I understand that they want to force people to switch to HTTPS and to convert their sites to be “mobile friendly.” But these two conversions are never going to happen to posts and podcasts that were created in 2013. Or 1998. Or before Google even existed.
And since these pages and podcasts are primarily there to serve as a record so researchers today and in the future can find them, what purpose is served in reminding me, the author of some of those pages that they are not mobile-friendly? Sounds like a threat.
All this on top of the horrible way they treated RSS, without an apology, without any offer to undo the damage they did. I guess they’re saying that until you get a government to force us to be responsible our answer is that you can fuck off.
I fully agree with Winer here. The thing is, this isn’t fully a Google problem and this also isn’t really a problem we as individuals can solve. The Internet doesn’t work like a public library where every published work including every edition of that published work sits on a shelf with equal placement as every other book where they’re all organized in a non-curated and non-algorithmed card-catalogue. Think about it. There is not and algorithm that puts certain books front & center based on your past reading habits or what your friends like and there’s no truncation of the card catalogue simply because the library thinks you don’t have time to go through 2-3 pages of books about insects. There also isn’t an ad for a book on insects at the top of every page of the catalogue. No, the library is the alter-Internet and when’s the last time you went to a library?
Google and every other company has to be like 24-Hour news. Show things that get traction, ignore things that don’t and try to guess what you’d be interested in. Finding a newsgroup post by Linus Torvalds from 1996 where he talks about kernel security and extensions, to Google is completely irrelevant and will be a pain in the ass to find but a half-nude swimsuit model that’s trending is very relevant and you’ll see it even you don’t want to.
As it’s been proven many times, any search term typed into google Images will eventually show nudity if you scroll down far enough. That’s the world we live in.
The Internet is going to push out 1st edition books and books published 10 years ago for the hot new thing and there’s nothing we can do about it. The only library we still have left is Archive.org. This is why Data Hoarders exist. Download everything, store and index it locally on your NAS because people stop paying hosting bills, websites go away, caches / mirrors die off. If you like something, don’t share it, save it.