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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

#241

Post by nuker »

wccrawford wrote: post #237
nuker wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And many are on first page of Google search, the “best search engine” lol. We get what we pay for it. Where is pay for web search startups?

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#242

Post by visarga »

estebarb wrote: post #26
fny wrote: post #24

Somewhat 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…

> I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking

Tools are not to blame here, it's like blaming the compiler for the behaviour of an application. Starting with the training data and ending with how the model is used in deployment it's the blame of people who made it, not of the neural architecture. The architecture itself can learn anything you throw at it, good or bad.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#243

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

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...

Compound words are about 70% of the fun we have.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#244

Post by dcdc123 »

eitland wrote: post #161
dhosek wrote: post #50

The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.

I used to have a text document on my desktop containing a list of domains that contained autogenerated content, each with a minus in front, like: -stupidautogeneratedcontent1.com -stupidautogeneratedcontent2.com etc I figured sooner or later Google would pick up the signal but I think instead they just started ignoring my "- requests" as I stopped using them. edit: or maybe they fix the problem. Spam sites used to be…

I’ve you tried -site:site.com? I think that still works.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#246

Post by a2tech »

yosamino wrote: post #231
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…

> 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…

Because criminal scum pay their bills. You don't think 8Chan was on a free account do you?

The sooner developers realize that Cloudflare is not saving the Internet the better.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#248

Post by Litost »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #225
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.

Cloudflare dropped the Daily Stormer. The ship of pretense of no judgement has sailed.

To anyone else who's curious links for the above:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#249

Post by franze »

In a similar note: https://www.autosuggest.net/ currently approaching a lot of websites in the german market.

"We help you to receive high-quality visitors from search engines, generate conversions and build your brand. To achieve these results, we ensure your website / company is recommended for specific keywords by the search engine's autocomplete function."

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#250

Post by eru »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #243
rvba wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Compound words are about 70% of the fun we have.

We don't have much fun in Germany..
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