so it seems like those should at least be on the page of search results, if not the top results. Not always so! At the very least I will have to scroll a ways down the page to get anything even wellness.
And sometimes the top results aren't even cat food, they will be random other pet supplies.
Or she wants a few different flavors of the food, and I find one and then the other flavors I have to search a few different ways to pull them up and they don't show up on any "similar" displays.
It's painful. I hope Google doesn't go the same way - I think with Instacart it's because they want to promote whatever it is they put at the top, but even that doesn't explain how terrible some of the search results are.
For anything that’s indeterministic, it just brings me garbage. The same with YouTube as well. I’m searching for a specific thing about a particular library and it’s showing me stupid definition blogs or useless garbage. I apologize for my crudeness but no other words can describe it.
If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand without missing it (so that barrier of review is low), while being prohibitively expansive if an actor want to cheat the system and generate millions of reviews.
At the moment, the only tasks (that I can think of) that come close to the 'time-consuming-enough to not scale, but not quite annoying enough to put off committed individuals' are the various forms of CAPTCHA - which is unsurprising, given that we're discussing a form of Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. (And of course, there are CAPTCHA-solving farms.)
But would people invest time in a review system that required them to complete a form of CAPTCHA regularly?
I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.
yet rich ppl are granted more upfront trust. maybe because we assume less incentive to rob.
No, what you're talking about is POWER and AGENCY. Rich people have the power to override trust through the fact that they can operate with near impunity; so you have very little agency to not trust them. If you choose to not show trust, you may invoke their wrath.
In order to prevent hacking trust the SSO again must ensure:
- unique human, or
- resource spend
Here's the thing. A sovereign nation can "generate" as many "unique" humans as it wants (via printing "fake" but official identities). No one would be on to them until there were more users than probable people in the country.
Of course Wikipedia is way smaller than the internet, but still one way to go could be by having themed "human curated niches"
> 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.
These are solved by being transparent and surfacing the agent (maybe even the sub-agents) for ranking, and allowing us to choose.
This way, if someone/something is gaming the system, I can just say "this recommender is garbage", and consequently it and all its sub-choices are heavily downranked for me.
This'll make filter bubbles even worse, but that ship has sailed. And I'm sort of a progressive-libertarian-centrist (in the classical sense, not in the American sense). If I get put in a bubble with people who have similar balanced tastes: yes please!
IMO it's how all moderation should go: you subscribe to some default moderators' lists initially and then mutate those subscriptions and their trust levels. Mod actions are simply adding visibility options to content and not actually removing anything.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Areddit.com&tbs=qdr...
Or, you know, just make your own open-source search engine, with blackjack and hookers.
Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.
We've seen Google sell a profitable business, Google Domains, because it didn't make enough money for Google to bother with. For some reason Google believes that it is entitled to make some insane profit, rather than being content with having a reasonably profitable ad supported search business.
Google Search sucks because of the current financial model they, and most of society works under.
AdSense is serving ads on third-party websites, which is very different.
Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.
By every measure don't people have more time than ever before? I think it's more a dramatic shift in how people use & view the internet. The (unfortunate in a lot of ways) answer is probably create something new and exclusive, but universal enough for the target audience that's going to do all the work to align incentives, try to pull along the good and leave behind the bad. There has been and will continue to be a lot of false starts & failed attempts. If successful it will eventually be co-opted and ruined too. So it goes.
Can you say more about that?
Times have changed. While there are significantly more open-source projects, online communities, and all kinds of available help than ever before, the proportion of active contributors relative to the number of people online has decreased. Consequently, the time required for each volunteer to process input for a project like a "webring" has increased significantly.
I also feel that it's become harder to motivate people, but not because they've become lazier. Rather, the tasks have become more demanding, so "nobody seems to have the time for them anymore".
Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.
Thanks @Kagi - I attribute three solutions last week directly to you.
Because they don't work.
It should be concerning that email has re-centralized to deal with all the problems that come from federation and decentralization.
