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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#511

Post by Kerrick »

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…

While I agree with everything you said in general, Ken Rockwell seems to buck the trend for photography gear, especially lenses.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#512

Post by rapind »

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…

Popular HN post circa 2015: “Content Marketing Handbook“

Popular HN post in 2022: “Search engines and SEO spam”.

Inevitable popular HN post 2025: “How to avoid getting flagged when content marketing“.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#513

Post by Arbalest »

Jorengarenar wrote: post #387
noduerme wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm going to guess Paul Graham, who wrote the tweet. One of the founders of YCombinator and HN (just in case people who read this don't know).

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#514

Post by denton-scratch »

freeflight wrote: post #409
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 find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all. Most of these many more people are mobile users, where creating long-style text content can be quite bothersome. What ain't bothersome, with a smartphone, is taking pictures and videos to slap filters over them, alas that's why we are where we are with TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the…

> TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web

For my part, I'm glad these fora aren't indexed well; I don't want my search results dominated by single-sentence posts and photos. In particular, I don't have accounts on any of these services.

I'd be happy if search engines would decline to index sites behind paywalls. Links to Medium, Substack and Washpo are very common, and if the first thing I see is a popup demand for payment, that browser-tab gets closed.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#515

Post by nucleardog »

lucasyvas wrote: post #456
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…

To address your issue, we can simply accept that certain information cannot ever be available day and date. The best results I've ever got from Google is by doing > site:reddit.com If I want to know about headphones, or TVs, I'll find better answers in the sidebar than anywhere else on the Internet. But, I will not be able to find those quality answers until a reasonable period of time has passed where products can b…

I do the same reddit.com trick, but for TVs and headphones (and anything else they cover), I can wholeheartedly recommend rtings.com.

They're in Montreal. They buy their products retail. They get their funding through subscriptions and affiliate links. Overall ratings are formulaic based on measurements applicable to the category. The formulas are available on the site. So are all the test designs.

They're surprisingly thorough too--when I was shopping for some over-ear headphones I really appreciated that they measured the clamping force (when you wear glasses, something that clamps onto the arms too hard gets really uncomfortable pretty quickly) and breathability (temperature differential between your ears and ambient when wearing the headphones). These are pretty important for all-day comfort but don't really factor in most of the time.

Their methodology is all available:

Breathability: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/breathability Clamping Force: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/comfort#compa...

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#516

Post by naravara »

ajmurmann wrote: post #480
marcosdumay wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if implemented by the monopolist. People's best chance is stopping using Google and pushing for it to be broken-up.

I wonder if punishing presence of advertisements would filter out most pages that are SEO'd to the max and instead promote "labors of love" type pages.

Google owns the largest online advertising network though, so that’s definitely not where their bread is buttered.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#517

Post by dehrmann »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #482
dehrmann wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the CPGs, like Coke and P&G Did any of these heavily buy newspaper ads before 2000? Definitely TV, possibly magazine, but newspaper? I just don't remember seeing ads for Tide in newspapers.

I thought for a moment about your reply. Do you remember Saturday / Sunday coupon sections? These are essentially adverts. Those are 100% consumables -- like branded health, food, and cleaning products.

That's a fair point; I forgot about those. That said, the earlier comment was on conversion metrics. Unlike brand advertising, brands track conversion metrics on coupons closely.

I stand by my point that tech just exposed a bad business model. Newspapers were only viable because they were the ~only game in town.

Now what actually killed newspapers wasn't search, it was Craigslist killing the classifieds...at least according to a study Google paid for.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#518

Post by denton-scratch »

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.

> making legal software and legal web services

SEO is perfectly legal. So is spamming, regrettably.

I think Goo no longer cares about the quality of search results; they have other business priorities, so SEO works. Spam is another thing again; we still, after 30 years, don't have an agreed definition of spam. We still don't have a flawless spam filter - far from it. So it astonishes me how much email spam I get promoting SEO services for my non-existent website.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#519

Post by aghilmort »

baby wrote: post #8

Searching code is also impossible on Google. If there’s a competing search engine for that I’ll use it at least for this use case.

* we're adding a code finder as a topic search engine on Breeze * publicwww.com is also a good source code search engine

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#520

Post by wyclif »

jonathankoren wrote: post #505
amelius wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You don’t think Google does this already?

Paul Graham says Google doesn't want to follow anybody down that road (human intervention in search). But ISTM the problem is that even though they don't, they can just throw a giant pile of money at it if they needed to crush a competitor. Also, VC will refuse to invest in anybody doing it because Google.
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