Rap Genius is Back on Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#161

Post by EdwardDiego » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 12:46 AM UTC

blumkvist wrote: post #151

aaronwall wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try. Removing 200 links out of nearly 200,000 links in a holiday week is not a lot of work. In fact, Google has told others waiting to be reconsidered that the wait time is multiple weeks. https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/statuses/418734227228606464 Further, some sites which submitted reconsideration requests before RapGenius was penalized have not received a response. And in many such cases those other sites: h…

A very well known and funded business gets preferential treatment. BOO-HOO. Do you think Bill Gates waits on a line at the bank? At the mayor's office? Anywhere at all? In real life if you are powerful, you get respect. There is no such thing as fairness. It's a paradigm of the feeble minded. Most likely a defense mechanism - "look guys, he cheated on the exam, let's tell the teacher!".

Someone took the Godfather to heart.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#162

Post by aerolite » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 12:55 AM UTC

friscobob wrote: post #118

argonaut wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disavow?

I've tried the disavow. Seen no indication that it had any effect. There were 31 thousand new backlinks added on December 31st (Holy shit, I just noticed that. WTF!). Another 1300 added on the 1st of January. It's normally 100 or 200 a day. Not sure how I'm supposed to manage the disavow process when I get that many new spammy inbound links a day.

maserati problem

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#163

Post by dreamfactory » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 12:59 AM UTC

nknighthb wrote: post #158

dreamfactory wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user I care whether Google finds me the most relevant results from the biggest haystack or whether it editorialises those results - it's a big distinction. By that measure I'd say they definitely _shouldn't_ be penalising sites for finding loopholes in their algorithms but should simply close those holes up.

Whether a search engine presents "the most relevant results" is a subjective determination that can only be made with certainty on a per-user basis. I'm confident in this assertion because people have, at various times, claimed that other search engines provide them more relevant results, yet for me, those search engines almost always failed to even match Google, and never exceeded it. This was also the case pre-Goog…

> what some bureaucrat has decided

That is precisely my point.

(And if you are looking for personalisation, an algorithm isn't necessarily counter to that but a global smack-ban on behaviours most certainly is.)

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#164

Post by friscobob » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 1:07 AM UTC

aerolite wrote: post #162

friscobob wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried the disavow. Seen no indication that it had any effect. There were 31 thousand new backlinks added on December 31st (Holy shit, I just noticed that. WTF!). Another 1300 added on the 1st of January. It's normally 100 or 200 a day. Not sure how I'm supposed to manage the disavow process when I get that many new spammy inbound links a day.

maserati problem

Why would you say that? This is impacting my Google search results TODAY. If I turn off Adwords, my leads drop to virtually nothing...

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#165

Post by nknighthb » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 1:11 AM UTC

dreamfactory wrote: post #163

nknighthb wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether a search engine presents "the most relevant results" is a subjective determination that can only be made with certainty on a per-user basis. I'm confident in this assertion because people have, at various times, claimed that other search engines provide them more relevant results, yet for me, those search engines almost always failed to even match Google, and never exceeded it. This was also the case pre-Goog…

> what some bureaucrat has decided That is precisely my point. (And if you are looking for personalisation, an algorithm isn't necessarily counter to that but a global smack-ban on behaviours most certainly is.)

Government bureaucrat. I don't care if Google, Microsoft, or whoever else has humans who directly modify search results. I'm free to choose among the competing search engines based on the value they provide me.

Any external notion of correctness imposed industry-wide will destroy that choice.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#166

Post by blauwbilgorgel » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 1:12 AM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #89

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to give both Rap Genius and Google the benefit of the doubt. I like to believe that Google checked the link profile again and found a large amount of low-quality links removed. Google would not remove a penalty if the spammy links were still abundant. So that they are out of a manual penalty is justified. Rap Genius showed good intentions to comply with the guidelines. They went out of their way to clean up th…

This was not greyhat. This was blackhat. Paying money for inbound links on keywords that trasnfer page rank (don't include NOFOLLOW) has been blackhat for a LONG time.

It was Panama hat. Rap Genius did not pay money, they offered a tweet. In a crude and obvious enough way to be a little scheme-y. Which unfortunately for RG was picked up in the media.

"even I was scratching my head to figure out if this was actually a Google violation or not. Rap Genius’s apology post had the company deciding itself that maybe it violated guidelines that links should be “editorially placed." - Danny Sullivan.

At least now we know. This is blackhat.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#167

Post by joelrunyon » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 1:33 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #152

skrebbel wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting something. As a search engine user, I don't care whether the search engine firm is "fair", whether their rules apply equally to everyone or not. It's not a country, it's a search engine. You can say what you want about Rap Genius, but they're just about the only lyrics site that doesn't suck. As a searcher, I want to get to sites that don't suck. In the case of lyrics, that's Rap Genius. Google has…

I search for "[song name] lyrics" and I get a site that has the lyrics. I've never thought it sucked. I don't care how many banners on the side, just that the words are there. And I prefer an "expanded" view with all the [Hook] type stuff replaced with the actual words, rather than the "more correct" RG presentation. Heck, sometimes I have to click more to get what I'm looking for with RG. After trying a few things,…

> All that to say: it's not clear to me that RG really sucks less for "[song name] lyrics" queries.

1000x this.

I think Rap Genius is great for "song meaning" queries, but their interface is just as distracting (if not more) than other lyric sites that "suck."

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#168

Post by pmarca » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 1:37 AM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #95

Honestly, this is just saddening. Google needs to have a consistent policy towards these blackhat SEO offenders and enforce it for everyone. RapGenius bought backlinks to artificially inflate their pagerank. They knew they were cheating but they did it anyway. They got caught. And they were hit with a manual action on Google. Sounds good so far. But that's where it stops. RapGenius, using the connections they have fr…

Do you have any evidence "VC connections" had anything to do with anything? Or are you just making shit up?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#169

Post by dreamfactory » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 1:39 AM UTC

nknighthb wrote: post #165

dreamfactory wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what some bureaucrat has decided That is precisely my point. (And if you are looking for personalisation, an algorithm isn't necessarily counter to that but a global smack-ban on behaviours most certainly is.)

Government bureaucrat. I don't care if Google, Microsoft, or whoever else has humans who directly modify search results. I'm free to choose among the competing search engines based on the value they provide me. Any external notion of correctness imposed industry-wide will destroy that choice.

I wasn't talking about anyone outside google, just critiquing the game being rigged internally, but it's maybe interesting you brought that in.

On the one hand that could be criticised as an illusion of choice in the market (behind the curtain there is often ownership across entire industry sectors, regardless of 'competitors' within a sector). On the other, governments quite correctly get a say in any case (what do we representatively govern otherwise - the alternative is to cede governance to global corporations). Google is particularly sensitive to the latter as it has a huge de facto monopoly and has become part of our infrastructure - it is absolutely a huge target for regulation wherever it has traction.

Talking of competition, is there anything viable in the shape of an open source effort where the algorithms and indexes could be crowd-managed - perhaps indexing via browser plugins?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#170

Post by rodly » Sun, Jan 05, 2014, 1:41 AM UTC

If Google were to have a year long ban on RG stuff to leave a precedent, Would people start to view Google as a sub-par search engine because Bing returns "high quality" results like RG still?

It's also rather weird how a lot of people seem to view Google as this public service for the people by the people etc, it's not. They can do whatever the hell they want and if you don't like it, simply stop using their service to send a message.