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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#371

Post by ancarda »

numbsafari wrote: post #117
birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

> Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results

I would love for Google to build this in. Until they do, there is a WebExtension that does this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/ ("Block or Highlight Search Engine Results"). I use it to block stuff like W3Schools so when I search for something, MDN is always #1. Saves me a lot of time having to add "MDN" to the end of every query.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#372

Post by thereddaikon »

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…

Its a double edged sword. Reviews take effort so you want to make them easier for customers to write. But making them easier for your users also makes them easier for those trying to game the system. This is why Amazon's product reviews are useless as well as pretty much any other community based review system.

But on top of that you do have the problem of whether or not someone is really qualified to write a review. So Joe User thinks product X is good. What is their metric for good? It reminds me of an LTT review of the Amazon TV from a few months ago. They gave it an awful rating but noted that the reviews on the product page were generally very positive. And their reasoning was that the people buying these TVs and reviewing them didn't have a good comparison point for what a good TV actually is. They are probably comparing it to a much older and less advanced product not to a contemporary one.

So then you think the answer must be get reviews from industry related media. But then you fall into the classic problems of unethical journalists or simply ones that are out of touch.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#373

Post by Rastonbury »

llaolleh wrote: post #257
gorbachev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the examples used in the Twitter thread Paul was referring to would be better served by a manually curated directory service with a possible addition of a search engine only surfacing content from the sites in the directory. For health information and recipes in particular there are only a handful of really high quality sites that have quality content for 95% of the information most people need. I bet if you…

It's really hard to get people to use something other than Google. If you were to launch such a product, it would have to be so much better that people recommend it organically to other people.

That was what Google was to Yahoo/Altavista back in the day, a 10x improvement. Reading this thread, people feel pain enough do all sorts of hacky stuff - appending 'reddit 'or 'forum' to queries, blacklisting spam domains, switching search engines depending on topic. If G keeps declining and a new product does things better, the penny will drop and people will swap.

Siebel and PG see blood in the water no doubt, they see G's market share and want to fund companies to take some of this.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#374

Post by aemreunal »

eatonphil wrote: post #330
mc32 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone pointed out yesterday on that other search thread that [most?] libraries provide free access to Consumer Reports through a membership. I just looked at the San Francisco Public Library and it does indeed give me access to the magazine and a searchable database.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#375

Post by mirekrusin »

The whole thing seems "simple" to me – graph of identities with url vetting/liking/approve-this-message-like actions, you don't need anything else.

Reputation, non-fakeness etc. can be derived from it for anybody - you just list identities you trust/follow (with weights?) and anything you look at can be scored.

Virtual identities can also be created, ie. identity listing all links mentioned on HN (with positive sentiment only?), links from wikipedia etc. so people can follow those to create their reality graphs.

The interesting part is that it doesn't claim universal truthness - depending on who you follow your results will be skewed towards their opinion of the world. Ie. if you follow MIT, Wikipedia and E. Musk you'll see different view of truthness than somebody following FOX News and Flat Earth Society for example.

It could be interesting to focus on "dislike" marking (only?) as it may be much more lightweight to approach it from blacklisting side.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#377

Post by visarga »

xnx wrote: post #81
birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

A lot of people forget that one of the inputs to the Google ranking algorithm is input from human quality raters who work off of an extensive, 172 page, guide that Google publishes and updates for anyone to read: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

Apparently the "human quality raters" never found the sites reported in this thread.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#378

Post by mrkramer »

adventured wrote: post #357
mrkramer wrote: post #316

Earlier 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. 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 eli…

>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

Become software entrepreneur?

And many international software companies have software development teams and presence in Russia.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#379

Post by leobg »

titzer wrote: post #183
PaulHoule wrote: post #170

For medical search the answer is pubmed. Not only is the collection of documents clean (of low-grade scammers, pharma companies have to pay big $ to play) but the NIH has done a large amount of search quality and ontology work -- the system knows "Tylenol" is synonymous with "Paracetamol", "Acetaminophen", etc.

> the system knows "Tylenol" is synonymous with "Paracetamol", "Acetaminophen", etc. This is the exactly the kind of thing that Google cannot fathom manually doing. As if entering facts into a computer were morally wrong somehow. They'd much rather launch the equivalent of a shell script that harnesses face-melting amounts of computational power, processing literally trillions of webpages in bulk, signal and noise to…

Isn’t that kind of easy to do? I mean, you can do that kind of thing as a one-man-show on consumer hardware using GloVe or fastText.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#380

Post by Volker_W »

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…

What does SV stand for?
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