The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway • Hacker News Board

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#231

Post by yosamino » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 10:52 AM UTC

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…

> The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it.

Or worse. Since I have no way to know beforehand who I would be dealing with, this is actively dangerous - what if the mobster running this site is having a bad day and choses to retaliate ?

Also what a stupid fucking policy that is. Even if you are not legally compelled to block content, what is the point of actively helping distibute harmful content?

What they are doing is worse than just saying "We are not a hosting provider" - because while what is true, they are actively distributing content that is hosted elsewhere while hiding who is hosting it.

One can easily write an email to abuse@hoster.example.com and usually these people do not want garbage on their networks. CF is making it impossible to do notify them, and they refuse to implement an alternative procedure.

I still do not understand the moral position of profiting off of enabling criminal scum, when it would be so easy not to...

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#232

Post by yosamino » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

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.

That is not true. They do have a line specified here https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/

It's just that the procedure is so useless that it might as well not exist.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#233

Post by wccrawford » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 10:55 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #215

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He has never murdered anyone" "Are you referring to the one incident where he shot a racist hater and then vowed to never murder again?" All I'm saying is that we won't know until they come under pressure again

> All I'm saying is that we won't know until they come under pressure again That's also true of people who haven't murdered anyone yet , though. Whom do you trust more? The person who did something and vowed to never do it again, or the person who didn't vow anything? I tend to prefer the former.

When it comes to murdering someone, I'm going to prefer the person who has never murdered anyone yet.

When it comes to service providers, I would tend towards your direction. They did a thing that had conflicting ethics on each side, weighed the outcome and their ethics, and then made a hard decision for the future. What they did could be reversed, too, and didn't cause much permanent damage.

Murdering someone is very permanent and should take a lot more initial consideration.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#234

Post by belter » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 10:57 AM UTC

The mermaid mentioned in the article seems to be either a terribly amateurish operation or a very sophisticated sting.

They can be easily traced to a block of flats in Latvia but since their registered phone its a Toy Store in Riga...I am going to go with probably stolen identify operation and a sense of humour on their part instead of the real operation of some 12 year in Riga...

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#235

Post by algismo » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 10:58 AM UTC

Just tried Google.no from my computer (Norwegian IP (Larvik area)). Nothing similar. I see “normal” search results. In any way, I stopped using Google stuff 5 years ago. Never looked back since then, so my search history is kind of clean, maybe that changes their algorithm behavior.

Recommend to switch to DuckDuckGo:)

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#236

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 10:58 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #159

avian wrote: post #111

Earlier 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.

This logic doesn’t make sense. Nobody is under the illusion that CF is somehow incapable of denying service to individual customers.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#237

Post by wccrawford » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 10:59 AM UTC

nuker wrote: post #227

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 search has progressively deteriorated in quality 49 out of 50 review sites are now just affiliate links to Amazon. “Check the price on Amazon” buttons is the main content there

I've noticed this a lot lately. There are words on the page that look like a description of the product and a review, but once you really read them you see that they could be generated by a bot and they don't actually review the product, just describe the basic properties of it. Then they provide that button.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#238

Post by spaniard89277 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 11:00 AM UTC

soco wrote: post #223

spaniard89277 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Yeah, I also try DDG first then and only if not okay I go !g. Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing? They could have shown advertisements also in their "classic" search (let's call it like that) so I'm really at loss - what was in it for them to change??? Germans have a word for that "verschlimmbessern" (or even two words - kaputtreparieren) which means breaking something by trying to make it better.

I guess it has something to do with Google Internal dynamics. But I'm not the one being paid big bucks to think about such stuff. Maybe they've done their due diligence and made their tradeoffs, but I'm clearly not the target of the search engine anymore.

I'm only a dumb nobody, so if this is a problem for me, I wonder how it is for all the smart people that hangs out here at HN.

It just feels very uphill to use Google right now. No matter how many flags or tricks.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#239

Post by londons_explore » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 11:03 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #151

It's the hooking of the browser back button in a way that Google does not detect which is the real 'trick'. Anyone who can do that can rank as high as they like for any search query.

To expand on this: A very strong ranking signal is how many of the users that click a search result are sufficiently satisfied with the information they have found to end their search.

A good proxy for this is how many people don't click the 'back' button to see other results.

Google is already aware of sites which hijack the back button. Their crawler detects this, and if they find it, they throw out the figures of how many people click the back button.

So if you can find a way to hook the back button so nobody can click back, while stopping google thinking you have hooked the back button, then your page will keep creeping up the rankings.

Google detects back button hijacking with their crawler (by rendering the page in Chromium and seeing the effect when hitting the actual back button), but this is circumvented by presenting the crawler different html. (or making sure the page behaves differently in their crawler, potentially by checking things like the model of the graphics card - googles crawlers don't yet support most of WebGL 2.0, and also simulate playing audio at the wrong rate)

Google also detects how many real users click back. If it's zero, then thats a warning flag. So I'd guess the back-hijacking logic is only activated ~80% of the time.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#240

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 11:04 AM UTC

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…

If 90% of what you’re searching for is keygens and „inside closed Telegram groups“, it might just be time to grow up?