I've been invited so two similar events over the past couple decades and one company I worked for had standing weekly meetings with Google. All I can say is my experience is pretty much they same, they lure you in wanting info and to help you, but don't give any answers and just keep wanting more info. In the end they didn't unblock us and in my opinion built a lot of what we shared into their systems. It was a knowledge theft exercise in my opinion, was NOT in any way meant to help anyone but Google.
When I handled a lot of ad spending for numerous companies, Google would schedule continuous meetings with junior sales people dedicated to figuring out which client relationships that they could interfere with to convince me to spend more money recklessly. This is a common experience in that particular industry with Google's salespeople in particular.
What's interesting about that is that if any of the (dozens? over a hundred?) salespeople that I interacted with could have provided a solid rationale for what they were suggesting in the context of what a particular client wanted to achieve, I could have been persuaded. None of them ever did at any time. It was always just a one-sided appeal to spend more money with no coherent plan for a return on spending.
in fact the standing weekly meetings were cancelled after we got to the point where the entire half hour was consumed with going over all the AIs their end had they we were still waiting for answers on. Since we never got any, we cancelled the meetings as wasteful.
This article doesn't give any specifics on the "shadow-banning." I am totally willing to believe in any douchebaggery anyone reports from Google, but I (as anyone should) require specifics to give any credence to the writer's claims.
This "article" fails to answer the first questions you'd have. For example, how did Google single you out for this invitation? The article asserts that it was all "shadow-banned" site owners, but then says the Google employee denied all shadow-banning. So how was the invitation phrased?
I'm not even going to waste time breaking down the rest of the empty bullshit in this article. It's unfortunate, because I'll bet every claim made against Google is true. But I'm not going to give a single one credence without specifics. If you're too lazy to provide those, you don't deserve support.
From a quick search it seems you get invited to these things by filling in a feedback form for Google.
As for shadowbanning, well, it doesn't take much to remember Google is a search platform and then to match that with his complaints about his site getting deranked.
Maybe that could have been made clearer, but surely if I could figure that out you could too.
Nobody should be expected to run around doing searches to support the assertions in a random article. Why would you serve as an unpaid tool?
Anybody on here can speculate as to what Google does to this or that Web site; but if you're going to write an article claiming it as fact, you need to support it.
Your time seems to be free as well as engaging to demand "proof" wastes as much time. But yours is way more wasted as you created only a HN comment, not a proper blog article.
"It was then I realized this wasn’t our funeral, it was Google’s."
What Google seems to be doing is banning aggregation sites. There was a previous posting today by someone who was complaining about low ranking for his book review and link farm site. Google wants to be the only aggregator. Why fan out queries to another level of aggregator?
A list of the 20 sites he's talking about would help. How many of those are aggregation sites?
The whole article is pretty confusing to me. It's never made at all clear what this event was supposed to be about or why this specific set of people were there. Presumably it wasn't "invite people who run 'shadowbanned' sites" when they don't acknowledge that there is such a thing. So what was it, then?
It's not confusing; it's totally unsupported bullshit.
The author claims that a bunch of "shadow-banned" site owners were invited to some summit, but couldn't be bothered to say how this invitation was phrased or delivered. How were the recipients identified, especially when he says the Google person claimed that no such sites existed?
This is irrelevant for the theme. Some could came in a plane and other in a car, but who cares? Is assumed that either they were invited or wouldn't had walked on the building and asked about how improve google for hours. I assume that Google has some level of check-in security at least.
> claimed that no such sites existed?
claimed that they weren't shadowbanned, that is a different thing. And they were said that only some pages were affected. This means implicitly that google was aware that the webs existed.
It’s irrelevant because reaching out to shadow banned companies does not seem like a rational thing for Google to do and and while we may dislike Google they do at least seem rational.
I initially read this article with sympathy, but something isn’t adding up
And that's exactly the point: How do you invite "shadow-banned" site owners specifically, without stating why or how this select group has been identified (and denying that anyone's shadow-banned)? This is an obvious question that's ignored by the article.
Irrelevant? HOW? It's central to the entire topic. The guy claims that shadow-banned people were singled out and invited to participate in this thing. Given that Google denied their existence, how did Google phrase the invitation?
"Hi! You've been invited to join a select group of people we totally didn't shadow-ban, to discuss the shadow-banning that didn't happen. We look forward to seeing you and getting your input on not being shadow-banned!"
It WAS to invite shadowbanned sites that they don't acknowledge exist ... why? Is there some other euphemism that they use to describe these sites, and that would make some sense as a group of people to give special attention to?
