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Google likes to claim it loves the web. Google fucking broke the web. Cookie notices on every fucking website? They need those because they use Google Analytics or Google Ads. Recipe sites that go on for fucking days? That’s because Google penalises websites when you leave too quickly, and they can’t show as many ads. Obviously-bullshit machine-generated “content” designed to entice you to click ads? That’s because Google Search is a monopoly. I’m so tired of Google. 325 comments
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@everard Clearly helping you focus on your work instead of scrolling Mastodon, you time-waster you. @samir reason I moved away from Google’s products. For analytics I’d recommend plausible (https://plausible.io) @duncan @samir it really depends on your needs. Is it just for you? Company wide? Which OS are you running with? I rarely use spreadsheets, but when I do, I use apples (as I work on an Apple computer). Same goes for documents (although most of the time I use note taking apps and don’t really write documents that need an app like Pages). @duncan Without having used it myself so far, maybe https://cryptpad.org is of interest to you. @samir Been so tired of Google for so long... don't start me on AMP either... but the fight is long and few people seem to actually (realise && care), sigh  @motorola68k  @samir they went from 'do no evil' to 'do know evil' pretty quickly. And then they owned the news with AMP.  @samir misfire on the cookie notices. That is due to GDPR and the California version CCPA, not Google analytics specifically. Any type of technology that uses cookies and is used on EU or CA residents requires that notice. @Archnemysis @samir that is not true. If the website sets only login cookies you do not need to have the notice. If you’re setting cookies for anything else that is not required for your website to function you have to add the notice. You can pick the analytics provider that does not use cookies to track page views. @Archnemysis @samir fair point but google is responsible for a lot of the cookies. If there was no notice, you'd get the cookies and have no choice in it (unless you used other software to prevent cookies of course). Google don't want you to be notified.  @Archnemysis @samir the gdpr is a result of tracking and data harvesting abuse by many actors, but Google was the driving force behind the trend for cookie-based analytics, so... @Archnemysis @samir cookies notices are not to do with gdpr, but the ePrivacy Directive, which is eventually going to be replaced by the ePrivacy Regulation, when they get their act together (as it is just over 4 years late now). The cookie part of ePR is intended to get rid of all those cookie warnings, as they will expect browsers to implement controls, and sites to then make use of them. @samir That‘s exactly why I try to avoid using Google as much as possible. DuckDuckGo has grown considerably better these last years, so I have an alternative there. And for those cookies, I usually deny all of them. The list of things they’re testing includes “cookie jars” similar to the ones implemented by Firefox. A cynical attempt to solidify their leading browser and advertising market positions at the expense of all other players. No less UPDATED on Thursday, January 5, 2023 @samir Told my husband the same thing last night. Google is turning into a desperate piece of crap. @melsaywhat I've heard it's about recipes not being copyrightable but the rest of the page is. Any truth to that part?  @samir I've been trying to avoid Google products whenever I can. The only ones I still use are Gmail (lots of things to move off of there, including some I will probably forget), YouTube (no decent alternative) and Google Translate (still seems better than Bing Translate). Oh, actually, I use Chrome, but only for compatibility-testing my work's Web apps. I don't use it for browsing. @meredith @hyrulian DeepL *always* prioritizes a coherent sentence over any level of accuracy. Maybe it's because I'm mostly familiar with a rather non-concordant language pair (English and Japanese), but DeepL is largely worthless for anything beyond the most simple textbook-level phrase construction. Google Translate produces "worse" (less coherent) translations between the two, but what it produces generally has a more logical path that I can follow, even if it also isn't what I would consider to be accurate.  @hyrulian when I was moving away from Gmail to Tutanota, I started by setting up email forwarding to my new inbox. that way I'd still receive and read an email from a service I'd forgotten about, and then I'd go their website to update my contact info right away. definitely a lengthy process, but in the end I've managed to pretty much catch them all. @samir Today I tried to quickly translate a rare word using #Google, back & forth to my native language. Of course I could directly use their separate #GoogleTranslate tool, but wanted to find synonyms. Guess what: it was impossible to search for that word. Google kept replacing it with another, almost similar word, a homonym. Each time. In all results. I’m used to this ridiculness for some time. But usually I could force them to return back to the desired word. Not anymore @samir The cookie notices are thanks to the UK (or maybe all of Europe, I forget). Their rules. Google may benefit from them, but it’s not their doing.  @AlliFlowers @samir The cookie notices are malicious (and generally questionable) compliance from corporations who want to continue their surveillance-advertising business model despite Europe specifically legislating against it. Also its on EU's public survants for not setting a better example...  @AlliFlowers @samir What's being implied here is that fewer sites would even _have_ any cookies to have to warn about if they weren't running Google Analytics or Ads on them.
