Search engines and SEO spam
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Search engines and SEO spam
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Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#2 Why not try writing a search engine specifically
for some category dominated by SEO spam?
There in fact are many vertical search engines. You can click on "more engines" to see the whole list.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#3> And boy would Google find it hard to follow you down that road.
This is a good perspective. Where can Google not go? Places that don't lead to profit. They will try (cough Wave cough) but will give up.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#4> Lots of people want to be amateur police. (pg)
This is very true. How many times have I clicked on a site met with ads so bad that the browser slows down, and after 10 seconds the page gets covered up by more and more crap and then a paywall shows up sometimes too. Now here's the thing - a competitor to Google might detect you clicking back and then pop-up a special set of controls near the search result that lets you say: "too many ads" or "paywall".
However, if such an engine were to start beating Google, I'm sure Google would implement it in their own way: automatically detect why you clicked back in such a short timespan.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#5The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make the problem worse.
I'm not saying that curated search results for particular verticals is a terrible idea (though I'm sure like anything the devil is in the details), but on the whole Google search is very, very good considering the constant assault they are under from spammers (which most other search engines are not, at least directly).
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#6I believe that the only moat protecting $100B of AdWords revenue is the quality of the Google Search results. There is no meaningful switching cost to using a new search engine, and the spend inertia in ad spend is not very significant (i.e. any online marketing manager will happily spend 5% of their budget in a different search engine adwords-like program if they get better ROI, there is no incentive the be a "Google Ads only shop").
On the other hand, Google needs to maintain the ballistic trajectory of its revenue growth. So how can they fix search quality when they've minmax'd themselves into this situation in the first place? If they were to make the ads background yellow again, that would have negative short term effects that I doubt any career exec can stomach.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#7Go read any default subreddit on Reddit to see what this idea would look like long-term, especially the "amateur police" part.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#8Searching code is also impossible on Google. If there’s a competing search engine for that I’ll use it at least for this use case.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#9>This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam?
>You might need to do a lot of manual spam fighting initially. That could be both the thing-that-doesn't-scale, and the thing that differentiates you by being alien to Google's DNA. (They must hate manual interventions; so inelegant).
Is he describing...Yahoo circa 1994? A manually curated directory service.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#10Good idea. You could start with fitness. Lots of high-quality information out there that’s entirely, 100% inaccessible via google.
Over COVID, I did the whole fitness thing from a few different angles (overhauled diet, trained for a marathon, now lifting weights a lot). I found I could only find good info by going directly to a trusted source - literally, typing http://www. like I’m in the 90s or something. This is the exact issue a search engine should solve, but Google doesn’t.