In September last year, Google released an update called "Helpful Content Update" (HCU) that was supposed to demote made-for-Google spam websites. Usually, a blog with dozens of articles from cheap authors that are optimized to rank well in Google.
Unfortunately, many legitimate niche websites were demoted by this update. Google's Webmaster outreach team (primarily Danny Sullivan, also known as "SearchLiason") has been in contact with people running such legitimate websites.
This event was supposed to bring such people together with Product Managers and Engineers at Google.
Someone from the data science side at Google, who is probably very far removed from the actual ranking algorithm, said that there was no shadowbanning of domains. That is, of course, total crap and probably just the result of some misunderstanding of what banning, demoting, penalizing, etc., means to different people.
The people at Google who actually work on communicating to webmaster never said there was no shadowbanning.
A few years ago, a guy went super viral with a video of himself getting punched outside of a bar. He cried nonstop and went on the typical outrage media tour. Over and over declaring how unfair it all was “These people attacked me because I wore a hat! They attacked me because the color of my hat!”
It seemed super suspicious from the jump, I kept asking myself, “There has to be more to this story, this guy is being incredibly vague, is there more to this?”
A couple days after his media circus tour, videos from other people started popping up. these videos told us a little bit more. video after video of this guy—for hours—trying to start fights with dozens of people. multiple videos of him complaining while getting ejected from various bars by bouncers. he spent like 6 hours at many, many bars provoking and then feigned shock when it happened. “my hat. every time i go to this particular city, they physically beat me because they don’t like my hat” … ya left a little bit of important context out eh friend?
this blog post feels very similar to me as that guys initial video. something is missing.
When I removed the "client" parameter to post the link here, the original post ranked higher. However, that's really neither here nor there. Reddit is consistently cited as outranking original content.
Personally, I've learned not to cry about sites that don't rank. My time is better spent building new sites. Sometimes de-ranked sites come back in subsequent updates. Not everything sticks on the first try. You have to be persistent if you want to profit from organic traffic.
My impression is that these creators have one-trick ponies they have deeply invested themselves into. They may not be good at creating new ideas. Expectations of fairness are misplaced. You have to roll with the punches. Dwelling on what they think Google "should be" is a waste of time. Highly recommend focusing on areas within your immediate control. Individual agency is empowering. Victimhood, not so much.
What exactly are these websites, why do their webmasters have a special relationship as "Google Web Creators," and how is it so many of them were coincidentally shadowbanned? This article is interesting about the state of Google as seen by a visit to the campus and at a dismal event, but I still don't have a clear idea who the people let down by Google are.
In September last year, Google released an update called "Helpful Content Update" (HCU) that was supposed to demote made-for-Google spam websites. Usually, a blog with dozens of articles from cheap authors that are optimized to rank well in Google.
Unfortunately, many legitimate niche websites were demoted by this update. Google's Webmaster outreach team (primarily Danny Sullivan, also known as "SearchLiason") has been in contact with people running such legitimate websites. There was a lot of public discourse on X/Twitter on this topic for months.
This event was supposed to bring such people together with Product Managers and Engineers at Google.
People tend to create value inherently. If they are not receiving the benefit of that then it would most appropriately be described as theft with the aid of blind regulators.
It could be true for things that could only be "used" once. But I don't think that it's a valid point at all times.
Recently, for example, I've made a little "Linux for dummies" zine, and put it on my shelf.
Sometimes guests take it, read it, and put it back.
Technically, all of them get to read it for free, through no additional cost to me, because this zine already existed before they knew they wanted to "use it", and this zine will continue to exist after they "use it".
Capitalism and thief are different things. We should stop using the first to justify the last. If this people was lured to work for free, this is not capitalism.
Not making any claims or value judgments about other economic structures. I wanted to point out that the value extraction aspect of capitalism is fundamentally cold blooded / soulless / impersonal.
As opposed to value extraction under socialism, also known as "GULAG", "down to countryside", "killing fields", "reeducation camps" and "transitory labor regime". The most prominent feature of all those is how kind, warm blooded, soulful and personable they are. Literally everybody who was there (and came out alive, which wasn't easy) makes sure to point that out.
So we need to persuade the NSA to finance our new search engine? Or should we turn to Putin or Xi? The European surveillance services would not be able to
I agree with your sentiment, however its not exactly true.
According to his son, Milton Friedman used to say this but stopped because he realized that trade itself is free lunch- because its a win on both sides- consumer and producer surplus. He replaced it with "always look a gift horse in the mouth".
Depending on who pays, the incentives are different. In a socialist society, where some things are funded by the government, those things are generally much more aligned with the interest of the public than in capitalism, where most money wins.
