[HN Gopher] Become Ungoogleable
___________________________________________________________________
Become Ungoogleable
Author : pabs3
Score : 218 points
Date : 2023-07-20 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joeyh.name)
(TXT) w3m dump (joeyh.name)
| runjake wrote:
| Didn't work.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%253Ajoeyh.name
|
| PS: lfsgg.com is neat! Wish we had this for my area.
| Crontab wrote:
| Joey Hess. The first time I heard his name, it was an article for
| Linux Journal, which was about managing your home directory in
| CVS. He went up to create Git-Annex, which I understand works
| well.
| revskill wrote:
| I'm not sure if Googlebot respects robots.txt.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Most people are. And Google tells you at least the same.
| twelve40 wrote:
| disappointed, title hints at how to become ungoogleable as a
| person, was hoping to see something like the right to be
| forgotten which doesn't work in the US and would be useful, but
| instead just a bunch of whining and deindexing a website, nothing
| new.
| [deleted]
| thih9 wrote:
| About DRMing the web, related HN discussion from 2 days ago about
| web environment integrity:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36778999
| [deleted]
| 50 wrote:
| what about the robots meta tags[1], e.g., noindex, nofollow,
| noarchive?
|
| 1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-
| indexing/...
| tenplusfive wrote:
| This is actually the correct way. Robots.txt only stops google
| from crawling your website, but it might still appear in the
| index. If you search for the site, then it is shown in the
| search results, but without any of the content of the page. If
| you want to prevent indexing as well, you'll have to do this.
|
| Also explained here:
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
| izzydata wrote:
| I find that google is "useless" in the sense that it is no longer
| the best search engine. There are many solid search engines as
| options now so why pick google in particular? I think for most
| people its just a habit.
|
| I don't need Google in particular to use the internet anymore so
| why should I?
| CacheRules wrote:
| Every google search I perform these days is pretty disappointing.
| olah_1 wrote:
| I know I'm not going to get results from smaller pages when I
| search google. It makes me think I might as well make a list of
| 20 popular websites and just search all of those and collate
| the results
| kevincox wrote:
| If you really want to make a stance it is probably much better to
| keep your pages on Google but put up a "browser wall" that
| doesn't allow any Chomium-based browsers.
|
| "Using chromium based-browsers is harmful to the openness of the
| internet. See [link] for examples of harmful APIs that Chrome is
| pushing. Browser diversity is important to an open and user-
| friendly internet. Please use Firefox, Safari or any other non-
| Chromium browser to view this site"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| superkuh wrote:
| It's a fine idea. But what I'm taking away from this post is the
| link to the Google/Chromium web DRM prototype and summary ...
| yikes. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-
| Environ...
|
| >- The web page executing in a user's web browser
|
| >- A third party that can "attest" to the device a web browser is
| executing on, referred to as the attester
|
| >- The web developers server which can remotely verify
| attestation responses and act on this information.
|
| Chome only for now but I imagine after it's pushed to Chromium
| and all the browser based on that Mozilla will implement it too
| (just like all the other DRM FF has now).
| yankput wrote:
| The weirdest thing is that GOOGLE of all companies now wants to
| make an obviously anti-scraping technology.
|
| Oh well, the world we live in
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Isn't it a feature? Now search engines will skip drm sites.
| bakugo wrote:
| I've been telling people for years that android's safetynet
| attestation would eventually arrive on PC, seems like it's
| finally happening.
| fooyc wrote:
| Google would do anything to make it harder for others to crawl
| the web. Killing RSS was part of that strategy.
|
| News sites will implement these DRMs, but of course they will
| still allow Google because it is their source of traffic.
| Alternative search engines and good bots will be locked out.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Not just Google, Cloudflare is working hard on it too.
| xwdv wrote:
| Cloudflare works hard but Google works harder.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Killing RSS was part of that strategy.
|
| Oh please.
|
| I get that it's more satisfying to blame Google than the
| faceless masses who had zero interest in RSS and who had a
| variety of alternatives to Reader in any case.
|
| I guess they also had a strategy to kill social media by
| axing Google+ and user-created encyclopedias by killing Knol.
| fooyc wrote:
| Not only Reader, but also the RSS support in Chrome and
| Firefox (whose Google used to be the primary source of
| funds). And Feedburner.
| greiskul wrote:
| > Firefox (whose Google used to be the primary source of
| funds)
|
| Google deal with Firefox was always about being the
| default search engine there, and that's it. They never
| had any power of cutting it adding features to the
| project.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Officially, sure, but you shouldn't pretend that Google's
| funding isn't the main survival line for Mozilla as an
| entity, and that there isn't pressure there.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Note: Brave (Chromium) has a RSS support. It's pretty
| good.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| You can Oh please, but Google will never live that one
| down.
|
| It'll live on in the history of the internet ...
| foreverrrrrrrrrrr.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Yeah... I don't think the original post is the best. This blog
| post doesn't add much context. Maybe the URL should just be
| updated to the github document the blog post links? [0]
|
| [0] https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-
| Integrity/...
| sclarisse wrote:
| On the contrary. The URL you post here has been submitted to
| HN several times (plus my attempt to make the title a little
| catchier as I linked to the GitHub issue #28, which I titled
| "Don't add website DRM to Chrome" in a defensible attempt to
| expand the title the best I credibly could under HN rules -
| the issue title is just "Don't.")
|
| These all died in obscurity. This blog post by contrast had a
| catchy title that HN actually engaged with, and as such is
| measurably superior.
|
| Blame dang & co, for making forum software in which blogspam
| is the only way to add comment or meaningfully add context
| and editorialize. (Since blogspam is officially discouraged
| I'd say the software is not fit for purpose.)
| 38 wrote:
| actual link:
|
| https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...
| superkuh wrote:
| Nah, that's a link to a javascript application you can run
| that will eventually download and display the text if
| everything is just right. I linked to the actual text.
