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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#111

Post by throwaway14356 »

ah, so everyone wanted to move from carefully crafted personal websites where every detail counts and low effort publications are harshly punished to platforms with guranteed readership and now we have a curration problem?

Someone (who probably doesnt have a website) said that comment moderation on your own website is to much work. Perhaps the whole internet is to much work?

But i like the spam search engine by and for spammers as a way of finding the latest and greatest affiliate marketing and blockchain swindle.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#112

Post by aantix »

nanna wrote: post #46

If you were to start a search engine, what stack would you use?

Typesense looks easy to use.

But with 3x memory needed for the indexes, the server costs probably aren't going to be bootstrap'able.

Especially for a "small" crawl of a billion web pages, event at just 10k per page.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#113

Post by marginalia_nu »

eitland wrote: post #97
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…

https://search.marginalia.nu has a very interesting approach to this: Use tracking especially and JS generally as a weight in ranking so sites that contains much of any of these needs to be exceptionally high quality to float to the top. This means sites with limited ads and tracking, typically enthusiast driven pages float to the top. Now always when someone discusses a novel way to combat webspam someone will immed…

Another big factor in what I do is prioritizing the opinions of certain indieweb sites when ranking domains, basically a segment of the graph consisting of humans with a particular dislike for seo spam. This makes ranking manipulation much less effective.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#114

Post by jeffbee »

All of the amateur search quality experts forget to mention the regulatory environment. Obviously, Google could nuke Pinterest from orbit, dramatically improving image search results. Clearly, Google could effectively take down Statista, technically. But various Eurocracies have shown an extreme willingness to take the side of Yelp, Pinterest, and whatever other spam/scam mills are able to form a shadow alliance with Microsoft's astroturf campaigns like "fairsearch" and whatever.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#115

Post by snth »

jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

> If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find.

That's not strictly true, given that reviewers are often sent pre-release versions of things in order to do that work before release day.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#116

Post by Covzire »

Could this issue be related to Gmail's spam filtering? For approximately 2 years now it's been downright porous, I'm getting on average 1 obvious spam message in my inbox that is something like:

c0nGrats-You_HaVe_Won_ThE_Pr1ze!

..Or some silly variation of this that takes literally 0.1 ms for a human to discern that it's spam. Yet something happened to Gmail's spam algorithm in the last couple years that has been consistently letting these through. To be fair, it does catch most spam but it's only batting something like 75% and the spam it does catch is often times much less obvious to human eyes than the stuff it lets through.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#117

Post by numbsafari »

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 problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities.

It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities.

If Google:

- Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT)

- Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coordinated network detection" and down-ranked domains coordinating with ones you've blocked, that'd be pretty cool).

- Allowed you to create your own custom search engines, like "Programmable Search Engine".

That would be incredibly valuable. They already have most of the tech. They could even create a subscription service around custom search engines if they really wanted. Plenty of people would find something like that incredibly valuable.

Anyhow, buried in there is your startup idea. Remember: your startup doesn't have to generate the same revenue or profit as the incumbent on day one to be successful.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#118

Post by numpad0 »

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…

Is that...essentially a Proof-of-Work system...

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#120

Post by cft »

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 search results markedly worsened in the last 5 years. Why could they keep up with SEO spam until 5 years ago, and now they can't? Their revenue has been growing dramatically, so they could proportionally increase the allocation. It's probably because the focus of their HR/changing workforce is now elsewhere: maybe fighting "disinformation": both COVID and political. Those efforts were non-existent 5 years ago.
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