> In a socialist society, where some things are funded by the government, those things are generally much more aligned with the interest of the public than in capitalism
Just for fun, compare the Soviet built Lada cars with cars built by capitalists. Or the contents of supermarkets. Or the quality of health care.
Oh, and the advice given to American tourists visiting the Soviet Union - pack a couple pairs of blue jeans, as they are great for trading for stuff!
I'll make it easy - name any consumer product made by the Soviet Union that was preferable to one built by greedy capitalists. Did you wonder why the US did not import Soviet made consumer products?
This is like a fish saying "living on land results in breathing less water". Yes, that's the point, but the fish almost can't imagine how that might be a good thing.
You're surrounded by and typing on valuable goods and services that you received in exchange for a store of value called money, which you received by providing value to someone else.
I visited this website, and Chrome ended up blocking around 2,500 third-party cookies. Websites like this should face consequences for such behavior—it’s like dealing with a live malware site.
First: if I am not happy with my site's placement in google (I don't care, but if I did), and I complain, nobody would even acknowledge my existence. I have no idea how I could even talk to a live human working for Google. People who get invited to "conversation" are obviously very special. In what way? What did they do to deserve that?
Second: certain people built their business on certain aspects of behavior of certain technology that does not belong to them and they have zero control over. These aspects changed, and their business is suffering. I understand their frustration. But why do they expect that the technology owner would do anything to help them? They aren't their paying clients. The technology owner's interests are in no way aligned with theirs. Why do they think anything would be done?
Oh, and also - why do they think anything can be done? I mean Google's codebase by now is decades of code stacked on top of older code. Probably nobody even knows how all of it works. I mean some people probably know how some parts work, but overall likely nobody knows why the ranking is such and not other. And each change shuffles things around and some pages go up and some go down. Why should anybody in Google prioritize the complaints of those who went down, and even if they did - it only would result in replacing one group of complainers with a similar group of complainers with identical complaints. It is obvious that there's no perfect ranking that would satisfy everyone, and likely at the complexity it is every change leads to unpredictable chain of rearrangements. Googlers can politely listen to those who got unlucky but they likely can't promise them anything more than that.
I follow another creator who attended this event. Apparently, they filled out a feedback form complaining about how they were wrongfully punished by Google search.
More importantly, this creator (and I assume others as well including OP) has a good social following. He has been criticizing Google's treatment of small publishers, how Google AI is stealing content, and how bad the current search results are. The criticism is gaining traction, especially after Google Search's anti-trust trial. So, I am assuming Google wanted to take some steps and thought inviting the loudest voices would help bring the criticism down.
I kinda agree with your second point. These people built a business around a technology that they have no control over. But my only reservation is that said technology is Google—a huge monopoly and literally the gateway to the Internet. You can't let huge monopolies that control all entry and choke points go scott-free over these things.
Google is literally NOT the gateway to internet. At most, it's a gateway. I haven't used google for search for many years now, and still manage to be on the internet. There are many alternatives. If people choose not to use them, maybe they need some efucation, but that doesn't change the fact they exist.
> Google is literally NOT the gateway to internet.
Many business models rely on people finding you via Google. Lawmakers and courts in both the US, EU, Russia, Turkey, and other jurisdictions came to the conclusion that Google is in fact a gatekeeper.
If that means everyone deserves to rank with their website, is of course an entirely different question.
> > Google is literally not THE gateway to internet. At most, it's A gateway.
> Lawmakers and courts in both the US, EU, Russia, Turkey, and other jurisdictions came to the conclusion that Google is in fact A gatekeeper.
[Emphasis added and capitalisation changed in both quotes -- CRC]
Yeah, the GP acknowledged that Google is a gateway to internet; they just denied that they're the gateway. See the difference? That is, according to the quote from you, also what the courts said.
They very loudly complained on X/Twitter and cried about losing all their revenue, business, etc.
> Probably nobody even knows how all of it works.
That is exactly what Google admitted at the event. They do not understand how to demote all the spam blogs without also demoting legitimate niche websites.
Feel bad for the author. This was clearly an information pump. They just wanted info from them. That’s it. Of course google lies. Of course they steal. It’s Google and it’s not 2007 anymore. Don’t trust them. Don’t engage with them. They just steal and harvest from others. They couldn’t even keep a simple chat app running. It’s a trash company filled with trash people who will talk down their nose at you while destroying the fabric of society. Pretty par for the course these days for anything tech though. I work in tech and can say we are awful, vampiric, and pretty much useless people who get off on having power over people through knowledge. If you approach most software engineers with that understanding they are much easier to deal with, but that doesn’t make them and the industry any less parasitic. I hate my career choices.