| 38 wrote:
| Ok fair point. GitHub does suck
| [deleted]
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Ooh, this is epic, the ultimate antiadblocker is here.
| [deleted]
| tagyro wrote:
| This is the way!
|
| I thought about this the past couple of weeks: I get less than
| 10% of the visits to my website(s) from google [measured via
| Plausible].
|
| I want to block google(bot) from visiting my website and I'm
| seriously considering adding a "Usage Policy" that specifically
| prohibits any crawler from visiting my site(s).
|
| Admittedly, I couldn't care less about the traffic, others might.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a
| Google search now
|
| This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that
| only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely
| removed from the average person's use of the internet.
|
| Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author
| who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than
| they are about being discoverable, but removing yourself from
| Google is terribly bad advice for anyone who wants to help people
| find their content.
|
| Many people do use Google to find content and people, even if you
| don't.
| xwdv wrote:
| > This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement
| that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely
| removed from the average person's use of the internet.
|
| The average person isn't going to google an individual to find
| their blogs or whatever. The first stop is figuring out their
| social media destinations. You would hardly expect to find
| really anything about a person on Google that isn't a link to
| their socials. Or perhaps an article related to some crime.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| >The average person isn't going to google an individual to
| find their blogs or whatever.
|
| I guess I'm not the average person but, sure I would. (Though
| I _might_ look on LinkedIn first especially if I knew their
| employer.) A Google search would presumably return social
| media handles among other things.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It may depend on the audience you want to reach.
|
| I've blocked webcrawlers from my websites for years now, so you
| can't find them on Google (or most other search engines). But
| plenty of people find them anyway because my audience shares
| links with each other, puts links on sites that _are_ indexed
| by search engines, etc.
|
| If I were addressing a more general audience, this might not
| work as well.
| jijji wrote:
| Google from 10 years ago is much different from the Google that
| we see in use today... results are much different it's hard to
| find what you're looking for.... then of course you have the
| first page covered with ads so that makes it that much more
| difficult... then there's the negative changes that they made
| to the instant searching where you type in keywords and then it
| provides suggestions which are completely not related to
| anything that's popular that you might be searching for... The
| one example that is still true today is when typing "men can",
| google instant will still show "men can get pregnant", "men can
| lactate", "men can have periods" as the top results...
| greiskul wrote:
| The web from 10 years ago is very different from the web
| today. High quality content is found more and more in closed
| gardens like Discord. The spammers have gotten better and
| better tools to automate their production of low quality
| trash more and more.
|
| A lot of tech people have started to use the trick of adding
| reddit to their query, since it is one of the few bastions of
| actual human beings talking in volume in the open web. But
| even that might stop working, if reddit decides to close
| itself to google, and the way their leadership is doing
| things, I wouldn't doubt it.
| srsQ wrote:
| From my reference frame, "being discoverable" is an ideological
| stance.
|
| You can have your tribal perceptions and others are allowed
| theirs. Social norms are immutable physics.
|
| Other people's content is over rated; I've been soaking it up
| for years and frankly none of it has been as moving as the
| effort of making my own.
|
| Social codependency at scale is proving toxic to the species.
| We can intentionally "great filter" by winding down globalism.
| Whether or not humanity does eventually won't be up to us;
| appeals to preserve our BS are appeals to some greater good. No
| one will owe us that after we die.
| all2 wrote:
| I find this opinion to be solipsistic, but also relevant to
| the discussion because it moves the focus from consumption to
| production. I find the focus on producing goods/services/etc.
| to be more palatable than the consumption focused mindset we
| often see.
|
| Yes, we're all looking for information, but should we only
| consume as a way of life? I'll leave that as an open-ended
| question.
| yeahjofp wrote:
| [dead]
| srsQ wrote:
| [dead]
| myth2018 wrote:
| > This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement
| that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely
| removed from the average person's use of the internet
|
| Not entirely false, I would say. I see more and more non-
| techies getting tired with their search results, instinctly
| expecting to see a variety of poorly-formatted, extremely
| poorly-written, ad-ridden sites.
|
| I believe more and more people will wake as Google pushes the
| boundaries of good sense. This will lead to a decrease in
| qualified traffic, but that won't demotivate Google -- anyone
| who already ran ads targeting a niche public knows that Google
| will burn your monthly budget, and they won't hesitate to
| override your parameters to make that happen.
| epolanski wrote:
| I guess it is kinda true for the author, average person isn't
| looking for his content and his public will find other ways.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >This is a categorically false premise
|
| This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people _do_ expect to find
| things of value when the use Google to search.
|
| But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and
| bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking
| for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something
| equally banal.
|
| And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their
| corporate property. Alphabet won't change unless it's made to
| do so.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| I'm not sure that I agree.
|
| My brother tried to set me up with a girl last week. She has
| a pretty uncommon name. Googled her. Found... a lot of stuff.
|
| I have a VERY common name. Think multiple (relatively) famous
| people (photographers, US Medal of Honor winner, enough
| lawyers to choke a court system for DECADES), but if you
| google my name and the city I live in (1,000,000+ people), my
| LinkedIn is like the second result.
|
| For everyone saying that Google has gotten worse over the
| time they've been using it, these two use cases (which are
| pretty challenging) do really still work.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| And did you Google yourself on a clean computer?
| distortedsignal wrote:
| Tried this test three ways - from my wifi, on my phone's
| LTE connection, and via a VPN that my family uses, all in
| private windows to prevent Google using my local cache.
|
| All found my LinkedIn in the top 2 slots.
|
| It seems pretty stable to me? How could I make this
| cleaner?
