[deleted]
Search engines and SEO spam
351–360 of 555 posts
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem, IMO, might be the monoculture we have around search. Because Google is soo big, it's enough for spammers to target it and they have the vast majority of the search visibility. If we had better, more diverse competition, that might manifest as a tradeoff, presumably, they would have competing and diverse criteria so you would probably not be the top result on _all_ dominant search engines. SEO spam needs…
Doesn't your model predict that Bing would have substantially less SEO-gamed results? (Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search)
Well... Yes, it should. But, no, it seems it does not. I thought about this when typing it but did it anyway, maybe because I thought there is still something worthwhile there.
I still think the model could work if the algorithm is sufficiently different than Google's. Ideally, people would go "I did not find anything I cared about on Google, I know, I'll use Bing!" - but nobody does this, because the results are consistently worse.
Don't get me wrong, I like G as a company, I think they do worthwhile things! But they have left things slip and need competition into this field, I mean real competition, then maybe they would actually address issues.
Maybe the issue is also on the incentive level as well. I mean more searches means more eyeballs and more money for Google. If someone searches one thing and they are done that is less interaction! I hope they don't work like this, but it's possible.
And another possible problem is the opposite. Maybe Google is optimizing search for what it thinks people want, but it uses the wrong metric. Or it gives people what they want but not what they need.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#353He’s just describing Webrings, except in a reactive tense (“filter out spam sites”) rather than a proactive tense (“associate your site with other worthwhile sites”). Google’s ranking algorithm only works when someone is proactively curating, and only SEO spammers do so these days. Reactive curation is not a viable way to manage information. The simplest way to compete with Google is to create a DIY Webrings site tha…
If I understand correctly, you're saying you'd create an exclusive webring, but the rule to joining is that you have to Disallow: Google, Bing, etc. in your robots.txt file. That sounds outrageous, but speaking as a content creator, I wouldn't be giving up much. My blog gets about 3% of its traffic from search engines. I have no idea who these visitors are or what they searched for, since browsers no longer send refe…
No, you can join the webring and be still indexed by Google, but the sitelist of the webring cannot be. That’s all. It prevents Google from leeching off the human curation and not paying a fair market value for it. Given that Google makes billions of dollars a year on pagerank data, webring curators got screwed over pretty hard already once by Google twenty years ago, so no reason to allow it again.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.
There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.
That will get worse yet most likely. Younger people no longer produce public text to the extent they did prior to the the smartphone heavy era. Supply of that blog style content will continue to dwindle as the producers age out. I'm sure there's a stability point it may reach, of course, because some tiny percentage of people will always want to write long-form.
Younger people TikTok, they Instagram, they chat in private conversations with eachother, they occasionally post short messages in walled gardens like Facebook, they YouTube, they listen to music, they watch Netflix & Co. That's what they do. They do not persistently write LiveJournals, Tumblrs, blogs. That pre video/audio-focused era is over and it's not coming back (even if there's occasionally a bubbling up of hipster fakery centered around how cool it is to write text).
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.
There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.
I heard an interesting theory the other day: blog viability declined because Google killed Reader. Which indirectly ends up poisoning Google's biggest well, since blogs are an important source of relevant cross-domain links.
I'm somewhat skeptical, it seems a little too poetic to blame Google's ultimate downfall on a decision that was notably hated at the time. But it's plausible. If you want it to be a conspiracy theory, you can posit that killing off independent blogs was the intent, to convince bloggers to migrate to Google Plus.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#356> 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…
Something else that has largely disappeared is that there used to be a fair amount of organization of content, whereas now a lot of content is just thrown into a big pile and the user is left to go fishing on their own with search engines, whose ability to search seems to be declining (ie: Google often seems to no longer support mandatory include/exclude search parameters). Generally speaking, the result seems to be decreasing order and increasing chaos.
Of course, the massive volume of content creates a fundamental problem, but user curation & categorization on sites like Youtube would be possible, were Google to provide the software support so people could do that. Whether this and similar decisions are deliberate or accidental is likely one of those things that we will never know.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. There are literally millions of Internet savvy people who would be able to survive on what we would consider barely anything profit-wise in adsense revenue, which also usually pays out in US dollars. In this currently terrible global economy, desperation turns the most intelligent minds bound…
>The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. Not quite right because cybercrime aka hacking, cracking, spamming etc. originated in US not in East Europe, Russia and third world countries which are dominating hacking and spamming scene today. Main motivation of cybercriminals is quick money and ease of getting away with it since you are…
It is quite right. Those are the main drivers and it's due to lack economic opportunities.
Hacking heavily originated in the US because the US practically built the entire modern tech universe from the ground up. The US was far out in front when it came to utilizing the Internet and the Web, so of course unethical people in the US pioneered various types of online crime, the US was the early adopter.
If you're an elite engineer in the US, you can make millions of dollars doing legal work for big tech. It helps in a big way to drain the labor pool as it pertains to criminal activity online. You generally can't do that today in the countries that dominate SEO spam, online scams, etc. In those countries elite engineers suffer terrible wages doing legal work compared to what they should be able to earn for their abilities; commonly they can earn a lot more doing illegal work instead, it's a very potent lure.
You're an elite engineer in Russia, top ~1%-3% globally. What do you do? Earn several thousand dollars per month doing legit software development in Russia (with either zero or little consequential equity compensation); flee Russia for a more affluent market; or do illegal work where the rewards can be dramatically greater. It would be difficult to resist if you were unable or unwilling to leave Russia.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#358To 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…
This resonates with me a lot. A few months back I upgraded my desktop's insides. New motherboard, CPU, graphics card, etc. That was the first time in about seven years I've gone looking for review for that sort of stuff.
I remember doing the exact same thing in the past and being overwhelmed with information. The detail and data in reviews would take a long time to collate and make sense of. But this time even the big name sites seem to be much shallower. Less models reviewed, less testing and benchmarking, more regurgitated press releases and other news.
Last time it took me a while to sort out all of the information, this time all my time was spent trying to find any that wasn't 100% fluff.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#359> 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…
Those guys covered literally nothing compared to what I can get recommendations for with “product type Reddit”. No thanks.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That would be incredibly valuable. They already have most of the tech. They could even create a subscription service around custom search engines if they really wanted. Plenty of people would find something like that incredibly valuable. Why would they do this? Google's customers are the advertisers, not the end-users. And no one is going to pay for a search engine, it's been tried and has failed.
You only need ~1/10000th of Google's revenue to be a financially successful startup. 1/1000th and you'll have a great business, and at 1/100th you'll be somewhere between a unicorn and a decacorn.
sure, but you'd need a better search engine if people are going to pay for it.
A company with an objectively superior search engine could make even more money with ads so now you’re back to the beginning