As someone who administrates their own email server and works at an SMB who administrates their own email servers, it works quite well and doesn’t require centralization.
I've done a lot of a lot of email administration over the years, servers with 100,000s of accounts, and you walk a very fine line in being able to communicate with the rest of the world. Your IPs must exist in certain blocks (or at least not be in banned blocks). You must block outgoing spam messages at a much higher rate and quality than google/hotmail do. Get yourself blacklisted for any reason and expect to disappear from the internet, meanwhile no one is going to block the largest services.
50 year old decentralized protocol has problems, so decentralized protocols can't possible work. Just like 50 year old computer can't play doom, so doom doesn't exist.
The basic problem with email is that it assumed good-faith participation from the parties involved. It was assumed that only legitimate actors would have the resources to participate and they would always be well-behaved. This, it turns out, was flawed on several counts. For one, it assumed legitimacy could be assured. For another, it assumed legitimate users would be well-behaved and would never abuse services for gain. For a third, it assumed account takeovers or other impersonation attacks wouldn't happen.
Every de-centralized system that aspires to not have email's problems needs to take them seriously.
The actual logic involved in search is itself pretty simple and almost trivial to shard, the problem is dealing with a mutable dataset that is of the order of a hundred terabytes.
Search gets enormous benefits from data locality, such that distributed approaches are all significantly more expensive.
Decentralized has a small convenience cost and the crime of surveilling everyone to advertise to them (among other uses) is too cheap for decentralized to come out on top. Note I am Atheist when I say this: if law doesn't hammer the scourge, those who get religious about this stuff are the ones who'll enjoy any modicum of sovereignty.
The answer is simple, allow some level of user feedback from proven real users (for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret) and apply it mildly as a ranking signal.
As long as it doesn’t become the only factor in ranking, you still retain strong incentives to do all the old SEO stuff, yet with a layer of human sanity on top.
If you pay close attention, you can spot fake reviews because they usually come from “Local Guides” (so supposedly the most trusted users).
Reddit is somewhat better at ranking and filtering spam, due to local mods, like there were in the times of web directories and webrings.
One of the former bosses of Google search explained that the key metrics they follow to consider the success of “Search” are the number of page views and the total revenue.
So if a user doesn’t find what he needs but keeps coming back it’s a win for them.
tbh this is just a bandage, its just going to get botted once people discover the pattern (a lot of premium bot farms do offer mature or hacked gmail accounts anyway) and its going to be worse for legitimate discovery
The point is, there's experimentation that could be done and there's absolutely solutions that could be found.
Early Google did tons of experimentation with the search algorithm to maintain the integrity of the results. There was definitely an active game of cat and mouse back then that Google actually cared about staying on top of.
But as a decades entrenched monopoly, Google lost all incentives to tinker with anything anymore. The "operational" folks took over and any change to the search algorithm is now a multi-year endeavor involving thousands of stakeholders.
You won't though, unfortunately. Too many people know the rules to keep it a secret, especially given that corruption exists.
I'm not saying that circumventing Google is the easiest thing in the world, or the cheapest, but it's not mission impossible either. I didn't find Hacker News from Google, not the dozens of other tech communities I'm following.
I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't like than doing something awesome themselves.
I know what you gonna say, but... ya... you knew.
So, Google becomes two orgs: Google indexing and Google search. Google indexing must offer its services to all search providers equally without preference to Google search. Now we can have competition in results ranking and monetisation, while 'google indexing' must compete on providing the most valuable signals for separating out spam.
It doesn't solve the problem directly (as others have noted, inbound links are no longer as strong a signal as they used to be) but maybe it gives us the building blocks to do so.
Perhaps also competition in the indexing space would mean that one seo strategy no longer works, disincentivising 'seo' over what we actually want, which is quality content.
If search providers could at least match Google quality 'by default' that might help break the stranglehold wherein people like the GP are at the mercy of the whims of a single org
How sure are you about that? I find them to be subpar when compared to Bing, especially for technical search topics (mostly, PHP, Go, and C related searches).