| ghaff wrote:
| That sounds pretty thorough for the purpose. I think the
| parent's point was just that if you naively Google
| yourself without doing anything special, your own results
| will tend to percolate to the top more so than if a
| random person were to Google you.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Based on the rants I've gotten from barbers, taxi drivers
| and the like when I've told them what I'm working om,
| there does indeed seem like there is a widespread
| dissatisfaction with capital G.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| Yeah - but that's a different problem. How many barbers
| are there in your city? How many taxi drivers?
|
| Now - how should Google satisfy all of those people?
|
| I'll confess that I don't have the answer here. But if
| you're trying to look up "barber ${my_city}" or "taxi
| ${my_city}", and there are more than one page of results,
| everyone but the top 10 (top 20? how many results per
| page are there on google these days?) is going to be
| unhappy.
|
| Unless there are 20 (or 40?) or fewer barbers in your
| city, more than half the barbers are going to be unhappy
| with google. It sucks, but when x people are clamoring
| for y resources, x - y people will be unhappy. And if y
| is significantly smaller than x, a significant amount of
| people are going to be unhappy.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| No I mean it's the barbers and taxi drivers struggling to
| find things.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| Sorry, I misunderstood.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Okay, but now try "what's the best gaming laptop?" or
| something similar. This is the sort of query that, at one
| time, would unearth some nerd's web site alongside PCWorld
| or whatever.
|
| Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles, some of
| which are on bizarre domains like
| "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are
| festooned with ads, also provided by Google.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| Ok, I'll try that.
|
| Top results (excluding sponsors b/c UBlock Origin):
|
| PC Gamer
|
| The Verge
|
| Games Radar
|
| Youtube (channel: Jarrod's Tech)
|
| A giant ad showing some laptops to buy
|
| Youtube (channel: PC Builder)
|
| RTINGS.com
|
| PC Magazine
|
| Youtube (channel: Top Tech Now)
|
| CNET
|
| Tom's Hardware
|
| Another giant ad showing some laptops to buy
|
| Engadget
|
| PC Magazine
|
| Laptop Mag
|
| TechRadar
|
| These are mainstream tech press sites. And maybe the
| reason that it's a bunch of similar listicles is because
| the thing you're looking for (a laptop) is a product with
| relatively few entries in the market.
|
| What are you expecting here that Google isn't giving you?
| I'm trying to be as charitable as possible, but, for me,
| the expected results are about as good as I could hope
| for.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >mainstream tech press sites
|
| That's kind of the point. Old Google unearthed things.
| New Google is where you go to find out what the media
| (and Google) wants you to know.
|
| If that's what you want, then sure, Google is great.
|
| I used "best gaming laptop" as an example, but you can
| try "what is the best mayonnaise" if you'd like. My
| results included Uproxx. Which I guess counts as
| "unearthing," since I would never go to a clickbait farm
| like Uproxx for culinary tips.
|
| I'm not suggesting I have an alternative, before you ask.
| This may be nothing more than the inevitable result of
| the commercialization and commodification of the
| Internet. Since all of the search companies are going
| all-in on AI stuff, you may find yourself in my position
| in a year or two.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| Yeah - I think that "commercialization and
| commodification" is kind of what I've attributed this to.
| I think the webring concept is probably the best way to
| get away from this, but it's not trivial to find those
| hidden gems. The good ones become/became less hidden. The
| bad ones get/got buried.
|
| But if these are the complaints about Google - "I only
| see sites that are so good that they constitute the
| mainstream" - I'm... ok with that? That seems like a good
| outcome to me. I don't mind using that tool.
|
| From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in the
| last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider art. I
| would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything that's
| known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of thing
| becomes a target. So people target the Google algorithm
| to place better. I don't know that there's a solution to
| that. But I don't think it's because of a change inside
| Google - more like a change in society.
| abathur wrote:
| Before I pick at this, I'll clarify that I don't think
| Google is _useless_. It 's still perfectly fine for many
| uses.
|
| > Now it's seven pages of nearly identical listicles,
| some of which are on bizarre domains like
| "DougsAutoBodyAndFlowerShop.com", and all of which are
| festooned with ads, also provided by Google.
|
| > From what I understand of your complaint, sometime in
| the last 20 years, the Google stopped finding outsider
| art. I would guess that's due to SEO. And with anything
| that's known to drive revenue to a business, that sort of
| thing becomes a target. So people target the Google
| algorithm to place better. I don't know that there's a
| solution to that. But I don't think it's because of a
| change inside Google - more like a change in society.
|
| There has been SEO for all of these years, and the search
| engines have historically been in an arms race with these
| efforts to minimize how readily ranking can be gamed.
| "some of which are on bizarre domains" is the more
| important part of the complaint. It implies that Google
| has either stopped playing this game or has started
| losing the arms race.
|
| I have (for years now) been regularly finding search
| results where pages that are _obviously_ scraped from a
| stackexchange network site (and more recently from github
| or reddit and such) and stuffed full of ads are ranking
| above the original threads on their canonical sites.
|
| Scammy/bizarre/non-canonical domains outranking canonical
| sources in search results is putting Google-search users
| at elevated risk of being phished or infected with
| malware, so it's not like the stakes are low.
|
| As we've watched this drag on long enough to ~metastasize
| into the kinds of sentiment you're pushing back against,
| it's grown hard to imagine explanations that boil down to
| anything ~better than indifference or negligence (and
| leaving a lot of oxygen for explanations that involve
| incompetence, malice, etc.).
| deltarholamda wrote:
| You make me sound like Grumpy Old Man Yells At Clouds,
| and that's accurate, but I'm not wrong, I don't like the
| look of them clouds.
|
| It is possible that this is a problem that will solve
| itself. I think a lot (most?) mainstream media outlets
| are hemorrhaging money, and the gravy train can't go on
| forever. We'll reach some maximum of Terrible Crap, and
| it will peter out, and then maybe Google can get back to
| finding honest content and playing merry hell with
| Internet standards.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > "I only see sites that are so good that they constitute
| the mainstream"
|
| The problem as I see it is that the mainstream websites
| are not good. Search results that gave a broader range of
| hits than just that sort of thing would be much, much
| more useful.
