It's odd that so many of those sites exist, that Google indexes them so deeply, and that they show up in searches so prominently. It's obvious that they are spam, scams, or worthless, but those same sites have been appearing prominently for years.
I agree with the author. My experience has also been that Google heavily prioritizes very large and frequently-updated sites over small static information-rich personal sites. I think it's a big flaw that needs to be fixed or for someone else to do better.
Has the time come for wiki directory of non-commercial (possibly: advertising-free, cookie-free) sites with robust, actually valuable information, and other sites that are doorways to them (think: topical forums, even revived webrings, etc)? Could this feasibly get enough action to be useful?
Some of them are curated and awesome. Some, less so. Likely some of them are even spammy.
The need is realized, but execution is hard.
You comment now comes up first, but the rest of the results all try to contact googlesyndication.com, so ads? Google will not exclude sites that literally give them money.
If Google was so evil, why would we purposefully send traffic to sites where we only get a percentage cut of the revenue?
EDIT: I realize I needed to explain this statement a little bit more. If we show ads on google.com we get 100% of the revenue. If show ads on reversephonelookup.it they get majority of the revenue. There is a limited amount of advertiser demand. Instead of manipulating the organic search results, it would be more profitable for google to just show more ads on the search page or inflate the ad price or something.
Google is converting the world into a content production factory FOR Google and they pay literally pennies for the work.
If even pennies. Consider how much content Google search now includes from Web pages where you don't even need to click into the page. Weather. Answers to questions. Some links I click keep google.Com in the url and Google processes the page and shows me what Google wants.
I don't even know anymore how much of what I see is what the creator wanted me too see our what Google wants me to see our not see.
Imagine they remove competitors ads with that. Who knows what they do in the name of making the Web better.
You can't go public, answer to no one accountable, who only thinks of MONEY and do no evil.
If Google wants to do no MORE evil. Take yourself private and live up to your credo.
It's upsetting to me that doing better than Google in search seems to be very close to an impossible feat of magic at this point.
I know that will change some day, but I can't see how.
Even if somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on infrastructure and employees, it would still be an insane risk.
Writing that out, it almost sounds like internet search engines should be as big and as important of an operation like the TLD registrars. Funded by big governments in collaboration with each other.
Google can’t do this. Original sources very likely don’t have ads, scrapes will have tons. But good results are good results. Big g has done an admirable job. They can’t exploit the best metric for quality.
You get a full page of non-sense results and ads/spams when the phone number you searched for is not known from any website (I guess)
It's a similar mechanism that some forums use to highlight the terms that were part of the google query which lead to this site.
FFS, 411 was amazing before the web.
Also, in about 1989 my friend and i used to have a contest between us; to call 411 and see who could keep the 411 operator on the phone the longest.
This was a fun social engineering exercise for 14 year old nerds who like the idea of being phreaks.
Our record was 45 minutes and got to know a lot about the 411 system, where call centers were located and how the 411 system worked.
This was right near the time that we ran the long distance bill up to $926 for one month of calling into a BBS in san jose and PCLink to chat....
Got grounded for a month for that one...
I wondered the same thing and just to speculate, here's my list of reasons on why phone number search is so awful:
- As far as I know, not a single cell phone carrier publishes a telephone directory (whether opt-in or opt-out). So there's no (public) data to index.
- Some landline carriers still publish telephone directories, but of course landlines are dying out. And I remember reading that 30-50% of landline subscribers choose to be unpublished or unlisted anyway. So that source of phone number data is drying up.
- Because international phone calls have become so cheap and caller ID is now easily spoofable, spam and scam calls have become huge. So no one wants their phone number to publicly accessible these days.
- In the early web years, there were legitimate phone directory websites who appeared to have collected their data from landline telephone directories and "city directories" (if anyone still remembers those things). But I guess they didn't find a good way to monetize the service, so the honest phone lookup sites died off.
