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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#41

Post by acdha »

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…

Your point is good but I'm not sure I'd say very good given how easily the same SEO spam domains can stay at the top of search results for ages simply by scraping someone else's content. What I'd be most interested in knowing is what their success metrics are defined as — for example, how much of a problem does Google's management consider it if someone searches, finds the answer they were looking for on someone's Stack Overflow rip-off, and stops searching? I could easily believe that a significant amount of what we're seeing here is that they're focused on some kind of user frustration metric which doesn't include things like damage to other businesses.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#42

Post by Debug_Overload »

mg wrote: post #2

Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? I like to compare search engine results and wrote this tool to make it easy: https://www.gnod.com/search There in fact are many vertical search engines. You can click on "more engines" to see the whole list.

The fact that you included Reddit, SO, Google Scholar etc is awesome (I thought it was only for main search engines). Thanks for sharing. Bookmarked.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#43

Post by IshKebab »

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,…

Yeah, the newest nuisance seems to be sites that clone Github Issues and StackOverflow with a crapper interface. Somehow they rank higher than the original sources. I'd say it's spam but it's definitely not traditional spam.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#44

Post by judge2020 »

Jenk wrote: post #18

> What would a paid version of Google Search results look like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible results and not be worried about generating revenue? God please no. YouTube premium shows what Google would do, i.e., they would further ruin the free experience by ramping up the amount of ads you see to "incentivize" the premium search.

Premium offerings like that are amazing simply for the fact that you can 'return' to the days where you obtained services by paying for them directly, not by looking at ads and paying with your mindshare. Google and YT aren't free services, and it's a miracle they continue to be accessible with ad blockers enabled.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#45

Post by darinf »

baby wrote: post #8

Searching 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.

Give Neeva a try. We have improved ranking and some nice features around tech queries.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#47

Post by abakker »

I have a version of fixing this that I would personally enjoy a lot. Leave google alone, let it crawl the web, prioritize what it wants to via algorithms. But, give me a version of that which ONLY surfaces results from discussion forums (including SO, Reddit, HN, etc). For most of the stuff where I am actively searching and not just looking stuff up, discussion forums of motivated, self-selected contributors have the stuff I need with the context I need. It used to be that blogs had answers, but that media has been categorically ruined by SEO.

Now, one of the deficiencies here has been examples. Try this: "best miter saw". you will not find any websites that actually discuss the answer to this question, despite it being a product category with a lot of price variability and performance tradeoffs (weight, capacity, power, cord vs cordless, accuracy).

Nearly any product reviews for large purchases follow the same pattern unless consumer reports has decided to dig deep (e.g. washing machines).

How about guitar strings? Sandpaper? Printers? google's algorithm has allowed profit motivated websites to displace the commons to too great an extent.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#48

Post by awillen »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #29

I'm honestly not trying to take a potshot against PG or YC here, but it's kinda funny to see him saying this after I worked for a YC-backed startup years ago that built its core revenue streams around generating SEO spam, we just marketed it as something else. Just to be clear, I don't think PG or YC are responsible for all or even most SEO spam, but I know firsthand that they've profited from it through at least one…

I don't think it's as counterintuitive as it sounds - just because they're playing the game doesn't mean that they think it's right. If your options are to not be successful at SEO or to do the SEO spam thing, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to do the latter - it's your job to make your startup successful, not to make a stand against the way Google does things.

I view it as something like the rich folks who call for additional taxation of the rich. They're not going to just pay extra money that they don't have to under the current tax rules, both because it's not particularly fair and because one person paying extra taxes, even if they're very wealthy, isn't going to make a big impact. That doesn't mean they can't lobby to change the rules and be totally fine with it if everyone is paying additional taxes.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#49

Post by tonyedgecombe »

new_here wrote: post #17

> Maybe ultimately you open up spam fighting to your users. If you managed this well, you could harness a lot of energy. Doesn't Google already consider that if a user returns to the results page (or clicks a second link) then the first link visited was not satisfactory. Seems like a pretty elegant solution.

That's to Google's benefit though, they get another chance to present some adverts to the user.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#50

Post by dredmorbius »

gomox wrote: post #6

I 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 "Googl…

No.

The other moats are lock-in to advertising networks, website metrics, and effective control over Web standards through the Chrome browser.

An alternative search platform might provide better search. It would be fighting Google on at least three other fronts. It might have some success, but it would be challenging. (As history largely demonstrates.)

Even a rival tech monopolist, Microsoft, barely holds even with its own search offering (I use that indirectly via DDG), and scrapped its own web-browser development

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