Search engines and SEO spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#301

Post by visarga » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

canyonero wrote: post #259

I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve and that Google is not incentivized to solve. Google wants you to click on ads at the end of the day, full-stop. Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. Ot…

> Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best.

I do too. I'm wondering why didn't Google invest some effort into "best X" searches? I bet they could extract such information from the web and correlate various sources. They already answer all sorts of semantic knowledge questions.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#302

Post by visarga » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:08 PM UTC

llaolleh wrote: post #257

gorbachev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the examples used in the Twitter thread Paul was referring to would be better served by a manually curated directory service with a possible addition of a search engine only surfacing content from the sites in the directory. For health information and recipes in particular there are only a handful of really high quality sites that have quality content for 95% of the information most people need. I bet if you…

It's really hard to get people to use something other than Google. If you were to launch such a product, it would have to be so much better that people recommend it organically to other people.

Should be able to run on top Google in a browser extension to insert itself only when the topic allows.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#303

Post by NumberCruncher » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

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…

This resonates with my experience. A couple of years ago I invested more time than I proud of into buying the right bluetooth headset for me. I have found a site with pretty detailed reviews and tested their reviews standing in stores and trying dozens of headsets out. I also bought 3 headsets on Amazon and sent back all of them later. My impression was that the reviews on this particular site are 100% unbiased, where all other reviews I read just want to sell whatever product is in focus.

I wonder how a search engine could distinguish between "honest & professional" and "fake & amateur" headset reviews without having a head and two ears?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#304

Post by sct202 » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

awillen wrote: post #31

judge2020 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, i'd be very surprised if they didn't have tens of thousands of workers aiding in spam review already. The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is. Are all the pie recipes where there's a 2000 word essay about their grandma at the top 'spam'? They still have the recipe, and Google Home devices pick up the recipe instructions just fine so people end up not reading it,…

AFAIK the 2000 word essays in recipes are Google's fault - it prioritizes pages with a lot of content, so you have to add that junk to the top in order to rank highly. While I'm sure there's more going on behind the scenes than I'm aware of, it does seem like the rules could be altered on a category-specific basis where a lot of text isn't necessarily a positive.

While I think the essays are excessive, I appreciate that some of them document that the blogger actually made the recipe with progress pictures. With the more basic recipes websites, I wonder if anyone's actually made it before or if the recipe is from some scrapped database of unknown origin and quality.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#305

Post by visarga » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #64

hammock wrote: post #9

>This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? >You might need to do a lot of manual spam fighting initially. That could be both the thing-that-doesn't-scale, and the thing that differentiates you by being alien to Google's DNA. (Th…

And makes me think that StumbleUpon had a similar curation ability, in that the value qualifier is how often [hopefully] real people interact with content - tracked by who's using SU and agreed to allow tracking; can't remember if sharing that was optional or not? The gamification of the system then would have to come through onboarding fake users, pretending/mimicking real user behaviour to send that signal into the…

SU was a great way to surface random interesting stuff. I bet most blog entries today could be picked from Twitter, even if they are unlinked.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#306

Post by mrkramer » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

Good idea Paul I had similar one but no way you would do it manually. Machine learning algorithms need to detect spam not people because that way search engine can't scale. If people were marking what's good content and what's not such search engine would be reduced to content curation not organic search and discovery.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#307

Post by jefftk » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:13 PM UTC

I'm seeing a lot of comments along the lines of, "Google shows ads on the SEO-gamed sites that show up in results, so their incentive is to give spammy results". But wouldn't this predict that results would be much better on Bing and other search engines that don't have much presence in the "put ads on random sites" market?

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#308

Post by tchvil » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:14 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #249

nradov wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust DC Rainmaker's reviews of fitness tech products because he always returns products back to the manufacturers after writing reviews. So there's no conflict of interest based on free products. https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews

If companies don't like his reviews, they'll stop sending review units. That hits both in the pocketbook and the race to be one of the earlier reviewers of a new product. Reduced conflict, perhaps, but not none.

In DC Rainmaker's case it is probably the opposite. A fitness product not reviewed by him is a bad signal.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#309

Post by marban » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

pkamb wrote: post #281

A search engine that only indexed Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, and a small number of other "good" sites would get 80% of the way there. No, DDG bang operators don't let you do this. I want an SERP, not a shortcut to a single site's on-site search.

For business news, I do this with https://yup.is

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#310

Post by Ros2 » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

wenbin wrote: post #139

FYI - Google hires 10,000+ search result raters [1], who are contractors, to evaluate search result quality. In an ideal world, you build a thing, and it's done. It runs automatically and prints out money. In reality, you still need human labors to do manual tasks, even in tech industry. [1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-eat/quality-rater...

Thanks for posting this. An acquaintance of mine did this job 6 years ago and I wasn't sure if it still existed.

Crowd-sourced humans are making Google appear more intelligent than they actually are. I always envisioned that spam efforts would just immediately set off an alarm that would be handled by a bot to blacklist you without a human even knowing your site existed, but there still seem to be at least a few ways to game Google's search ratings.