|
| If I want, for example, to find what laptops people
| consider the best, none of those sites help me.
| ghaff wrote:
| Because the "mainstream" sites pay people pennies a word
| to crank out content like "best gaming laptops."
|
| There are sites that do some good gear reviews for
| relatively specialized equipment--especially not
| gadget/electronics. But this isn't the 1990s when PC
| Magazine would have a 600-page issue with a big chunk
| devoted to the best printers as evaluated by their on-
| payroll staff.
|
| I'll occasionally put a review of something up on my site
| but I have neither the money or interest in doing multi-
| product comparisons. That's pretty much impractical
| outside of something like Wirecutter (which I generally
| think does a pretty good job).
| distortedsignal wrote:
| Help me out here - could you give me examples of "what
| laptops people consider the best" pages that
| <i>aren't</i> in the top of Google? I still don't
| understand, and I want to.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| The other problem is that for every "good" non-mainstream
| website there are like 4000 that are so much worse than
| the mainstream. It is a problem with scale. If everyone
| has a voice, without some metric to say who has
| authority, how do you pick the gem from the masses?
| twelve40 wrote:
| if people link to Tom's hardware for new laptops (i dont,
| but maybe it's popular), is that bad? and a sign of
| googles demise? what would you like to see instead of
| those results that made you so unhappy? what else should
| have been unearthed? switching topics from your own
| initial example is not helpful.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| I want to point out - if you get to the seventh page of
| Google, it's been known for some time that those results
| are... specious at best. Check out this xkcd from almost
| a decade ago:
|
| https://xkcd.com/1334/
|
| https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1334:_Second
|
| If you're really going to page 7 of Google... man, that's
| a desperation I've never known.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I've searched for various weird error messages and ended
| up far into the Lands of Deep Pagination before, trying
| to find some glimmer of hope that I can unbrick whatever
| beep-boop thing I broke.
|
| It is a violent and windswept place, barren of joy or
| peace.
| distortedsignal wrote:
| We've all had our denvercoder9 moment, for sure.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Not really sure what organic content you expect to find
| for that query.
|
| _Maybe_ you 'll find a blog post from someone who bought
| a gaming laptop and found it pretty good? Or an old forum
| thread like this one[1]
|
| Not a lot of actual human beings sitting around buying
| and comparing various gaming laptops. It's much more
| likely the content you'll find is from some content mill.
|
| [1] https://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61296
| motbus3 wrote:
| I believe it was an ideologic position by the author, but
| maybe it is not too far. I can't tell for others, but
| depending on what I look for Google is not the best option. I
| find that now there are too much ads which kind get in the
| way of the answer. There are too many crafted results to
| appear more relevant than they are and they tend to sticky to
| the top for a long time.
| 8jef wrote:
| Corporations are rarely made to do anything, unless some
| court judgement forces them. More likely, corporations die
| because they couldn't adapt and survive.
|
| Any legacy web entity is at risk of disappearing sooner than
| later, because most actual web trafic (that isn't bot made)
| is driven by people born after the web was created, who
| couldn't care less about why and how the web came to be. They
| are running with it and breaking it (as well as other things)
| as they see fit.
|
| Google et al. is already that irrelevant, old, rotting and
| decrepit thing from ancient history. Unless Alphabet can pull
| some new trick without killing it first. Thanks for the ride.
| That's the message here.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff
| and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually
| looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or
| something equally banal.
|
| I typed "Joey Hess" into Google.
|
| The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably
| because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of
| results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking
| about him that links me to his Patreon. The search results
| are, I would say, very relevant and very good.
|
| I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from
| people who aren't even trying to use it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I think these claims that Google is useless are coming
| from people who aren't even trying to use it.
|
| Maybe. But I stopped using Google because while it didn't
| become useless, it did become one of the worse search
| engines.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| "Useless" isn't accurate, but "not nearly as good as it
| used to be" sure is. At least in my experience.
|
| PageRank was brilliant, and worked as expected. It's now
| been superceded by... whatever is going on over in
| Googleland. Some of which isn't Google's fault, per se; the
| Internet is a lot bigger now than it was two decades ago.
| Some of it is. Their entire profit model depends on people
| using Google in a way orthogonal to "search and find and
| move on," as it was back in the 00s. People pay Google to
| game Google results. No corporation is going to overlook
| that.
| __loam wrote:
| The problem with Google is people professionalizing
| gaming the algorithm because of the huge incentives to do
| so. I don't think it's Google's fault and I think the
| problem is hard or they would have fixed it.
| twelve40 wrote:
| > People pay Google to game Google results
|
| are you referring to ads? cuz Im not aware of a way to
| pay Google to game search and it doesn't make any sense.
| Is there some dark alley in Mountain View where I can
| drop off a bag of cash? to game the search? Really
| curious now.
| buro9 wrote:
| Google don't fully remove you.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=lfgss
|
| That will return the website as a first result (I run
| https://www.lfgss.com/ )... but no description or metadata.
| Lots of tangential results talking about it... the first
| result is more like a shadow profile, a more fact an exact
| domain match exists but nothing more.
|
| Two months ago I had almost 7 million pages indexed from
| that site.
|
| For this community, it was their objection to their content
| being used to train AI that caused them to request me (the
| owner / admin) to exclude bots. I surveyed more widely,
| presented arguments in a balanced way, then when the result
| was overwhelming I hard blocked all known bots and
| useragents and pretty much everything that looks like a bot
| and user agent.
|
| It's early anecdata, but sign-up rates have not been
| impacted at all.
|
| Several other communities I've run have taken similar
| decisions.
|
| Defensively with the UK Online Security Bill some of the
| other communities I run are considering similar things.