Google's index is so large that it's physically very hard to transfer out while being updated. Bandwidth cost is non negligible outside google's data centre. In terms of data structure, i can imagine it is arranged in a way that make google search easy.
The #1 website in Google's ranking belongs to a company that significantly overcharges future students and has outdated/incorrect information on their website.
Tl;dr Google is imperfect but for a while it was helping people find your site. I worry there are darker paths in our future.
I know it's imperfect, I know it's getting worse, I know it's an obscenely profitable money making machine. But a lot of people seek it out because it's a functional product that (at least for me) is free and still outperforms the competition.
I don't want to like Google, but I'm not going to pretend the product sucks just because I'm unhappy with the business model and the decline in quality.
I've been using chromium and firefox side by side at work and play all day for abt 3 years now. Indistinguishable except chromium uses more memory and crashes and hangs. I get hundreds of tabs open in firefox for weeks and months. I reach about 50 before chromium gets lethargic.
I used to do this under ubuntu 18 and 20 with 32GB ram, now under win11 w 64.
I don't understand the Chrome reality distortion field.
Did you miss the part where Google would directly advertise and ask if you wanted to use Chrome instead on Google's search page? Or how it would be bundled with every installer under the sun? Chrome isn't the most popular browser because we collectively decided it's the best. It's because they leveraged their position as the world's search engine and advertiser.
I've worked with tons of your average PC user. They don't even know what a browser is or what a search engine is. If Google asks them if they want to install Chrome, they will always answer yes because why not. It's Google.
This is not likely to change unless OpenAI finds a way break the monopoly. It's the only currently existing search that can claim to be better than Google. Which is why Google is pushing Gemini so hard.
If you're a creator-type why on earth would you ever build a web product in this type of environment? Join a corp or create trash and ride the wave -- at least then you'll have some semblance of a normal life instead of a living like a starving artist into your 30s
Did you get an agreememt with them or is it not an issue in Germany?
As long as we don't use the trademarked name 'Nürburgring' or their logo or an outline of the track in branding, it's all fair game. If we were to start selling t-shirts it would be a bit more tricky and we'd have to be pretty careful.
You can probably get away with using it in the URL too, but that becomes a gray area and really will depend on context. As soon as you want to put anything on merchandise though, it becomes really tricky.
An example, if you're a massive fan of a specific brand and start a forum at [brand]-fanclub.com as a hobby, for other fans to share info, you'll probably be ok, since that would be fair use. If you use the same name to start a paid website where people can buy a membership to get the latest news and you start selling branded t-shirts, you might get sued at some point.
I think mine is a relevant question.
Google is just gatekeeping Google.
You know there is this nice idea of hyperlinks. These don't have to come from Google. Just as an example, I use HN as a source of new sites to discover quite often.
They really don't. People reach enormous audiences thorough social media.
But people are reaching huge audiences through social media without even having any domain that can be indexed by Google. That is also the world wide web.
So we created a map with actual walking routes and people were finding them. Now they're not finding them and they're back to lots of searching.
We get some traction on social media too. But it's people who already go there and know a lot of what we provide already. People don't search Instagram for walking routes to POIs.
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.
Edit: On this page 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.
If you're offering me money to link you, then presumably you believe your content is not of high enough quality for me to link you otherwise.
You seem to have misunderstood the difference between an advertising agency and a SEO company. What you're describing is what advertising agencies do, SEO companies are spammers that sell access to their spamming tools. It's similar to the difference between an agency practicing law and having them send a cease-and-desist, and buying a DDoS.
Not that I'm particularly fond of any of that, though I have lawyers practicing in another area as customers.
Some of you guys need to get your heads out of your butts and realize how the real world works. It's not just black and white all the time.
Email spam is cheaper than news paper adverts, does that make it "legitimate"? Because that seems to be your argument here.
Sorry, but I'm not willing to have this discussion. As I said, you'd better grow up and face the realities of the world you live in.
At this point, the argument has lost good faith.
ADDENDUM: for comprehension, not plastic surgeons.
