It's the hooking of the browser back button in a way that Google does not detect which is the real 'trick'.
Anyone who can do that can rank as high as they like for any search query.
The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
151–160 of 359 posts
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#152I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are…
Interesting, I've been seeing the same spam for Norwegian searches, but with the domain nem-multiservice dot dk, or nem-varmepumper dot dk - presumably another legitimate business' domain that expired and was grabbed by the scammers. Visiting those domains show the same graphic as shown in the article. Almost any search in Norwegian will have obvious scam sites like these in the top 10 results. Other domains part of…
Yup. Those domains are the same thing, and redirects to the same thing. There are even more domains.
Never seen anything on this scale before. I can search for basically anything(tax rules, baking, stocks, property, hygiene...) and Google will most likely show those domains somewhere.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Cloudflare is not a public institution. It troubles me that they get to define, draw, and then maintain that line.
However, I do agree - privacy unveiling like that should require a judge's order.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#154I hate dealing with this and now refuse to use Google now when I saw patterns in search results while I was researching common things (like housing) in Norwegian, here in Norway. I rarely use Google these days, but I thought for a second that Google might be better with search results than DDG in Norwegian, but this stuff is aggravating. This is one of those where they screw around with history that you just have to…
> edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian.
Another big one is that Norwegians like Germans write words together, just one example from one of the stupid ads: "Spesial Reportasje" is a dead giveaway not only because of the capitalization.)
(Oh well, sadly because of pressure from Words incompetent spell checker over years and lenient teachers this is getting worse. I fear we are seing compound damage here as kids that got away with this are now becoming teachers...)
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#155Google 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 sof…
Google seems to also place less emphasis on search phrases. When searching for exact article names I easily find them on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google. Two recent search-term examples:
1. the scientific worldview needs an update
2. from reproducibility to over reproducibility
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#156For 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.
Even worse, getting this kind of spam through to DDG (Bing?) seems easier than on Google It seems DDG is worse at finding the more authoritative sites about a subject compared to Google.
That's an advantage. Since google tuned up their engine to treat authoritative results as better their searches became absolute dogshit.
You search for a very specific thing and all the results are big sites that have said something that contains two of the 6 words you search for in a completely generic article that helps you none.
My favorite is when your query contains a word that is the very essence of what you search for and google chooses to display results without it so you have to do extra click "yes I actually want to search for what I said I want to search for".
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#157Yeah, I've seen this domain a lot lately. But I've complained about the Norwegian results for years [0]. For most searches there will be a result that's just keyword spam ranking high. Retried my "pes anserinus bursitt" search now 2 years later, and two results are spam from havfruen, and there are some other results from https://no.amenajari .org which is also just translated and scraped content for all languages go…
When I try that search, havfruen is seventh place. NHI and other good results at the top.
YMMV a lot with Google results. For me, it's usually great where DDG is kinda crap, but not as bad as... shudder ... bing
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#158Google 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 sof…
Google scholar search is still very useful.
DuckDuckGo is nowadays more useful than Google for my web searches.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#159I 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…
They might take that stance, to avoid liability and complication.
At the moment, they have a very clear rule. If they stop providing services to obvious spammers, they will create lots of grey areas, and they will also implicitly make a judgement that the client they still serve are _good_ in some way, and an enterprising lawyer or muckraker might exploit that.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#160I've also seen this, but from a different side. I have Google Alerts for many open source projects that I run, but in the past few years these alerts have become all but useless. Spammers scrape genuine pages from all over the place (including ones containing references to my projects) and put them into scammy ".it" domains. These appear both in Google Alerts and high up in Google Search. So alerts and search both become useless. The scam appears to be that when you visit these web pages they say you're the billionth (or whatever) visitor to Google and you've won a prize, just type in your bank details.
This has been going on for years now, so I don't have much confidence that Google is able or willing to fix it.