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

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#281

Post by bigpeopleareold » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #154

bigpeopleareold wrote: post #100

I hate dealing with this and now refuse to use Google now when I saw patterns in search results while I was researching common things (like housing) in Norwegian, here in Norway. I rarely use Google these days, but I thought for a second that Google might be better with search results than DDG in Norwegian, but this stuff is aggravating. This is one of those where they screw around with history that you just have to…

> edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian. Another big one is that Norwegians like Germans write words together, just one example from one of the stupid ads: "Spesial Reportasje" is a dead giveaway not only because of t…

This reminds me of the facebook group: Bilder i kampen mot særskrivingfeil: https://www.facebook.com/ettord :D

(Something like: Pictures in the struggle against mistakes when using spaces between words)

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#282

Post by iratewizard » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

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.

And 8chan, the 4chan alternative where anyone can make and moderate their own board.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#283

Post by yetanotheralexn » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

kkoncevicius wrote: post #155

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 seems to also place less emphasis on search phrases. When searching for exact article names I easily find them on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google. Two recent search-term examples: 1. the scientific worldview needs an update 2. from reproducibility to over reproducibility

Your examples seem to work for me (the second one only if combined with double quotes). Do you have more? https://snipboard.io/PYhNHW.jpg https://snipboard.io/HvRaiE.jpg

It would be cool to find datapoints for a proper bug report for Google :)

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#284

Post by breakingcups » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #276

avian wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How is that different from a hosting provider If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching"). In other words, a common carrier. Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content,…

But in a way, they actively host the content. The fact that their server periodically retrieves new content from a different backend makes no difference. The page sits on their hard drives and is server by their servers when I visit that domain. It's always been a very, very thin argument and it has gotten even thinner with the likes of Cloudflare Pages and Workers.

Cloudflare is just a huge company actively ignoring abuse complaints and somehow they are getting away with it. It even helps their PR to a certain market segment.

They even still host kiwifarms, a board that is primarily known for its vicous harassment of people and is known to have driven multiple innocent people to suicide.

I consider CloudFlare a bad actor at this point and I wish the other big names around them would too. They are subsidizing crime with VC money.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#285

Post by cnxsoft » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

Google is garbage. I once complained a website stealing my contents and other people's contents was ranking very highly in Google. I was told I'd better fixed my website before looking at "competitors". Part of that was true, but at the time the person did not seem to care at all of spammy content delivered by Google.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#286

Post by ant6n » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

hoppla wrote: post #214

The recaptcha process should be reversed. The sites should prove to humans that it’s content is not generated by bots.

Perhaps a search engine that deranks pages that monetize visits (like ads) would be a good first step.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#287

Post by pdimitar » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

tlogan wrote: post #264

yosamino wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I do not think that it is up to Google or CloudFlare to police the internet. If a site is doing something illegal then report it to appropriate gov agency. If gov agency does not anything then get involved into political process to fix that.

Gov agencies and political processes take ages to do anything at all.

At this point I'd still like the internet companies doing partial policing of content. At least they'll achieve something.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#288

Post by lubesGordi » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #271

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…

I think there is a market here. "Dumb" search engines, that search exactly the words you type, maybe with advanced features like regex, metadata search, etc... It won't replace Google's guesswork, but sometimes, I just want to grep the internet. All non-Google engines are all about privacy, which is nice, and almost a requirement if you want to compete with Google, but I'd like to see features that actually improve s…

I think so too. It'd really be nice to get a search capability that doesn't take my past searching into account. I want an unbiased search, and give me good tools to filter.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#289

Post by manceraio » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

They will get probably outranked on the next big Google update.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#290

Post by lifeisstillgood » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #278

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I just clarify? There is / are organisations that a) scrape legitimate sites for content, b) host that content on their own 100K domains, c) sit behind cloudflare, d) do some seo??? e) when someone finds their site they then inject an ad or similar rubbish f) do this enough that they make money off the ad / competition / porn ? That seems like a problem that the ”original-source” metatag was supposed to stop?

Canonical urls help with noting your own purposeful duplicated content. But that meta tag goes on the duplicated content. So it doesn't help with scrapers, who strip that out.

But I thought that it was useful for google - who could find two caches with same content, one of which was 2018 one of which 2020 and both say "this is canonical". At that point the 2018 version is real and the other rejected.

Then again, you could just do it with publication dates ...