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.
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?
https://www.americanfastener.com/tap-and-drill-size-chart/
That was the first result.
You know it’s bad when you trust Apple’s search function over Google.
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.
https://kagi.com/search?q=what+is+the+tap+size+for+a+5%2F16-...
Because of the way transformers work, they have very good hindsight, so they can realize that they've just said things that are incorrect much more often than they can avoid saying incorrect things.
because products that require iteration lend themself to subscription models which in turn mean a recurring revenue which is deemed superior to onetime payments for a 'finished product'.
The best one is probably Kagi, but let's be real: "normal" people would never pay for a search engine service. Well, "normal" people don't even know the difference between Google, Google Chrome and probably the internet.
A family of four, two kids and two adults; 20 dollars ex GST (excluding tax) is.. gosh.
With the cost of living growing so quickly.. It’s quite a defeating experience.
So in conclusion; I expand your criteria above. Even “not-normal” people may not pay for a search engine, though for financial reasons in my case.
Also didn't know you could turn them off. I don't mind ads to support businesses when it is reasonable and DDG is a decent business. I just hope you folks don't try to keep up with the giants by playing their game. ;)
In a sense we resorted to the searchable message board, once an university homework assignment, in the form of HN here.
> 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.
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".
Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.
Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?
If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up?
The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for a while) is a better metric, but also not ideal: did they stay because they found what they were looking for, or was the result just that confusing they had to stay to comprehend whether it was the right thing? Most often it's because they found what they were looking for, but the pathological cases hide in the middle: many similar correct results, winner is the one that makes the user a little slower.
(This has nothing to do with tabs or back buttons, by the way. It happens any time they can detect subsequent clicks on the search result page.)
I've worked in the search space (though on less evil projects than Google) and I still struggle with the question on how to evaluate search. If you have ideas, let me know!
Kind regards, Roel
Why do you care as a search engine? This is a natural human problem that can't be solved with technology, only by humans.
It used to be, that I went to page 5 of Google instantly, because that was where the real results were. The first few pages were people who knew more SEO than sense.
These days, that doesn't work since "semantic search" because now it appears to be sorted by some relevance metric and by about page 5 you start getting into "marginally related to some definition of what you typed in but still knows too much SEO to be useful."
The point is, this was already a solved problem if you knew to go to about page 4-5. Then people started trying to use a technical solution to a very human problem.
Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?
Granted, there are a lot of search engines that sell themselves on other metrics ("it's fast!" or "it uses AI!" or "it's in the cloud!") but any serious search engine player strives to learn how good it is -- in practise -- at helping the user find what they are looking for. That's ultimately the purpose of a search engine.
While a useful metric, it's an unknowable metric.
1. You have no idea if the user even knows what they are looking for, so how would you know that they found it?
2. You have no idea if the user found what they are looking for, maybe what they are looking for isn't on the internet?
3. You have no idea if the user is even looking for something, maybe it was just a cat running across the keyboard?
The only way to learn the answer is to have humans talk to humans. You can't game your way through it by using metrics.
It reminds me of this one time the CEO asked our team to add a metric for "successful websites" (we were a hosting provider) and we rebuffed with "define successful." They immediately mentioned page views, which we replied "what about a restaurant with a downloadable menu that google links to directly?" and back and forth with "successful" never being defined for all verticals and all cases. It just isn't possible to define using heuristics.
Do you philosophically agree there are websites that are more successful than others? If yes, then there are tangible qualities that distinguish this group from the other. They may be subjective, fuzzy, and hard to pin down, but they're still there. If no, a success measure is irrelevant to you but other people might disagree, and once thoroughly investigated, you sort of have to agree the measurement coming out of it reflects their idea of success.
In none of this am I saying it's simple or easy (I started this subthread by saying it's difficult!) but fundamentally knowable.
Yes, humans talking to humans is definitely the start. But then I'm posivistically enough inclined that I think with effort we can extract theories from these human interactions.