|
| Feels like the end of an era, communities seeking to
| protect themselves from external threats, and search
| engines providing as little value as search pre-Google.
| indigochill wrote:
| > Feels like the end of an era, communities seeking to
| protect themselves from external threats, and search
| engines providing as little value as search pre-Google.
|
| IMO this is inevitable. It's why countries have borders:
| resources are limited, and access to those resources
| needs to be moderated. That's true whether you're a
| country or a server admin.
|
| We already apply this principle to bandwidth in the form
| of DDOS mitigation. Some forums/social media spaces apply
| it to moderation capacity in the form of requiring
| invites.
|
| We're slowly learning that the same thing applies to
| information. Which sounds ridiculous in an age where you
| can drown in information overload, but personal
| information is obviously a precious resource (judging
| from what advertisers are willing to pay to leverage it)
| and even content we write like comments on articles take
| some time and thought to produce even if we've grown
| accustomed to sharing it freely and voluntarily. Now
| we're growing more cautious about sharing even that when
| we see others exploiting it for purposes other than its
| intended use case.
|
| This is also why I'm arguing that social media content
| should in general have a legal license attached to it, so
| that use in violation of the license can be prosecuted.
| CC is probably a good general starting point. I think
| most people have the assumption that their social media
| content/comments can be shared only non-commercially
| (opinions may differ on attribution), with an exception
| for the site that hosts the content (which may in fact
| actually give itself broader permissions in the EULA).
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> I run https://www.lfgss.com/_
|
| Let me take the opportunity to _thank you_. This is a
| rather amazing forum. Kudos to you for listening to what
| the community wanted. This is probably my all-time
| favorite thread:
| https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/172374/
| buro9 wrote:
| for those following that link to the first page... all
| the images are dead, they were hotlinked.
|
| read the end of the thread to get an idea about it:
| https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/172374/?offset=27000
| bartvk wrote:
| Same goes for DuckDuckGo though. I'm not disagreeing with
| you. Just noting that for this result, Google isn't
| delivering anything special.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement
| that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely
| removed from the average person's use of the internet.
|
| I mean no harm by this comment, but I think you're the one
| living in a bubble. Do you watch high school students using the
| internet? Where do they go for information? Reddit is the first
| place they look. Then they look for a Discord server. Google is
| a last resort, but since they know it's probably just going to
| return crappy SEO spam articles, they may give up entirely
| without even trying Google.
|
| Your answer is technically accurate, but only in the sense that
| it disproves the "nobody" part of the statement because of the
| population of users age 45+. Google has lost their place as the
| site to use when you want to find information.
| oAlbe wrote:
| > Then they look for a Discord server.
|
| How? Are there ways to search for discord servers that might
| have content you want _inside_ of them? Like, directories of
| discord servers? I 'm genuinely curious because that would be
| very useful.
| rezonant wrote:
| Well, you Google them I guess.
| shortformblog wrote:
| This is one of those times where anecdotes don't really do
| the argument justice. I'd recommend talking to people who
| actually do research. They can't rely on Reddit alone.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Idk, google scholar still works for the most part.
|
| Seems there is a gap. If you're looking for astroturfed
| opinions a search like "<thing of interest> reddit" works
| pretty well. If you are looking for scientific content,
| Scholar is at least a good _starting point_. In the middle
| there is a wasteland of listicles, SEO spam, etc.
|
| It's like that IQ bell curve meme template.
| DrThunder wrote:
| School students can barely type or use a full blown computer
| anymore so I don't think this is a good anecdote. The type of
| people you're referring to are more worried about their next
| TikTok swipe and live on mobile apps. They don't even get to
| the point they search for meaningful content.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Your example basically says they are in the wrong bubble, as
| far as high schoolers are concerned.
|
| If they want to look for something/someone, why would they go
| to the most unreliable places with totally random people to
| get gossip instead of reputable sources?
| FireInsight wrote:
| Well, that is highly dependent on the type of information.
| For simple facts nobody goes past Google, for actual research
| you do more digging, and for some tutorial type stuff it's
| actually probably youtube. The only thing I think ppl'd look
| for a Reddit thread or Discord server for is a somewhat
| technical topic they need help with.
| g_delgado14 wrote:
| The majority of the world is still using Google to search the
| web [0], including high school students (let's also think
| about high school students outside of North America).
|
| [0] Sources:
|
| - https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-
| market-... - https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-
| share - https://kinsta.com/search-engine-market-share/
| aprdm wrote:
| discord ? reddit? High school students ? Are you living in
| the same universe I am ?
|
| If you said Instagram or tictoc or snapchat maybe
| niederman wrote:
| As a high school student myself, you are just wrong.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| If a highschooler is using reddit to find information, I
| guarantee they find the thread through google.
| pperi11 wrote:
| I literally search "xyz reddit" on google if i want reddit
| refs lol
| dmoy wrote:
| To be fair reddit internal search is terrible
| dylan604 wrote:
| to be fair, the argument that people don't use google
| while someone is saying they use google while limiting to
| a specific site is more the point. while reddit's
| internal search is terrible is not really the point even
| if a motivator. googs is still being used nullifying
| whatever the point of the start of this topic was
| Arrath wrote:
| A truth since time immemorial: built-in search for forums
| sucks, terribly.
| m463 wrote:
| I use ddg, but I'm weird.
| codetrotter wrote:
| If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using
| DuckDuckGo. And we told all our friends and family to do the
| same. Would it have an impact?
