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List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

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Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#31

Post by elsewhen »

chc wrote: post #30
elsewhen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am sure that hacker-news users are savvy enough to check each site one-by-one, but blacklist-sharing in general can be detrimental if they get distributed to mainstream users. imagine if these lists get to be 100-domains long... some users are simply going to take the shortcut and apply-all. the due-diligence required to cull a good list takes time. the very fact that this post is getting upvoted is because even ha…

So, again, it's a matter of trusting your source. Just like with word of mouth.

word of mouth is typically a one-by-one recommendation, where doing your own research is straightforward and quick. ie, if a friend recommends a movie for you to watch, you might check it out, read the reviews, and then add it to your netflix queue.

with a long list, doing the due diligence becomes orders-of-magnitude more labor intensive, so users are more incented to just copy/paste an entire list. in the case of netflix queues, perhaps there isn't too much at stake... but with a domain blacklist, SEOs and spammers have their entire livelihoods at stake... if this extension takes off, and if google starts using this data, i would expect well-funded SEOs to start heavily promoting their lists (with their sites omitted, and their competitor's sites included).

of course hacker-news users may be immune from such tricks, but we represent just a minority of the data that google will get from this tool... if it goes mainstream, i am sad to admit that my parents are likely fall for "follow these simple steps to dramatically improve your google results"

Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#32

Post by elsewhen »

Natsu wrote: post #26
elsewhen wrote: post #16

i think there are some unintended consequences with blacklist list-sharing: 1) if google ever starts using this data as a signal in their search algorithm, do you really think demand media is going to give up, or do you think they are going to start moving their content on the 500k+ domains they own, effectively making it impossible to deal with the problem. 2) list-sharing seems to be starting an arms race where spa…

> do you really think demand media is going to give up, or do you think they are going to start moving their content on the 500k+ domains they own Google already has a "find pages similar to this" function. So if they look at the stuff you've blocked that would have shown up in your search, then give you the option to block pages similar to that, well, hopefully it will block any copies of that crap, too.

i am not suggesting that they are going to duplicate their content onto other domains, but rather host say a handful of articles with unique content on one domain and a different set of content on a different domain. they dont have to be similar in any way. one will be about grilling lobster tails and the other will be about restringing your tennis racket.

Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#34

Post by cpeterso »

Does Google "beta test" their search results on their employees? I imagine Google could allow their employees to flag bad sites and search results to improve their search algorithms. Google can't trust anonymous internet users, but they can presumably trust (to some degree) their 24,000 employees's real-world feedback to improve their search algorithms.

Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#35

Post by lwat »

udp wrote: post #7

Hmm. Although this seems like a good idea at first, sometimes I'm searching for something obscure and I actually do find the answer on one of those annoying websites. I can't help thinking it's probably more useful to see all the results even if I have to wade through the junk, just in case the answer is hidden in there somewhere. (PS. did you know you can see the answers on experts-exchange.com if you scroll down fa…

Tools -> New Incognito Window

Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#36

Post by retube »

cpeterso wrote: post #34

Does Google "beta test" their search results on their employees? I imagine Google could allow their employees to flag bad sites and search results to improve their search algorithms. Google can't trust anonymous internet users, but they can presumably trust (to some degree) their 24,000 employees's real-world feedback to improve their search algorithms.

Their search engine is being constantly improved every day by people using it. Every search result you click on is recorded, along with no doubt the time elapsed before you clicked another result and so on until you found what you were looking for. Google is a gigantic statistics engine with a growing data set.

And in terms of Google employees testing their search results - 1) their employees aren't exactly the average Google user demographic 2) their emplyees is way to small a number to draw any conclusions about how useful/accurate their search results are. They can only figure that out by trialing new algos on a fraction of users. If successful, they push to all.

Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#37

Post by jberryman »

timmorgan wrote: post #20

Experts-exchange is indeed an annoying site, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as a content farm. There is actually a lot of information there not found on other sites.

I think you're right that it isn't by definition a content farm. It is most definitely google search result spam though.

I've honestly never tried to get past the spammy "sign-up to maybe view the information you thought you'd find" message.

Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#39

Post by fat_tony »

chc wrote: post #28

I don't entirely understand the outrage at Demand Media. They're not a bastion of quality, but for a lot of searches, there aren't better results. For example, the other day I was making chocolate cream of wheat and I wanted a quick refresher on the proper chocolate:everything else ratio. I opened a bunch of the top links, and the best one for quickly getting the info was eHow. For searches where there are better res…

I agree with your assessment. One of my favorite sites, Cracked.com, is Demand Media as well.

Re: List of content farms to block with Google Personal Blocklist

#40

Post by basugasubaku »

kqueue wrote: post #38

it is missing the following: - osdir.com - markmail.org - www.dennyweb.com

As I wrote on the other thread, markmail is the best site for searching through Apache mailing lists that I've seen. Many of the Apache project websites link to markmail for their archives. Why are people wanting to block it?
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