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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#291

Post by asiachick »

numbsafari wrote: post #117
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 "coo…

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

Not convinced this would help. The spammers would just hire people to dislike competitors

> - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results

This I would use. Never show me results form collider, watchmojo, ranker,

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

I think this would lead to people writing highly polarized engines. The Red Pill engine for example and we'd have a new problem, the proliferation of popular highly biased results. Of course that's not to say Google's results aren't already biased but they certainly are trying to cover everyone.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#293

Post by hubraumhugo »

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…

Search engines are pretty good at solving the problem they were designed to solve, which is "finding pages which contain all the query words". But they are pretty bad at solving the much harder problem of rating the trustworthiness & authenticity, intentions of the owner, monetization of the site, etc.

One possible solution to this could be:

- Let the community vote on the most trusted sources

- Include results from enthusiasts that have little incentive to write biased reviews (Reddit, HN, expert forums)

- Look at the ownership of the site and how transparent they are about it

- Regularly reassess these criteria

This wouldn't scale for a generic search engine, but I'm working on a service that does this for many product verticals/niches.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#294

Post by nobbis »

celdon25 wrote: post #270
nobbis wrote: post #222

10 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.)

I would have told him not to quit his day job. That sounds ridiculous.

I don't agree, plus he's a billionaire.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#295

Post by marginalia_nu »

ffhhj wrote: post #245
marginalia_nu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good to see you in this thread! I just added Marginalia to the recommended search engines in a new search tool I'm building, to get programming answers faster. The search assistant builds queries for specific sites with "site:targetsite.com , programming question" (that comma is not a typo). When doing a query like that I get no results but these warnings: /!\ The term "," contains characters that are not currently s…

Ignoring comma seems doable, I'll have it fixed in a few days, currently away from my work computer.

site:-queries are supported, but only at the first domain level. (e.g. site:marginalia.nu; not site:search.marginalia.nu). I might tune it so that it strips subdomains automatically, that is pretty trivial.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#296

Post by jefftk »

RealityVoid wrote: post #172
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, IMO, might be the monoculture we have around search. Because Google is soo big, it's enough for spammers to target it and they have the vast majority of the search visibility. If we had better, more diverse competition, that might manifest as a tradeoff, presumably, they would have competing and diverse criteria so you would probably not be the top result on _all_ dominant search engines. SEO spam needs…

Doesn't your model predict that Bing would have substantially less SEO-gamed results?

(Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search)

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#297

Post by asiachick »

willhinsa wrote: post #196
numbsafari wrote: post #117

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…

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

They're doing a great job. I'm so happy dislike visibility have been removed. It removes the effectiveness of pile on coordinated harassment which many youtubers have fallen victim too.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#298

Post by winternett »

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…

The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. There are literally millions of Internet savvy people who would be able to survive on what we would consider barely anything profit-wise in adsense revenue, which also usually pays out in US dollars. In this currently terrible global economy, desperation turns the most intelligent minds bound into poverty into bootleg SEO engineers, online catfishers, scammers, and ransomware creators, and God bless their creativity...

Instead of creating income opportunity and crowdsourcing people in foreign countries for common (more positive) good, companies rarely create opportunities for the people who would normally turn into spammers and scammers, and that's what creates an endless army of people that constantly destroy online communities like Soundcloud, FaceBook, Twitter, and TikTok with stolen content, trend scams, fake news, and spam messages.

Google search has been invalidating and subverting their most accurate search results based on abstract SEO rules for quite some time now. It was likely done so that they could implant paid ads first into content, because that makes them the most profit. Doing that has destroyed their reliability and reputation as a search service leader, and they're never going to admit it, but payola is the undertone that is ruining their search results... There is a certain type of corruption that occurs when a company turns away from upholding customer service and value towards a monopolistic "profit-first economic stranglehold" business model... That strategy never ultimately works out well for both companies AND users in the long run. The next leader will likely be a search that avoids the same pitfalls until they themselves become a profit-driven monopoly.

There is no algorithm that will usefully and fairly counter spam based on desperation, companies need to realize that creating opportunity for people to operate equally on their platforms is the best move, otherwise, spam will drive any community of rule abiding users away or into madness.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#299

Post by yawaworht1978 »

wakiza33 wrote: post #140
endisneigh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why would they do this? Google's customers are the advertisers, not the end-users. And no one is going to pay for a search engine, it's been tried and has failed.

there is a smaller niche market. SEMrush is a tool used in the digital marketing industry that is now public and has a multi-billion dollar market cap. It originally started as a search engine. When they didnt gain traction they used the tech to monitor Google and interface it for customers who are tracking their performance in search results (and much more).

Can I ask what you mean by public?

It's not open source as far I know and there's only the free trial way to try it.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#300

Post by fauigerzigerk »

xondono wrote: post #162
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…

There’s a lot of good quality reviews on YT on launch date of pretty much anything these days. It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.

Interesting. I never watch video reviews. They're painfully slow and impossible to search.
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