Search engines and SEO spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#171

Post by SamoyedFurFluff » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

roughly wrote: post #143

endisneigh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would be incredibly valuable. They already have most of the tech. They could even create a subscription service around custom search engines if they really wanted. Plenty of people would find something like that incredibly valuable. Why would they do this? Google's customers are the advertisers, not the end-users. And no one is going to pay for a search engine, it's been tried and has failed.

> And no one is going to pay for a search engine, it's been tried and has failed. Always curious about things like this. I certainly would pay for this; it sounds like many other people here as well would. I'm curious if the constraint is that there aren't enough people to actually pay for the investment required for the service, or if there aren't enough people willing to pay to meet the standard VC notions of succe…

The people most able to pay for a service like this are the people that advertisers most want because they’re the people with enough discretional budget to spend on things like better Google search results. Allowing someone to buy something like this also reduces your attractiveness to your advertising clients.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#172

Post by RealityVoid » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

The problem, IMO, might be the monoculture we have around search. Because Google is soo big, it's enough for spammers to target it and they have the vast majority of the search visibility. If we had better, more diverse competition, that might manifest as a tradeoff, presumably, they would have competing and diverse criteria so you would probably not be the top result on _all_ dominant search engines. SEO spam needs upkeep and attention to latest algos, else it decays. Competing algos would yeld better results for everyone. Maybe Google is just ripe for a shakeup.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#173

Post by kevinmchugh » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #159

numbsafari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

Those shitty SEO spam sites exist only to serve ads, and Google has a monopoly on internet ads. So there is no real incentive for them to solve the problem.

Google had the same incentives in 2011, 2012 when they built and released Panda and Penguin.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#174

Post by UncleMeat » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

awillen wrote: post #31

judge2020 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, i'd be very surprised if they didn't have tens of thousands of workers aiding in spam review already. The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is. Are all the pie recipes where there's a 2000 word essay about their grandma at the top 'spam'? They still have the recipe, and Google Home devices pick up the recipe instructions just fine so people end up not reading it,…

AFAIK the 2000 word essays in recipes are Google's fault - it prioritizes pages with a lot of content, so you have to add that junk to the top in order to rank highly. While I'm sure there's more going on behind the scenes than I'm aware of, it does seem like the rules could be altered on a category-specific basis where a lot of text isn't necessarily a positive.

This one is hard because it does actually seem to be the case that the cruft around the recipe is valuable if the content is right. Most of the recipe blog stuff is garbage, but if you look at youtube it is clear that creators who add extra flair around the recipe are a powerful force.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#175

Post by Kiro » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

snth wrote: post #20

Several people mention DuckDuckGo in that Twitter thread. I use DuckDuckGo for my main search engine, and it's not obviously any better than Google regarding SEO spam.

I don't think they apply much spam fighting to the results they get from the underlying search index (Bing), but I could be wrong.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#176

Post by rhtgrg » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

I think pg is missing something important here. The reason Google was able to beat Yahoo, Altavista, Ask, etc. was not just because they had a better formula — it was also because they started in the era where 'search' was still seen as secondary to 'portals' by the big guys. Had these companies known how important search is to the internet back then, they would've copied Google's secret sauce and crushed it long before it could suck up their traffic.

This isn't going to happen again. Google isn't going to sit around twiddling its thumbs while a competitor develops a better algorithm.

You have to attack the problem from a different angle entirely (make something that looks nothing like a search engine), I don't think a niche market is going to be enough.

Perhaps you just want to make something that scares Google into acquiring you, rather than actually bettering the situation. If that's the case, I implore you to think of doing better ways to spend your life.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#177

Post by imranhou » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

I believe google tracks click throughs from search results pages, which should provide in theory plenty of insight into what links aren't really working for specific keywords and what are... thus helping improve or reduce rankings of SEO laden sites.

Wonder if someone can throw light on to why this isn't effective.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#178

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

numbsafari wrote: post #117

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

Some kinds of "spam" can improve search results.

Things have changed in the past few years, now that Google has developed advanced transformer models, but for a long time Google's question answering facility has been: "let spammers make 10^8 pages where the title is the question and the answer is in the page".

The trouble is that there's a fine line between "answer is in the page" and "word salad!"

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#179

Post by foobarian » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #152

The quote-Tweeted thread mentioned recipes as one of the things that has been SEObliterated. It's a great example of the problem, and also a great example of the problems any solution will encounter. Recipes have become a bellwether Internet problem. In the past, your great-grandmother had a card file with a bunch of 3x5 index cards with the ingredients and instructions on how to make everything, and they pretty much…

The recipe problem is mostly because actual recipes are not copyrightable. See e.g. https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/03/24/recipes-copyright...

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#180

Post by mad182 » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #124

numbsafari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

> Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) Are there any search engines that do this? It's a great, simple idea.

Not really that simple, I see a lot of potential for abuse - using bots and brigading to mass downvote your competitors or political opponents.

Couple of positions up or down in google results for somewhat popular and valuable keywords can mean the difference in thousands of dollars per day of ad or affiliate revenue. I suspect it would get pretty wild if google launched something like this. There already are black-hat seo methods and services, but something so simple and direct would turn it up to 11.