Back in 2014, we were looking at how google works for search -- and it turned out it... doesn't work for search. It hasn't improved hence, in any sense. On the contrary.
Earlier this year, we were looking at how google works for "added value" services, such as locating restaurants or other businesses -- and it turned out it... doesn't work for anything like that, either.i
Today I went through the 2017 traffic logs on Trilema. Here's the salient points :
- Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email... 253,324,420ii 99.1 %
- Links from an Internet Search Engine 1,428,425 0.5 %
- Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) 792,476 0.3 %
The Search is mostly Google, with a smattering of others. The external pages is mostly Facebookiii, with a smattering of others.iv
It could, of course, be said that some of those directs are simply privacy-conscious surfers that deliberately set up their browser to not pass referrerv, but then again all sorts of things could be said and have historically been saidvi. Moreover, I sometimes google to find Trilema articles in lieu of the more common "type in the first few letters"vii and while this is probably counted as a "google referral" it is in no possible way different from a direct. I can't possibly be the only one.
In any case, the moral that I see here is that the cattle internet consists of facebook & google in approximately equal proportions, and it doesn't matter anyway.viii
Does Google do anything else ?ix How about Facebook ? Because whatever it is they're doing... la vie, c'est ailleurs.
PS. There's no cloudflare, there's no google analytics, there's no https to force every pageload to call home @ fort meadex, there's no imported javascript, tracking pixels, foreign cookies etcetera on Trilema. I imagine it gives the NSA&friends hives that there's so much activity entirely outside of their crystal ball. A well!
———- I mechanized another girl recently. She, being in the age range, immediately asked for a navigational aid in the shape of a smartphone. I told her that if she can prove utility, she can has her smartphone.
She proceeded to try, by going on google maps / driving directions / whatever and making detailed notes as to how to get to various places. On the three passes of this before I formally forbade her from ever visiting the god damned thing ever again, we enjoyed navigational mayhem in the sense of "turn left at the roundabout" / "wait, that was an UNADVERTISED roundabout, should have gone straight there, left at the NEXT one". How are you to know this ? The fucking point of the driving directions is that you don't ask these sorts of questions!
Each case was the same, unexpected 90 degree turns in the road that weren't in the notes (or on the map), "first left" that turned out to be third left, "second left" that turned out to be first, because no such thing as what the map purported to show exists in reality, and so following.
Each case was the same, I lowered the window, asked a local, and got us there with a navigational management burden of half a minute or less. She, with her worse-than-useless Google-powered navigational aids, spending upwards of an hour "preparing" useless notes that didn't match the field. At all.
In this one Californite's own experience, Google was worse than nothing at all. And yes, before you jump in, I'm sure it works for you. That's because you never go anywhere ; just like the "restaurant finder" works fine for you because you never eat out ; just like the great socialist state "works for you" because you uncritically assign all the good it had no part in creating to it and all the ill it actually created to imaginary racists, misogynists and other terrorists.
As far as your needs are concerned, as a poor-but-stupid rottinculo, the unsubstantial impression of shops and roads and knowledge and understanding, placed colorfully on the sides of a track you'll never leave, are absolutely sufficient. You're just ecstatic that your Matrix shows "Restaurant" or "Bar" or whatever printed on the sides of the cardboard box. You don't care that the door is not a door but just a painted image of a door because you weren't ever going to try and go in anyway.
It's very sad to be you, yes, but wake up and smell the coffee : your experiences carry no importance and offer no value! Not to you, and not to anyone! [↩]
- Various spammy shit like for instance the WP DDoS we keep discussing and Automattic deliberately won't fix (yes, it's fixed in MP-WP, use that instead of Automattic's crapolade) is not part of this figure, but counted separately. I served an extra 52,292,672 pages with 53,562,363 hits worth 852.62 GB to that sort of crap so far in 2017. (If you're curious, the large BW figure is due to my tendency to ban repeat offenders -- some IPs attempt to load /xmlrpc.php in excess of 100k times as part of the DDoS scheme -- which means they no longer receive the 54 byte error message they ignore but a soft 404 worth however many kb a Trilema page is worth. This does make them stop trying in a day or a week or whenever next the BW bill hits ; but there's of course other 17yo experts waiting in the wings and ready to pick up the slack. Kinda how sexuate reproduction works in the first place, amirite ?) [↩]
- I am not paying anything for the service. I tried that back in 2014 and well... [↩]
- No, Reddit is not visible in the pile. (And don't give me the "because it doesn't want to or try to" bullshit, there's about a hundred different reddit urls referring in.)
Neither is slashdot, ycombinator/hackernews, whatever other self-important "platforms". Their practical value is zero, I understand that the few unfortunate souls caught within the resonance room end up with confirmation bias convincing them their paper bag matters deeply, but reality diverges from this purely psychogenic hallucination. And yes it's true that twenty years ago they were a big deal. Not anymore, not for many many years now.
The principal non-Facebook "others" are actually various RSS readers. As for the logotrons : btcbase 3,576 ; mkj 314 ; bvulpes 278. (The methodology here used varies from last time, in that I simply took the first occurence rather than bothering to add all.) [↩]
- Or, for that matter, visitors from privacy-minded websites that set the rel="noreferrer noopener" attribute (which is why Fetlife, for instance, appears nowhere in the referral logs). [↩]
- Yes, back in 2011 Trilema direct traffic was moar like 40%. Times have changed, I guess, and besides the ESL is a lot more paranoid than his RSL counterpart. [↩]
- Did you know that trilema.com/lets-r actually resolves to this article ? You need the r because without it will resolve to the older one about idiots and Gavin. [↩]
- Consider that ancient point : why would you be happy to get a click through google ? If it's an old reader, google is irrelevant in your relationship. If he's a recommended reader, which means someone who already reads you sent him over, google couldn't be less relevant in the relationship. If he's neither, well... let's quote :
Moreover, of all the people interested in one particular topic, or niche, or segment, a vast majority already have a hierarchical structure of sources in their head. If you wish to hear the Republican talking points on the shutdown you don't go to google and type "please show me some representative Republican sites". You already know where to look, which incidentally makes Google significantly less useful in aggregate : sure it can send some visits, but the users it sends aren't representative of the Internet population. They're a selected group, and they're selected for cluelessness. Who would want to pay to be visited by more clueless people ? Some some sort of scammer, perhaps, like a patent toy vendor or something - unless you're selling cheap goods for massive mark-ups, google advertising makes absolutely no sense for you.)
And yes things have changed a lot around here since the million-a-month early days of 2014. Recall sponsoring 8chan in 2015 ? Recall the very many and numerous other things I can't be bothered to fish out ? Anyone want to assemble a list of all my great exploits online in the interval ? [↩]
- Don't you find the fact that Alphabet created "Artificial Intelligence" sorta capable to win a game of Go years ago but you've not heard anything of it since kind-of suspicious in the "you're fucked" vein ? [↩]
- Lmao, why did you think the whole "https everywhere" was being pushed ? Huh ? [↩]