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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#311

Post by cratermoon »

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…

> what if the mobster running this site is having a bad day and choses to retaliate ?

I wonder if someone with malicious intent could set up a site designed to generate complaints (how exactly would be an exercise for the reader), put it behind Cloudflare, and purposely use the information in the forwarded complaints to harass, abuse, dox, or otherwise harm people.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#312

Post by ocdtrekkie »

My guess is they get away with it because it's a non-English query and most of the people working on these problems aren't looking at their localization. A big issue in general for global tech companies is that they don't usually handle things outside the US/English context particularly well. This often crops up in that political space, where for instance, something contentious like gun sales might get pulled from Google globally even though the political concern with them is mostly limited to the US.

An SEO-fighting Googler might at a glance have no reason not to think that could be a really relevant or popular site in your country.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#313

Post by samstave »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #268
oblio wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm convinced that at least 10% of all legitimate economic activity is actually money laundering for crime organizations, in various forms. I imagine that percentage goes even higher in the financial capitals of the world.

That’s the low estimate.

'ey... I'm trafficking Paintings 'ere -- ya know... Art

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#314

Post by notRobot »

Schnurpel wrote: post #280

If I would run a global infrastructure company like Cloudflare, I also would not take any sides, and leave my service open to anyone. The world is full of people who get upset about something. However, if I declare a hands-off policy, it must be truly hands-off. Cloudflare kicked off Switter https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla... , it banned 8Chan https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-servi…

To be clear, that's not HN, but The Hacker News, a different website, known for... dubious reporting.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#315

Post by Matsta »

I had a look at this, and it looks to me like it's a 301 from another domain. Typically when domains get a manual penalty (primarily for spam), they drop in rankings overnight. So to counter this, you register a new domain and redirect it and overnight, your rankings bounce back. This technique is super common for blackhat sites like illegal streaming sites.

If the redirect is done as a meta refresh, then you can block it in your robots.txt from being picked up from SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush etc.

These types of sites are called doorway pages and have been around for ages. They are most popular in Russia and on Yandex, but you do see them on Google for super longtail keywords with 0 competition.

The other important thing to remember is that doing SEO in any language that's not English is a walk in the park. Lots of SEO influencer types have case studies showing how much extra traffic they get by translating their content. [1]

[1] https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-trend/

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#316

Post by logicchains »

skinkestek wrote: post #260
the_biot wrote: post #134

For all that Google search has been utterly crap for going on a decade now, I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. I like DuckDuckGo for now, but I imagine as they get bigger they're going to be a target for these kinds of spam just the same.

> I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. A bit of it is probably that. Outright ignoring my queries: +, doublequotes, "verbatim" and all takes more than SEO tactics, it takes someone inside Google, either malicious or more probably incompetent on the inside. Or more probably: someone was so busy trying to use AI in searches that no they haven't had…

>Or more probably: someone was so busy trying to use AI in searches that no they haven't had time the last ten years to consider if it was smart.

Or maybe Google started applying "We know better than the users", the driving principle behind their software and libraries, to their search.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#317

Post by burnished »

tikiman163 wrote: post #296

I'm kind of curious why he's so concerned about this? They've never managed better than ninth most relevant and in most cases they didn't even make the first page of result. Any advertising person will tell you, if you aren't in the top 3 results (basically the top result now that paid ads automatically get the top 2 spots on nearly all searches) your odds of being seen and clicked on drop to almost nothing. Are they…

These kinds of scams are a stochastic process. They don't work on your average person, they only work on vulnerable people. Heres the catch though, everyone is vulnerable at some point in their lives. This is where the stochastic process comes in, they don't need to get you when you're strong, they just need to test enough people enough times to catch them in a vulnerable moment.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#318

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

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…

> DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.

Yeah but it ignores most other operands. It's fairly frustrating to be unable to mandate a search term.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#319

Post by quijoteuniv »

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 just want to grep the internet” +1

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#320

Post by beart »

agency wrote: post #31

This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?

I'll chime in as well. I forward everything from gmail to another account I have. I pretty much never got any forwarded email for years because the gmail account is only really used as an identity for google services. A few months ago I suddenly started to get a significant amount of spam forwarded for no known reason.
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