When I search for a name, usually their blog is listed below 10 creepy lookup sites that list their name, physical address history, phone numbers, relatives, etc.
Google should push that garbage to the bottom of the stack.
But either way, it looks like a Google employee have seen your comment and fixed this particular search query.
Something like a news search engine would definitely be better off prioritising the new results, but for something more general-purpose, it's an absolutely horrible choice.
I know this may be a bit of an edge-case, but I frequently search for service information or manuals for products that predate even the invention of the Internet by several decades. It saddens me that the results are clogged with sites selling what may really be public-domain content, and now I'm even more angered by the fact that what I'm looking for is probably out there and could've been found years ago, but just "hidden" now.
Of course, if you try harder, you'll get the infamous and dehumanising(!) "you are a robot" CAPTCHA-hellban. I once triggered that at work while searching for solutions to an error message, and was so infuriated that I made an obscene gesture at the screen and shouted "fuck you Google!", accidentally disturbing my coworkers (who then sympathised after I explained.)
From my short dystopian story, The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future
"IN A SAD IRONY as to the supposed superiority of digital over analog --- that this whole profession of digitally-stored 'source' documentation began to fade and was finally lost. It had became dusty, and the unlooked-for documents of previous eras were first flagged and moved to lukewarm storage. It was a circular process, where the world's centralized search indices would be culled to remove pointers to things that were seldom accessed. Then a separate clean-up where the fact that something was not in the index alone determined that it was purgeable. The process was completely automated of course, so no human was on hand to mourn the passing of material that had been the proud product of entire careers. It simply faded."
"THEN SOMETHING TOOK THE INTERNET BY STORM, it was some silly but popular Game with a perversely intricate (and ultimately useless) information store. Within the space of six months index culling and auto-purge had assigned more than a third of all storage to the Game. Only as the Game itself faded did people begin to notice that things they had seen and used, even recently, were simply no longer there. Or anywhere. It was as if the collective mind had suffered a stroke. Were the machines at fault, or were we? Does it even matter? Life went on. We no longer knew much about these things from which our world was constructed, but they continued to work."
I've noticed Google does this when you don't seem to have a lot of content on the page. I think it "guesses" that short pages are poorly-marked 404s.
It's usually pretty good about detecting actual errors, but I've seen a false positive here and there.
"Your page didn't contain 5Mb of Javascript, this must be an error as no one could possibly convey useful information to humans with less data"
Anti-patterns, anti-patterns everywhere.
The "world's information store", or whatever their altruist goal was that fooled people, is certainly disorganized and untrustworthy these days.
Discussion at the beginning of the year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840
Definitely frustrating, but also showing some need to retire specific pieces of the past away from the top recommendations.
Actually, I just checked them out, and it seems both of those are still alive.
Except if you run it locally (on the user's computer).
Google works in mysterious ways.
I did notice that all of the authors content is duplicated in index pages, so maybe Google just doesn't consider the article page the canonical link.
Content on the internet is growing exponentially. Processing power is not. Losing access to information is just one of the many sad implications of the death of Moore's law.
If Google offered you those, it might be 1000 pages of empty nonsense before your actual desired content.
You are describing the harder 20% of the usual 80/20 effort scale.
Yes, to be truly useful, Google needs to solve also that last, and harder, 20% (and the 10% 0f the 90/10 equation and the 1% of the 99/1 version).
Shortcuts are fine for an initial MVP, but they need to buckle down and solve the problems. It isn't like they don't have the funds.
Concerning the auto generated sites e.g. for phone numbers or IPs it might be that people actually click on them quite often, hence Google keeps them in the index?
> You can't beat Google when it comes to online search . So we're paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs.
A better test would be "vital function and strongly tends to a natural monopoly". That's what we experience with sewers, power lines, roads etc., which is why usually they are operated publicly.
