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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#361

Post by giantrobot »

mc32 wrote: post #266
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…

Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues: 1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.) 2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge. 3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands com…

> Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues

Review sites suffer from a singular problem. They are overwhelmingly SEO spam content farms. People go find some product niche and pay some Fivvver/whatever people to write literally fake reviews of products. Because they're pulling all the SEO tricks and are in a niche category they shoot to the top of search results for that niche.

Their reviews sound realistic and viable but they're pure fantasy. The writers never touch the products being reviewed. Many times they'll pull details from Amazon listings (including factual errors) and even other "review" sites.

Once they get established in their niche they'll accept paid placement from product manufacturers without marking it as such. A single scammer might own dozens of these sites, even supposedly competing ones.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#362

Post by Veen »

renewiltord wrote: post #359
Veen wrote: post #36

> Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? Back in the olden days, there were lots of organizations that collated high quality content from the best writers. They nurtured expert writers and paid them well. They fact-checked the content and employed diligent editors and proofreaders so it was accurate and well-written. Over the years, they'd build a reputation for reli…

Those guys covered literally nothing compared to what I can get recommendations for with “product type Reddit”. No thanks.

You may not be aware, but the written word can be used for more than product reviews.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#363

Post by citizenkeen »

GarlicToum wrote: post #334
Veen wrote: post #36

> Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? Back in the olden days, there were lots of organizations that collated high quality content from the best writers. They nurtured expert writers and paid them well. They fact-checked the content and employed diligent editors and proofreaders so it was accurate and well-written. Over the years, they'd build a reputation for reli…

I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search. So from an individual developer perspective, it's very hard to get people to change their habits. And Google/duck/Bing is the one stop shop. It's still out there, but I haven't worked on it much lately. I always think that if I had some good a…

(1) What is it?

(2) Do you have a bang on DuckDuckGo? I'm pretty aggressive with bangs, and I suspect a lot of DDG users end up being aggressive with them as well.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#364

Post by sam0x17 »

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…

> 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 in practice this is actually largely untrue -- with technology products, video games, movies, and just about anything I can think of, most well known reviewers are given early access to the product so that reviews can come out on or before day 1 of general availability. That said this does create a dirth of 100% trustworthy reviews on day 1 since companies are naturally disincentivized from giving early access to reviewers who they know are going to write a negative review.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#365

Post by onion2k »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #318
hubraumhugo wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed here, but in your second bullet, people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition etc. It just so happens that these "forums" have built in voting systems that they spend time preventing from being gamed so the search engine doesn't have to. Not sure if this is a good model for a search engine, but it does work to a small degree in those forums.

people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition

Internet points are a terrible reason to write anything. They're completely meaningless. We should all judge comments on their own merit and not because the author has a lot of karma. Apart from mine, obvs.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#366

Post by Beldin »

chongli wrote: post #280
ijidak wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, years ago, linking to lower reputation sites would drain your page rank. So everyone worried about SEO became afraid to link to anything except: 1) Their own website 2) High reputation sites like NYTimes, etc. It's sad. Makes it harder to navigate the web.

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.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

-- Goodhart's Law.

Google's algorithms didn't create this situation; people chasing high Google rankings did. Had Google used completely different algorithms yet became equally dominant, people still would have poured their hearts and souls into getting higher rankings.

Basically, an application of the tragedy of the commons. Or: "why we can't have nice things".

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#367

Post by anfilt »

An other thing does not help is how some sites gate content from being scraped. Also forums are not as popular today again reducing the amount of indexable content. Think about some sites have migrated from using forums to something like discord.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#368

Post by renewiltord »

Veen wrote: post #362
renewiltord wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those guys covered literally nothing compared to what I can get recommendations for with “product type Reddit”. No thanks.

You may not be aware, but the written word can be used for more than product reviews.

Oh, they were just usually wrong on everything else. Fortunately, these days we have individuals debunking the nonsense. Back then, people just uncritically believed total horseshit.

The invariant has always been: find people who make falsifiable predictions and improve. Back then the pool was small and you had no choice. Now, fortunately we have a choice.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#369

Post by jonathankoren »

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?

Different, but not better.

The incentives to game the algo remain. People adapt to the environment.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#370

Post by Volker_W »

ufo wrote: post #326
nkrisc wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all. Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.

I think the bigger issue now is that more content is inside social media "silos" like twitter, instagram or youtube. I don't have the numbers though.

Why is this a problem? Can't google index social media silos?
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