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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

"This" is the internet Google created. Not a catalog of all information, but a catalog of all the information which has been wrapped in monetization schemes.

Use Google Search for "convert PDF to HTML." See page after page of links which Google might monetize alongside the paid advertisements it already has.

Google makes it look like this is a difficult task, not a solved problem with a FOSS solution - Pdftohtml that ships in many Linux distros.

Google obfuscates the most relevant information by burying it within links to discussions on Linux forums. Even though there's a fucking SourceForge page and it links to a Windows friendly version. The crap results increases the odds that the average user will click through a revenue generating link either directly on Google's page or on a site running their ads.

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No, Google did not create attention-grabbing-for-money. Look in a good old yellow pages phone book: All those colourful, attention-grabbing ads diverting your attention from the small-print actual listings? They're paid for.

Google merely made a very successful business out of making businesses willing to pay up slightly easier to find, roughly like the yellow pages did.

Finally, on your "convert PDF to HTML" example: My first hit is PDFOnline.com, that has a nice, green button labeled "upload". When I use that button to upload a PDF document, the site generates a HTML document for me. It was quick, easy and it didn't ask for money. Totally passable for the top result for the query.

pdftohtml was the fourth link - hardly outrageous for a terse, technically worded page. Oh and that Windows version (helpfully referred to as a "win32 GUI", because nobody calls it "windows" anyway) that it linked to? The link is dead.

I know what brudgers is talking about - I frequently encounter the same frustration when attempting to use Google to find actual information in a space where too many people are trying to make money. The links you see depend on what Google knows about you. I tried the search in an incognito tab, and the pdftohtml link, which would be the most useful result, was nowhere on the first page. When I add the word "linux" to the search, it appears. Not bad at all in this case, but I've been stymied in the past when no combination of keywords and search operators could locate good, technical information that I knew was out there, but instead returned page after page of spam and junk. I know Matt Cutts still claims that there is a firewall between search and ads, and there is no compromise on search quality for profit reasons, but does anyone still believe this?

This whole sub-thread hinges on the assumption that the "pdftohtml" result is objectively the correct one for the the query "convert PDF to HTML", and that it's commercial corruption of Google that keeps that result off the front page. I think that that is a false assumption. If a non-technical user need to convert a PDF to HTML, the pdfonline.com result (the one with the friendly green button) is leaps and bounds better than the pdftohtml SourceForge onw with the broken Windows link. Google doesn't have any kind of obligation to promote FOSS software at any cost, they have an obligation to answer the users question - and in this case it does just that.

Yes, I too have had to sort through pages of various SEO keyword-spam to find what I'm looking for, but the connection from there to this poor example to the number of extraneous elements on a website to accusing Google of having forged a broken web is, well, weak.

Your point about the difficulty in establishing one or another result as objectively better is a good one - though somewhat weakened by then arguing that the online service is better.

However, it is not as if pdftohtml is obscure. It is a common component of a great number of GNU/Linux distributions and has been for many years. So setting aside the merits of the top result, the lower results are still problematic.

Unlike the top result, neither Pdftohtml nor the high ranking results are SaaS - they're downloads for offline use. What differentiates them is their value propositions. They are in opposition between Google and the lay person and the results are caveat emptor solely for Google's benefit.

Elsewhere, I have used a better example, "weather". The top results are advertising revenue driven. The best result? In most cases, the National Weather Service point data - advertising free, updated regularly, and generated by Phd meteorologists, not pretty faces for TV.

In this case, Pdftohtml shows the way in which Google drives us toward online rather than offline solutions. It drives us away from using our CPU cycles and towards consuming bandwidth, and absent that toward tools which pay for advertising.

Perhaps you're right that the connection is becoming tenuous. I, for one, was not assuming that the pdftohtml result was "objectively the correct one"; just that it's obviously more relevant than some, or many, of the results that are ranking higher than it for the query. And it's so common for less relevant or spammy pages to rank higher than more relevant, higher-quality results that I no longer expect the best results to be near the top, nor even on the first page. There are probably many reasons for this, and one reasonable theory is that Google is attempting to increase their profit by driving people to pages that might earn them a commission. Or it might just be that their ranking algorithms, despite being still perhaps better than anyone else's, are fundamentally flawed, and attach too much importance to linkage and not enough to other signals of quality.

The Yellow Pages was called "The Yellow Pages" to distinguish it from the White Pages (and the Blue Pages). Recall that the White Pages contained names and addresses in a (largely) neutral format, and that both individuals and businesses were included.

The service you used was monetized. It just didn't charge you a fee. Instead, it will seek to charge someone else a fee later for data about you. Free doesn't mean "public service."

> Recall that the White Pages contained names and addresses in a (largely) neutral format, and that both individuals and businesses were included.

And still, the Yellow Pages were successful because they were helpful. People liked using them, so businesses were happy to pay for better exposure.

> The service you used was monetized. It just didn't charge you a fee. Instead, it will seek to charge someone else a fee later for data about you. You didn't use a charity.

It's not clear why I should care? They provided me with a valuable service (or they might have been, I was just testing it out), if they can get paid for that, good for them. They didn't ask for any information from me, contact or otherwise, so I doubt the value for resale is very high.

The service requires JavaScript to be turned on in your browser and thus there is little reason to ask you for information, and since you might lie, a good reason not to.

Monetization depends on lack of awareness first and the bother of dealing with ubiquitous attempts at data mining second. Care or care not. There is no should.

Search for "convert PDF to HTML linux" and you have a whole page of relevant, useful links. I don't understand your complaint.

Google isn't making anything seem "difficult". They offer advertising space, and companies happen to sell pdf conversion software. Therefore, those ads show up on searches. It isn't Google's fault if the companies advertising pitch is "PDF Conversion is hard!". That's the company, not Google.

Google hasn't forced the internet to do anything. The reason we have terrible pages like the one in the OP is because of the economics of giving away free content and relying on advertising.

I'm not a huge fan of Google, but your complaint is pretty :tinfoil:

Google didn't invent Web advertising and the page linked to doesn't have any AdSense ads. In fact, Google has restrictions against using too many ad networks or filling pages with too many ads, and that will cause your page to get down ranked.

Spot on. This is why I'm still a fan of the old directory style systems like dmoz.

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