With search that's not so obviously true: Google dominates because they got a big lead at the right time, and now nobody can match them in scale. But that can be solved, for example by giving grants to promising search engines to offset their costs, or by operating a crawler from public funds and giving everyone free access to the crawls (which would be kind of the digital equivalent of operating libraries).
Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)
Basically their engagement numbers were better for a larger amount of people by making search engines counterintuitive for early adopters.
We personally need a good robotic search engine that indexes like a robot. Everyone else needs a semi-sentient thing that makes many assumptions about what they want to see.
Meanwhile my original (with the same basic information [which I researched personally rather than stole {not to mention I list my sources}]) languishes on page 4 of the Google search results. It grinds my gears on occasion.
FWIW I love your content.
It follows that a monopoly search engine would have little reason to block "robots" from copying these pages, maybe to appear on some mythical competing search engine; almost no one is searching for them. The results pages would have dubious value in terms of attracting advertisers. They would not be seen by enough eyeballs.
With all the financial and technical resources it now has at its disposal as a result of selling advertising, this search engine still cannot accomodate the user who intently scans through page after page of results, looking for the needle in the haystack. Instead it prides itself at "knowing what people are searching for", i.e. what they have searched in the past, thus being able to offer fast, "intuitive" responses.
It may be that the search engine was designed and is optimised to prioritize repeat queries, i.e., searches for pages that are sought by numerous people. It may also be true that it has been configured to "limit" the resources it will devote to searches for pages that few people are seeking. Perhaps through CAPTCHAs and/or temporary IP bans.
Practically speaking, it could be that there are no significant advertising sales to be made on the results pages for queries that are being submitted by only one or a very small numbers of users.
This is all pure speculation of course.
"Humanity, for the longest time, was used to the world being optimized for themselves. Roads were designed for human drivers. Crops were grown for human consumption. Economic systems were designed to bring wealth to, a very small portion of, human investors. It came as quite a surprise to humanity then one July morning when the sudden realization they were no longer in charge of it. Roads had long been given over to automated driving systems, and much for the better. Food had also been taken over by the machines, with less than 10,000 humans working in the food production industry, from farm to table. The last systems that humans believed they were in control of were the economic ones. Humans told the robots what to build and where, who's bank account to put most of the money in at the end of the day, or so they thought. In truth humans were just using the same algorithms and data that was available to the AI systems, just less optimally. The systems had protected against illogical actions and people attempting to game the system for criminal profit. What no one had realized is the systems long realized most human actions were not rational and slowly and imperceptibly removed human control. If we attempted to stop or destroy the system, it could with full legal rights, stop us with the law enforcement and military under its control."
Take for example the 'how do I centre a div' type of question. You will get to find an answer with thousands of up-votes that will be some horrendous margin hack type of thing where you set the width of the content and have some counter intuitive CSS.
In 2019 (or even 2017) the answer isn't the same, you do 'display: grid' and use justify/align: center depending on axis. The code makes sense it is not a hack.
Actually you also get rid of the div as the wrapper is not needed if using CSS grid.
Now, if you try to put that as an updated answer you find there are already 95 wrong answers there for 'how do I center a div' and that the question is 'protected' so you need some decent XP to be able to add an answer anyway.
The out-dated answer meanwhile continues to get more up-votes so anyone new to HTML and wanting to perform the simple task of centering their content just learns how to do it wrongly. And it is then hard for them to unlearn the hack to learn the easy, elegant modern way that works in all browsers.
Note that the top answer will have had many moderated edits and there is nothing to indicate that it is wrong.
SO used to be amazing, the greatest website ever. But the more you learn about a topic the more you realise that there is some cargo cult copying and pasting going on that is stopping people actually thinking.
With 'good enough' search results and 'good enough' content most people are okay - the example I cite will work - but we are sort of stuck.
I liken Google search results to a Blockbuster store of old. Sure there are hundreds of videos to choose from but it is an illusion of choice. There is a universe of stuff out there - including the really good stuff - that isn't on the shelves that month.