What seems to happen is that after there is an initial surplus of value or benefit in any business - perhaps some of it going to customers, some of it going to service users, some of it going to employees, etc. - eventually someone in charge identifies and implements a way to tap that benefit and turn it into money that is absorbed by the company.
And with a monopoly, some of the surplus simply vanishes as deadweight loss.
Google makes nearly $500K in profit (out of $1.6M in revenue) per employee. It seems possible that they could potentially bring back some of the old work environment, or maybe even reduce overall encrapification, but there is little incentive to do so.
I'd like to think so. If Google didn't provide some useful goods (Pixel phones) or services (Google Cloud) then it would be a purely financial company.
For a ton of people, the ads Google sells are very useful. The ads make their products visible. It's weird (do you often click on ads?) but the effect exists, some customers do come this way. Businesses, big and small, readily buy ads.
This is what powers their empire, not selling phones or even GCE. Search is but a delivery vehicle of ads, maybe one of the most powerful but not the only one.
(Disclaimer: I don't buy or sell ads, and run an ad blocker in my browsers.)
This is what I noticed to when I had to disable the ad blocker on some sites.
The ads are annoying because they break the reading flow (I think it is called parallax when the ad moves with your scrolling, but slower - I hate that).
My brain just compensates to keep z smooth reading peace but I have no idea what the ad is about.
They're complaining because they run human written sites but they've been deranked because Google can no longer tell human content from AI. Google is now privileging sites like Forbes, USA Today and Reddit. Google wants to rank their sites but it can't distinguish their content from the ocean of AI content. They have a legitimate gripe, that Google is no longer favoring niche content sites.
Google should play fair but if its not required by law I can understand if they don't, if there are business benefits to being unfair and no requirement to be fair, why would Google change?
This is one of the few instances where Google is actually trying to do better but cannot figure out how.
Hence this event where owners of affected websites were put in direct contact with the product managers and software developers working on the topic.
But yeah, in general Google is often not incentivized to play fair. See the demotion of price comparison websites after Google Shopping ads were placed on top of search results.
Google business model is mostly ads (~80% revenue) and majority of their ads are from google search (~60% of revenue). This allowed them to subsidise many other projects in the past.
These days they have a lot of competition in ads scene (meta, tiktok, x, reddit, amazon) and also other are gunning at google search: perplexity, searchGPT, bing. Apple choosing OpenAI for Apple Intelligence. Amazon teaming with Anthropic for Alexa. On top of that antitrust in EU and USA.
That's the reason google is killing lots of projects or loosing on many fronts these days or they aggressively try to monetise other projects (Youtube, Manifest V3.0). If they don't win in this AI race or diversify revenue/business model enshitification will continue.
the enshitification will continue regardless, because stock prices need to go up and they will eventually run out of runway.
in theory, winning the AI race gives them more runway, but we've hit the limit of LLMs and there is a lot of hope that some magical Gen-AI daddy will come in and fix everything. even if they get there, will it be profitable compared to competitors? and for how long?
Wow, this is impressively brutal. I don't know anything about search or ranking these days, but the way insist on putting an AI summary at the top of every page definitely is good evidence for the theory that Google doesn't give a damn about the people doing all the actual work that makes a search engine valuable.
They must be planning on milking what value can be had from the web to which they used to be the entryway, and clash with OpenAI, MS and Apple over AI trained on curated datasets, to layer some semblance of a business model over it. And I say milking because the relationship to websites is now parasitic for the most part.
I started using Google search like ChatGPT, for asking questions and reading the AI responses. In many simple cases, it suffices.
As an actual search engine, Google search is still not bad, but now one of the many, without a large edge it used to have; I try it when DDG does not bring results I want, or I query DDG when Google does not bring results I want.
If you are doing this, I suggest giving the Perplexity app a try. It's very fast, convenient, and accurate. It was Perplexity, and not ChatGPT that reduced my Google usage.
Google has always been a middleman between information producers and information consumers, taking slices of attention and converting that into money. If they kill off the information producers, they're dead anyhow.
"Empty too, was the rest of Google’s behemoth campus. Their numerous buildings are surrounded by beautiful, park-like pathways with no one to enjoy them but the groundskeepers. They follow the paths with their lawnmowers, weaving between softly shaded employee parking lots, with no one to park in them."
