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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#321

Post by deltarholamda »

max49 wrote: post #210
deltarholamda wrote: post #152

The quote-Tweeted thread mentioned recipes as one of the things that has been SEObliterated. It's a great example of the problem, and also a great example of the problems any solution will encounter. Recipes have become a bellwether Internet problem. In the past, your great-grandmother had a card file with a bunch of 3x5 index cards with the ingredients and instructions on how to make everything, and they pretty much…

>I'm not sure there is any technological solution The technological solution would be to stop rewarding them for these monstrosities. One of the main motivator for turning a short recipes into a 19 page essai about the chef's life is that more words = better ranking.

But the technology is solely controlled by a single multinational advertising corporation. The motivations are controlled by that same advertising corporation.

Which is the same as there being no technological solutions.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#322

Post by dehrmann »

Veen wrote: post #36

> Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? Back in the olden days, there were lots of organizations that collated high quality content from the best writers. They nurtured expert writers and paid them well. They fact-checked the content and employed diligent editors and proofreaders so it was accurate and well-written. Over the years, they'd build a reputation for reli…

I think you're unfairly putting blame on Silicon Valley. Publishers were only able to produce high-quality content because, with no conversion metrics, advertisers were willing to overpay for placement. Tech undermined publishers' revenue, but what it revealed was that people don't actually want high-quality journalism, they want entertainment, and they're definitely not going to pay a premium for it. This was hidden behind publishers' business model.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#323

Post by siva7 »

techdragon wrote: post #63
compiler-guy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the cafes were open, you can bet they said, "I'll have another Danish, and then get back to work on this problem that never seems to go away."

I sure wish I had problems that were totally unsolvable, they are so easy to measure progress on. /sarcasm I think it’s more likely that because they are just building hundreds of tiny tweak experiments and it’s someone else who desides what to build and if it even worked. Search quality is such a meta-problem that it goes beyond any real hope of simply working on it in anything beyond piecemeal trial and error fashi…

What is a danish?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#324

Post by marginalia_nu »

aantix wrote: post #112
nanna wrote: post #46

If you were to start a search engine, what stack would you use?

Typesense looks easy to use. But with 3x memory needed for the indexes, the server costs probably aren't going to be bootstrap'able. Especially for a "small" crawl of a billion web pages, event at just 10k per page.

Eh, I run a 100M-index off consumer hardware in my living room. Very doable if you avoid bloated off the shelf solutions.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#325

Post by lethologica »

nkrisc wrote: post #312
ufo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.

I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all. Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.

I wonder if the majority are moving to vlogging instead?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#326

Post by ufo »

nkrisc wrote: post #312
ufo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.

I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all. Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.

I think the bigger issue now is that more content is inside social media "silos" like twitter, instagram or youtube. I don't have the numbers though.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#327

Post by Baeocystin »

nkrisc wrote: post #312
ufo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.

I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all. Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.

I'd believe it. As an IT consultant, I interact with a lot of people who are semi-techs themselves- mostly small business owners who are used to wearing a lot of hats, and also the type to have been motivated to run their own personal blogs about diving/photography/conlangs/quilting/gardening/whatever their personal hobbies are.

Ten years ago, the majority(!) had at least something up and running, where they would post essays, thoughts, whatever came to mind.

Nowadays? All gone. All! When asked why, the answer almost always is along a mix of ever-increasing negative feedback and harassment from randos, and aggressive automated spamming of their forums. Loss of the pseudo-anonymity plays a large role as well. Many have deleted years' worth of work, simply because they are afraid of someone trolling through their posts to find something to harass them with.

I was never a blogger myself, but I am sad about the change. There was a lot of good stuff out there for a while, and sometimes it just plain made me happy to read someone joyfully nerding out on a favorite subject of theirs.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#328

Post by fassssst »

jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

Companies like Sweetwater do this right. They have “sales engineers” that help you find what you’re looking for over the phone or text message or email. It probably doesn’t scale but as a customer, I don’t care as it saves me so much research time and I consistently get what I’m looking for.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#329

Post by salt-thrower »

Veen wrote: post #36

> Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? Back in the olden days, there were lots of organizations that collated high quality content from the best writers. They nurtured expert writers and paid them well. They fact-checked the content and employed diligent editors and proofreaders so it was accurate and well-written. Over the years, they'd build a reputation for reli…

It's been really sad to grow up and watch the cool techie optimism of the 2000's internet get sucked dry by profit motives and left to rot. The change has occurred pretty much entirely within my adult lifetime (I'm only 27 and I still remember when Google was the cool new thing on the internet).

It went from "search engines and the web will usher in a new era of wisdom and democracy" to "useful content is dying at the hands of monetization schemes, and also the internet will be the death of liberal democracy, woe unto us all" in about 15 years.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#330

Post by eatonphil »

mc32 wrote: post #266
jrockway wrote: post #91

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…

Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues: 1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.) 2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge. 3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands com…

I pay for Consumer Reports. I'd encourage more people to too. I don't trust it completely but it's a good companion to manual searches on Reddit/HN/car forums, etc.
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