Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google search and search engine spam

googleblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 223 posts

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#161

Post by bmastenbrook »

Beyond the flood of SEO spam and Demand Media-style content mills, there's another search quality problem I have with Google: torrent sites. I will frequently search on the exact name of a song or album on Google in order to find out more information about that song or album, but lately most of the results have been links to torrents, including results on the first page. This applies even if I add "review" to the search query. I will even see links to torrents ranking above links to iTunes.

These songs and albums are not available legitimately through torrents. What value is there in providing links to pirated content? I understand that Google is not under any legal obligation to remove these results, but as a non-pirate these results are significantly lowering my perception of the quality of Google's search results.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#162

Post by ugh »

jsherry wrote: post #70
jonpaul wrote: post #20

You know, sometimes it really makes me mad that it's difficult to get into contact with a person at Google for support of their products. But, I've got to hand it to them. They could have issued a non-personal public statement like most companies and signed it with "Google Search Team" But instead there is a personal touch. It's public statements like these that add just a bit of personal touch that makes people love…

The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.

It is, however, completely wrong to assume that this means that Google has no incentive to treat you well. It is not altruism that compels them to remove spam from search results.

Google needs many happy users to be able to offer an attractive product to its customers. They depend on people using them just as much as they depend on advertisers paying them money. Both sides of the market are important, advertisers and users. Google cannot just ignore one side.

Those who use Google to search don’t pay Google any money and they are, in that sense, no customers. You shouldn’t read much more into that word, though.

(Two sided markets and network effects are fascinating and relevant to so many discussions on HN. Wikipedia has a pretty good primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market)

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#163

Post by klbarry »

bmastenbrook wrote: post #161

Beyond the flood of SEO spam and Demand Media-style content mills, there's another search quality problem I have with Google: torrent sites. I will frequently search on the exact name of a song or album on Google in order to find out more information about that song or album, but lately most of the results have been links to torrents, including results on the first page. This applies even if I add "review" to the sea…

Google tries to make no judgments about the sites that go the top of their algorithms.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#165

Post by jlees »

antirez wrote: post #148
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the reason why it's difficult to contact people at Google is that 1 billion+ users visit us each week, and we only have ~20,000 Google employees. Even if every single employee did nothing but user support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 50,000 users apiece. Likewise, there are 200,000,000+ domain names. Even if every single employee did nothing but webmaster support 24/7, each Google…

Of course not everybody should be able to contact Google 1:1, but at least all the people that were subject to an action that required human intervention from Google. Example: I get my adsense account or site banner in a non automatic way since there is some problem with the content: so not into an automated way, but because somebody looked at my site. I should, in that case, have a chance to communicate with Google.…

You do, though. I recently had my AdWords account suspended and got to talk to a human at Google to handle the issue (through normal channels). For Chrome OS, we have an actual call center with real people sitting in it.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#166

Post by ajkohn »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #15
dustingetz wrote: post #7

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…

The definition of 'low-quality' sites can be rather subjective, can't it? I personally get no value out of Mahalo or Squidoo but I know others actually do.

While I might not love eHow's process and tactics, I'll admit that I've benefited from one or two of their easy-to-read articles. (Though I'll often second source that information.)

I think Google's in an interesting pickle to decide whether results should be: fast food or fine dining.

Google could serve up 'fast food' in results (e.g. - farmed content) and it would likely be 'good enough' for MOST people. Plenty of folks will eat fast food even if there is a better alternative down the road.

I'd like to see more fine dining results, but I'm not sure I'm in the majority there. Quality for the early-adopter might look different than quality for the late-majority.

If the algorithm is leveraging user behavior as a signal, doesn't it follow that popular and familiar sites and brands may gain more trust and authority?

Is Google thinking at all about search in this way?

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#167

Post by zone411 »

First, I haven't noticed any significant increase in the frequency of spam sites appearing the Google search results. The biggest problem that I did notice is social bookmarking sites, like reddit and digg, outranking original content. They often have nothing more than a copied-and-pasted paragraph, sometimes supplemented by low quality comments (as is common with these types of sites). Since this site is very similar, not many people will be concerned about this issue.

Second biggest issue is poor Wikipedia articles appearing in the top results for almost any reference type query. Many less frequently updated Wikipedia articles are nothing but regurgitated content lifted from other quality sources. What makes it worse is that Wikipedia is using no-follow for their links, so even if these sites are linked in the reference section, they won't get any credit. It's interesting to see so many people complain about low quality content on commercial sites, but they never mention Wikipedia, which is a much bigger offender (I guess this might be because Wikipedia gets its content for free and doesn't have ads and other sites pay for the content and do have ads).

Third, I hope Google doesn't make any changes without checking very carefully that good sites will not be negatively affected. For example, newspapers will often have the exact same articles from the AP, but also original content based on their own reporting. Punishing them for having duplicate content would not work well. There are many similar possible pitfalls.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#168

Post by zaidf »

storborg wrote: post #86
rfergie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on point 1; if Google's search quality is not the best than people will (eventually) go elsewhere. I disagree on point 2. Users on low quality AdSense sites almost certainly arrived there from a search engine so if I can display my adverts on a users landing page it will be almost as good as if they arrived on my site straight from Google.

In fact, AdSense ads on sites with shitty content are even more likely to be effective, because users won't find what they're looking for in the page content.

Bingo. When our indie music site's stream server would go down, our adsense ctrs would skyrocket. The people who come from google go apeshit and start clicking anything--especially adsense units--when the content they were expecting isn't found or isn't functional.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#169

Post by jeremycolins »

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.

Hey Matt, thanks for the response. I actually have a huge list of these type of sites that I've submitted through the spam report and 90% of them are still indexed and have pagerank. Is there another way I can send them in?

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#170

Post by pyre »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #53
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My experience is the exact opposite: I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search results in the last few months. It feels like it increases when I accidentally click a clone site. This happens for more than StackOverflow clones. Mailing lists, Linux man-pages, FAQs, published Linux articles, etc. all have clone pages that are obvious link farms (sometimes they even include ads that attempt to harm my compute…

I think there is a disconnect in the scale at which you are both commenting:

Comment #1:

  > I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month.
  > 
  > it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks
  > ago.
Comment #2:

  > I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search
  > results in the last few months
You can't argue against "things have gotten better in the last week" with "things have been getting worse for the last 6 months."
Post reply on HN