Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reaction to the story

  • Many found the article both hilarious and depressing, using words like “tragicomic” and comparing it to broader “enshittification” of the web.
  • Others criticized the framing (“Google made me…”), arguing the site owner chose to trade UX for money and should own that choice.

AdSense incentives and junk content

  • Multiple commenters report similar experiences: simple, highly useful tools or calculators were rejected by AdSense until they added long, often pointless explanatory prose.
  • Some abandoned projects rather than pollute clean tools with filler; others switched to affiliate links or direct sponsorship.
  • Several note that after adding obviously low‑value text, approval suddenly came through, suggesting the review process is crude and easily gamed.

Ads and user experience

  • People visiting the linked site with ad blockers initially thought there were no ads; disabling blockers revealed aggressive layouts: large banners, pop‑ups, and 50%+ of the page as ads.
  • Some stress that Google’s “Auto Ads” feature alone can turn otherwise normal pages into ad‑choked messes.
  • There’s a recurring theme that Google’s ad and content policies directly encourage worse pages and more intrusive UI.

Recipe sites as emblematic failure

  • Recipe pages are a major example: long autobiographical intros, walls of text and images, and many ads before the actual recipe.
  • Commenters tie this to Google ranking signals like “time on page” / “long click” and content‑length expectations, plus ad revenue pressure.
  • Workarounds mentioned: browser extensions that extract recipes, disabling JavaScript, using specific “clean” recipe sites, or reverting to paper cookbooks.

Monopoly, power, and antitrust

  • Many see this as a symptom of Google’s dominance in both search and ads:
    • If you want meaningful traffic and monetization, you must play by Google’s opaque rules.
    • Competing ad networks face chicken‑and‑egg problems and lack Google’s user‑tracking data; publishers fear traffic loss if they defect.
  • Proposals floated: market‑cap caps, breaking up vertically integrated giants (search vs ads vs browser), stricter anti‑monopoly enforcement, or banning certain corporate forms. Others call these naive or hard to implement.

Search quality and SEO “landfill”

  • Several describe search (Google and sometimes others) as increasingly full of AI‑generated blogspam and SEO content, making simple factual queries unreliable.
  • Some now rely on paper references, human‑curated communities (HN, Reddit, niche forums), or paid search like Kagi.
  • There’s discussion of how classic signals (links, time on page) have been undermined by social media silos, nofollow links, and industrial‑scale SEO.

Responsibility and alternatives

  • One camp: Google simply optimizes for advertiser value; if your site isn’t a good ad vehicle, that’s not Google’s fault.
  • Another: Google’s policies clearly incentivize behavior that degrades the web for users and even advertisers, and its market power lets it ignore better designs.
  • Suggested alternatives for small sites: donations (“buy me a coffee”), direct sponsorships, affiliate links, or just self‑funding; others respond that these rarely match ad revenue and often still need intrusive prompts.