The timing of this is interesting... About a week before Demand Media's IPO. Must be a bad day for the investment bankers.
Google search and search engine spam
41–50 of 223 posts
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#42Please, exile half or more of Demand Media's pages from the index before their imminent IPO!
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#43To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been...". On the other hand, you can't open an RSS reader today without tripping over someone griping about content farms polluting the search results. There are intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. Why such disparate viewpoints?
As Matt's post suggests, it could simply be that people's expectations are rising -- search results are getting so good in general (which they are) that we notice the problems more. Or it could be that Google is focused on a narrow definition of "spam" that doesn't cover content farms. It could even be that both sides are "right" -- that overall search quality is rising even as the content farm problem worsens, if Google has been successfully reducing other causes of low search quality.
I'd love to see some hard analysis of this. For instance, pick some a reasonably large set of sample queries, and show what the results looked like five years ago, and what they look like today. Of course, you'd first have to find a set of sample queries and results from five years ago.
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
to be completely fair, the very first link (from the official springsource blog) also appears to answer your question.
True, it does... I just noticed this because I've actually got in the habit of scanning for stackoverflow results, first - they almost always are right on the money, and it's less cognitive overhead to read a site format I'm familiar with, with extraneous discussion well tucked-away. It almost feels like a cache miss when I have to drop down to the official site/documentation, since that typically requires a greater…
Thanks for the concrete query--I'm happy to ping the indexing team to make sure it's not tickling any unusual bugs or coverage issues. Jeff's original blog post helped us uncover a few of those things to improve.
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#45Google 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.
Although a google with perfect results would kill itself because the ads would be pointless.
disagree. counter-example: if I google "philly events" and google sends me right to philly2night.com, I certainly want to see ads selling me event tickets.
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#46Metrics-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've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. It's gotten much, much better, and one additional algorithmic change coming soon should help even more. 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.
Why not just downrank the results from the SO clones?
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#47One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads.
That's not quite what I've been reading. I believe the more common claim is that Google has a disincentive to algorithmically weed out the kind of drivel that exists for no other reason than to make its publisher money via AdSense. It's about aggregate effects, not failure to clamp down on individual sites. Or, put another way, it's not if certain sites are serving Google ads, it's because that kind of content is usually associated with AdSense.
AdSense is definitely a problem for search quality. It creates the same imperative for the content farm as Google Search has: get the user to click off the page as soon as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to create high-ranking but unsatisfying content with lots of ad links mixed in.
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#48I just want to thank Matt Cutts for always being classy. His blog posts/comment are always just set at a high bar.
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
His reply seems to indicate that they are working on a per-page basis, not moving the whole site on or off the index.
Google knows what that site is. 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.
It might be better to cripple the site rather than kill it. If all of Mahalo's pages disappeared you can be sure they would return en masse when they found the workaround for the filter. Blocking chunks of their content might make finding the workaround harder and may ultimately force them (or any other low quality site) to up the quality - yeah, I know I am deluding myself.
Re: Google search and search engine spam
#50I think there might be something else at work here: our rising expectations of how search engines should work.
In years past, Google's results were measurably less relevant than they are today. In the time between "then" and "now", we're grown more accustomed to high quality, fast, relevant results. I think this makes it seem like small problems in search are bigger than they are.
It would be great if there was a "Google of 2004" to test this side by side, but I don't think that is possible. :)