I had a CEO who searched for the related business search terms every morning. No clicks, he just wanted to see the ranking. The other day, I was searching for an open NOC page that I knew existed but couldn’t remember the search terms. Eventually I gave up, but I’m 90% sure I left the tab open to a random promising search result that had nothing to do with what I was really searching for. There’s a pdf that archive.org fought over and simply mentioning it results in a DCMA, you can find it now, but for nearly 20 years, you could only find rumors of it on the internet and a paper copy was the only way you could read it.
Even when I know what I’m looking for exactly, I sometimes open a bunch of tabs to search results and check all of them, (This is actually the vast majority of my non-mobile searches) especially because the search results are often wrong or miss some important caveats — especially searching for error messages.
The only way you could find out these searches were unsuccessful (or successful) is to ask. There’s no magic metrics to track that will tell you whether or not my personal experience found the search successful.
Result? Adsense-based websites started jamming in more ads per page to maintain their old revenue levels. Pages became longer so that more ads could be thrown in.
After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.
[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.
[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.
Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.
[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk...
[2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...
The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is a pain, shortcuts for low-tolerance users seems like a good compromise.
Enough has to be enough!
The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad.
Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it?
Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.
Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind.
And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
Detect sales/commercial language and structure,* and specifically target that for removal from results as if sales-oriented sites were hardcore porn and the child safety filter is turned on.
*Buy and cart buttons/functions, tables containing prices with descriptions but don't look like long-form reviews (which would be it's own filterable tag), etc, and domains trying to obfuscate are blacklisted permanently.
This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours?
Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.
Edit: real cookbooks was basically my answer to this problem to be honest. Some of them actually have fun stories in them. Most of them have a standard-ish "recipe on one page, photo on the opposite page" format. But none of them have promo codes for shoes, supplements, or terrible Canadian coffee chains in them.
You enter the name of your desired dish and have a plain recipe with steps in 5 seconds. No ads etc
I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.
https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5x...
> When the weather starts to finally cool down and the evenings ...
Just No.
That's exactly the point. It doesn't need to be there, doesn't add any value whatsoever, etc. ;)
Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen
Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe
Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless.
Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.
If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
It's the site owner providing Google with value (that they want Google to pay for).
It's not incumbent for companies to interact with every person who thinks they _should_ be a supplier to said company. I get people cold calling me every day wanting to be my supplier. I absolutely ignore most of that.
In this case Google's algorithm did not ignore the potential supplier. It evaluated the site and sent a reply saying basically "thanks, but no thanks".
Now, I understand your gripe - an algorithm did this, not a human. But this has been the Google way since long before they were a fifth of this size. So it's not like a competitor changes Google's way of doing business.
And Google's way is not a secret. If you don't like it, then don't have a business relationship with them (as a supplier or customer.)
but the problem is that there are no "2,3,4,5' options - there's only one. And it has no incentive for "good people" to leverage
But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on?
Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising.
Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving that value on the table? If so, why hasn't some other company taken advantage of this value?
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.
But that's not the real complaint here. The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".
As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.
Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.
>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.
That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.
There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.
Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.
But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?
And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.
> how that value might be unlocked?
Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.
I don't know what you're asking here.
Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.
I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.
You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)
What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.
If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.
This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on.
That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.
Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
Hell, even legal age of consent is arbitrary (please don't argue this -- if it's not it won't vary across developed countries).
The absolute majority of legal lines we drew are arbitrary.
Do they? I thought it was ignored everywhere.
This is bullshit. 18 is when consequences start, because that’s when you’re treated as an adult by the legal system.
If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.
You can join the US military at 17, why this arbitrary number, why not 16, why not 20?
Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car.
We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole traders hiring someone directly for each thing without a corporate structure, partly because that too is a specialisation, and partly because that's way too fragile (every such thing either has a bus number of 1, or it's a mediocre reinvention of a corporation).
The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Physically disassembled in its entirety by a paperclip maximiser.
> the rich are richer than ever off of the hard work of the poor.
And the poor are, too.
The natural state of our species: https://youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550?si=xUTMUkTdB3oT...
