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John Socks

@briankrebs but don't we know a specific ways that this happens?

I think it is a common strategy now to set up a page for high search rank, and then to swap it, hot swap it, for a worse site?

Given dynamic page creation this could be a very hard thing for Google to track. Essentially how many kinds of users does Google have to be as they crawl the web to detect all of the subterfuge?

What if a "good" site is actually putting out "bad" pages for old Android phones?

8 February at 16:54 | Wall-to-wall | Open on socks.masto.host
7 comments
John Socks

@briankrebs btw, as I've mentioned I think the dynamic nature of the new web is the reason Google has given up on caching.

A cache would only contain an image of the page given to the robot.

It would increasingly *not* look like what we see when we visit the same place.

8 February at 16:59 | Open on socks.masto.host
BrianKrebs

@John That's interesting. But even a static image can be very useful, esp. if the alternative if you don't get to see anything at all.

I think this is probably the correct explanation for why this feature is being killed, from the Verge story I cited above:

"Although the cache links are only now being discontinued, the writing’s been on the wall for a while. In early 2021, Google developer relations engineer Martin Splitt said the cached view was a “basically unmaintained legacy feature.”

theverge.com/2024/2/2/24058985

@John That's interesting. But even a static image can be very useful, esp. if the alternative if you don't get to see anything at all.

I think this is probably the correct explanation for why this feature is being killed, from the Verge story I cited above:

"Although the cache links are only now being discontinued, the writing’s been on the wall for a while. In early 2021, Google developer relations engineer Martin Splitt said the cached view was a “basically unmaintained legacy feature.”

8 February at 17:03 | Open on infosec.exchange
Nicole Parsons

@briankrebs @John

Google's strategy changed when Mohammed bin Salman invested in tech starting in 2018.

The fossil fuel industry recognizes to keep its wealth, it needs to thwart democracies from enacting penalties for frying the planet.

Funding Trump and anti-democracy billionaires' #enshittification is how.
cnbc.com/2018/04/07/heres-a-lo

8 February at 19:43 | Open on mstdn.social
MooMoo the Cat

@Npars01 @briankrebs @John I did not realize he was a big investor, but it makes sense. This visit (April 2018) was just a few months prior to Jamal Khashoggi being killed (October 2018).

8 February at 20:05 | Open on mas.to
SlightlyCyberpunk

@John @briankrebs That dynamic nature is exactly why they should retain the cache. There are SO MANY times where I search for something, click a promising result, and find none of my search terms are present on the page...so I go back, grab a snippet of the summary from the result, do a CTRL-F on that, and still find nothing!

If the search result is the homepage of a news site for example I clearly don't want to see the new current headlines, I want to see the headlines from whatever day the page was indexed where it actually matched my search query!

@John @briankrebs That dynamic nature is exactly why they should retain the cache. There are SO MANY times where I search for something, click a promising result, and find none of my search terms are present on the page...so I go back, grab a snippet of the summary from the result, do a CTRL-F on that, and still find nothing!

8 February at 20:39 | Open on mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com
don't be an evil dick 🌈

@John @briankrebs When they've also removed boolean ops and exact text match options from search, they're definitely making it worse on purpose.

It used to be possible to chip away at things, to narrow on what you were looking for. Not anymore.

8 February at 21:11 | Open on kamu.social
don't be an evil dick 🌈

@John @briankrebs Google is well positioned to punish site swappers, but they don't.

I still believe they started the avanlache to breaking search by first getting everyone on Google Reader and then taking it away.

When blogs died, unrelated human maintained sites stopped providing high-quality links to each other, eventually losing the key sense-making mechanism of the web.

(Granted, prople moving to FB is part of the same problem, but Google has also been active in making it worse.)

8 February at 21:15 | Open on kamu.social
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