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Kinda...
|
| DuckDuckGo allows for supplement of Google Search, as does
| Brave, and other search engines. Google freaked out after the
| ChatGPT release (rightly so) and padded their hand a bit.
|
| Impact would probably be Ads via Google Search Engine. Which,
| great, because Google Ads-generated results remain a huge
| vulnerability in terms of active phishing attacks. Maybe it's
| gotten better in the last month, however I don't really use
| Google Search anymore, to avoid phishing attacks.
|
| And, this is one reason why I like Brave, because I can
| control what content cannot appear in my search results, to
| better mitigate phishing attacks.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| It would have an impact. None of us would find anything of
| value at all.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Google has over 4 billion monthly active users.
|
| HN has about 1/1000th of that. They do not click every link
| or make decisions in unison, so the number of people who
| would interested in such a boycott is probably 1/100th of
| that. Maybe less.
|
| So, no.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| > _If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using
| DuckDuckGo_
|
| *Bing, DuckDuckGo's own indexing is fairly limited compared
| to other search providers like Brave. Most of DDG's index
| comes from Bing.
| FireInsight wrote:
| I used to love Brave search for this reason. Now I can
| _never_ seem to find what I 'm looking for, even for a
| simple search for some product a bit more obscure or smth
| the results are always wayy off from what I'm looking for.
| It is sad if it's due to their usage of entirely their own
| index, I was happy with that mix of Bing&Brave.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Everyone on HN isn't enough to have an impact. And telling
| friends and family isn't good enough because changing default
| behaviors is very difficult in practice and they would listen
| do you, but ultimately keep doing what they're doing.
| OO000oo wrote:
| I agree, but when my 70 yo mother was visiting last month I
| watched her look something up on her ipad and she typed in
| "duckduckgo.com" to do it! I was amazed and asked how she
| learned to do that. Apparently, she learned it from me! She
| said she thinks it gives better results. Then I set it to
| her default search engine so she wouldn't have to type it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _70 yo mother was visiting last month I watched her look
| something up on her ipad and she typed in
| "duckduckgo.com"_
|
| If you want your mother to bake you cookies, tell her she
| only needs to type "duck.com," not "duckduckgo.com."
|
| At least until today. Now I get: Application error: a
| client-side exception has occurred (see the browser
| console for more information).
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| ddg.gg still works.
| codetrotter wrote:
| ddg.co as well :D
| dewey wrote:
| Not even on HN people are united in preferring Google.
|
| Personally I tried to switch many times and always made my
| way back, and I'm not even really in the Google ecosystem
| unlike others.
| code_duck wrote:
| I have been using DDG as the default on all of my browsers
| for several years. However, there are still searches where
| I am not finding exactly what I want, and using the !g to
| perform the same search on Google comes up with better
| results. I don't use Google unless I have to, and agree it
| has been degraded, but the idea that it's now useless is
| unrealistic.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Google Search was awesome until it was ruined by Ads. Such
| a shame. There's dorking, however Google is actively de-
| indexing content, so much so that it makes you wonder what
| (monetary) motivation Google is serving with Search because
| it's not "information for all" anymore. The term "sell out"
| comes to mind, which sucks when you think about how cool
| Google was (i.e., the best and brightest doing the most so
| you could also do the most).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >because it's not "information for all" anymore.
|
| Anyone who has thought google was doing anything good
| after they bought doubleclick is living in fantasy land.
| They pretty much immediately started playing advertising
| extortion games and they optimize for more viewed google
| ads with things like AMP and making ads harder to notice.
| Google stopped caring about "information for all" the
| second after they made their original research paper and
| realized they had a significant competitive advantage to
| make some money with.
| [deleted]
| devilsAdv0cate wrote:
| [dead]
| ghusto wrote:
| > This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement
| that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely
| removed from the average person's use of the internet.
|
| I'm not convinced, though accept that this could be because I
| am in that bubble.
|
| I can't imagine this average person searching for me on Google,
| finding nothing (which they won't, because I did the same as
| the author long ago), and concluding that there is nothing to
| find. Especially since nobody who has tried to find information
| about me after real life encounters has stopped at Google.
|
| The more persistent ones did eventual find bits and pieces, but
| admittedly they were more technically inclined. Even so, none
| of them -- technical or not -- presumed that there _wasn't_
| anything to find.
| coding123 wrote:
| It's better to ask chatgpt instead of google now.
|
| tell me something interesting about joeyh.name website
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/5497fc90-006a-47be-bf80-786a7e...
| bilekas wrote:
| > The web will end one day. But let's not let Google kill it.
|
| The web will end one day. Imagining google in it's form today
| will even exist is a stretch.
|
| Google and all the big players today are all fault to some degree
| of the cesspool we are in at the moment. I get the hate. But the
| hyperbole of blaming them for the destruction of the internet is
| just nonsense
| shrikant wrote:
| How long does it take to actually remove your page from Google's
| search index? I just searched for the author's name and his site
| still shows up as the top result.
| skilled wrote:
| I think you can do it instantly from Googles webmaster tools.
| As for robots, its like 3 days maximum.
| scottLobster wrote:
| That might work for this guy, but it's a big stretch from "this
| works for my niche use case" to "everybody should do this".
|
| You can dislike the game, but being a martyr and refusing to play
| it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling, and
| if he's trying to start a "de-Google" revolution, I would expect
| a more serious effort than this lone page that many normies would
| mistake for an error message at first glance.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up
| potential benefit for virtue signalling
|
| I don't know about this guy, but it might not be virtue
| signaling. It might be that he simply doesn't want to take part
| in that "game". So what if he's giving up some potential
| benefit? Not all benefit is worth the cost.
| wittyusername wrote:
| The process is somewhat straightforward: - Search your full name,
| your username, your phone number, pieces of your last 3
| addresses. - Check image search in particular For each result: -
| Google their remove me process and execute it, if they have one.
| - If not, find an email contact and ask nicely. Make up some
| excuse - If that doesn't work, email a more formal GDPR right to
| be forgotten note if you are in EU. - If that doesn't work,
| Google has a GDPR removal process if you are in EU.