 @samir The search results are garbage now too. Even their supposed original product is near useless. Even putting stuff in quotes gives garbage results. I’m starting to migrate to duckduckgo I mean I use DDG by default, and it's even more vulnerable to machine generated fake search results, in my experience. @samir @cherylfrancis how is "wow look at all the ads we have" the pinnacle of civilization. i have avoided ads like i avoid covid now. i think it must have been a good warmup exercise.  In response to commentary by Cory Doctorow, I've started experimenting with Duck Duck Go. Early results are promising.  @samir add to the list trying to kill RSS, and the misdirect that “amp” is designed to be @samir And it's only going to get worse as ChatGPT-like systems make it easy to create low quality spam pages that crowd the search results. @samir every time I open a webpage on my Android it tells me sync isn't working. And I don't know how to fix it. And I work in IT. It's annoying. Google is annoying. @samir I know I’m not the only one who thinks it’s gotten worse over the past few years, too. Super glad I know how to use Boolean search, it’d be unusable at this point without it. Goddamn I miss AltaVista. @samir Amen. They have tweaked their algorithm so may times, and it has been very damaging to our sites. Grrr...  @samir don’t forget about all the spam blogs, ruining rss, comment spam, and viruses all just to boost page rank. Not sure where you're from but where I am from the "cookie notices on every fucking website" is due to EU privacy laws. Which is a GOOD thing.  From #california and I get them all the time aswell. I am pretty sure Cali passed a law regarding that aswell @rjayasinghe @samir What works for you? I have set #duckduckgo as my default search engine, but find myself manually switching over to google at least once a day because the search results are useless. @andreaskyriacou @rjayasinghe @samir I'm happy with DDG's search results. My challenges for leaving Google are YouTube and my factory Android phone. @Montag @rjayasinghe @samir What I severely miss from DDG is the possibilityto exclude search results. The „-” seems to have little effect. This frequently leads to result sets consisting entirely of false positives.  @samir I’ve been functionally Google free for years and I love it. I bounce between iOS and Android, and I have a GSuite org. for custom domain email + features for the family (I’d rock Fastmail if it wasn’t for the wife’s email needs, tbh), but otherwise? Fuck ‘em.   @zalintyre @samir a site that serves static webpages with publicly accessible content has no need for the safety provisions of HTTPS and it's safer than an HTTPS site you have to log in to and whose credentials database got hacked. @zalintyre @samir you can get worms delivered to you by the Google ad network via HTTPS, and you won't have anything to fear from a plain HTTP site serving static content  @samir joke's on them... I block all kind of analytics (yeah, also those supposedly benign, self-hosted, FOSS analytics) at DNS level and also locally on my browser. Also, I dont' use Google but SearXNG with a mix of search engines (which doesn't include Google). @samir I absolutely am not a “Google Apologist”, and agree that they have done net bad in many aspects, but you always have to look at both sides, HTTP 2.0 and QUIC are some of the biggest innovations of the internet in the past decade, both brought forth and pushed by Google  @samir the opt-out thing is EU and CA law, and the few places that list it's a mile from 1a to zed. But yes, Goog is still the giant. But to be fair they occasionally police. The DIY spam a few years ago as an example But food sites, I spend a *lot* of time there, as every recipe is a synthesis of what's out there (and tossing the white girl stuff) and increasingly Goog is pushing less vacation blogs and more YT videos that are generally worthless. /my site is anathema; I don't have ads @samir I use Firefox with Duckduckgo as the default search engine, and add-ons to automatically block all cookies and ads. If a page is too visually 'busy', I'll also enable an add-on to block all scripts, breaking everything on the page other than the text and basic images. @samir wait, I thought the "recipe sites full of waffle" thing was a sign of broken copyright, not broken Google. If I just post a recipe online, it's not protected by copyright – neither a list of ingredients nor a list of instructions are copyrightable. But if I write six pages of creative bollocks about how delicious this particular cake is, you can't legally rip off the recipe because it's now part of a creative work. @samir Alternatives exist like #duckduckgo @StartpageSearch. It also helps to not use a brand name as a verb, talk about "web search" as this is what it is. @samir is *that* why you have to scroll endlessly to get to the actual recipe 🤦♀️ The whole web is like machine learning in reverse, training people to behave like algorithms 😠  @samir also: when Google introduced Google image search, people where sueing it because it removes their creative work and intellectual property from the original context. Why browse a photographers website when Google images displays it anyways? Here in Germany several people sued Google for cooyright infringement, but Google lengthened the law suit and later argued that the tool has been around now for quite some time, making it „generally established“ thus winning the suit  @samir A thousand times this. Plus, their products just suck. Beyond, say, Google Maps and Google Calendar, what Google products are there that are genuinely good? Gmail is terrible (I use the old HTML-only interface whenever I can), Google Drive is a hot mess (surpassed by Notion and the like, much easier to locate information), Google Search is useless these days (better go to Reddit), and the rest have an approximate lifespan of three years after which poof, they're gone.  @samir Agree to you, what Analytics is concerned. But without Google, we would browse the web with MS Internet Explorer 17.0 and build our MS-HTML websites with the document.all.office365 object.  @samir It feels like quite a closely related problem to "enshittification" as outlined brilliantly here by @pluralistic @samir It sounds like the problem is capitalism, tbh. Capitalism is constantly getting in the way of things being efficient. @samir In the Netherlands websites have to warn consumers when they place cookies. Google doesn't have anything to do with that.  @samir Aren't cookie notices on websites all due to a piece of EU legislation from 2011?  @samir but if bing had the throne, wouldnt they also would have broken the web in their own eclectic way ?  @samir fuck google mate, I am spreading the word out there, but aint nobody listen
