I'm surprised to find out people actually return to the search results page using the back button. Whenever I am serious enough (enough to keep looking after the first link I click does not satisfy me) about finding something I always Middle-Click or Ctrl+Click the links to open them in new tabs.
The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
171–180 of 359 posts
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#172Google 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…
> And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.
Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either.
What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap.
Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site beforehand, which is another problem.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#173For 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.
Because they automated anything and you cannot contact any human from quality assurance.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#174Google search seems to have gotten significantly worse lately (sometimes to the point that it's barely usable). From scams like these (I've seen others) somehow getting a foothold, to a lot of internal "unbiasing" skewing the results towards googles political stance (usually totally irrelevant to my query). It's gotten to the point that I barely google anymore other than for things I already know what the results will be.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#175According to DK-hostmaster (https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/da/find-domaenenavn) its registered to
Ance Dzerina. Ieriku iela 37, dz. 32, LV-1084 Riga, Letland
At 2. juli 2021
Thats pretty fast to work so well. But i see lots of this, with other domains, when searching and have done for years so nothing new here i think.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.)
For someone learning German as a foreign language separating the words would really help.
Even if it leads to things like "Trink Wasser fur Hunde" (as mentioned in the Wikipedia article).
Hyphens or spaces are still better than those long words...
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#177Earlier 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…
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.
How is that different from a hosting provider that has to address legal complaints regarding spam, copyright infringement, etc. on their servers? Just like a hosting provider, they specifically have a relationship with the website owner to provide the reverse proxy service. It's not like they can say "we don't know who or how our service is being used".
It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they have to deal with these liabilities and complications, not hide behind some vague "our hands are tied" language.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#178This image features characters from Smeshariki animation series, hugely popular in Russia in the last 15 years.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#179I 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…
I'm pretty sure they stopped providing services to a neo-nazi site a few years ago. A decision that I am completely happy with btw.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#180I 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…
This policy even extends to stresser/booster/DoS-for-hire services services - try searching for some and see who fronts them?
20 years ago the transit providers of the internet would have spotted Cloudflare for what it is, and cut it off.