191–200 of 555 posts
I believe google tracks click throughs from search results pages, which should provide in theory plenty of insight into what links aren't really working for specific keywords and what are... thus helping improve or reduce rankings of SEO laden sites. Wonder if someone can throw light on to why this isn't effective.
I think pg is missing something important here. The reason Google was able to beat Yahoo, Altavista, Ask, etc. was not just because they had a better formula — it was also because they started in the era where 'search' was still seen as secondary to 'portals' by the big guys. Had these companies known how important search is to the internet back then, they would've copied Google's secret sauce and crushed it long bef…
To displace a giant gobbling 180 billion dollars a year? Yeah, no kidding. But nobody is asking for that. They are just asking for decent search results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "coo…
How do you fight brigading, the organization of groups elsewhere to collectively vote on something? Eg white supremacist groups get together and vote down everything by people of color, and vote up their pages about how great they are?
If I remember correctly, it used to be called About.com - with categorized and human curated links. It was big during the dot com days, but withered after Google. Interestingly, I do think that that model may need to be revisited. Edit: I feel that Reddit is filling some of this need, at least for things like Vaccuum and Espresso machines with dedicated spaces.
It's easily one of the largest SEO players out there, and they've been on a buying spree recently with their purchase of Meredith. The quality of the content has gotten better, but it's still a monster of an SEO optimized content machine.
Eventually search will become a decentralized activity (No, not a web3/crypto/coin type decentralization, I am talking about the useful type). Is there any particular reason why internet search has to have a distorting gatekeeper to the global commons (that pretends playing Maxwell's demon). For chrissake, the stuff being indexed is public .
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 "coo…
They're going the OPPOSITE DIRECTION from this!! They recently removed all downvote visibility of YouTube videos from the user, so now downvotes only feed into their algorithm. So in the last line of defense of me ending up watching a shitty video, one of the most valuable tools has been removed by my betters. It's preposterous that people think that Google is doing a good job. They're actively getting worse, and ignoring everyone saying so.
What are some search categories that are so dominated by spam that they are unusable? I'll start: "how to rent a car" [0] [0] worth noting that I personally get somewhat reasonable results for this, with a 3rd result from nerdwallet.com and a 4th from wikihow.com, both of which seem to answer the question in an unbiased way
Nerdwallet and wikiHow are both SEO spam content farms. They just happen to have above-average quality content. They don't exist without a search engine.
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 "coo…
Google's search algorithm is tuned up for searching the whole web. It turns out the heuristics you need are very different depending on the size of the collection.
When Gerard Salton was doing IR experiments with punched cards he was working with collections of as little as 70 documents and in that case you are going to be very concerned about recall and not precision. Maybe there is 1 relevant document and if you miss it you failed.
If you had 70 billion documents you might have 10,000 relevant documents and if you lost 60% of them you still have 4,000 documents. The end user gets more results than they can sift through.
Thus I always groan when I see a site is using "Google Site Search" because the relevance is usually worse than you'd get with the alternatives.
Connected with that is the tuning work: Google has sufficient data to tune up a big model for everybody but true personalized search eludes them because they don't have enough data from you to tune up a model for you.