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Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

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Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#61

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

> cleaning up the spam I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but I think Google is now fully in the 'optimize for engagement' camp. If that's what they're doing, it's by definition not spam (from their point of view) if people are clicking on it more than the non-spam results. Again, only my guess as to what's going on. I don't see another good explanation for them only serving cloned Stackoverflow and top X lists for ba…

From a user point of view, a search engine’s job is to link you away from the search engine, so how does a search engine measure engagement? Is it time on page or maybe number of searches performed? When you don’t have viable competitors both of those are improved by worse search results. Even number of ads clicked would be improved with worse search results because ads don’t have as much competition for your attention when there are no relevant results on the page.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#62
post #54
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: git, GitHub and GitLab switched the default branch name from master to main. - https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-the-default-branch-... - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/03/10/new-git-default-bra...

With the consequence that the default branch now differs between locally and remotely initiated repositories

For old versions of git, yes.

However, recent versions come with "main" as the default.

And since 2.28, released more than a year ago, we have the option to change the default:

    git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a word for this tendency to say, "it's someone else's job" as a justification for doing nothing at all to help or improve one's own circumstances? I see more and more of it in the public discourse over the last years and it kind of bothers me. I see it a lot in conversations related to poverty or climate change, but it is as we see here by no means exclusive to those topics. To the original replyer: you coul…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

I think the question was specifically about declining to improve one's own circumstances because someone else could, not declining to help someone else. That's different from the bystander effect as usually conceived. The theoretical bystander effect is something like "Someone is being attacked, I could call 911 but someone else will;" this is perhaps something like "I am being attacked, I could scream for help but other people will notice anyway" - but really more like "I can't cross the street in front of my house because the storm drains by the crosswalk are clogged, I could rake them but the city is supposed to do that."

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#65
TL;DR: I strongly suspect that relatively small, personally-curated lists will be much more appropriate and highly effective. These might be augmented with specific classifications, but probably not on a widespread basis.

Though the proposed solution borrows heavily from concepts long used in email and Usenet spam, there are a few critical distinction in SEO SERP[1] spam which both make a widely-crowdsourced listing less applicable and less necessary.

In the case of email, your inbox is an unlimited resource to the spammers --- there's effectively no limit to how much spam they can throw at it. As there are also an effectively limitless set of source addresses (by either domain name or IPv6 addresses), and because email/Usenet spam is itself a quantity/numbers game with rapidly shifting origins, collectively-source and curated blocklists have value.[2]

A SERP is itself a finite resource --- the default is to display 10 results, and not making it into the top ten provides little reward. Moreover, high ranking search takes some effort and time to achieve, it's not like in email where a new server can spin up and immediately start deluging targets.

My experience with annoyances matching this sort (stream-based social media is one example) is that blocking a relatively small number of high-profile annoyances hugely improves signal/noise ratios. And I think that will be the case with SERPs as well. There are a half-dozen or so sites which tend to dominate results in most cases, and those can be individually blocklisted (if the capability exists). If more appear, they can similarly be removed.

The other factor is that quite a few sites which some people find exceedingly annoying and spammish, others find appealing. Coming to agreement on what to block, and classifications of such domains / sites, is likely to be difficult and/or contentious. There may be exceptions in specific instances (hence: specific classifications of unwanted results), but less so in the general case.

I might be wrong. The case of DNS adbloc, with PiHole as the classic example, shows that very large lists can be compiled and used. My own Web adblock / malware block configurations have typically had from ~10k to ~100k of thousands of entries. That said, the really heavy lifting is typically done by a much smaller fraction of the total. Power laws and Zipf functions work in your advantage here.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Search engine results page, that is, what you see in response to a query.

2. Even in the case of email spam, the principle value is largely from curated lists, usually by experts, e.g., Spamhaus.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#66
Huzzah, that extension supports other browser engines as well. It's not nearly as atrocious an issue on DuckDuckGo but there are still some of those re-post heavy sites that aggressively get through, as well as some low quality content farms. It's nice to have a tool available to do local/personal fine grained refinement.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#67
This looks like a big, time-consuming project that would rely on a private Google API that can change any time. I think it's not worth to invest your effort into that. I wish more people would help to improve FLOSS, peer-to-peer search engine YaCy instead, https://yacy.net.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#68

Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?

Instead of spending energy to change Google, why not just leave them for good?

Start with changing default search engine to DuckDuckGo or something else, install uBlockOrigin and Privacy Badger to disable tracking, and gradualy reduce using every Google or application, starting with Chrome.

Be the change you want to see.

Re: Ask HN: Let's build an HN uBlacklist to improve our Google search results?

#70
post #47

Quoted post unavailable.

Interesting. I'm curious as to what you use instead of "whitelist" and "greylist"?

Whitelisting and greylisting is still fine. The current movement (primarily in the USA, but not only) to replace the word black where the meaning is associated with something negative is quite superficial and happy with simple swaps. And this fine because if we went deeper, we would have many problems related to the fact that many positive values are associated with light and many negative with darkness. So people would either have to rewrite the fundamentals of our culture (and maybe even biology), or to accept the fact that these two - the pigments in our skin, which is neither white nor black btw, and the culturally-influenced meanings of various colors - belong to two different semantic planes.
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