> 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.
> 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.
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).
This is so untrue. Most high schoolers run a Google search for their queries first. Most of the time just looking for a Wikipedia page. Occasionally smart ones will Google and append "reddit" to the end of their search when looking for opinions but a lot of highschoolers barely know what reddit is. YouTube would probably be next up and then maybe TikTok. But Google is still 100% the first place to go.
Source: I'm a highschool student and spend a lot of my time with other highschool students.
I don't disagree, but that's actually what I'm talking about. It apparently wasn't clear that I was making a distinction related to using Google to find information as opposed to using Google as a portal to sites that hold the information you're after. Your response shows that it's taken for granted that of course people wouldn't use Google to find a link to someone's website (which is the topic of the post).
Use Google to find a Wikipedia result.
Use Google to find a Reddit result.
Use Google to find YouTube videos.
Use Google to find TikTok videos.
20 years ago it was "Search Google and click on the links it provides".
No they aren't, they are trying to make a distinction between how Google used to be good for scouring the wide web but now it's results are poor enough that you are better off narrowing your search to single known good avenues.
By poor I mean the results may be relevant but of low quality, thanks to commerce and SEO spam often dominating the results.
In some ways this is actually a decent reflection of the reality of the web. It is mostly spam and ecommerce, with human communities taking refuge in certain platforms.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
And how the hell do they "look" Reddit? Don't tell me the high-schoolers actually prefer Reddit's search than Google? If it's true I'm deeply worried about humanity's future.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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/
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
> "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.
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?
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).
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.
Sometimes you can get an answer that's better and filtered through actual experience by adding reddit to the search query, but if you're explicitly buying consumer goods, idk why he would be surprised that that result would be a bunch of hyper commercial listicles.
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.
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.
People are focusing on the one example I gave off the top of my head. I have never actually searched for "best gaming laptop," because I don't really play games. It is an example of a type of query that, at one time, gave different sorts of answers when compared to today.
If you can't extrapolate the larger point from that, I don't know what to tell you.
But you are suggesting with "if people link to Tom's hardware" that PageRank is still in play. As far as I know, it isn't anymore. There may be something similar or related to PageRank in the black box Google unhelpfully calls "the algorithm," but it's not counting up the number of links and showing that. Google dropped and/or altered that fairly quickly after people learned to game it.
Perhaps you have never had to alter, tweak, or otherwise fold, spindle and mutilate your search queries in order to get Google to find what you're looking for instead of what seems to be clickfarming nonsense. If so, I'm impressed. I would also say that you are pretty unique, as bashing Google to get it to spit out something useful seems to be more and more difficult these days.
I believe Google is aware of this problem. It's why they're jumping into AI like everybody else. They have reached the end of what they can contort the algorithm into doing, so they are going to replace at least some of their search with AI generated answers.
I have no idea why people are so eager to defend Google either. They are a privacy nightmare, they run roughshod over Internet standards, and they throw their considerable weight around like a bully. It's very weird.
thank you for a thorough reply, but extrapolating from anecdotal hypothetical search that wasn't even tried seems pretty comical. My counter-anecdote (which I've actually tried) is that Google works for most of my searches. I have no love or affiliation with them, so without anything more than anecdotes there's is not much to pontificate about, so I'm pretty amazed these walls of text about googles demise (purely based on "feelings") pop up every time.
Replying to an old reply, but reminded of this by the more current thread regarding StackOverflow.
Lots of comments in there about how SO doesn't show up as more (or at all) in Google results, and instead we get geek4geek or whatever other clickfarm sites there are out there for technical questions. It's a great example of exactly the problem I was talking about. Is it still comical to you?
Sure, yeah, anecdata and all that, but until I'm hired to dig through all of the internals of Google, anecdotes are about all we've got. Other than Google's reassurances that Everything Is Going Just Splendidly.
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:
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.
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.
The worst is when (as in your example above) there's a bunch of YouTube videos on the first page of results. I do watch some YT channels, but generally speaking if I'm doing a Google search I'm looking for information quickly, so there's no way I'm going to watch a video in order to extract the bit of information I'm looking for.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
People who are not good with tech with certainly use Google especially if they grew up with it.
Yes, search results are bad, but are you using duckduckgo instead? No, you are still using a Google search to get somewhere even if it's just to use it to find a another site with better pages. Maybe you are using Bing though I know some folks were liked Bing...
