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

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

digitizor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 87 posts

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

#41

Post by lhnz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #36
yaakov34 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you then have the same problem suffered by most social networks.

I actually think a similar problem has been partially solved by Twitter already. Twitter grows but the content curation is done by the people you follow therefore new users don't affect your interactions on the site unless you let them. Of course, there's gardening work which has to be done by the user in getting to this point but it would probably be less work than browsing some of Google's search results.

Additionally the intelligent thing would be to mine the social interactions of authoritative users to provide public data for users that don't want to engage with the app.

edit: Of course, it's possible to become an authoritative spammer in which case as a power user you will still need to garden the group of users that you interact with.

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

#42

Post by CrazedGeek »

vaksel wrote: post #23

you could probably take it even further just by making it a lot more difficult to rank the other types of domains: 1. anything that's not a .com or .org(let's face it...if it's a .net, then it's most likely bought for seo optimization) 2. the .co.uk/.de etc, should only get a bonus in their own countries. 3. anything that's longer than 16 letters. If it is, chances are that its just a spam domain. 4. anything with a…

Most ISPs I've used use .net for their domains, and there are plenty other legitimate sites that use .net (Battle.net, anyone?).

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

#43

Post by snowwindwaves »

lsb wrote: post #37
nodata wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.co…

I came to the same conclusion after switching from google to duck duck go for 2 months. I found what I was looking for faster with google.

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

#45

Post by jonknee »

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…

> 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)

I recently did the same thing and didn't have a hard time finding a provider. Both StrongVPN and WiTopia showed up at the top of the SERPs (and StrongVPN also in AdWords), I went with WiTopia after then searching for reviews of both.

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

#46

Post by brudgers »

yaakov34 wrote: post #39
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? D…

It's an ugly cheap kludge. Furthermore it is a kludge which raises a question about how good Google's new singing dancing search results filtering algorithm really is, if it can't separate the wheat from the chaff at /co.cc/.

The cynic in me sees the timing of this as the first salvo in an effort toward the monetization of the coming proliferation of new commoditized top-level domains. When search results are nothing more than an advertising platform, why should a search engine return your results unless you are paying for the screen space? Perhaps, /co.cc/ was not encouraging the use of Google Analytics or promoting Adwords sufficiently.

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

#47

Post by asciilifeform »

lhnz wrote: post #24
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…

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…

> How could this be solved though?

We aren't talking about tornadoes or earthquakes. Let's remember that spammers are people.

How would we "solve" people who spread toxic waste on city streets?

That is exactly the way to deal with spammers. They have names, addresses, bank accounts, finally bodies. All of these could be located and dealt with if law enforcement officials felt like it.

Until spammers are dealt with in exactly the same way as other types of miscreants who love to piss in our collective soup, the problem will persist and grow arbitrarily worse.

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

#48

Post by willwagner »

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,…

We tried doing something similar at XMarks (a bookmark sync service) when I worked there. We figured bookmarks were a good source for mining quality websites and hired some very bright people with a search background to build it. For some searches, it gives pretty good results. Here's the one it gives for VPN providers:

http://www.xmarks.com/topic/vpn_providers

It was an uphill battle for us, which ultimately never worked out. Early on, we did a usability study with users to see how they use search engines and the people we interviewed tended to think that google was more of an expert than themselves and if they were having trouble finding things, it was more their problem than google's.

We ended up trying to take our data and tried decorating it directly on the google search results page to start getting usage, but it was really hard to get any traction and build any momentum. For most searches, Google is good enough and only a small number of our current users started using our website for search/discovery.

We ended up spending a significant amount of time decorating the ads within search results and after a considerable amount of logging and number crunching, found that decorating those ads not only increased the clickthrough rate of ads we decorated, but also increased the overall ad clickthrough rate. That's a huge win for a search engine and worth a lot of money, but ultimately google just did it themselves, and for other search vendors that had ads on their pages, they were basically handcuffed to google's contract which wouldn't allow them to use our technology.

TL;DR - Competing with Google is hard.

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

#49

Post by rwmj »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #40
rwmj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you're describing is not PageRank, but the extra information that Google's current and secret algorithm uses. The PageRank algorithm doesn't involve domains, and no amount of downvoting is going to change that -- check your facts.

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

#50

Post by yaakov34 »

brudgers wrote: post #46
yaakov34 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? D…

It's an ugly cheap kludge. Furthermore it is a kludge which raises a question about how good Google's new singing dancing search results filtering algorithm really is, if it can't separate the wheat from the chaff at /co.cc/. The cynic in me sees the timing of this as the first salvo in an effort toward the monetization of the coming proliferation of new commoditized top-level domains. When search results are nothing…

> can't separate the wheat from the chaff at /co.cc/.

The wheat is a lie.

Post reply on HN