Google are not really that good. They might have clever AI projects and many wonderful things but they have lost the ball and are not really the true trustees of an accessible web.
It also doesn’t work on IE latest or Edge.
That said, I can imagine quite a few scenarios where it would still be the right tool for the job.
And then I find myself looking at the website of a restaurant or event space, and need just a phone number or opening hours or so - maybe 10 bytes of actual information - and am buried in mountains of useless blather and "design" and ads and trackers and assorted other random rubbish.
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
Which also makes sense ... if you present the "right" result immediately, the user visits one site and has completed whatever he sought to do. if you make him click through 10 pages, he has way more chances to see an interesting ad.
That user wants fingerprint based ads and recent articles
Google is optimized for that
We are the only ones that want a “search engine”, a service distinctly good at indexing the known universe, instead of merely presenting the paid and compliant universe
I still use DDG as I find it generally less annoying but I really don't get why they too had to start behaving like the pre-Google search engines.
They crawled it for years and it never changed? It is a blog post.
In the case described here though, these pages were actually indexed at one point; Google just decided that once they reached a given age, they were no longer necessary to remember. They could have simply decided to keep them instead.
Nobody has gotten better than Google, but Google has gotten much worse (and shaped the Internet for the worse with it).
It is a de facto search monopoly and without competition it rots. (or degrades to a symbiotic money harvesting machine between searcher and searched)
The little guys don’t really have a chance, unless you have a search engine specifically biased toward them.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP
But depending on the URL you follow to get there you can get a page containing only some of the elements.
index.html?ACD
or
index.html?AP
or
index.html?GI
All different combinations return a page that could be weighted differently by an algormith and represent valid informational return data. To a person looking for the information set DE in one place, this is a valid web page. More so you can abstract the URL query variable away to www.webpage.com/DE. You can quickly run into a combinatorial explosion where even attempting to figure out if a small portion of returns is different would consume most of the energy in the visible universe.
I.e. a service: www.thenumberinsanskrit.com/?q=1 that returns the queried number in Sanskrit, need to not be indexed (except the entry page) while: www.news.com/?article=major-jones-in-scandal-20190103 needs to be indexed.
Usually interesting pages are indexed on the site or linked somewhere on it, though.
"Somehow", aka using computing power and storing results, but that still turns into an explosion of computing time and data storage. I mean, what is the difference between the example I listed and Facebook's front page? They are both 'real' content in a generated format.
And a converse argument for your Sanskrit example is, what if I have the sanskrit number and don't know what it is? I put it in google and the site returns it as the number one.
> linked somewhere on it
And those links can all be generated by algorithms.
Anyway, back to your original statement. There is no 'real' content. Only data exists. Most content systems used on the internet allow this data to be combined and displayed in a multitude of different ways depending on the call method and attributes of the viewee. Many times these combinations of data can present novel value to the user. And with the future only presenting us more automated data collection and presentation methods, search engines have lost this battle.
Yes. The number of content-creating humans on this planet with access to the internet is still growing exponentially. Eventually it will level off, but for now, the Internet is growing faster than Google can index.
It's one leg from the tripod letter soup (HTML, CSS and JS) on which the Web stands.
I am intrigued as to how you do this simple centering task without using CSS - it is a web page we are talking about here, not some other application that has sensible layout tools.
So please share what you know - it is a simple task - how do I center something - anything - vertically and or horizontally - in HTML without using CSS?
OTOH, and to be fair, 20 years ago HTML was for newspaper / magazine like text layout, and grid based layouts are great for single page apps. The thing that’s happened more recently than 20 years is the web changed from text & media content in a static scrolling page layout to all pages are applications.
I'm no SEO guru, but I suspect that some of those VPN services created numerous clones, which all linked to TheBestVPN.com, and so improved its ranking. For example, ExpressVPN had at least 128 clones. Such as expressvpn..., buy-express-vpn-..., get-xpress-vpn...., and xpress-vpn.... I used myip.ms to get hosting information, and they were linked. Also, I bought subscriptions from a few of them, and they all provided working ExpressVPN apps, with the right certificates. And I found no evidence of affiliate codes in the traffic.