> The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
A legal fiction, but not exactly identical.
Countries too, "L'État, c'est moi" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'%C3%89tat%252C_c'est_moi
> I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Could be. There's a reason we don't see aliens in the sky.
A the same time the "miracle" of collective action that you want to get rid of — because everything corporations do wrong is also done by other kinds of co-operations — isn't really just corporations, it's everything that makes us primates.
That's why you need to be more precise than "just ban them all", why the simple and obvious solution is wrong.
But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts:
- they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them.
Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
What does this mean?
In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.
Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.
The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.
Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?
(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies.
That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
Not sure if this was an intentional pun or you are more right than you realize...
Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.
(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
If you figure out a system where that happens reliably, you've basically solved civilization.
Automatic breakup based on stock price is a terrible idea. (Market capitalization is total value of stock in a publicly traded company.)
It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.
Beware of that while reading the responses.
Beware that you're a hypocrite and don't realize it so you will argue that you aren't, but it's proof that you are.
It's super obnoxious when someone says that.
But the comment you're replying to does not say that.
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.
I have no clue how, they must be burning investors' money
Basically they are in the business of providing human curated targeting parameters instead of the algorithm based that Google supplies.
And they are hard to block as a site owner as they seem to constantly have new accounts.
Yes, tragicomic.
——
I hate it when i see such useless explanations
> manifesting both tragic and comic aspects
There's also the laugh-cry emoji, which can be used for both situations, I think.
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?
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.
> Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did.
That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!"
Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too.
If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...
There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.
Do you think it applies in this case? Do you think the incentive (a few $ at most) drove the author into a corner?
At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."
You do always have a choice. If you surrender that you become...inhuman...I think. Because you've said: "Now this thing I've done, is not my fault." Then you go around looking for other people to blame, which makes you a monster.
To be more clear (which is useful I think): it's not your choice what the world presents to you, but you choose how you respond always.
As long as you're not unconscious of course. If your mind is there, you're choosing.
But ultimately where you come down on that is up to you. I guess it comes down to: with how much integrity do you plan to live? :)
There could be some edge cases, but it's important to remember how valid that is for the majority of experience.
I didn't start it like this, but that got dark quick hahahah! :)
Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.
Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.
The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent).
Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.
>> Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
Improvement in this case I assume meaning "identifying the site gamed the rules".
I suspect, but don't know, that Google spends a lot on trying to identify site quality. But the ones building spammy (gamey?) sites are winning.
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing?
In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from.
2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to extend their ad ~monopoly to his web page. A refusal that gets satisfied only after he loads his site up with useless, time wasting crap.
I'll grant the author did have a choice. The author could be denied access to Google's ad monopoly or he could crap up his web page.
It helps clarify that Google is lying - by pretending advertisers actively desire webpages that are unreadably overloaded with pap.
Again, you disclaim Google of any responsibility for choice but hold the author to one? Doesn't that biased difference strike you as jarring?
That's the point here. Everyone seems to complicate it; it's pretty simple.
I'm not against you specifically, I just think this is a clear issue. Admittedly, not a lot of people grasp this right now.
However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.
The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.
Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?
The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.
Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.
On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.
I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this:
> For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic.
Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.
On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.
EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
Why are words so important?
Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.
Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".
Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google
Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.
I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.
[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.
As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created
But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
Political ads? Campaign ads?
Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?
People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site.
Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....
But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads.
Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.
My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
Plus, the auction value for spots on that site must be beyond tiny.
Oh right advertisers pay a price based on the amount of traffic so less traffic means even less cost for them.
Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.
The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.
The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business.
If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently.
Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.
There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?
By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.
This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.
See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).
Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix.
And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers.
And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.
Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)
Also my memory suggests 3x. But I'll go check.
Top result says 2.6x from ftc.gov but is from last decade.
Another result says "Targeted ads are twice more effective as non-targeted ads, and retargeted display ads encourage 1000 percent more people to search for a product." In response to that, I will note that even if google could not discern the site content at all, that would only affect targeting and not retargeting. So that suggests 2x at most in this situation.
