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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#381

Post by Volker_W »

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…

> 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.

Link please

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#382

Post by smk_ »

Volker_W wrote: post #380
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…

What does SV stand for?

Silicon Valley

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#383

Post by leobg »

foobarian wrote: post #179
deltarholamda wrote: post #152

The quote-Tweeted thread mentioned recipes as one of the things that has been SEObliterated. It's a great example of the problem, and also a great example of the problems any solution will encounter. Recipes have become a bellwether Internet problem. In the past, your great-grandmother had a card file with a bunch of 3x5 index cards with the ingredients and instructions on how to make everything, and they pretty much…

The recipe problem is mostly because actual recipes are not copyrightable. See e.g. https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/03/24/recipes-copyright...

Neither are ideas. Hence article spinning and book summaries.

We need a semantic dupe filter: If it doesn’t add new facts or new ideas, treat it as an identical copy.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#384

Post by emerongi »

mrkramer wrote: post #378
adventured wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite right. Those are the main drivers and it's due to lack economic opportunities. Hacking heavily originated in the US because the US practically built the entire modern tech universe from the ground up. The US was far out in front when it came to utilizing the Internet and the Web, so of course unethical people in the US pioneered various types of online crime, the US was the early adopter. If you're an eli…

>You're an elite engineer in Russia, top ~1%-3% globally. What do you do? Earn several thousand dollars per month doing legit software development in Russia Become software entrepreneur? And many international software companies have software development teams and presence in Russia.

> Become software entrepreneur?

Exactly. Hacking for hire, making cheats, botnets, SEO farms, selling exploits and hacked social media accounts; practically anything you can think of that US software engineers can't be bothered with, as they already earn a healthy salary. That is entrepreneurism.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#385

Post by [deleted] »

Volker_W wrote: post #380
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…

What does SV stand for?

[deleted]

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#386

Post by DangitBobby »

basch wrote: post #350
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…

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.

That's all fine and dandy, but the goal isn't to just make some good sites a bit easier to find, it's to keep the top of your search results from being interspersed or superseded by SEO spam. Unless I misunderstood your suggestion.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#387

Post by Jorengarenar »

noduerme wrote: post #337
sillysaurusx wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has he been wrong about?

Okay. I was gonna respond with something snarky about what a crappy mod he was, or how he was a Saint and you don't deserve to worship at his functional feet. But I'll tell you what he was wrong about: He was, as a leader and a human and a mod, petty . He pied pipered himself into a sweet spot and no one would deny he's a good coder, but there the ego took off and forever left behind a skidmark. The cool exterior, th…

What in the world are you babbling about? Who here does worship who?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#388

Post by allochthon »

Volker_W wrote: post #380
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…

What does SV stand for?

Silicon Valley, i.e., the California tech scene.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#389

Post by treis »

chongli wrote: post #286
mc32 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers. In my experience, the best reviewers are hobbyists. The thing is, it's not reviews that are their hobby. Rather, they review the products go along with their hobby. So, for my hobbies (espresso and aquariums), there are tons of easily accessible reviews on all kinds of aqu…

People like to talk about their work too. There's plenty of those sort of reviews out there. Mostly on reddit because like others have mentioned organic search results are completely gamed.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#390

Post by Spivak »

thereddaikon wrote: post #372
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…

Its a double edged sword. Reviews take effort so you want to make them easier for customers to write. But making them easier for your users also makes them easier for those trying to game the system. This is why Amazon's product reviews are useless as well as pretty much any other community based review system. But on top of that you do have the problem of whether or not someone is really qualified to write a review.…

It's not a question of whether someone is qualified or not, everybody is more than qualified to write about their own feelings toward a product they bought or service they used. In fact no one is more qualified to talk about their own feelings and experience. How useful that review is to you is a combination of the writing quality and depth, and how similar the reviewer is to your own experience and preferences.

Professional critics usually try to distinguish themselves by producing well written in-depth reviews but not from their own perspective but that of a hypothetical everyman who, ideally, is similar enough to a critical mass of their audience.

So it always interests me when people complain about popular gaming review sites being out of touch because almost always it's the reader that's out of touch but doesn't realize their bubble. It's not an absolute rule but I'm in enough niche hobbies to realize that my desires for products are way out of whack.

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