Now if you want to argue people are using TikTok as a main search engine now that's a bit different (that's of course not accurate as it has terrible search just like reddit)
But yeah even Google knows people are only using it to find Reddit pages now (which is Reddit started the whole API issue) and why Google and Reddit are fighting a little.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because I was curious about this: the use of "categorically" in the phrase "categorically false" doesn't directly relate to the concept of "categories" as groups or classes of things. Turns out it's actually related to the philosophical use of the term which originated with Aristotle and was further developed by Kant (see "categorical imperative" on Wikipedia).
"categorically" in this situation is used to emphasize the absolute, unambiguous, and unconditional nature of the falseness.
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...
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.
>- 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Oh boy. RSS died because it was "only for nerds". Never had I ever met a person outside my tech bubble that had used RSS yet knew what it was. That's not how the average Joe uses the internet.
Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom.
People were suspicious of TPM and the "trusted computing" initiative and were fed plenty of propaganda about how it will make things "safer" and more "secure". There are corporate mouthpieces spreading that FUD on any article that's even just slightly critical of them and their plans.
I consider it an utterly disgusting premise, that will:
- make OSS systems second class systems online
- make older devices second class systems online
- prevent people from modifying devices they own (as it'll break the chain of trust and therefore the attestation)
- prevent people from modifying software (custom builds of Chrome, Firefox, etc won't be signed and therefore break the chain of trust and therefore the attestation)
- prevent people from running browser plugins that do things browser authors don't approve of
But hey, from google's PoV, it's a giant win, they can:
- make it harder for anyone else to crawl the web, and therefore compete with google
- make it harder for people to not watch ads, preserving google's revenue streams
- make it harder for anyone to automate the web in ways they or other browser vendors don't like
The 'holdback' mechanism is a joke and I imagine would disappear after a year or two.
Feels like a really good reminder of why it's a terrible idea for google to both be in control of really large important web properties like google search, youtube, maps, ads, but also the single most popular browser.
edit: I hope Apple and MS push back, as they're both vendors with significant marketshare (Mozilla too, but they're smaller). At least if Apple didn't do it, it'd be hard to rely on in US/UK.
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.
I can't even visualise how this would work in any meaningful way. You are going to have some software that "attests" that, say, the user is running an approved version of Chrome. But you couldn't just distribute such software everywhere, since I assume it would be trivial to extract any keys from it and then attest whatever you wanted. The site mentions "Google Play" as a possible attestor, so it would perhaps work on locked-down mobile devices, at best.
You can have the same cryptographic chain of trust on PCs with Secure Boot enabled. Essentially the attestation is a signed hash of the computing environment, with Microsoft as its root authority in the PC ecosystem. The kernel+boot environment is next, then the system software stack, and finally the executable image. This is exactly what is provided by the trusted execution environment on Android devices, and Google Play is just the trusted arbiter of the software signatures.
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]
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I can't speak for what specific tradition GP might have been thinking of, but it seems like a special case of what happens in systems where typically a bride marries "into" a groom's family, with the occasional exception where a groom marries into the bride's family for e.g. inheritance purposes. This is globally quite common in cultures where inheritance is relevant with male preference.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm AFAIK ungoogleable, in part because there is a C or D list actor who shares my name, as well as a successful business owner, and apparently a couple football prospects.
On the other hand, the business owner is in the tech space and apparently an early adopter, as he always seems to take the lastname and/or firstlast name, so it's not all roses.
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
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?
For example, Intelius does background checks, reverse phone number lookups etc. One small piece of information can lead to others. As far as unwitting, of course. The wikipedia page says that company has acquired background check companies, a facebook genealogy app company, classmates.com and a "people" search engine company... not to mention all the public databases that are available (criminal records, property records) The've been collecting online and offline data on people for almost 20 years. I'm sure they have data scraped from sites that don't exist any more. Combine that with the current terminally online population and I think it would be surprising to most regular people how much data is out there.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
I'm not sure why people are asking for search queries and posting search reaults. These are either way filtered by the profile determined for you as a "category" or cohort of users.
So saying that Google is useful for a generic search like "the best gaming laptop" is a bit wrong. The issue starts when the response to this begins with "scrlling past the ads and sponsored content" to "SEO optimized but not necessarily useful content".
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".
There is a better reason to "become ungoogleable": Simply make the content you want, how you want, and if it has value Google will have to adjust their index to account for it. Too long we've been slaves to the SEO wheel, spending so much time on SEO that we don't have time to make stuff.
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
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.
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.
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"
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.