Posts about Google (RSS, JSON)

7PM — Search-engine optimisation for Google has tremendous effect on how websites are designed and built. The result is that most websites look very similar these days, but it also makes it easier to spot the content farms not worth reading.

5PM — The End of the Googleverse traces the decline in search-result quality we’re feeling today back to 2003 when AdSense was introduced: “Google’s advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet.”

7PM — The rise and fall of Google Reader, told by the people who were involved in the project.

9AM — A lot of content on the web is AI-generated and only exists as a gateway to make online shops findable in Google. It is true, the internet is becoming less useful by the day.

5PM — The Verge’s Nilay Patel boils down the effects of Google status as the default way to discover information on the Web:

Google’s grand promise was to organize the world’s information, but over the past quarter century, an enormous amount of the world’s information has been organized for Google — to rank in Google results. Almost everything you encounter on the web — every website, every article, every infobox — has been designed in ways that makes them easy for Google to understand. In many cases, the internet has become more parseable by search engines than it is by humans.

The piece is the first in a series of articles commemorating Google’s 25th birthday trying to better understand how Google works to shape the Web.

9AM — A man chilling in an armchair on the back of a lorry, a marriage proposal, or a bear feasting on fish—Wonders of Street View is a collection of curious scenes that can be found on Street View.

8PM — Google Maps is no longer served from the subdomain maps.google.com but from a path on Google’s main domain (google.com/maps). If you’re allowing Google Maps to use your location, Google can now use it on all sites under google.com.