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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

301–310 of 359 posts

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#301
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…

The reason you found so many domains is that they intentionally take down thier spam sites and reload them under a new domain every few hours. They do this so they can't be taken down by people reporting them as spam. They literally setup the next domain while the current one starts being used so they can do a live swap to the next one without interruptions to thier spam operations. This is typically done in an effort to spread Trojan malware to anybody running computers with out of date operating systems and browsers. Windows getting people off of Internet Explorer has been a huge hit for them as it reduces the number of possible vulnerabilities someone might have when they get sent to one of these Trojan spam sites.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gnoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do Also the opposite: insisting on pushing local and localized results on google.com even when I set my browser language to english.

They used to have google.com/ncr 'ncr' stands for no-country-recognition and it did what it said on the tin. Of course like all useful power-user features it got deprecated for the natural language query non-sense we have today.

Nowadays you need to VPN to the target country. For a reason to complicated to explain here I searched local businesses in the city of Melun, France. There were no reasonable hits. Well, my IP was Finnish (to my best knowledge they have no other means of localizing me) and "melu" means noise in Finnish with "melun" being a common form. No addition of French shopping terms could convince Google that I am not interested in noise abatement. Accepted language header did not help. After switching to a French IP it worked like a charm. And one would guess searching for shopping and businesses would be Google's strength.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#303
post #223

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.

The median Google search user probably never learned to use any of these "advanced" features in the first place. For them, having Google ignore the precise wording of their query and show results for more common related terms is almost certainly an improvement.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#304
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://neeva.com/ is trying, but I doubt they're succeeding :-/

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#305
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.

Exactly, it's very easy to see how Google doesn't leave the user unspammed. YouTube's search works the same way, and even if there are useful results on top, they quickly trail off into clickbait garbage. Plus the unrelated lists of ‘people also watch’, injected every few items. The search filters are barely enough to dial in when you want to skip obvious trash, but give up on anything slightly complicated. On Play S…

I feel like YouTube's goal is to always get you to watch something else. Scroll down in search results? See unrelated videos. As soon as the video starts? See a 'Recommended' badge. Pause the video? See an overlay with other videos. Leave the video running? Autoplay fixates on something else.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better known for being linked to the Christchurch and El Paso shootings, being the origin of the QAnon movement and having a history of hosting child pornography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except a blank page is exactly what I want to see if there are no results or if I mistyped my query. These shoehorned-in results throw me off every time because it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret them as "oh, google has no results for what I typed in past this point , so they're showing me random crap". I miss the old days when search was as precise as a scalpel. Maybe I'm naive about the complexity of the p…

>"blank page is exactly what I want to see" I literally couldn't agree more. I can't stand how bad searching has become. While we're at it, you know what else I really hate? How google switches the order of the buttons for Images, News, Shopping, Video, etc. on EACH QUERY. Who in the world ever thought this was a good idea?

I've always assumed that this is a bug in their A/B tests, because I cannot even imagine how utterly degenerate their product design process must have become to come up with this on purpose.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ver…

this metaphor is absurd. the actual murderers here are the contributors to the banned sites, nor cloudflare, and there were a lot more than 1 murders.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#309
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.

This may have had something to do with the fact that the daily stormer was claiming prior to that that their lack of suspension was an implicit endorsement by CloudFlare of their site and content.

Misuse of trademarks is a thing.

I agree, however, that CF's policies are applied arbitrarily.

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