Oh, for fuck’s sake, this one blew up. I am not going to reply to everyone. Here’s some common rebuttals. So: yes, the EU mandates cookie notices if you are doing stupid things like tracking. If you don’t track, no notice. You don’t need a cookie notice for authentication. Yes, people also write a lot of text to help with recipe copyright. It doesn’t preclude ad money, which is why a lot of other people do it. Please don’t come into my mentions defending Google. They can do it themselves. They have the money. @suppi I am shocked I managed to find your reply in the deluge. Currently in the process of migrating to Fastmail. My Mastodon handle is also my new email address. @suppi @samir I have been self-hosting on a VPS for 22 years (so far), but you can even *pay* for someone to host your email and don't depend on gmail or yahoo or outlook (hotmail? whatever Microsoft calls their email now). People going with one of those providers is what is making email difficult for everybody else.  @samir also, by monopolizing search, they halted one of the most promising growth directions for the web. I would love to be able to port all my Mastodon posts, Facebook chats, ettc into a searchable directory somewhere, into a single timeline. But no way would I do that at a company that will keep records of everything. I'd pay for private search but nobody offers it even tho the technology has been around for decades. The number of people in my mentions saying, “you don’t hate Google, you hate capitalism”. Now, I’m on Mastodon, so I can see why you would think that. But no. Turns out capitalism does *not* require monopolistic practices. In fact, the world did capitalism for quite some time without encouraging those. You can do capitalism and still punish overreach! Typically with laws, but taxes also work. Capitalism does not mean “no taxes”. That’s just what the USA and UK would like you to believe. @samir capitalism trends toward monopolies and rewards companies that behave badly (a race to the bottom where people say, "if I didn't do this someone else would"). We've been through similar periods before (eg the gilded age). Google's behaviour is natural and consistent with that order. But the accusation against you is a bit like saying you shouldn't hate a wife beater, you should hate the uncle that sexually abused him. It doesn't help anyone. @caoilte I broadly agree with you. It seems to me that the core of it is people believing the capitalism is the goal, rather than one of several means. Of course, this belief is put there by those who benefit from it (hi, Murdoch), who are using the reach afforded to them by capitalism. So perhaps it was always inevitable. @realn2s Yes, I think it’s very good! When you have several multinational, highly profitable corporations simultaneously conducting mass layoffs, I think it becomes clear that monopolies are failure states. When you have capitalists taking advantage of discrepancies in fundamental human rights to create a market (e.g. cheap clothes made in terrible conditions), you’ve got a failure condition. I think the core issue is capitalism as religion.  @samir As a result of your post I just learned that Google was once called BackRub, which seems, in office terms at least, slightly more honest in terms of disturbing and unwanted contact. @samir It sounds like you have a beef with capitalism. Websites want to generate revenue so they run advertising. People click more ads if they're relevant, so ad companies introduce tracking and build interest profiles. Websites want to scale their income so they find cheap/lazy ways to write content and game search engine rankings. All of this would still be the case if Bing was top dog. It's just the natural result of people trying to make money, for better or worse. @samir We could return to the early days of the Web where advertising didn't exist. But if you take away the money making machine, a lot of good and crappy sites will not be able to sustain themselves. While I don't like how commercialized the internet has become, some of it's necessary to fund all this free content. I hope that increasing regulation will keep companies like Google in check while still allowing content creators to survive.  @samir So well said!  @samir@mastodon.functional.computer @samir Spot on! No cookie warning needed on my website because there's no google analytics or analytics from anywhere else. Each user ends up in the log, but I can't control that. Time to eliminate the panopticon JavaScript from the web.   @samir I’m worried about the possibility of a Chrome monoculture. Google packing Chrome with non-standard APIs, websites only tested in Chrome, it’s a cancer. @samir this is what happens when the idea of a distributed Web meets capitalism. Over time, things consolidate until you end up with a few giant companies effectively controlling everything. Ultimately, it's a failure of regulation. Our governments are not doing enough to ensure these enormous monopolies never firm in the first place. It seems we're past the days when a govt will break up a company, like AT&T/Bell.  @samir Some "recipe" pages have the actual recipe so well hidden that you have to scroll around for minutes until you can find it ... unless you use print preview, which eliminates all the crap and shows you want you wanted to see. |
Gregory's Server
@samir plus one for BBC Good Food recipes, no need for advertising, so don't go on for days, but know what you mean on other pages.