Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Search engines and SEO spam

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 555 posts

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#441

Post by PeterisP »

mrkramer wrote: post #396
emerongi wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wasn't speaking about that kind of entrepreneurism but about making legal software and legal web services that solve problems and are useful. So many Russian hackers got arrested when they travelled somewhere outside Russia and now they are serving 10 or 20 year sentences in US jails.

> So many Russian hackers got arrested when they travelled somewhere outside Russia

How many? 20? 30? 50? IMHO the cases are rare (and get widely publicized whenever that happens, creating a disproportional visibility), you get a couple captures per year but the number is just a tiny fraction of the actual participants, more like an exception than the rule.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#442

Post by amelius »

jonathankoren wrote: post #369
wussboy wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Perhaps it could work if the algorithm changed its algorithm all the time.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#443

Post by jart »

floatingatoll wrote: post #353
jart wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand correctly, you're saying you'd create an exclusive webring, but the rule to joining is that you have to Disallow: Google, Bing, etc. in your robots.txt file. That sounds outrageous, but speaking as a content creator, I wouldn't be giving up much. My blog gets about 3% of its traffic from search engines. I have no idea who these visitors are or what they searched for, since browsers no longer send refe…

No, you can join the webring and be still indexed by Google, but the sitelist of the webring cannot be. That’s all. It prevents Google from leeching off the human curation and not paying a fair market value for it. Given that Google makes billions of dollars a year on pagerank data, webring curators got screwed over pretty hard already once by Google twenty years ago, so no reason to allow it again.

So the webring would use rel="nofollow" hyperlinks? Blog authors might see that as an insult.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#444

Post by B-Con »

mrkramer wrote: post #438
Beldin wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 nic…

>Google's algorithms didn't create this situation; people chasing high Google rankings did. But lowkey Google incentivized such behaviour by not being open and transparent on how exactly their algorithms work.

That would have allowed people to artificially chase rankings even faster and more efficiently. It makes the problem worse, not better.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#445

Post by marginalia_nu »

aantix wrote: post #344
marginalia_nu wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I rum all custom software, I feel most off the shelf solutions aren't very resource effective.

The server has 128 Gb RAM and the index currently fits on a single 1 Tb SSD + an Optane drive of 480 Gb.

I find the average document to clock in at 7 Kb, in terms of raw HTML. In the index that's, dunno, probably less than 1 KB/doc.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#446

Post by mrkramer »

PaulHoule wrote: post #200
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…

The custom search engine is harder than you'd think. Google's search algorithm is tuned up for searching the whole web. It turns out the heuristics you need are very different depending on the size of the collection. When Gerard Salton was doing IR experiments with punched cards he was working with collections of as little as 70 documents and in that case you are going to be very concerned about recall and not precis…

I agree with you that "true personalized search eludes them because they don't have enough data from you to tune up a model for you". That's what Larry Page said as well "Google doesn't know what you know". His ultimate goal is Answer Machine powered by AI but that's not happening anytime soon. I think internet search engines that we are using today are primitive compared to what we will have in the future.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#447

Post by amelius »

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…

Regarding finding reviews, I think we have to look at the problem in a different way.

Instead of having 1 search engine which returns the same results for everyone (depending on interests, etc, like Google does), we could have trust networks. E.g. you trust a few people, those people trust other people. From this network you could build something like PageRank, which computes some kind of transitive closure of trust for one given person. This will then determine the search ordering for that person.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#449

Post by oefnak »

donio wrote: post #430

What I am looking for is control over the results. Personalized blacklists and lists of sites to be (de)prioritized and also the ability to subscribe to community curated versions of the same. And to be clear I want to be able to control these myself, not algorithm trying to guess my preferences. No guessing, just do what I tell you to. Multiple search profiles with different priorities would be nice too. I would lik…

You can use ublock origin to blacklist domains from your search results. I do this for example with codegrepper and other sites who just copy paste Stack Overflow comments in a less readable format.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#450

Post by mrkramer »

saalweachter wrote: post #213
edrxty wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with all of this is it would help us greatly, but it would be useless to the 99% that the internet is increasingly being designed for. Modern UI trends are becoming obsessed with removing as many options and features as possible so the dumbest humans bordering on smartest vegetables can still use the service.

And customization breaks caching.

It does not if there are common interests and characteristics among users. Let's say for example I'm a young African-American girl who wants to learn how to code and I query "how can African-American girl learn coding?" and Google shows me Black Girls Code a non-profit organization that focuses on providing technology education for African-American girls. Considering that Google knows that I'm African-American girl and that I want to learn coding, how many other African-American girls want to learn coding? Probably many so caching doesn't break customization and personalization as long as Google knows my characteristics and interests and characteristics and interests of other people that are similar to mine.
Post reply on HN