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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

#191

Post by herbst »

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…

Google only recently started to totally butcher the Swiss search results. For some reason I could still find direct download links to movies and music a few years ago (kinda legal here).

Now such search results often don't even get a second page...

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#192

Post by javier2 »

agency wrote: post #31

This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?

Yes, a few days I've even had 5 different spam emails in the inbox.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#193

Post by eru »

rvba wrote: post #176
eru wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, I can see that. Pervasive hyphens would resolve most of the ambiguity and make it easier to learn. (But they also look kind of ugly.)

Just be glad you ain't learning Turkish or Finnish, though.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#194

Post by javier2 »

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

It is not happening with the example from the article for me, but I have seen this practice ruin my search results in varying degree over the past 6 months. Some times entire keywords will just be broken because there are so many fake sites.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#195

Post by eru »

avian wrote: post #177
eru wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

You have a point, but I assume those businesses' lawyers understand this better than our armchair speculation here.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#196

Post by fogihujy »

porbelm wrote: post #157
matsemann wrote: post #145

Yeah, 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

With DDG, I found this thread. Google set to Norway as region/language found nothing from havfruen4220.dk, unless I specifically added site:havfruen4220.dk in the search.

My guess is that someone at Google reacted.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#197

Post by probably_wrong »

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 tried four of the queries from Germany using a private window. 3 returned results from themermaid on the first page.

In particular, the only results ranking higher than themermaid for "hvor ofte oppdaterer apple ios" are those coming from support.apple.com.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#198

Post by pepy »

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…

Do you want to get to the bottom of this? A friend of mine is a top Dutch lawyer with an interest in these things.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#199

Post by matsemann »

fogihujy wrote: post #196
porbelm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With DDG, I found this thread. Google set to Norway as region/language found nothing from havfruen4220.dk, unless I specifically added site:havfruen4220.dk in the search. My guess is that someone at Google reacted.

Almost all my searches from the last days still show havfruen as a result somewhere. My pes anserinus above. Or "obos fellesgjeld" from a ~week ago which was when I noticed the pattern first. "monstera jord" gives lots of translated blogspam, and then a row of havfruen results.

Switching language on Google has basically no effect. Sometimes I want to find Swedish results for a thing with the same name, but no matter what I do I get Norwegian results ranked first. So don't think this is easily emulated from abroad.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#200

Post by account42 »

stavros wrote: post #188
trangus_1985 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they don't, that's explicitly their stance. There is no line. They host everyone equally. To do the opposite would require drawing a line.

> They host everyone equally.

Everyone except those that are too right wing.

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