How will these search engines interoperate?
Search engines and SEO spam
231–240 of 555 posts
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#232Searching 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.
hot take: why would I need to enter my email to do a search online? You already lost me :o
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#233The 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 think the problem is just that the solution isn't in Google's wheelhouse: There is no algorithmic ranking system that can't be gamed. Human moderation and curation is the only way to provide true quality, and Google is allergic to solutions that don't automate and scale. I think a really good search engine would still algorithmically search it's index, but the content library should be human-curated with a goal of…
This was Yahoo in late 90s early 2000s. They had a human curated directory search where one could look up something like "kayaking" and find a bunch of sites on kayaking. Then if you wanted to search on keyword it was outsourced to AltaVista and later Google. Altavista results were terrible and were almost nothing more than a keyword search (IE the word you were searching appeared on this page). Google got much better at the general search and this was history.
I think the death of the directory search dramatically dropped the number of self-curated, informative sites from a domain expert that were common in the early internet. Now instead of making a website, many people are on content silos like Reddit/FB
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#234To 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…
I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well. What's happened since then is that almost all the normal "people linking to things they like" has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Face…
I wish FB would be more open, but since they have all this walled garden info, are they well placed to start a competing search engine? Would be interesting if their activity could help filter out seo hackers.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#23510 years ago, the original engineer of Google's search engine told me what he now wanted was asynchronous, human-powered search with curated results, e.g. a Google-like interface, but queries cost $5 and take 15 minutes. Money's no object for him, so he wanted to outsource the filtering, ranking, and interpreting of results. Would be even more useful today (albeit a tiny TAM.)
> the original engineer of Google's search engine you mean Larry Page?
No, the guy who re-wrote Larry's research code into Python and put it in production.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#236The 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…
You talk about this "constant assault from spammers" like it's not Google's fault and it's an intractable problem. That is not a correct characterization. There are plenty of low hanging fruit that could easily be detected and deranked, for instance scraped stack overflow spam. But google chooses not to deprioritize these results. The reason they don't is that they make money on ad clicks, which many responses have already elaborated on.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#237Just give users the ability to blacklist domains when searching; pretty soon you'll have a decent list of what users consider worthless. And pintrest would die.
uBlock Origin static filters to the rescue!
Block results from specific domains on Google or DDG:
google.*##.g:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"])
duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(a[href*="thetopsites.com"])
google.*##.g:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i))
duckduckgo.*##.results > div:has(*:has-text(/bye topic of noninterest/i))
*##body>div:has(div:has-text(/To make Medium work.*Privacy Policy.*Cookie Policy/i))Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#238Earlier 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?
How does Google already handle this exact problem on YT?
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#239The 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.
I think it is also no longer in their interest. If you look at their mobile results now, there are sometimes no search results for webpages, just ads, and their automatically extracted data. So, it is in their interest now to have the search for non-advertisers to be bad. Eventually people will consider those results junk and just use the google extracted data/people who paid to go up.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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
Not necessarily: https://yacy.net