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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#31

Post by awillen »

judge2020 wrote: post #15
birken wrote: post #5

The 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 th…

Also, i'd be very surprised if they didn't have tens of thousands of workers aiding in spam review already. The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is. Are all the pie recipes where there's a 2000 word essay about their grandma at the top 'spam'? They still have the recipe, and Google Home devices pick up the recipe instructions just fine so people end up not reading it,…

AFAIK the 2000 word essays in recipes are Google's fault - it prioritizes pages with a lot of content, so you have to add that junk to the top in order to rank highly. While I'm sure there's more going on behind the scenes than I'm aware of, it does seem like the rules could be altered on a category-specific basis where a lot of text isn't necessarily a positive.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#33

Post by edoceo »

hammock wrote: post #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. (Th…

dmoz!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#34

Post by _xnmw »

Interestingly, Google Maps doesn't suffer as much from the issues with Google Search. Maybe because it has those community-driven curation features that PG is talking about? Google Maps is fantastic at finding places to go to (and getting you there).

Also, why hasn't Apple built a search engine yet? It baffles me that they chose to go head-to-head with Google on Maps, yet outsourced their search engine. I would've liked it the other way around: Google Maps and Apple Search.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#35

Post by matt_heimer »

hammock wrote: post #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. (Th…

I always used DMOZ more than Yahoo! Directory. It looks like [dmoz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ) became https://curlie.org/ which is still active.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#36

Post by Veen »

> Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam?

Back in the olden days, there were lots of organizations that collated high quality content from the best writers. They nurtured expert writers and paid them well. They fact-checked the content and employed diligent editors and proofreaders so it was accurate and well-written. Over the years, they'd build a reputation for reliability and trustworthiness that kept people coming back for more. If you wanted to learn about fitness, or cars, or cooking, or science, you'd find a reputable author and publisher and buy their magazines or books.

But then, in the early 2000s, the geniuses from SV "disrupted" the publishing industry and its financial model. They brought us a much better way to find content, the search engine. Because they were so much better than the old-fashioned publishers, search engines gobbled up the advertising money and became the dominant gateway to content. Publishers had to abandon expensive high-quality writing because rankings and eyeballs now mattered more than quality and trustworthiness. Instead of investing in writers, they invested in marketers and SEO specialists.

The result: worthless content, writers banging out garbage for peanuts, and useless search engines.

Two decades later, looking at the barren wasteland they had created, the SV geniuses thought: I know what we need, more search engines, but smaller ones that collate high-quality content from the best writers. There must be money in that, right?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#37

Post by whiplash451 »

birken wrote: post #5

The 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 th…

I understood PG's point differently. My understanding is that he is suggesting an angle of attack in which carefully crafted manual reviews (that do dot scale) can be used to bootstrap a product that does scale thanks to something else (e.g. collaborative filtering). All of this being on a niche domain where you can drive a wedge into the mediocre performance of Google (online shopping probably being the worse possible choice, but there are many others).

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#38

Post by paulcole »

curiousllama wrote: post #10

Good 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…

Is your trusted source the same as my trusted source which is the same as my neighbor’s trusted source which is the same as my Australian cousin’s trusted source?

If not, at least one of us is going to hate this new search engine.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#40

Post by tonyedgecombe »

rickdeveloper wrote: post #14

I think a lot of this is due to Google both owning search and the ads on the websites (AdSense). There’s an incentive for them to prioritize click farms (and other sites filled with their ads). I think in general there may be a correlation between the number of ads on a site and its usefulness to me, which is inverse to its usefulness to google. I’m curious what would happen if those products were split up into 2 sep…

Yes. In fact if you wanted to cut out the SEO spam then delisting anything with Adsense would probably be a good start for a competitor.
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