Google search and search engine spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#151

Post by Matt_Cutts » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 11:43 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #100

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got the results of a test run of search results I did in October 2000 sitting on my computer. The Google search results from today are much better than from October 2000. I do think it's fair to make the point that overall Google is much better--and overall spam is much lower than 5 or 10 years ago--before we drilled down into responding to the blog posts from the last couple months.

Matt, I'm sure that Google does better than it did in October 2000. They'd be something horribly wrong if that wasn't the case. That's not relevant to the specific concerns people have about what's happening here and now.

Sorry, I was responding to the "They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph." by trying to defend that the statements in the first paragraph were true.

Regarding the specific concerns that people have been raising in the last couple months, I think the blog post tried to acknowledge a recent uptick in spam and then describe some ways we plan to tackle the issue.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#152

Post by jshen » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:03 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #137

space-monkey wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were "ideal", it wouldn't be game-able. I'm not going to claim that this ideal is possible!

Any real-world search engine is going to be analyzed until enough of its internal mechanisms are laid bare to allow gaming to some extent. Typically you pretend the search engine is a black box, you observe what goes in to it (web pages, links between them and queries) and you try to infer its internal operations based on what comes out (results ranked in order of what the engine considers to be important). Careful a…

I think the solution is a diversity of search engines. Maybe even vertical search engines. These days I get such shitty results from google for programming related searches that I've started going straight to SO and searching there. If I don't find it there I then try google, then try google groups search.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#153

Post by rhwd2003 » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:07 AM UTC

@Matt_Cutts starting around page 4 results for the term [loans] what is with all the .edu sites? This seems to be an error on the ranking side of things for all these .edu sites for a financial related term such as [loans]? All the results are .edu after page 4?

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#154

Post by richcollins » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:10 AM UTC

dustingetz wrote: post #45

richcollins wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A perfect search would show the pages that the ad points to as the first organic results if they were, in fact, the most relevant.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#155

Post by mwilton13 » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:13 AM UTC

@Matt I like that you pinpointed some specific here, but is the algorithm going to be strong enough to easily pick up things like this: http://posterous.com/people/YrCushFlSet This single account is feeding 100 different websites alone that all feed hundreds of others. This is helping fuel numerous sites in the plastic surgery niche and it's quite disturbing.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#156

Post by paul9290 » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:31 AM UTC

A recent Google search for the Walmart being built 2 miles away from me led me nowhere. Google listed 2 pages of job sites listing open positions at this wal-mart. I almost gave up my search, but decided to search twitter and in doing so I found what I was looking for!

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#157

Post by RyanHolliday » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:37 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #138

kloc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While searching for a pdf file, I hardly find the pdf through the top results. The top results are often kind off pdf, ebook search engines themselves and they clearly appear on top by gaming Google. I hope this gets fixed too.

If you know it's a pdf that you're looking for, you can add filetype:pdf to your query.

This is great for HN readers. For most people using Google, not so much, I think.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#158

Post by xahlee » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:40 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #116

jeremycolins wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Matt, is there anything y'all can do about the content farm sites where someone buys an old high pr domain and sells 100's of links on it and drops them in between tons of content? Here's a prefect example of that: http://www.dcphpconference.com/ .

That is clearly webspam. We only indexed five pages from that site, but there's no reason for that site to show up at all. Thanks for mentioning it. It won't be in our index for much longer.

awesome. gosh that page is ranked 5! I still think google is best and trustworthy, but i also felt the problem of content farm in recent years as others. I run my site and find it troublesome that many spammy sites contact me to buy links. They absolutely have no interest in nofollow ads even with banner. They just want normal text links often with a given paragraph they specify mixed into my writing.

though, i do have a question about this ...sometimes i find 1 normal link (do-follow) on a page is approprate for my reader (e.g. the content match, and i approve the site), so in that situation i would like to sell link (and absolutely with a CLEAR "sponsored link" text in plain view but not with “rel="no-follow"”. Afaik google doesnt approve do-follow sold links in anyway. I find this a bit problem because good links from commerial activity could be just as appropriate that benefits my reader.

any advice, or perhaps furture plans, on this?

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#159

Post by eitland » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:46 AM UTC

There are a few signals that should be possible to pick up. Examples:

- When power searchers start adding -somedomain.xyz to their searches

- Increase spam reporting by adding some kind of feedback to the spam reporting feature. I think I'd love to get an automated mail saying something like: "The site somespamdommain.xyz that you and others reported x days ago is now handled by our improved algorithms". Submitting spam reports really doesn't feel useful when it seems like nothing ever happens.

- Adding weight to spam reports. You know a lot about us, and I guess you can filter out who are power searchers. This could help stop people from gaming the system into blocking competitors.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#160

Post by ericras » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 12:47 AM UTC

ddemchuk wrote: post #16

It doesn't appear that Cutts & Co. are looking to address any of the more popular blackhat link building methods that all popular SEO bloggers continually say "work but you shouldn't use them yourself because they're bad". Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"

My search for buy viagra returns the Florida International University Course Catalog on page 1 along with other academic links (non medical) too