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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

#71

Post by msbarnett »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #65
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.…

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 t…

Interesting.

Blekko was a distant third for my go-to search engine confuser "ruby god" in the three-engine monte, and I was going to write it off for my purposes when it occured to me to try "god /ruby", which to your credit is much closer to being competive with google, and drastically outperforms bing.

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

#72

Post by yaakov34 »

Klinky wrote: post #68
yaakov34 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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", "C…

This is the problem with the customization of Google - for me, these are not in the top 4 results even sorted by date, although 2 of your titles show up further down. But yes, I see your point now, someone spammed Google News as well. Scum. I think it's still less spammy than the Web search, since some kind of human attention is required to get in there.

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

#73

Post by jokermatt999 »

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...

Here's a link to a RWW story about what msbarnett is talking about: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_illiteracy_how_much...

It surprised me at first, but I really forget what it's like to be tech illiterate.

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

#74

Post by dangrossman »

bigwally wrote: post #35

This is one of the dumbest things Google has done. If Google really wants to get rid of 90 percent of spammy sites all they need to do is block any website that is registered with Godaddy.

That doesn't make much sense. GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world, with the most extensive general public advertising campaign, and manages over 45 million domains. They're the registrar for your neighbor and your neighborhood small business more often than not.

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

#75

Post by lsb »

joshuacc wrote: post #51
lsb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"a simple massage of the URL works well" As does prefixing your search with "!g".

Well, I'll be jiggered.

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

#76

Post by Tiomaidh »

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.

I'd rather they fixed the results now and worried about the algorithm later (and you know they're working on the algorithm) than make us suffer unnecessarily until the algorithm was suitably improved.

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

#77

Post by brudgers »

sorbus wrote: post #64
brudgers wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really having a dog in the hunt for Google page ranks, it's not really paranoia for me. It's not really cynicism either given that it is a natural extension of Google's basic revenue model, i.e. showing links to pages in exchange for payment. I just added the tag to keep the post consistent with implicit HN style guidelines.

There is nothing sacred about the blue text links, and with "personalization" they don't reflect an objective page ranking, but a subjective ranking based on speculation about what one is most likely to click.

It is only in the minds of consumers of Google's search services that a wall between search results and advertising exists. With personalization, the same algorithms are applied to both.

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

#78

Post by immortalbeast »

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…

mp3 player reviews?

easy

1) you buy an iPod. 2) or You ask your friends on Facebook 3) or You ask your followers on Twitter

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

#79

Post by pavel_lishin »

lhnz wrote: post #41
pavel_lishin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So why not adapt the Twitter model to this? You can choose who to include in your Bogon-net, and maybe set different confidence requirements; e.g., "Show me only results that at least 50% of my Bogon-busters have rated, and only show me results that have a 75% approval rating."

The problems I already see are a) having to compute all those scores, and b) I'm unlikely to rate more than a handful of sites a day - I think Google tried that with their browser toolbar, too.

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

#80

Post by gojomo »

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…

And yet in a category where the natural results have become useless, the AdWords above and to the right can still be valuable. Ability-to-pay is a useful filter, and Google often looks more closely at the content and people behind those paid-advertiser landing pages.

As long as people aren't leaving en masse for another search engine, there is a margin at which Google makes more money when the AdWords remain useful, but the natural results are not.

Of course, Google still has to keep the natural results about as good as the external competition. But those other search engines have to fight the same SEO trickery that Google does. Competitors don't have the same ad revenues to finance the fight. Competitors don't have the same ad inventory to serve as a backup reservoir of market-filtered results. And competitors don't have the benefit of many-years of user-habit to try Google first. So, Google's scale advantage keeps growing, even if natural-search quality is middling.

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