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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#161

Post by eitland »

dhosek wrote: post #50

The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.

I used to have a text document on my desktop containing a list of domains that contained autogenerated content, each with a minus in front, like:

-stupidautogeneratedcontent1.com -stupidautogeneratedcontent2.com etc

I figured sooner or later Google would pick up the signal but I think instead they just started ignoring my "- requests" as I stopped using them. edit: or maybe they fix the problem. Spam sites used to be a problem during the early decline of Google. I think what happened was that problem actually almost disappeared for me and was replaced by irrelevant results from non-spam-sites

Edit: mahalo.com was one of those, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#162

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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.

Is there really any difference between DDG and Google when it comes to SEO spam? If there is, I sure haven't noticed in spite of using both, often for the same search terms.

It seems to me that the techniques used to spam Google's index work just as well on Bing's index.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#163

Post by mojzu »

keyme wrote: post #140

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 sof…

I think it depends on what you’re searching for, for dev related stuff no other search engine I’ve tried comes close. But there are whole industries now that are so heavily SEO’d that finding useful information without knowing the exact keyword to search for is incredibly frustrating

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#164

Post by rowanG077 »

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…

In fact I completely agree with that stance. It's not cloudfares job to police the content. They provide a simple service. If something is unlawful law enforcement should go after the owners.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#165

Post by RileyJames »

mattwad wrote: post #51
dhosek wrote: post #50

The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.

UBlacklist is a plugin that does this. It's so great to be able to hide all those sites that just cache Git issues and SO posts.

Just to add to that, uBlacklist has a power feature called subscriptions. Which is massively under utilised.

It enables a collaborative effort in blocking spam / low value domains.

If you make a block list, please submit it to the list I’ve made: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

(There’s no great subscription discovery as yet)

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#166

Post by eru »

eitland wrote: post #154
bigpeopleareold wrote: post #100

I 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 t…

In German there was actually quite a lot of historic development about whether to write words together or separate or with hyphens.

The current state of formal German will surely not be the end of history.

See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita#Gesch... (Might need Google Translate, if you don't speak German.)

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#167

Post by 55555 »

Ueland wrote: post #110
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #48

Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for: Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale. For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" whi…

Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool. But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad was…

ahrefs is the best in the business.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#169

Post by Adrig »

keyme wrote: post #140

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 sof…

One of the last use case for Google is being a proper search engine for Reddit. But I think they are aware of their downfall, that's why the top of the page is increasingly taken by their widgets to provide directly the information.

On the other hand, Youtube is the second most popular search engine and I don't see it slowing down. What an insight they had when they bought it.

Edit : I entirely agree to the fact that valuable information is found more in communities nowadays. I also predict that the web in 5 years will be mostly explored through communities

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#170

Post by tluyben2 »

dylan604 wrote: post #115
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…

That sounds like a hell of an investigation, and now my curiosity is running. 100k domains sounds like an huge amount of logistics on their side to keep it all running. It would be interesting to read about how a spam company manages that kind of infrastructure compared to a "legit" company. Legit company will always have internal struggles between dev/sales/marketing, so things just take longer and are much more dra…

It is not very difficult to manage: a company of mine was bought by a squatter (I found out after dealing with a broker for the sale; I had to integrate it with their 'tech team' and walked away after) and for many years already, this all has been fairly easy to automate. The registars have apis, cloud flare has apis. There was 1 tech guy keeping it all up and running and he didn't have to do anything. It would register and provision with content automatically. There is really almost no work involved besides keeping money in the registrar account and the costs are only the domains probably, maybe they have a little hetzner load balanced setup with 2 machines but that's likely it.
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