|
| Now wait 1-2 months and do it again. Now wait 1-2 months and do
| it again. ..
|
| After about a year you should be able to reduce your surface area
| tremendously.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There are several businesses that claim to help with this
| process, including providing convenient links to those removal
| processes for many big entities. I cannot advise whether they
| are grabbing all your info too.
| damnesian wrote:
| > Over 30% of the traffic to this website is rss feeds. Google
| just doesn't matter on the modern web.
|
| RSS feeds are dead, long live RSS feeds.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| I have a pretty common name, with a number of famous folks with
| the same name (mostly dead) and others who are listed on various
| sites.
|
| It used to be (>ten years ago), Google would return information
| about me, specifically, on the first page of results.
|
| I made an effort to remove specific references to me and it's
| been mostly successful. I can still be found on
| whitepages.com/yellowpages.com and various background check
| sites, along with a bunch of other folks with the same name.
|
| If you know where I live or my age, you can probably work out who
| I am from those, but otherwise I'm not googleable (or bing/ddg-
| able).
|
| Every few years I go and do some ego surfing[0] to make sure
| things stay that way.
|
| This post caused me to do so again and I was pleased to see that
| I'm not in Google or Bing results (except as noted above) at all.
|
| Even my pseudonymous handle here is used by other folks on
| various other public sites, although mine is reported on the
| first page of searches.
|
| Other pseudonyms I use are likewise mostly not reported either.
|
| Which is just the way I like it.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosurfing
| jklinger410 wrote:
| This is a pointless exercise.
| _the_special_ wrote:
| Another approach of becoming anonymous is to flood the internet
| with fake content and fake AI generated personas that hold your
| name
| andrewaylett wrote:
| One slight problem: that won't remove any pages from Google's
| index.
|
| It tells the crawler not to _crawl_ the pages, but it won 't stop
| the indexer from recognising that the pages exist, or that
| they're authoritative for keywords like "Joey Hess", because --
| and this was the magic of PageRank -- other people link to the
| site.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I thought the method was to change your name to something
| extremely common, like "Janet Brown." A variant is to take the
| name of some celebrity, so that all the search results are for
| him or her.
| tyingq wrote:
| You can also spam the web with profiles, pictures, and posts
| from fictional people that share your name. LLMs have made that
| much easier. It's a pretty common tactic for reputation
| management companies.
| toast0 wrote:
| This works. I have the same name as a Pulitzer prize winning
| author, and it's pretty hard to find me by name. And since I've
| mostly worked at popular user-facing companies, searching for
| my name + employer just has stuff about him with share links
| that use my employer's services. Well except for the guy with
| my name in Florida who got arrested in connection with using my
| employer's service.
|
| What's not fun is hearing promos about upcoming interviews of
| your namesake on the radio and stressing out because you were
| unprepared for a conversation with Terry Gross.
| [deleted]
| twelve40 wrote:
| Michael Jackson sounds pretty good too, there is him and then
| some VC dude apparently
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Frequently such people add a distinguishing middle name,
| which probably helps a little.
| exlurker wrote:
| I wonder if Michael Jackson would have even more success with
| his beer guides if he chose a pseudonym. https://www.beerbook
| s.com/cgi/ps4.cgi?action=enter&thispage=...
| chaostheory wrote:
| This only helps until someone has an email address or some
| other detail like where you work. Then you have to use
| something like Optery which costs about as much as a premium
| netflix sub
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've had a robots.txt disallow Google for 23 years, maybe that's
| why this sort of announcement doesn't seem like it warrants a
| blog post (but evidently warrants a comment on HN, I guess).
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "This is a unique time, when it's actually feasible to become
| ungoogleable without losing much."
|
| This is true. Some sites get buried in Google SERPs because of
| SEO but these sites can see a majority of their traffic from
| sources other than Google.
|
| In the author's case, the other source is RSS feeds.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I have a lot of respect for Joey. But I cant help and think: it
| is rather easy to go full-protest-mode if you are as famous as he
| is. git-annex basically powers my whole long-term file archive.
| Not to mention all the infrastructual code he contributed to
| Debian. Or the fact that he apparently can make a small living
| off Patreons who use his Free Software. With that track record,
| its just a breeze to say "Google Fuck You".
| vmoore wrote:
| My most sensitive searches are when I lookup people online.
| Google only gets you so far. With enough money, you can throw a
| few coins at data broker firms and get back solid 'dox' on many
| people. It depends on how online a person is, and how much they
| unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell
| their data to people-search firms and other brokers).
|
| I have the real name of several so called 'anonymous' online
| personalities, but I won't divulge this info. I was curious
| recently about a Twitter account posting under a pseudonym and
| wanted to see if their opsec was tight. Turns out it wasn't.
| Their real name was discovered in ~15 minutes with some heavy
| Googling.
|
| Imagine if you can simply throw money at the problem and forgo
| Google entirely, getting not only their legal name, but other PII
| too?
| picometer wrote:
| I think this could be a bad idea for some prople, and here's why.
|
| I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was
| doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn't even have a
| smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I'll
| just see what comes up - it's a little lower friction than
| calling her.
|
| She still doesn't have any online presence except for one thing.
| The top search result for her name was a Project Veritas video
| where they had cornered her to ask some questions about her
| workplace and skewer her for whatever soundbites they could get.
| It was heartbreaking.
|
| It's an example of the benefits of the "security through
| obscurity" security posture. If there's lots of info about you
| online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative
| information.
|
| The "stay offline / stay ungoogleable" security posture, on the
| other hand, is fragile with respect to random spikes of negative
| information.
|
| Reality is that there's a gray area and most people have middling
| risk tolerance in this area. As for me, I rarely post on social
| media and have never deliberately cultivated an online presence,
| so I'm somewhat ungoogleable. But not so much that someone
| couldn't find me if they really tried. An seo-heavy event like
| that Project Veritas thing would probably take over my SEO
| presence, but I'm okay with that risk, and I also have the skills
| to spin up an official personal site if I want to.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > It's an example of the benefits of the "security through
| obscurity" security posture. If there's lots of info about you
| online, then it waters down the impact of any potential
| negative information.
