[HN Gopher] How Google Is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers ...
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How Google Is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers - and Why
Author : billybuckwheat
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-10-31 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.justapack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.justapack.com)
| not_your_vase wrote:
| > Oh, and by the way, here's how you can ditch Google and switch
| to DuckDuckGo.
|
| The closing sentence is... well... seems futile?
|
| DDG is Bing, and if you say that Google is all about AI-generated
| crap, then Bing turns it up to 11...
|
| (Don't read it as schadenfreude. I couldn't be more depressed
| about it)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Have you tried https://search.marginalia.nu ?
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| If you thought ".io" domains were unstable, you ain't seen
| nuthin' yet!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nu
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Of course. But they (well... he) intentionally avoid crawling
| mainstream internet, and also, the results are censored (just
| like with other engines) - it's not exactly what I'm looking
| for.
| nine_k wrote:
| I'm afraid that the real future is Kagi and the like. Kagi in
| particular is pretty good, but the point is that it's _paid by
| users_ , not by advertisers. It's rather hard to stay user-
| aligned because large commercial operations hich depend
| critically on their web sites will tempt a search engine with
| sweet, sweet lucrative deals for slight rigging that "nobody
| would even notice".
| rurp wrote:
| Last I saw Kagi was highly dependent on Google for their
| search results and seemed much more interested in LLMs and
| other side features than in replacing that core part of their
| search stack.
| rybosworld wrote:
| It really is a shame how bad the quality of google search results
| has gotten. The user experience today feels adversarial.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Well, Google's search results are still the best among its
| competitors. Bing's results are terrible and have a hard to
| understand UX. So it's not Google's results, it's the practices
| they use to dominate the market.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Most Bing results are actually much better today than
| Google's.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| I don't know your use case, but nah, it's worse. It forces
| news snippets down your throat instead of relevant results.
| Plus the results page is hard to navigate, and the edge
| browser is the biggest alien like what the fuck is this
| shit kinda experience. Everything they changed in their
| browser just hinders your work. Microsoft long lost its
| mind and feels like it is commandeered by some strange AI
| entity. Google also is close to losing their mind
| altogether.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| Virtually every time I feel like I'm not getting good results
| with a particular query in DuckDuckGo, I switch to Google to
| try it (I otherwise never use it), and 90% of the time now I
| get nothing better. That did _not_ happen in the past--Google
| was a reliable backup plan. Now my expectations are quite
| low.
|
| I have no idea about Bing because I never use it, though my
| understanding is DuckDuckGo uses Bing as one of its data
| sources.
| christkv wrote:
| I have started using chatgpt to generate my searches as it does a
| better job than me.
| Nekhrimah wrote:
| The axiom: AI allows wealth to access skill, while denying skill
| access to wealth, ringing especially loud from this story.
| will-burner wrote:
| An assumption of the article is that in addition to getting
| readers, bloggers want to make money from their blogs via
| advertising, brand endorsements, etc. That's fair and true for
| the author in this case, but not necessarily true of all
| bloggers, especially the tech type that are on hacker news.
| imp0cat wrote:
| This.
|
| He even mentions the "Blogging Apocalypse" and follows with a
| downwardly sloped graph titled "bye bye traffic" with no units
| or further explanation. I shortened my
| sentences. I used keywords that Google could identify easily. I
| wrote in a way that allowed Google to understand our
| content,[...] If I wanted people to find our article on Prague
| in a Google search I had to call it something Google
| understood. And then I had to repeat what the article was about
| in the first 100 words. And then do it again and again in the
| content. It led to some less than stellar paragraphs
| occasionally, [...]
|
| If the "blogging apocalypse" can rid us of SEO spam, then
| perhaps it's not a bad thing?
| kmbfjr wrote:
| I used to publish some of my edge use case and home lab
| networking experiments. I had about 150 pages on L3 switches,
| Wireguard, IoT connectivity.
|
| No ads, no SEO, just sharing information. By the beginning of
| the year, my only requests were bots. The only referrals were
| from someone on Reddit linking to a page.
|
| I took it down. Google extracted the value of my work, they are
| doing the same to everyone else.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Sorry, why was someone linking from Reddit not a valid reason
| for keeping it up? You already made it, why lose it? Hosting
| fees?
| xnx wrote:
| Reminder that Google owes you nothing. No one is entitled to free
| traffic from Google.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| DuckDuckGo and Bing is the same cesspool. People need to wake the
| fuck up and support each other instead of these behemoths.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I have a small blog. I don't run it for money and I like to tell
| myself I'm the only audience that matters. (It's not entirely
| false, I frequently check it to reference how to do something.)
| But I empathize with people trying to navigate the shifting
| waters of the Google algorithm.
|
| One thought I had: is there any plugin to rerank Google results
| by the number of ads on a site? For the top 10,000 domains we
| could count the average number of ads on a page and give each one
| an "annoyingness score" which would be used to downrank spammy
| garbage.
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(page generated 2024-10-31 23:01 UTC)