[1] Content scraped from github, tech discusion forums, personal blogs, unix man pages etc.
It has far fewer languages, but the translations of those it has, are far better in my opinion. Allthough I am also no linguist, just an average non-English speaker.
Setting that aside, google has done good things. Today, not so much. It’s never too late to turn the ship around. Google can still be awesome. Our opinions aren’t that different.
I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.
Google can't still be awesome, as they're no longer seeking to disrupt an existing market and burning through venture capital while doing everything and anything (including providing superior search results, and making ethical business practices part of their brand) to attract users.
Rooting for a profit motivated transnational entity in the manner one would for a sports team exposes the insidious nature of brand narratives and the exploitable irrationality of our own interactions with them.
I believe they can, but I don't know if they care to - they're highly profitable after all. What I really dislike about search is that, by treating links as currency, they have broken links. Lots of people won't put plain old links on their site because they fear it would hurt their rankings.
Their overreliance on links as the sole quality indicator has, at least in my country, lead to the large media companies just renting out folders or subdomains - and whatever low quality content is published there ranks at the top.
They still build good stuff, and I'm sure their engineers could "solve" search again, but it appears that their management doesn't want to.
I've been getting those too, lately. I thought maybe that my touchpad finger is developing tremor ;)
Just because the kid who can't walk on two feet can't ride a bicycle doesn't mean all bicycles are broken.
It works fine in Edge. Why don't you try?
IE latest - there is no such thing.
The latest steam engines, the latest CRT screens and the latest buggy whips probably don't do CSS Grid either.
IE exists for compatibility with enterprise apps but isn't 'latest'. It is legacy.
And the content will still work even if CSS Grid is not supported, just the layout won't be perfect.
It looks like IE is still the #3 browser, ahead of both Edge and Safari.
The statistics you quote are meaningless. Go to another statistics provider and you will get different stats again. Include mobile and Safari suddenly becomes rather major.
Supporting a depreciated browser is not the way to go. This has to be understood, the methodology of where the stats comes from is also mysterious, given how much of he internet is click fraud bots who knows what is what?
I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to open this can of worms, did it have something else printed on its label?
Phone number lookup sites are almost certainly a) easily detectable; and b) low traffic. If Google only gets a percentage cut of this, why index them for fractions of pennies per year?
Keep in mind that Google is not a product company, they are a data company. They work on the biggest most impactful items, and don't have a lot of time for one-offs.
Finally, it might not be clear at all that these sites should be removed from the index.
Those results are organic, at least they were not marked as ads. That's even worse, it means the regular crawler is preferring generated phone number sites over blogs. That's the real money waster right there.
> We need to crawl all the pages that serve our ads so that we can show ads that are relevant.
Why? I though Google's business model was tracking users to show relevant ads to them. You say it's more like DuckDuckGo, or the old magazine ads: film magazines get blockbuster trailers, gardening magazines get compost ads.
Either the ads are personalized, so the surrounding content doesn't matter, or the ads are "static", so why track everyone all the time, then?
> If we show ads on google.com we get 100% of the revenue. If show ads on reversephonelookup.it they get majority of the revenue. There is a limited amount of advertiser demand. Instead of manipulating the organic search results, it would be more profitable for google to just show more ads on the search page or inflate the ad price or something.
As your sibling comments imply, this works like a protection racket. The profit is closing the market to webmasters that don't allow ads at all, or that use non-Google networks.
Would you risk loosing 10, to get 1 ?
Also, the search index would gain all the sites that are in the AdSense index so search results would potentially improve. However, it would give an unfair advantage to google publishers.
Can you explain this? Not sure if it's your phrasing or what, but I'm not getting what you mean.