Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by asciilifeform » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 3:27 PM UTC

yaakov34 wrote: post #59

asciilifeform wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Please don't get the government involved in this. As much as I dislike eHow.com, I don't think they need to be dragged away in chains for "SEOing one's way to the top of search results, title 256, section D". That's not a good kind of call for the government to make.

> I don't think they need to be dragged away in chains

Why not?

I would love to see spammers imprisoned or perhaps even publicly flogged. With hangings for repeat offenders.

The social cost of spammers (in terms of the time and money wasted on filtering attempts) may well be comparable to that of burglars.

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

#62

Post by yaakov34 » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 3:31 PM UTC

Klinky wrote: post #56

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…

Do a search for RezVera. I research digestive health news & this has been coming up a lot over the last few weeks. Either copycat sites or PR sites that link back to another site with an iframe containing a short form promo offering the supplement for $60 bucks. Blah.

I checked it out. RezVera is obviously a commercial name, not a generic name, and its entire internet presence consists of a few PR sites. Google News finds them all, and puts them on one page. It's not like they are crowding out better RezVera news. There is maybe something to be done here about delisting these sites altogether, but I don't see a huge problem for this particular search. Or is there some legitimate review of it, which gets crowded out?

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

#63

Post by kalleboo » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 3:32 PM UTC

ice5nake wrote: post #11

Seems like a cop out to me. It kind of says, our technology can't weed these results out so we are just going to not deal with it. I am sure it is difficult problem; don't get me wrong. However, I'd rather see Google say that some fancy algorithm determined co.cc domains are junk and has relegated them appropriately.

You'd rather they lie to you?

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

#64

Post by sorbus » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 3:32 PM UTC

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…

You're confusing cynicism with paranoia. A cynic would think that Google has lost faith in its algorithm and is taking to manually blocking spammy sites; a paranoid would think that Google plans to have websites pay to be included in search, and is retaliating against hosts that don't use Google Analytics or Adwords.

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

#65

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 3:38 PM UTC

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.…

So there is Blekko (http://blekko.com) which does use what we (yes I work there) consider better social signals for ranking search. Try this and let me know what you think:

Go to blekko.com, enter your two words and append /monte to the search. That will put three columns up, results from Blekko, Google, and Bing. Pick the column with the best search results and see which service delivered them.

It is a great way to see what is what.

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

#66

Post by eneveu » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 3:49 PM UTC

willwagner wrote: post #48

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,…

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 w…

Why not sell this data to Google and other search engines, instead of competing directly with them?

Note that I've used XMarks / delicious in the past to get more relevant results. When a link has been bookmarked by many users, it is more likely to be interesting. It was extremely useful when approaching an unknown subject.

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

#67

Post by AlecSchueler » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 4:00 PM UTC

jawns wrote: post #3

Dang ... there goes traffic to the First State Tourism Board's http://www.visit-delaware.co.cc

Wouldn't it make sense for them to be using .us anyway?

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

#68

Post by Klinky » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 4:01 PM UTC

yaakov34 wrote: post #62

Klinky wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do a search for RezVera. I research digestive health news & this has been coming up a lot over the last few weeks. Either copycat sites or PR sites that link back to another site with an iframe containing a short form promo offering the supplement for $60 bucks. Blah.

I checked it out. RezVera is obviously a commercial name, not a generic name, and its entire internet presence consists of a few PR sites. Google News finds them all, and puts them on one page. It's not like they are crowding out better RezVera news. There is maybe something to be done here about delisting these sites altogether, but I don't see a huge problem for this particular search. Or is there some legitimate r…

I am not searching for RezVera. I am searching "gastritis" "irritable bowel syndrome", etc... RezVera is just a quick way to see the sites that get listed on Google, I assure you those sites come up for legit searches too.

If you do a search for "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" & then sort by date 3 of the top 4 choices are: "Manuka Honey Capsules Announced", "New Supplement [RezVera] Shows Great Promise for Gastritis", "CSIRO cereal a real superfood". Spammy McSpam Spam.

Sometimes press releases blur the lines between advertising & news, I get that, but these sites aren't really that useful & look almost like they're gaming Google News to advertise. Rarely do they actually have any authoritative links backing up their claims, which is something Google supposedly wants from sites joining Google News.

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

#69

Post by Zumzoa » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 4:03 PM UTC

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…

>2. the .co.uk/.de etc, should only get a bonus in their own countries.

A flawed rule. I deal with websites based in other countries and written in other languages. I also access websites from my home country when overseas.

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

#70

Post by msbarnett » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 4:12 PM UTC

jaredmck wrote: post #54

beaumartinez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Drop the strong signal of a search term being in the domain name [...] It's been abused beyond belief. I whole-heartedly agree—but people still search for "facebook.com login" and similarly trivial queries. If Google broke returning "facebook.com/login" for these it'd lose a lot of its value for these people.

I can only imagine how many links facebook login has across the web from their widgets. Don't think we have to worry about them falling out of the top spot for that query, in fact if they did google would likely get a visit from the DOJ soon after...

The Facebook login page did fall out of the top spot last year in favor of a ReadWriteWeb story about changes to the Facebook login page.

The comment thread rapidly filled with deeply confused people complaining that they couldn't figure out how to log in on this new page.