Ads, as long as they have not been banished from the world, should be viable in some form on a small useful site.
There are ideas about how to get rid of ads entirely, but I wanted to be more grounded to the current state of things for the purposes of that comment.
Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.
I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls, but that's pretty far off.
I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.
the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others
Extra effort is just a negative. So is needing relatively large donations to overcome transaction fees.
i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)
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.
The definition of monopoly is not 100% market share.
> but it isn't a monopoly!!!11
Source?
As far as I know you will need to put banners so users know you accept donations (as OP accepts donations in their support page and you literally missed that), and most people don't donate, so what tends to happen is you replace banners that everyone hates but that pays money with banners that everyone hates that don't pay money.
Also, people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
Also, the OP DOES NOT have a support page linked on the original, or meme page of apportionmentcalculator.com. Don't know why you're giving me snark when it seems you yourself didn't even look at their site.
https://theluddite.org/#!support
I think I saw a banner when I scrolled to the bottom as well, but it isn't showing again for some reason.
I assume that they already had this page before they chose to monetize with adsense, which kind of implies that asking for donations hasn't been very effective for OP.
>people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
I disagree. Do you want to know what my hot take is?
Imagine, for one moment, that we didn't have ads on the internet.
Instead, every page was full of banners begging for donations.
Instead of ad-blockers, everyone would be using donation-blockers.
All that "concern" I keep hearing about about privacy and tracking and long lists of partners in cookie banners would disappear in an instant, and everyone would show that what they really care about is just being mildly inconvenienced by distracting banners telling you to do things and nothing more.
That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.
I'd guess that'd be true so long as what replaces ads is also annoying/distracting/intrusive, misleading, a security/privacy risk, gets in people's way, and/or prevents them getting to what they requested/came for. Hopefully, something intended to replace ads wouldn't be any of those things.
Ideally the ads wouldn't be replaced with anything at all. It seems unlikely that we'll go back to how things were when people published content online because they just wanted to share something cool or useful with anyone who was interested, but maybe it'll get to the point where it's easy and affordable enough that publishing a table of data, or a recipe, or a simple calculator doesn't cost a person enough to justify worrying about ads or whatever replaces them.
Here we all are on this website after all, typing up comments without demanding payment from anyone and everyone who reads what we have to say or putting flashing ad banners on them. It doesn't cost us much to do it, so we do, without any profit motive.
As for your hot take, I see no reason why I should take that seriously. Plenty of contribution requests exist today and have not been blocked, and they seem to drive okay conversation. Ads and contributions are not the same, and different strategies will emphasize them differently.
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.
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.
I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?
1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)
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.
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.
This all coming from "an anticapitalist tech blog" humoured me a little.
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.
Here's an example:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/strawberry-cheesecake-4-...
I've literally never needed another recipe site.
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
Who controls this ratio? Is it configurable? I.e. could OP choose minimal ads and reduced monetization? Or does everyone always get the firehose?
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/ 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).
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/
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.
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.
>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.)
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.
I experienced it myself when I tried adding Google AdSense to https://techinterviewexp.site.
Google folks don't even see what the site is about.
If you think there is value then start charging money from your visitors.
Ruined indeed.
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.
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.
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.
So when things not related to AI are posted, it stands out and gains traction.
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-i...
The other side (as you were leaving town) of the sign read (if I recall correctly) "Fangs for coming, be bite back."
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.
> Loading... if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn't exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
But seriously, the craving is real...
In fact, they often actually work better: I can read the text without any other annoyance.
There are rare exceptions like this one and some personal blog from developers who insists on not putting the text in the HTML but through Javascript.
It is not only annoying, this is a total misunderstanding of what the web should be and, TBH, borderline stupid when done on purpose. (because it is more complex, it breaks most accessibility and it doesn’t add anything.)
It is surprising that someone who complains about such things and understands them requires Javascript for a simple blog post.
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
But you will have to override the encoding if your browser doesn't default to UTF-8.)
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.