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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#101

Post by neom »

dageshi wrote: post #92
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 said this in a similar thread yesterday, but I think this is an unsolvable problem because much of the content either no longer exists in website form or is old. To put it simply, a new generation of the people who used to make the reliable niche websites that not just answered your questions but also helped you learn a particular topic have moved to youtube instead. Google search is hollowing out as a result with…

Just a note on that, youtube search is finally getting better, yesterday I noticed it was able to find key words in the middle of a lecture that had nothing in the title or comments. I always wonder about their AI transcription service, it's gotten so good, if they're storing all that audio as text, I guess their search is going to get excellent?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#102

Post by notananthem »

We still need a search engine that actually blacklists everything serving ads. Google beat altavista, now we need to beat google.

I mean no mincing about- recipe sites that are ads are blocked. Results with pixel tracker etc are blocked. Hell, results that are paywalled are blocked because they're useless.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#103

Post by loceng »

noduerme wrote: post #59
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.

Okay that's sort of what the !bang in DDG is for, and why it's a meta-engine. What's the blue sky ideal for a real, no-bullshit, everything search engine that doesn't fall prey to the constant flood of garbage? 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 expl…

Creating a "trustless" search crawler, where anybody can participate, and then applying an algorithm to determine trust or value feels like it'd be a never-ending arms race - that'd require AI and extensive/expensive resources that is likely better invested in developing real trust networks and curation; curators are corruptible and regulatory capture of policy is possible if the organization is infiltrated or poorly overseen.

Carte blanche opening your system up to anyone to inject data seems like the wrong foot to start off on, whereas my curating a moderator, someone I personally know and feel good about, trust to whatever level, and hiring them - ideally making sure they're someone you respect and you're someone they respect, pay them well, and at scale will be able to pay for itself; this did just bring to mind however big pharma and pharmaceutical trials structure and how that system can be/is/has been captured - and so perhaps the pressures when dealing with multi-billion dollar market categories will always lead to shenanigans if ever trying to centralize too much, not allowing for de-risking and broader resource distribution via sales/profits to more parties than the "5-star" rated products.

In a thread on HN, I think it was yesterday, a few people posted about review sites where some product reviews are free - but others you had to pay for. A system to facilitate such organizations could allow a highly competitive environment, where organizations develop/build a brand - build trust for their brand as being competent and thorough - and so then over the lifetime of a reader/customer, perhaps they'll spend $1,000 buying reviews (say 333 big purchases over 40 years that you're willing to pay $3 a hit for) to make sure they're ; mind you there will be organized that could be captured to say promote one conglomerate of products over another, perhaps even regionally, but I'm beginning to think it's a necessary layer to combat the shit show that is Amazon (et al) reviews. Ideally these systems and how the reviews present the information, and how thorough - the technical depth and breadth and testing done - will help educate those who dive into using this system, which will sharpen themselves while keeping reviewers on their toes and arguably strengthening their organizations and competency as well.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#104

Post by the_other »

coldpie wrote: post #94
paulgb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've noticed this particularly with technical results. A lot of sites seem to have scraped StackOverflow and GitHub issues, put a crappy ad-loaded interface around them, and somehow out-rank the original SO/GitHub content. It's like the bad-old-days of ExpertsExchange, which somehow was never delisted by Google for its shady SEO tactics.

You just have to look at Google's profit motive here. Their motive isn't to provide quality search results. Their motive is to show users ads, either in the search results themselves or on the destination sites via their ad network. The SEO spam sites aren't a bug, they are a feature of Google's profit algorithm. Google's search quality will never improve so long as their motivation is to show you ads. Why should it?…

The core problem, I guess, is that search engines view all their results as ads. That’s why they got into the ad business in the first place.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#105

Post by hardtke »

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…

The curated search results business model doesn't work. Google gives "aggregators" and other search engines the death sentence for organic search traffic from economically meaningful queries, so you'd get no free traffic. This is one of the major antitrust complaints against Google in the EU. Since you get no organic search traffic, you need to build a brand using advertising, and once you start down that road you need to monetize the first click which compromises the quality of your site.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#106

Post by nikanj »

aronpye wrote: post #51

A lot of the spam results just seem to be copy pasted content. 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.

How would you avoid throwing the original site out with the bathwater?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#107

Post by ringworld »

abakker wrote: post #47

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…

You may be interested in searX - it refers to data sources as Engines; you have the ability to run your own instance (or use a public shared one) and only enable engines you want results from (reddit, stackoverflow etc.). Build your own meta-engine recipe, basically.

https://searx.space to learn / get started. Find one and visit it, click Preferences upper right then follow your schnoz.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#108

Post by zozbot234 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #70
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…

> 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. The reality is more that some Google engineer will come up with an algorithm change that makes the result 40% better, but it will come at the expense of making that search 3ms slower so the change won't get merged. Or it will make the results worse for some niche set of queries…

> There are lots of consumers who would gladly pay $1 a month or whatever in order to use a couple extra milliseconds of compute power per per search in exchange for drastically better results

Google has a paid-for Search API, so they could do that if they chose to pursue it. And then they could let Google One users opt-in to the same thing via ordinary Search. I'm not sure whether Bing has anything equivalent.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#109

Post by throwaway6845 »

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'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence

Really?

I can point you to Hard Problems that have been solved better at little startups than at Google - or, indeed, at any other bigco. That's why acquisitions happen.

Why does Google having 1000 engineers working on a problem automatically mean they are the smartest?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#110

Post by jeffbee »

bretpiatt wrote: post #75

This is already happening for a bunch of verticals: Travel - Expedia, Hotels.com, Kayak, etc. Consumer Goods - Amazon, WalMart, EBay, Etsy, etc. Automobile Purchase - Cars.com, Autotrader, etc. Career/Job - Indeed, LinkedIn, etc. As Google continues to lose search volume on these big revenue categories it is going to make spam much more difficult as they are working to sort out long tail spam. Way harder.

Wow so that's completely opposite of my feelings on this topic. I would never, ever use Expedia for travel search over Google flights/hotels. Google travel is the meta-search engine for this vertical. Expedia etc. are all-in on spam and scams, trying at every opportunity to take an extra dollar from you.

The same with Amazon. You'd think that with all the armchair search quality experts cropping up lately there might be more vocal complaints about the fact that Amazon's own search can't find basic consumer products sold by Amazon itself. If I want to find stuff on Amazon, I search Google for it.

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