Live data from Hacker News

Search engines and SEO spam

twitter.com

531–540 of 555 posts

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#531
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree, he's a pretty good guide to how VCs think, though not always in the ways he wants.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#532
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard an interesting theory the other day: blog viability declined because Google killed Reader. Which indirectly ends up poisoning Google's biggest well, since blogs are an important source of relevant cross-domain links. I'm somewhat skeptical, it seems a little too poetic to blame Google's ultimate downfall on a decision that was notably hated at the time. But it's plausible. If you want it to be a conspiracy th…

Google used to prioritize blogs and original content like forum posts in search results, but they don't anymore.

What do they prioritize now, "reputable" news organizations enrolled in Trusted News Initiative?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#533
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visionary leadership left the company? And arguably it lost its soul and excitement. I genuinely thought when Marissa Mayer was brought in as CEO and announced they bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash, I thought she could actually turn Yahoo! around - that she understood platforms and holistic systems; perhaps she did but her hands were tied, and then they made terrible decisions like banning porn on Tumblr - so b…

Hey man, try some breathing exercises and cold showers if you can - I watched this documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cvhwquPqJ0 and then the original vice documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaMjhwFE1Zw and then tried the breathing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ and cold showers and they've been helping a lot with inflammation! There are tons of benefits of cold showers, so if you ca…

Another frustrating thing for me: well-intentioned people like yourself will chime in and offer advice or suggestions for things they've found highly helpful - and instead of me being able to compile/organize a list of things I've tried and their outcomes, explaining why they didn't help, why I didn't continue them, why there wasn't a net benefit, I instead get reminded that that kind of writing up a complete list is an extremely difficult task for me. I'm only replying to you this morning because I couldn't actually begin responding to you yesterday even though I saw your reply because 1) I had opened my right eye already which allowed the post LASIK eye pain and symptoms to trigger fully (central sensitization/hyperalgesia), and 2) I had begun to do some activity yesterday - namely driving a short distance to my mother's for a late lunch and then take my puppy to an off-leash dog park for an hour - that relatively small amount of movement being enough to really compound/amplify with the seemingly exponentially growing pain/sensitization from the eye pain.

Central sensitization and hyperalgesia is really a different kind of beast when it comes to pain, people including most doctors really seem to have a hard time understanding it. That added stress to my nervous system from opening my right eye and triggering/ramping up the sensitization/pain from just low activity and careful movement was enough to lock up my thinking, and arguably my emotions, but more specifically the locking/the eye pain and increased pain from movement makes fluid thinking have much more friction added to it; one good or as relatable as possible thought experiment for a "normal"/unaffected person may be to imagine the feeling when you get something in your eye and you desperately react to get it out because it's so painful: now imagine that foreign object feeling is immense because it's permanent and broad, it's "a lot of objects" in your eye(s) because your cornea and nerves were sliced across 90%+ of the cornea (and so abnormally/constantly signaling as such), and imagine how your brain/nervous system may try to cope from such an overwhelming/overriding system constantly firing to draw your full attention to what your eye is telling your body is an active/present moment object in your eye - potentially as if you just walked into a sharp object and your eye is signalling for you to literally freeze still because it thinks you're in the moment just done something to critically wound your eye and moving another millimetre or less would threaten your survival (as the evolutionary strength of the reaction has come to dictate).

Well, the answer is some people after LASIK get this severe reaction, their nervous system gets overwhelmed - arguably the more naturally sensitivity, creative, healthy, and grounded people will have stronger/more detrimental symptoms/reaction to the eye damage; central sensitization and hyperalgesia that LASIK for years completely swept under the rug as being possible and only recently admitting to being a potential "side" effect. In fact they purposefully mislabeled what should be called corneal neuralgia syndrome as "dry eye syndrome" to mislead people away from learning that the "dry eye" part is actually on a spectrum of symptoms caused by the damaged cornea/nerves that happens in 100% of their surgeries; non-LASIK done research done has shown up to 40% of people have permanent problems after LASIK, and in 2011 one of the expert FDA advisors, who votes yes to approving LASIK, published a letter to the FDA asking them to immediately recall LASIK because there was data they were ignoring that they should have never been ignoring, and that it should have never been approved in the first place. Part of the medical industrial complex where arguably regulatory and institutional capture has occurred in the name of profits.

So again, I'm writing this out first thing in the morning with my right eye shut still, my eyes having had a reduced level of pain while I slept allowing my nervous system to calm down some, along with recovering from the movement yesterday that compounds with the eye pain and worsens the mental/executive symptoms/dysfunction. There are a few tangents I know I lost track of writing above, I'm not going to be able to go back to insert them, so if what I wrote above doesn't flow well or seems to be missing something then that's why.

To answer you specifically - I've done breath work and cold showers in the past, daily to multiple times daily for weeks, and there was no net benefit and arguably it was added stress to my nervous system that's already overwhelmed from active overriding [eye] pain that can't be reduced. That same eye pain and the friction it added once I'd opened my right eye, and in part I had used a lot of mental energy already writing longer comments on HN - that mental energy otherwise goes to trying to maintain focus/distraction on anything to try to keep me from getting completely sucked in/lost to the pain, the friction that will block mental (including emotional abilities/processing), lead to that small inconsequential reminder or level of frustration triggered from a well-intentioned person offering advice - where I was too blocked, too much friction/resistance from the pain at that point that it took me at least 20 minutes of going back and forth to reading parts of what you wrote then having to leave because of frustration/irritability being triggered because of the very slight pressure/stress that was added to my already overwhelmed nervous system; I'm not sure I'm describing this well here but it's best I can do at the moment.

