This error message began creeping up this week:
google.com is blocked
google.com refused to connect.
ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE
And appears with increasing frequency.
Maybe Google is too poor to be able to serve everyone? I’ve noticed the search results worsen, as this blog’s covered. Is this the reason I can’t use it any more? Or is it the fact I say that the company should be hit with a negligence lawsuit over its advertising business?
Whatever money they’re making, it’s not going to improve search. We know it funds misinformation.
It is a remarkably thin-skinned company. I remember when my anti-Google posts on Google Plus would get censored. There was that time Vivaldi lost its Adwords account after its CEO criticized Google. Or how a critic at a Google-funded think-tank got fired after criticizing Google. Coincidences? Google will want you to think so.
It is American, and there are websites there that are run by people who don’t believe in the World Wide part of the World Wide Web. The US version of Auto Trader is blocked to our entire country, and I suspect it only works inside theirs. I guess they don’t want their customers’ products to be exported. Google might be in the same boat now.
Oh well, I always said if Google vanished, we’d all find alternatives in a flash. And as it does vanish regularly now, I find it has not interrupted a thing.
It was a last-resort search engine and I never used Gmail. I might finally be able to remove the Feedburner stuff off my blog. Don’t think I used it for anything else.
For the record, I don’t use a VPN. I have Privacy Badger, though I also have a unique fingerprint. And I will click through to Google from Mojeek on occasion. Make of that what you will.
On that last one, it’s pretty easy to break the habit and to go from Mojeek to Yandex or somewhere else if I wanted an additional search. The world actually doesn’t need Google (in fact it might improve without it), and it hasn’t been my search default since 2010. It’s well past its prime, which I think was around 2003. Good riddance.
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You probably don’t know the name John Chow. He was a huge blogger in the late 2000s and early 2010s. He had tons of followers, and he did what he wanted to do. So Google decided to de-index him, like it did many others (including me for a while). What did he do? He went around them, and his blog and website only got bigger. I wrote about it years ago, then repurposed it in 2018; if you’re interested, go to the middle of this article, just above the picture of the troll: imjustsharing.com/the-art-of-hype/
In other words, if you can make yourself bigger than Google when it comes to promoting yourself and showing up higher on other search engines, you can achieve great things, and possibly get Google to play nice with you. I was never quite that big, but even now I’m more prominent on other search engines that Google; I’ll take what I can get!
Thank you, Mitch, I can definitely self-promote—at one stage we were netting a minimum of an article a week in the world press as a firm. But we’ve also been de-indexed by Google—here’s one blog post (of a series) back in 2013. At the time I might have been getting more press than Mr Chow. (This blog used to be quoted in some major international media.)
However, Google is notoriously thin-skinned, and there’s truth to what you say about making yourself big. By big I mean establishment. Instead of the scrappy independents Google used to support, it now firmly believes in the establishment, as it is part of it. But the establishment also believes people of colour should be silent, so I’ll never pander to it. My experience is that the site doesn’t even work some of the time, and its quality is clearly declining. I’m quite happy to distance myself from their sinking ship.