|
| Only if your worst fear is bad PR.
|
| If there is some sophisticated enemy who might want to attack
| you, then the fact that the embarrassing video is the 4834th
| Google result doesn't protect you from anything, it means
| there's at least 4834 results for you, all of which contain
| potentially dangerous information, instead of one.
| ghaff wrote:
| The worst is probably sharing a fairly uncommon name with
| someone notorious who is plausibly you at first glance.
|
| I had a classmate in pre-Web days who lived in NYC and shared a
| name with someone who was widely hated in many NYC circles
| (don't remember the details). Anyway, my classmate got literal
| death threats by phone.
| rotexo wrote:
| Yes it is an interesting set of trade offs. I have first-hand
| experience. Six years ago, people on one end of the political
| spectrum mistook me for someone on the opposite end, and doxxed
| me. My name is similar to theirs, but I have an additional part
| of my name that makes it more specific. Now, my google results
| are polluted with the residue of that doxxing event.
|
| For a while, I actively tried to remove my google results, but
| there are still archive and social media sites that have my
| info up, despite my best attempts to take it down. There are
| also people's personal sites that have my info, but I don't
| want to contact them, because I doubt that these people would
| believe that this is a case of mistaken identity, and I don't
| want to draw attention to myself all over again. I have family
| who had a similar thing happen, and they counseled me not to
| take legal action, since it would probably lead my harassers to
| double down.
|
| So now I am trying to rebuild my actual, positive online
| presence, except for contact information, because I still fear
| for my physical safety all these years later. It is a delicate
| balance. The political situation here (US) is so unstable, the
| memory of the internet is so long, and developing technology
| (generative AI) is making it so that there might be a point in
| the future where a sufficiently motivated individual could
| exact political retribution on a whole set of perceived enemies
| at once. This would make my entire life a hellish experience
| (or end it), no matter the fact that I wasn't an extremist. I
| feel that this makes my online presence as essential to my
| well-being as things like exercise, investing for retirement,
| etc.
| mikem170 wrote:
| Is this a situation where a legal name change might help,
| changing your last name like someone does getting married or
| divorced?
| rotexo wrote:
| Yes, though as I understand it, that still leaves a public
| record. Also, I looked into it when I got married, and the
| sense that I got was that name changes for men are
| logistically challenging.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of the "deep web" stuff is behind paywalls (like
| background investigation sites) now. But a number of
| years ago when some of them were still pretty open, I was
| pretty floored by how much information you could get on a
| person if they had an uncommon name and/or you knew just
| a little bit about them.
|
| There is a _lot_ of information that 's public as a
| matter of law--which arguably, in many cases, hasn't
| reconciled that a lot of public information is no longer
| just stored in a file cabinet in some dusty county or
| town clerk's office.
|
| >sense that I got was that name changes for men are
| logistically challenging.
|
| To the degree that's true I assume that women changing
| their names when they get married (or divorced) has been
| such a norm for centuries that it doesn't invite scrutiny
| (although I've heard plenty of complaints about what a
| headache it can be in terms of various IT systems etc.) I
| assume when men do it, there might be at least a
| suspicion that something shady is going on.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| There's tradition when a family has only daughters and
| the oldest daughter marries, her husband takes her family
| name.
| all2 wrote:
| Who's tradition? This sounds fascinating.
| nullc wrote:
| It's not like it helps, if she did have a presence online the
| malicious stuff will still totally wipe it out.
|
| Take me, for an example. Google Greg Maxwell. You'll get a
| smear piece written by the associates of the fraudster that
| claims to invented bitcoin title "Crypto Crime Cartel: Greg
| Maxwell" several pages ahead of my own webpage
| (https://nt4tn.net/) which shows up only on the sixth page
| where essentially no one will see it. (hey, at least the smear
| piece not #1 anymore-- It was for a long time.)
|
| (You could add 'bitcoin' to the search to get rid of most of
| the people who aren't me-- the "crime cartel" article is result
| #2 then, and my page is at the bottom of page 4-- again where
| few people are ever likely to see it-- after several other
| smear pages.)
|
| So I think the threat of negative material is mostly
| orthogonal. You're probably better off invisible, you're
| screwed either way if someone well funded wants to trash your
| name.
| picometer wrote:
| You're totally right - nothing can really stop a well enough
| funded smear campaign. In this example, I don't think Project
| Veritas was going after her specifically. But it's literally
| the only search result for her somewhat-unique name (and
| certainly the top result when combined with her profession),
| so it's the only thing that future employers would see. If
| there's even only a single other information source, there's
| at least _something_ to compare against when a busy recruiter
| is doing a quick screening search. Of course these examples
| are rare, but they do happen.
| nullc wrote:
| Okay, I agree that it's not entirely without merit, but
| realistically joe-blows personal page is really not likely
| to be on the first page of results without a pretty
| targeted query. So you've got to weigh the probability that
| the recruiter even finds the personal page, that is even
| has any effect relative to the negative thing, vs the
| potential harm of being out there.
|
| I don't think the cost/benefit is likely to pan out. Of
| course, on the same basis, blocking yourself out of google
| results is also mostly irrelevant for the purpose of
| standing up against DRMing the web.
| winddude wrote:
| > Google just doesn't matter on the modern web.
|
| It matters hugely, it's still pretty much the only thing that
| matters. That's the problem.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Probably depends on your market. I think I get about 20% of my
| traffic from Google. It's about on par with Baidu and DDG.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I know this is the title of the (3 line) article, but I was
| looking to remove my personal name from being googleable.
|
| Clickbait.
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