Ironically this blog feels like it was written by an SEO bot. There's basically no meat to what it's saying and spends each paragraph rephrasing the title without adding anything.
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New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
131–140 of 205 posts
Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#132As AI generated content takes over the web, algorithmic search will become increasingly useless. In fact, for many things - like what to buy - it already is useless. Your best bet is asking your family/friend/neighborhood groups. If I had trillions like google does, I'd invest in hiring a whole bunch of humans to curate a search index that is actually useful. It's something a new player will never be able to scale up…
> Your best bet is asking your family/friend/neighborhood groups.
Where should the ones you ask get information about the best options?
It seems much more likely that someone bought something for the wrong reason (easiest to find, being fooled by fake reviews etc) and then are recommending it onward because they are reasonably happy with it.
Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#133The expired domain abuse thing --- that's interesting because finding that signal was one of the few things I got done while I was at Google... in November 2006! And I vaguely remember being told that the fix went into the codebase after I identified that it was happening.
If your fix contributed to reducing ad revenue I can bet my money it was intentionally ignored. This is the only thing that matters to them.
Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#134I am interested to see the results of this. I had Kagi but got rid of it due to the cost. The results were a little better overall, but asking Gemini or Bing gets me to the same place faster most of the time. If I have to search manually, independent of the search engine, I am going to have to open like 3-8 tabs to get my answer most of the time. The difference between having Kagi and not having it is a couple more m…
Try out Perplexity. It’s so much better for me personally usually for such things.
Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#135I would really love for Google to provide advanced search capabilities or filters to superusers who know EXACTLY what they are searching for. I wouldn't even mind paying for it tbh.
That's a niche demand with a low chance of serving general audiences. SGE could be a potentially suitable user interface for this use case but I don't think they will integrate it into their entire stack anytime soon given the technical difficulty...
Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#136Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#137As AI generated content takes over the web, algorithmic search will become increasingly useless. In fact, for many things - like what to buy - it already is useless. Your best bet is asking your family/friend/neighborhood groups. If I had trillions like google does, I'd invest in hiring a whole bunch of humans to curate a search index that is actually useful. It's something a new player will never be able to scale up…
> I'd invest in hiring a whole bunch of humans to curate a search index that is actually useful.
This is going to be a honey pot for the antitrust authorities. Google's main defense is that its ranking is done in an algorithmic way and human rating can affect the result only in an indirect manner following their rating guideline, which is carefully reviewed by lawyers. When you add some subjectivity from random human, they occasionally make some unfair mistake then it makes all the way through the media outlets, you know what's going to happen.
Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#138They’ve known about this for years and have done nothing about it because it’s working exactly as intended, and there were few decent alternatives available to us. Now we’re supposed to believe they definitely haven’t been abusing their monopoly, have just realised all this and are taking this grave threat to quality search Very Seriously Indeed, to ensure that you, dear customer, can find what you need. Couldn’t pos…
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Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#139The expired domain abuse thing --- that's interesting because finding that signal was one of the few things I got done while I was at Google... in November 2006! And I vaguely remember being told that the fix went into the codebase after I identified that it was happening.
Interesting you bring this up. We saw something similar happen at another FAANG where the fake review detection mechanisms that had worked so well were suddenly removed from the codebase, among other quality control safeguards.
Safeguards can hard to fight for when they make key numbers go down but improve something else that doesn't (immediately) show up in metrics.
Re: New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like these spam pages work because some people actually like them... That would be a major problem for hand curated indexes.
> So this fall, as I flipped through Michelle Lopez’s new book Weeknight Baking, her recipe for Boxed Mix Brownies, From Scratch caught my eye. Would I finally be able to make homemade brownies that would be just as delicious as the ones from a box? I can’t even fathom how anybody thinks that this is fine on any level (from the mentioned site, the first result about brownies for me, and one of the first few paragraph…
The other advantages of buying a recipe book:
- you can take notes in the margins
- you can find your favorite recipes quickly because the pages are all stained and wrinkled
- you can reward the author for all the time they spent testing and honing those recipes
The real depressing thing here is the amount of whining about "wasted time" from folks looking for free cooking instructions on the 'Net. It's almost as bad as the "gimme teh codez" jerks on forums.
FWIW, I like this brownie recipe (and have purchased the book it comes from, twice): https://www.seriouseats.com/bravetart-glossy-fudge-brownies WARNING: contains even more words than the "love and lemons" page.