31–40 of 223 posts
Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."
I'm not saying that a clone will never be listed above SO, but it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks ago.
They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has taken action on Mahalo before and has removed plenty of pages from Mahalo that violated our guidelines in the past. Just because we tend not to discuss specific companies doesn't mean that we've given them any sort of free pass.
Mahalo pages are still in your index. Do you consider that site to be a quality & non-spam source of information?
"we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content." "As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-q…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mahalo pages are still in your index. Do you consider that site to be a quality & non-spam source of information?
His reply seems to indicate that they are working on a per-page basis, not moving the whole site on or off the index.
If they're serious about their standards, they would remove Mahalo en masse from their index.
edit: Or, to satisfy lukev, they can keep the index as-is but make sure Mahalo pages never rank high in results.
Google issues an announcement via blog post. TC and others start to pick it up. And the original author of the blog post takes questions and provides technical answers, where allowed, in HN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has taken action on Mahalo before and has removed plenty of pages from Mahalo that violated our guidelines in the past. Just because we tend not to discuss specific companies doesn't mean that we've given them any sort of free pass.
Mahalo pages are still in your index. Do you consider that site to be a quality & non-spam source of information?
The question is one of rankings. The only time there is a problem is when a spammy site ranks above a more relevant site for a particular search. If I enter a very specific query that only hits a spammy site, then I should see the spammy site, because it's there. Google is a search index, not a "visitors guide to the internet."
Google has taken a lot of criticism on HN and elsewhere for an apparent perverse incentive, to direct searchers to content farms with adwords, instead of the original source (like StackOverflow or Amazon reviews). I'm skeptical, because spammy-ad clickthrough rates are already low and trending lower, and I speculate google has great incentive to send people where they want to go lest their competitors get stronger.
Google also has a decade+ of track record of choosing the right long-term thing for users instead of short-term revenue: 1) not running annoying punch-the-monkey banner ads in the early days when everyone else was doing it. 2) not running pop-up ads when everyone else was doing it. 3) little-known fact: if the Google ads aren't ready by the time your search results are ready, you just don't see ads for that query. We…
This reads just like the nutrition label on Nestle products: the ones that boast that the product has "3 vitamins AND minerals", and, on a distant part of the package, lists two minerals and one vitamin and what the health benefits of them are. They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph.