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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#341

Post by anovikov »

Sadly the only way of fixing it is making search results unattractive for cracking. Ranking of a page in search results is a metric, and every metric is a hackable metric. Only way they won't be hacked is if there's no incentive to.

Sure a search engine that specialises on narrow area of knowledge without much money in it, can be very relevant and bullshit-free.

But there's no way to make it work for the general web search. People hack things. If they didn't we'd have Communism built by now (yes the "good" - classless, stateless one).

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#342

Post by behnamoh »

skilled wrote: post #277
vntok wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very interesting approach. Do you have traffic data collection on your blog?

I collect post views, but not using Google Analytics or anything like that. I built a pretty substantial developer blog (tips, resources, etc,.) back in 2014. I think it peaked at around 350,000 monthly visitors after 12 months. Later on, I sold it because I needed the money. Not so much that I didn't want to keep working on it. Unfortunately, the new owners didn't have any idea how to maintain a "healthy" content bl…

Could it also be due to reduction of public interest in blogs over the past few years? Most stuff are now published in the form of vlogs instead of blogs. I do miss the good old blogs era, tho, and I wish there were still high quality blogs around.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#343

Post by topicseed »

ijidak wrote: post #264
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…

In some ways paid search disincentives Google from delivering quality organic results. The larger the gap between paid results vs organic results, the more users click the paid results. Not sure how to solve this problem.

But paid results do not always, if ever, answer the search query better in any shape of form.

So this would end up with displeased users and bounce backs.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#344

Post by aantix »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #324
aantix wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, I run a 100M-index off consumer hardware in my living room. Very doable if you avoid bloated off the shelf solutions.

What search software do you run?

What sort of memory and space do you have on the single server?

What's the average document size that you index?

Genuinely curious on how doable a modern search engine is on modern hardware.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#345

Post by ceejayoz »

nradov wrote: post #311
ceejayoz wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If companies don't send him review units then he just buys them retail. He has already done this for many products.

Yes, I'm aware. That's less money in his pocket, and less ability to have the review be available on or before the product launch. There's still some conflict of interest, even if it's lessened.

Only purchasing review units at retail would remove this conflict.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#346

Post by marcosdumay »

wussboy wrote: post #315
chongli wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bang on. Saying that "there isn't anything out there anymore" is missing the point: Google's algorithms created this situation , intentionally or not. Before Google, people linked to what they wanted and communities would naturally cluster around topics of interest. Google came in and made reputation into a currency which effectively destroyed all these communities through incentivizing selfishness.

Surely there is just a different algo that could bring about better communities?

Only if implemented by the monopolist.

People's best chance is stopping using Google and pushing for it to be broken-up.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#347

Post by ZetaZero »

frenchyatwork wrote: post #145
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…

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…

That's an interesting observation. IMO, we stopped linking to good content because Google was good at finding it. Now Google is suffering, and we need to go back to doing more links.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#348

Post by basch »

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.

How do you compare 3 or 4 videos before watching them? Watching video reviews of the reviewers?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#349

Post by ffhhj »

ringworld wrote: post #107
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…

You may be interested in searX - it refers to data sources as Engines; you have the ability to run your own instance (or use a public shared one) and only enable engines you want results from (reddit, stackoverflow etc.). Build your own meta-engine recipe, basically. https://searx.space to learn / get started. Find one and visit it, click Preferences upper right then follow your schnoz.

The results include all the SEO spam that infected Google, ie. SO clones. How is it better?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#350

Post by basch »

gorbachev wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Isn't that what google Programmable Search is?

https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=dc408db269da4e769 (try searching for something you want a review of)

Make a search, whitelist the domains. Every time you run into a good review site, add it to the searchable list.

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