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Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

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Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#31

Post by oinksoft »

nodata wrote: post #5
yaakov34 wrote: post #4

The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French). They've le…

Google's search results are extremely... crap. There I said it. It used to be that I could search for something, say this: word1 word2 and Google would give me the results for pages which contain both those words. Then Google decided I didn't mean what I searched for, so I had to prefix my searches with plus signs, like this: +word1 +word2 And now this week I find out that even that doesn't work any more. It's crap.…

I agree completely, but because no other engine provides decent results while indexing so much, there's really no viable alternative right now. DDG is good for very mainstream things, but does not do a good job of finding user profile page X on site Z, etc.

All the time I'm having to quote my terms because Google tries to correct them. Same thing with Google disregarding search terms, I always have to prepend those pluses like you do there. Auto-correction should be enabled, not default behavior.

The worst is that a search for "some-thing download" or "some-thing pdf" is positively cluttered with phony search results from torrent aggregators, etc. Why is Google indexing these?

The switch to a JS-heavy page from a simple HTML one means that I inadvertently clear my results with a new, unintended query, or navigate several searches back when I intend to just do one. Sometimes search doesn't even work. "Instant" is a failure. They removed the "Instant off" option from the search page, and I'm sure there's something when you're logged in, but I'm not often logged in to Google services.

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#32

Post by matwood »

chaud wrote: post #18
yaakov34 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Google News actually doesn't seem very spammy to me. I just searched for "diabetes" - this is usually a good one to check if an index is spammed - and while it brings up some sensationalist garbage (that's life for you), it doesn't seem to find anything which wants my credit card number right now. Even a spam-king search like "weight loss", while it finds nothing interesting, doesn't seem like pure spam…

Take a look at game search terms, like Warcraft. There are plenty of sites that sell in game currencies or items, along with sites that republish news from other sites mixed in the results.

Have you thought that's because many people do buy currency and items?

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#33

Post by jasonlotito »

brudgers wrote: post #25

5000 phishing sites cause Google to block 11,000,000 domains? That's less than 0.5%. First, is that really "a significant fraction?" Second, when did collective punishment become less evil than innocent until proven guilty?

They blocked 1 domain and the millions of subdomains it was reselling.

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#34

Post by rwmj »

wisty wrote: post #20
yaakov34 wrote: post #4

The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French). They've le…

The issue is, it's no longer web 1.0. You don't have a few thousand geeks with domains, you have about a billion users with blogs, tweet streams, and facebook pages. And so Pagerank, which implicitly works off domains is busted.

Pagerank has nothing to do with domains. It applies a score to individual pages.

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#36

Post by pavel_lishin »

yaakov34 wrote: post #27
lhnz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could this be solved though? There are few easy-to-attain signals that will help you to differentiate search results in a way that approximates the opinion of an intelligent human. I believe we have reached the point in which Google's search results are only useful for one reason: speed of information retrieval. If you wish to get high quality information you visit sources that you trust. These are either (a) con…

Hey, I come here to offer useless kvetching and complaints, not solutions :). Seriously, if I knew how to solve it, I'd be the CTO of Google. But I'll make a couple of guesses. I think they need to go for a lot more human input. It goes against the grain of everything they do, they want to solve everything algorithmically. But SEO is just too good at abusing algorithms. I think they need to get more humans involved,…

> That's a lot harder for most people to manage than just using a search box.

Hey, sounds like a business opportunity. "Join our bogon-buster network! [fine print: invite only, your activities and reviews will be rated by other members.]"

Of course, after awhile, you'll need another layer on top of it to make sure that your bogon-buster networks aren't full of spammers themselves.

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#37

Post by lsb »

nodata wrote: post #5
yaakov34 wrote: post #4

The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French). They've le…

Google's search results are extremely... crap. There I said it. It used to be that I could search for something, say this: word1 word2 and Google would give me the results for pages which contain both those words. Then Google decided I didn't mean what I searched for, so I had to prefix my searches with plus signs, like this: +word1 +word2 And now this week I find out that even that doesn't work any more. It's crap.…

Duckduckgo's innovations are pretty cool, especially bang-commands (to search on google maps, add "!m" to your query).

But the underlying search is Bing.

Perhaps Google is personalized and Bing doesn't, or perhaps DDG doesn't pass a uid token to Bing, but it's just not as good actual results, which matter to me about 10% of the time. (Luckily, the query parameters to google.com/search are the same as to duckduckgo.com/ so a simple massage of the URL works well.)

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#38

Post by rakkhi »

yaakov34 wrote: post #4

The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French). They've le…

There is some innovation in this space. For example did you try Blekko maybe with some relavant hashtags. For comparison:

http://blekko.com/ws/buy+vpn+/monte

Or duckduckgo? It will be interesting whether G+ social signals help Google improve this going forward

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#39

Post by yaakov34 »

brudgers wrote: post #25

5000 phishing sites cause Google to block 11,000,000 domains? That's less than 0.5%. First, is that really "a significant fraction?" Second, when did collective punishment become less evil than innocent until proven guilty?

You must somehow have avoided running into it, but .co.cc was a fever swamp and a nightmare. For any popular search terms you can think of, it contained "popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "my-popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "best-popular-search-terms.co.cc" and so on ad freaking nauseam. And it got spammed all over your screen, because Google likes to find search terms in the domain name.

What do you think was there? Do you think 11 million people woke up one day and decided ".co.cc would be a great domain for my business"?

They should have nuked it from orbit a long time ago.

EDIT: I just realized .co.cc is not actually down, but it's blocked by my provider now and no longer indexed by Google, so it's pretty much gone for me. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Re: Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results

#40

Post by MatthewPhillips »

rwmj wrote: post #34
wisty wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is, it's no longer web 1.0. You don't have a few thousand geeks with domains, you have about a billion users with blogs, tweet streams, and facebook pages. And so Pagerank, which implicitly works off domains is busted.

Pagerank has nothing to do with domains. It applies a score to individual pages.

It does involve domains as well. That's why demandmedia and the like used to have higher rankings. Any old ehow article isn't linked to by many, but taken as an aggregate they are. I've always felt that they should be ranking individual pages and completely disregard the domain. We'd see a lot more expert content that way.
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