That's why logically, emotionally I'm already certain it's the compassionate thing to do and I'll forgive myself for not being able to handle the burden nor for being able to handle knowing the burden/consequences I'd be leaving behind, logically I'm only doing the piriformis syndrome surgery as the last thing I try - so if it doesn't have a dramatic reduction in pain and cause a noticeable reduction in my executive dysfunction (my argument or hypothesis is the eye pain, a/the major source of pain could be compounding with another potentially major source of pain [piriformis syndrome, similar to sciatica], so eye pain could be say 33%, the PS could be say 33%, and the compounding could potentially cause runaway/cascading/feedback loop pain of 33%+ - for potentially a 66%+ reduction in pain/sensitization) then I'm gone. Of course I have arguments and proof points from my prior experiences with healing injuries with stem cell treatments as to why the surgery may or may not help, so the outcome is completely uncertain if it will help enough, if my executive function will improve at all, if my quality of life can improve at all, and so the most accurate odds I can give it is a 50/50 shot.

I've also done plenty of water fasting, I did carnivore/high fat red meat only diet for 8 months - now I try to stick to just organic red meat, kale, and raspberries. I've also done many Ayahuasca ceremonies, MDMA therapeutic sessions, massage, acupuncture, etc. There are pros and cons to all of it, some I've been able to maintain because it's at least neutral - other things like acupuncture are intolerable, for example, as after sessions to clear my Wood meridian energy line [3 end points at right eye] then my body is completely calm but then the pain is completely localized at my right eye and then for the following 6-8 hours I feel an intense burning sensation at my right eye - meanwhile feeling the pain and strwss referring from my eye and building up the stress into my body until there's an equilibrium of sorts where the pain level/hypersensitivity/sensitivity level in my body matches the level of pain in my eyes.

My nervous system is very healthy, it's the pain that's overwhelming, short circulating or disrupting different processes. I can't do anything more to reduce the eye pain because the stromal stem cell treatment is up to 5 years away from being clinically available, everything being delayed due to pandemic as well, so my last hope is the piriformis syndrome surgery - for which I have no real or solid reference for how much it might be sensitizing my nervous system - all I know is "sciatica" symptoms bothered me enough 15 years ago for me to first try to investigate it, but that my nervous system could handle that pain along with vast majority of high school football related injuries that I wasn't even aware I had, and it was only after LASIK that my nervous system and therefore mind was disrupter.)

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#534

I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve and that Google is not incentivized to solve. Google wants you to click on ads at the end of the day, full-stop. Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. Ot…

> 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…

What do you mean by demonetizing forums?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#535
Oh so it's not just me... Most recently I was trying to find a way to reset a printer and also fix a certain error code. I search on google and it's filled with irrelevant content, unrelated to the model number I just put in, scam websites, ink sellers, even though I used correct filters such as + sign and the syntax, which is a joke if you think about it. A billion dollar company and this is the best they do. The advanced search is burried, the syntax they have is explained by third parties or burried somewhere in their options.

I jumped onto youtube, I put in the model number, same thing pretty much. I get unrelated videos mixed in with the model number I put in. I'm pretty sure some videos even though the model number is the same is not being shown. Ironically there's a video explaining a certain solution and warning people not to fall victim of another video scamming people, which the dislike has been removed, comments obviously deleted so some people may be calling and getting scammed.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#536
post #366

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.

"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.

You're technically right. You'd be more right if you said people chased the highest spots on search engines for the widest breadth of queries.

If there were implicit alphabetical ordering of search results I guarantee you'd end up a bias toward A's, Z's or otherwise in people trying to get top spots.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#537
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people are still writing this kind of content, but you have to look elsewhere for it: Reddit, Facebook, Twitter; to name the obvious ones. It’s also harder to find, but you can find all kinds of personal content written in comments and posts on these sites.

I realize that this is a hard thing to 'prove', but I am personally certain that the amount and quality of such things has dropped significantly from a decade ago. Not to zero. You can still find things tucked away in a post on reddit or the like. Almost never, as far as I have experienced, on Facebook or its ilk, as the affordances are different. I genuinely think there has been a loss.

It used to have positive utility, as before you were acquainting with people you would literally have had nil chance of acquainting with before.

Now?

Nope. Putting anything out there is basically just doing the rest of the world's Open Source Intel for them. Maybe it isn't the Net that changed. It's just there's way more sharks out there that can't just leave well enough alone.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is a smaller niche market. SEMrush is a tool used in the digital marketing industry that is now public and has a multi-billion dollar market cap. It originally started as a search engine. When they didnt gain traction they used the tech to monitor Google and interface it for customers who are tracking their performance in search results (and much more).

Can I ask what you mean by public? It's not open source as far I know and there's only the free trial way to try it.

Probably that they completed an IPO (initial _public_ offering)

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

https://garlictoum.com/

This is great. I've been juicing a lot lately and every site you go to is full of adds and useless content and you have to click `Jump To Recipe`.

1 thing that would be helpful is to add in the ingredient amounts.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#540
Big money in SEO, I had an acquaintance all the way back in the early 2000s that had tens of thousands of domains that he ran experiments on to reverse engineer how the algorithm worked. He also had tens of thousands he ran SEO/link networks on. He made a lot of money for a long time by being front page for a lot of terms.

Same thing is happening today, there are just more of these actors doing it. They just game the algorithm for terms related to products. Notice you still get decent serps in Google for terms that don’t relate to something that can be sold using an affiliate link.

Fairly easy problem to fix, but Google would have to hire a black hat to help solve it. But the good ones ain’t gonna work there.

Post reply on HN