I've been using https://search.brave.com for a few weeks. Most of the time I find what I need.
Yes me too. have like it better than DDG.
The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
21–30 of 359 posts
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#22Interesting, the image seems to contain characters from a Russian childrens' cartoon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikoriki )
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#23I'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 expired domains that have been bought.
For example if you check havfruen4220.dk on archive.org you can see that it appears to have been a legitimate business website before. https://web.archive.org/web/20181126203158/https://havfruen4...
How do they rank so well?
I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently. On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago. It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher.
Edit: Here is what the content of such a site looks like: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bk0VsM...
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#24Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#25Before I accessed the article I was hopeful from the title that “The Mermaid” was some hot new search engine out of Norway.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#26Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result.
I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#27Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
Atleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords).
Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showing me results for diving.
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.
I wonder why Yandex opens every link in a new window. How can they track bounceback?
You could do a slightly more difficult, less direct sequence check on the specific user.
If they circle back around to Yandex in N time and go hunting for the same query or similar query, then you can rank the prior attempts as not having been ideally helpful (downrank the result/s they clicked through to when they last searched for that query two minutes ago).
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#29> The simple solution would be to test sites regularly with an unknown IP and common user agent to check that a site isn’t just showing content to Google and gives real users something completely different. That would stop this.
Surely Google does this, right? Given that - in theory - showing different content to Google versus non-Google should result in a penalty, anyway ...
Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
#30I'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…
This definitely looks like an expired domain that was bought. Havfruen seems to be a restaurant in the city of Korsør - which conveniently have the postal code of 4220.