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Algorithmic search is sinking

skrenta.com

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Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#41

Post by _grrr »

jellicle wrote: post #14

I don't know if Skrenta's approach is perfect (can spammers make slashtags? I'll bet they can!) but Google's is clearly failing. Giant swathes of Google searches are now overrun with datafog spammers. Ehow, squidoo, hubpages, wikihow, buzzle, how-wiki, ezinearticles, bukisa, wisegeek, articlesnatch, healthblurbs, associatedcontent - all thee and thousands more domains filled with spam semi-automatically generated by…

There's one feature I wish Google would add - the ability to manually blacklist sites from the search results.

Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#43

Post by wahnfrieden »

jeremydavid wrote: post #17

"The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category." There are billions of webpages. Who is going to do this review? Is someone honestly going to review http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4300234/how-might-union-f... and put it in the category of "How Union/Find data structures can be applied to Kruskal's alg…

This is edited, but not to that kind of granularity: http://www.google.com/dirhp

Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#44

Post by mike-cardwell »

jellicle wrote: post #14

I don't know if Skrenta's approach is perfect (can spammers make slashtags? I'll bet they can!) but Google's is clearly failing. Giant swathes of Google searches are now overrun with datafog spammers. Ehow, squidoo, hubpages, wikihow, buzzle, how-wiki, ezinearticles, bukisa, wisegeek, articlesnatch, healthblurbs, associatedcontent - all thee and thousands more domains filled with spam semi-automatically generated by…

Why can't Google hire a crap load of people to manually sift through the most common queries and identify the spam and penalize those sites?

Google is worth billions. They could easily afford to hire 10,000 people to do this full time and it would completely transform their results.

Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#45

Post by [deleted] »

sandGorgon wrote: post #20
jellicle wrote: post #14

I don't know if Skrenta's approach is perfect (can spammers make slashtags? I'll bet they can!) but Google's is clearly failing. Giant swathes of Google searches are now overrun with datafog spammers. Ehow, squidoo, hubpages, wikihow, buzzle, how-wiki, ezinearticles, bukisa, wisegeek, articlesnatch, healthblurbs, associatedcontent - all thee and thousands more domains filled with spam semi-automatically generated by…

I invoke SandGorgon’s law of outsourcing analogies As an online discussion about PROGRAMMING grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving outsourcing or Indians approaches 1, if Godwin’s law has not already been satisfied

[deleted]

Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#46

Post by DrJosiah »

Use sentiment analysis to discover the intent of a link, and whether the destination should get more link juice. Positive sentiment: positive link juice. Negative sentiment: zero link juice.

Alternatively, for negative reviews, etc., use rel="nofollow".

To claim that algorithmic search is dead completely ignores the volume that Google is doing, or the fact that they are making $billions in algorithmic search and Ad placement. How much do curated places make?

Also, not to rain on anyone's parade or anything (just kidding, I'm going to rain it down) it would take decades of 10k people churning through pages to get even 1% of the new content that Google discovers daily.

You all saw the 24 hours of unique video uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day figure from a year or two ago, right? Imagine that, only text, and produced by 10x-1000x as many people at 10-1000x the volume posting to forums, newsgroups, social networking sites, blogs, etc., every minute of every day. Because of this, you can't just review a site, you have to review the content on each page of the site. That's going to kill any curated engine in the long term.

Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#47

Post by JoachimSchipper »

prakash wrote: post #36
tptacek wrote: post #4

... says the guy with the (crowdsourced) curated search engine.

pretty much anyone that has switched over to some other search engine as their primary did so because Google's algorithmic search is sinking, for the past couple of years.

Given http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/c..., I don't think there are many people who use a "non-algorithmic" search engine - or do you count Bing?

Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#48

Post by JoachimSchipper »

jellicle wrote: post #14

I don't know if Skrenta's approach is perfect (can spammers make slashtags? I'll bet they can!) but Google's is clearly failing. Giant swathes of Google searches are now overrun with datafog spammers. Ehow, squidoo, hubpages, wikihow, buzzle, how-wiki, ezinearticles, bukisa, wisegeek, articlesnatch, healthblurbs, associatedcontent - all thee and thousands more domains filled with spam semi-automatically generated by…

Even if Google is imperfect, a curated list of links doesn't need to be any better. Duck Duck Go is basically Google (well, Bing) plus a blacklist. SEO takes time, so this should be pretty effective.

Re: Algorithmic search is sinking

#49

Post by JoachimSchipper »

To everyone talking about "sentiment analysis": that's not easy. Sentences like "John has stupidly said foo[1], and even went so far as to say bar[2] (which was demolished by Jane[3] and Jan[4]); he's now capitulated[5]" would be quite difficult to parse. The following articles may also be instructive: all by the same author, all quite critical, but with links with quite different intentions.

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/05/dembski_responds.ph... http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/12/id_garbage_csi_as_n... http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/08/quick_critique_demb...

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