If you were to start a search engine, what stack would you use?
Google CSEs, Bing API, or our own YaCY instances are more or less what we do atm for various topic search engines as we bootstrap Breeze.
Search engines and SEO spam
521–530 of 555 posts
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#522Earlier 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…
One way out is to grow a community of enthusiastic reviewers. LibraryThing succeeded for book reviews. LibraryThing book reviews are better because LibraryThing caters to bookworms.
Goodreads also has a community of enthusiastic reviewers, but because Amazon owns it I'm afraid they don't have much incentive to improve the site or change anything.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, I like others to use keywords like "reddit" or "forum" to get to real humans who I trust and intentions are not to sell via affiliate links. And therein lies the problem. Reddit makes very little money. Forums probably make negative money nowadays. Google has decided to demonetize the organic internet and subsidizes SEO crap and AMP or whatever dumb thing their signals consider valuable. We get what we incentiv…
Did forums ever make money?
yes i think. until they were demonetized
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#524No post body was provided.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#525No post body was provided.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#526The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…
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…
> Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results
Blocking pintrest would be a dream come true.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
PaulG doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Average websites goal is now to keep you on them as long as possible. According to some metric folks, the longer you stay on a website the more money you spend there. Linking to another website destroys that metric. Also if you are going to make a purchase somewhere, any website would try to get a cut of the money you spend by actually sending referral links to the product. So small websites that do not allow this se…
Yup and developers have been allowing the marketing and product teams to break the back button as well opening every external link in a new window instead so users have to keep something open to their site. You always had middle-click to do this, but now it's being forced on users.
I just noticed even the goobers at GitHub break the back button when you click a project link too. I don't know why people champion this brand when they have dark patterns and shoehorn 'social' functions into the proprietary platform.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.
Average websites goal is now to keep you on them as long as possible. According to some metric folks, the longer you stay on a website the more money you spend there. Linking to another website destroys that metric. Also if you are going to make a purchase somewhere, any website would try to get a cut of the money you spend by actually sending referral links to the product. So small websites that do not allow this se…
This is a prisoners dilemma of sorts and the whole free web is loosing in this.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's taking for granted that Google would have become dominant. Perhaps if they hadn't chosen the algorithm they did then they wouldn't have been as overwhelmingly successful. Instead, I could imagine a world in which there are multiple search engines and none of them are all that good. In fact, that's the world I remember from before Google existed. Search was bad but communities were strong and life was good.…
On the glass-half-full side of this: we're getting those communities again! Here on HN, on reddit, for certain topics on various social media (there are pearls there too), on Mastodon, various blog authors, Ars Technica, Quanta, etc. [1] It's just fragmented - i.e., catering to a specific group. Because if it isn't, it's awesome for 5 minutes and then monetization rot sets in. [1] None of these work for everyone; con…
The trouble is, you are no longer "surfing" the Web, you are digging through your RSS feeds and links to interesting sites, fediverse subscriptions etc,.that's not good UX, perid.