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

Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

blog.searchmysite.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 391 posts

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#61

Post by 6510 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #49
albatrosstrophy wrote: post #6

Ona tangential note, I remember a time when Google had the option to search only for 'discussions'. The results were amazing and accurate as it scoured online forums. Almost all issue I had (was following the rooting scene closely back then) were quickly resolved. Then suddenly it got removed for reasons unknown to me. Anyone knows if it's replicatable today?

I have a suspicion they removed it because of the amount of spam on those forums. There's tons of abandoned forums that are only occupied by spambots. There's even pretty convincing looking accounts and messages that turn out to be spam in the end, once they start trying to post links. I have Akismet on the comment section of the Wordpress front-end of the site I run, it basically said something like 99.99% of attemp…

Everyone is a spammer according to Akismet. I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of that 99.9999% is false positives.

You could start a website for people you don't like, flag all the comments as spam and they wont be allowed to post anything elsewhere - forever!

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#62

Post by Teandw »

This guy throws multiple reasons/conspiracies out there on why the website is really struggling to gain literally any sort of traction. Web is all bots, search engines not promoting competitors and being drowned out by SEO spam, yet he's failing to see the most obvious reason... the reason nearly all websites don't gain traction...

Because it's a bad website. It provides no value to the user. I put in a few search terms and had no relevant search results back. What use is a search engine that can't find what I'm searching for?

Maybe if that was improved he may see traction.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#65

Post by kmlx »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #35
FargaColora wrote: post #27

You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!). I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there. If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just…

The internet itself is probably gonna die soon anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones, all with heavy filtering at the borders. I'm happy to have experienced the free internet. Truly a jewel of humanity.

> I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks

i think it already has.

the Great Firewall of China is the classic example, but I think the trend started in the west with the Right to be forgotten/right to erasure in Europe, and subsequent HTTP Status 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons. GDPR just further cemented the split between Europe and the rest, and the new DMA & DSA regulation in the European Union finally makes it clear. The writing is of course on the wall, so countries like India or Australia aren't too far behind. Places like California also have their own "right to be forgotten", and I'm sure the US will not be left behind for too long before we see regulation further splitting their internet from the RoW. And I don't think the RoW will hold off much longer till it also splits into multiple big blocks. It's the start of the new "nationalist" internet, and I'm sure we'll all be poorer because of it.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#66

Post by 7sidedmarble »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #35
FargaColora wrote: post #27

You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!). I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there. If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just…

The internet itself is probably gonna die soon anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones, all with heavy filtering at the borders. I'm happy to have experienced the free internet. Truly a jewel of humanity.

The networking may have been open like that, but I'm not sure the content ever was. It seems to me like a lot of internet users consume mainly the content of sites from their country. Kind of hard to blame them when that content is probably going to download fastest. But the language barrier has also kept the internet from becoming truly global.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#68

Post by dreen »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #35
FargaColora wrote: post #27

You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!). I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there. If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just…

The internet itself is probably gonna die soon anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it. I think it'll eventually fragment into multiple segregated continental networks, if not national ones, all with heavy filtering at the borders. I'm happy to have experienced the free internet. Truly a jewel of humanity.

I think this was inevitable all along, something similar happened to radio if I'm not mistaken.

However, the good news is that we will never stop reinventing everything. The real value of the old internet was showing us what is possible.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#69

Post by fifticon »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54
FargaColora wrote: post #27

You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!). I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there. If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just…

I built my search engine in part to explore whether this was actually true, and I don't think it actually is. There's still a lot of organic human-made content still out there, possibly more than ever, it's just not able to compete with the SEO industry that completely displaces it from Google and social media.

I second that independent sites exist - I maintain my own website on a personally run server. There are dozens of us! to quote a quaint phrase.

Re: Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots

#70

Post by api »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54
FargaColora wrote: post #27

You mention the "Dead Internet Theory" (not heard that phrase before!). I agree: the WWW Internet is dead, that is your problem. No-one visits websites anymore, everyone has moved to the 10 biggest websites and all data is now siloed there. If I want to search for something topical and relevant, I go to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, Instagram, Google Maps, Discord etc. The general Internet is dead: it's just…

I built my search engine in part to explore whether this was actually true, and I don't think it actually is. There's still a lot of organic human-made content still out there, possibly more than ever, it's just not able to compete with the SEO industry that completely displaces it from Google and social media.

All open systems are destroyed by spam once they become popular enough to be profitable targets. This will eventually happen to the Fediverse too. If there is money to be made pissing all over the commons, the commons will be pissed all over.

It even happens to proprietary silos if they are too open. Look at how many bots and spammers infest social media. Propaganda and disinformation can also be considered a form of spam.

I realize this sounds cynical but don’t shoot the messenger. It’s just something I’ve learned watching the Internet evolve since the middle 1990s. Spam eats everything it can.

IMHO the future is enclaves and invite only communities. The Internet is a dark forest.

Post reply on HN