51–60 of 555 posts
I wonder how difficult it is to compare the main body of text in search results, then say if it is over a 95% match with another site (I.e. it has been copy-pasted), demote it in the search results. If a site generates too many of these demotions then it gets blacklisted from the index.
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 li…
I agree they should make their own search engine. But currently they’re being paid a ton of money not to.
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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.
What's the point of writing succinct, to-the-point mini articles about problems and solutions if nobody finds them on Google?
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…
The only advantage a startup might have is that they could do completely new concepts, such as specifying what area you search in, allow you to modify their classification of your query and/or moderating sites you include - which is probably necessary anyway, since you'll hardly have the budget to fully index the web. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not going to be easy at all.
And after all of that, you still need a way to make some money.
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…
Unfortunately, defaults matter and Google is spending billions of dollars yearly to make sure they are the default search engine wherever they can. Most people don’t switch from default.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Marketers/SEO people are starting to infiltrate this as well, but since they can't control and SEO the content on Reddit nearly as much, this still works pretty well for now.
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.
I have an exterminator who comes to my house every couple months, and sets up traps here, poison there. I don't have any rats in my house. I do see rats running across the yard sometimes. The exterminator explains it like this: Rat pressure. The rats overpopulate and there's "pressure" (like, uh, "memory pressure", which is also a fluid concept) so they try to get into your house more, through smaller holes, as a function of how much outside drama is going on, how many they are and how overpopulated, how scarce their food supply is, how cold it is outside, and whatever else drives rats into your house. (I love the dude who's my exterminator).
Anyway, this is the same problem every search engine faces. The more surface area they expose, the more pressure they have building, the more ways people have to fake out their systems.
We have to go back to the 1990s Yahoo! model. Curated content. A list of websites that are reputable. 1990s Yahoo is the future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Incidentally, prioritizing long content seems odd to me, in my experience the best pages are short and get right to the point, at least in the context of something like a recipe or other "how to" resources.