Without comment on the rest of the article, I can personally confirm that this particular statement is disinformation. I was there, in person, at the Google Mountain View campus, on October 29, 2024 visiting as a representative of an external partner (and as a long ago former employee). I did not attend this event, but I was nearby the entire day. Throughout the day the building I was in was very busy, with many people coming and going and working at desks. At lunchtime, we walked to the Google cafe a few buildings away which was brimming with people, to the point where our group of three struggled to find a table to eat at.
Of course there may have been buildings on campus which were empty or sparsely utilized. But the area I was in (western end of Charleston Rd) was anything but empty. In the future, the author should try to stick to the truth when making their point.
I don't know how accurate this writeup is, but the characterization of behavior was eerily familiar.
If they'd been talking about a certain other place that I know, I would've wanted to shout "Exactly!", and would've implicitly believed that's what they saw.
There's a type who exhibits a combination of arrogance and self-interested fixation. There's no malice, and they aren't sociopaths, and they don't think of themselves as jerks. But they have a sense of superiority and entitlement, and can be aggressively, er, norms-bending, to get what they want.
Some environments seem to either attract them, or to nurture them. It's something unclear to me about the individual environment, not the external kind of organization (e.g., one high-prestige organization has a lot of it, but another high-prestige organization of the same kind doesn't).
I could attribute it to "culture", because I don't have any more specific theory, and play by ear how to try to filter or nurture it out of a collective. But I suspect there's a critical mass of that type gaining positions of influence in the organization, at which point the culture becomes irreversible, since there's too much arrogance to see it as a problem. At that point, I'd guess the rest of the people should be looking at their options for leaving, and also try not to think or behave like that type themselves.
There are now 5+ writeups from different attendees. They all agree on the larger points: Google has no solution to the problem. Google asked attendees if they have ideas for a solution. Google told people their content is good and they deserve to rank.
The site also disables the back button (on mobile Chrome).
I have no idea why the site owner thinks their site was downranked (and the article never says: it assumes some context I lack), but I cynically wonder if it's related to the back-button and video-ad thing.
Even for the most ad-crappified site, I think the objection to a mysterious and opaque system is still valid, especially when it's arguably a monopoly or close enough not to matter.
In other words, I'm not saying their site deserves to be shown, but in general people do deserve a way to see why their site is in a weird status and have some documented path to redemption.
_________________
Quoting the relevant bits for convenience:
> Undeterred, we then asked the only question that mattered: Why has Google shadowbanned our sites? [...] He insisted it is only done at the page level.
> Many of the shadowbanned site owners attempted to politely push back and point out that the reason all 20 of us were there was specifically because our entire site was deranked from Google in a single night. [...]
> When asked what was wrong with our sites, as if we were jilted lovers in an abusive relationship being kicked to the curb, one Googler actually said “it’s not you it’s me”.
> Finally, someone bluntly asked, since nothing is wrong with our sites, how do we recover?
> Google’s elderly Chief Search Scientist answered, without an ounce of pity or concern, that there would be updates but he didn’t know when they’d happen or what they’d do. Further questions on the subject were met with indifference as if he didn’t understand why we cared.
As it says, they were desperate enough to travel in-person to Google headquarters to attend an event during weekday work-hours. That kind of effort usually means other avenues have been explored and exhausted.
Are you saying site-owner is just incredibly dumb, and never noticed/tried those online resources despite being highly motivated to do so? Or is it that you think they found a useful answer they didn't like, and are lying?
I think if the site owner did an honest self-assessment of their content (as suggested on the "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content" page I linked) the problems with their content would be as obvious to them as they are to me.
I won't speculate about why they attended this event despite running a site filled with content that's at odds with Google's published recommendations for ranking well.
I could not read the whole thing or even get the gist of the parent site. Looks like one of those late 2000s content farm sites filled but chum box ads. Low quality all around.
I was reading this on my iPhone 11 Pro and my phone was turning warm in my hand. My music kept stopping and starting again. Eventually I had to kill the browser.
I am sorry this is happening to the authors. Maybe it’s related to the scumminess of their blog, maybe it isn’t.
For what product? Or do you mean there are simply too many submissions?
> Ads overlayed on ads overlayed on ads.
That's a fair critique, but does it merit flagging?
If "too many ads spoils the reading experience" is a cause for flagging content that would otherwise have some merit, then we should also be flagging all the submissions to otherwise-aboveboard news sites which happen to have pay/subscribe walls.
I'm not entirely against that in theory, but AFAIK that's not where the informal bar is set right now.
It's really funny how the Internet shifts the "best company in the whole
world" to a "worst company culture, needs cancelling" in just a few
years. Makes me wonder about the point of current internet trends in
general.
