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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#131

Post by feikname »

QuietCF wrote: post #91
finnh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect incognito to change? That would presumably show the same content the author is seeing. Only Google sees the content that drives the ranking. It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.

For all we know (as the OP doesn’t mention trying incognito) the OP could have malicious software on their device that hijacks their browser to manipulate search results

that's easily verifiable doing the searches yourself;

a search for "hvor ofte bør man dusje" in my english google, conencting from brazil shows havfruen4220.dk as 6th and 7th result, which is pretty high for a spam website

"hvordan regne prosent" shows 2 dk websites www.humanrebels.dk, and havfruen4220.dk as 9th and 10th results

could be since the OP clicked on these links to find out google made his personal algorithm show even more of this stuff

thus, I imagine a never ending cycle of even more spam could easily be generated, specially for an innocent user

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#132

Post by mlang23 »

It seems google has lost its ability to block spam effectively. Since a few months, I notice an increase amount of outright scam being promoted on YT. I even got a ad for a fake Musk telling people to invest in a shady bitcoin scheme. Knowing that Google is willing to let these slip through just to maximize their ad revenue is really a warning sign that this company, no matter how large it might be by now, should not be trusted anymore.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#133

Post by aembleton »

QuietCF wrote: post #91
finnh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect incognito to change? That would presumably show the same content the author is seeing. Only Google sees the content that drives the ranking. It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.

For all we know (as the OP doesn’t mention trying incognito) the OP could have malicious software on their device that hijacks their browser to manipulate search results

Does incognito prevent malicious software from hijacking your browser?

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#134

Post by the_biot »

For all that Google search has been utterly crap for going on a decade now, I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. I like DuckDuckGo for now, but I imagine as they get bigger they're going to be a target for these kinds of spam just the same.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#135

Post by aembleton »

knolax wrote: post #63

More reasons why a global search monopoly is suboptimal. Smaller markets like this are just going to get neglected and maintained just enough that a better alternative can't compete. Google search is basically useless for any language other than English.

Surprisingly no one has created another search engine that targets another language other than yandex

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#136

Post by NorwegianDude »

intarga wrote: post #105
Crazyontap wrote: post #92

Can somebody else who is in Norway can confirm this? It could be simply be a malware injecting this. Would be great to eliminate this possibility

I’m in Norway, and I tried the first search “rema 1000” without getting any spam results on the first two pages… That doesn’t entirely eliminate the other possibilities though, google search isn’t deterministic, and the domain could have been reported since the article went up.

Searches like "REMA 1000"(just a very well known brand name) seems to be the best case scenario, even according to the article(page 5).

I've noticed that the ranking of the results changes really often.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#137

Post by Cipater »

slacktide wrote: post #85
HideousKojima wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much the only alternative to Google Search is Bing. That's even what DuckDuckGo uses behind the scenes.

I’ve been using Yandex more and more. Better search results, less censorship. Thanks, Rooskies!

Yandex reminds me of what Google was like in the early 2010s. It just gives me the results of the search term I put in.

Google increasingly thinks it knows better than me what I'm looking for.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#138

Post by beebeepka »

the_biot wrote: post #134

For all that Google search has been utterly crap for going on a decade now, I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. I like DuckDuckGo for now, but I imagine as they get bigger they're going to be a target for these kinds of spam just the same.

Google search has been a brochure for a long time now

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#139

Post by FeepingCreature »

avian wrote: post #111
Ueland wrote: post #106

I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their…

> We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down. As someone that tried reporting spam sites because they were using content scrapped from my website, I'm not surprised. Cloudflare has a policy that they will not stop providing their IP hiding/reverse proxy services to anyone, regardless of complaints. The best they do is forwa…

That seems like the sort of thing that should require a judge's order.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#140

Post by keyme »

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault.

I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated software and keygens, detailed instructions for a variety of useful things. That was the golden age of the web.

These days, all the "interesting" data on the Internet is all inside closed Telegram chats, facebook groups, Discords or the rare public website here and there that Google doesn't want to index (like sci-hub, or other piracy sites).

The data that remains on SERPs is now also heavily censored for arbitrary reasons. "For your health", "For your protection". Google search is done.

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