Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have told him not to quit his day job. That sounds ridiculous.
I don't agree, plus he's a billionaire.
Why’s he not building it now, then? He has the means.
Search engines and SEO spam
391–400 of 555 posts
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#392> 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…
> Google often seems to no longer support mandatory include/exclude search parameters
I've noticed this, and it's frustrating. I have assumed it's intentional. I am left to guess as to what a change in this behavior would accomplish.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#393I have seen several google alternative search engine projects being posted in HN every other week. You have your privacy focused open source google alternative search engine for "insert niche here" with big hopes of disruption.
I will give you my two cents. I have used duckduckgo, bing, searx etc. for extended periods of time and hated every one of those things. The problem is that what you search seem to be essentially the gateway to wild west of internet. I understand the proposition of spam control in search engines, but atleast to me I think the early days of google without DMCA and copyright bans made google the best.
I fear SEO spam control will only bring the worst of the moderated internet. It will not be the first time big tech tried to douse a gasoline fire with more gasoline because they taught the more fire meant the previous fire will get suffocated by the lack of oxygen(?). Rather than using "AI" as a crutch to solve SEO as a problem, I want to see an option that is true to 2005 era google.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#394Earlier 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.
Because, years ago, linking to lower reputation sites would drain your page rank. So everyone worried about SEO became afraid to link to anything except: 1) Their own website 2) High reputation sites like NYTimes, etc. It's sad. Makes it harder to navigate the web.
> It's sad. Makes it harder to navigate the web.
Some would even say it killed the web by centralizing all the content in the hands of a few [0].
Which is the direct consequence of everybody optimizing to better show up on Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft and ultimately even migrating all their hosting to these companies.
[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#395To 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…
There’s a lot of good quality reviews on YT on launch date of pretty much anything these days. It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.
> It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.
I'd say it's more that YouTube offers a clearer path to content monetization than text does. YT is a much more lucrative platform for the same level of effort as SEO for their text blogs.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
> Become software entrepreneur? Exactly. Hacking for hire, making cheats, botnets, SEO farms, selling exploits and hacked social media accounts; practically anything you can think of that US software engineers can't be bothered with, as they already earn a healthy salary. That is entrepreneurism.
I wasn't speaking about that kind of entrepreneurism but about making legal software and legal web services that solve problems and are useful. So many Russian hackers got arrested when they travelled somewhere outside Russia and now they are serving 10 or 20 year sentences in US jails.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The biggest perverse incentive for Google is that making better search results can mean less clicks to ads (clicking an ad because results are crap, going thru more pages of results means more ads). Clicks are revenue which is much easier to optimise for. Internal Search owners can push for better algos, but what if the algo causes revenue to fall? Are there strong forces strong enough within the organisation to ensu…
> The biggest perverse incentive for Google is that making better search results can mean less clicks to ads
This is also something that Google can control if competitors come along.
i.e. If a reasonable competitor comes along that is willing to sacrifice ad revenue for better search result quality than Google, google can just adjust their search quality upwards to knock them out (and then adjust it back once the competitive threat is gone).
Perverse incentives from Google are all over the place - Searching for the delivery business "Just Eat" in the UK for instance returns an ad for their competitor Deliveroo above the legitimate organic search result for me - and I can also see that JustEat are trying to pay for their own brand name just to compete - and IMO this sort of behaviour is anti-competitive, borderline extortion considering Google is the de-facto way of searching for a business, and shocking from a search-quality perspective (where the wrong result is intentionally shown at the top because they paid more money).
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#398Google is not important because it has all the information - it's important because it has hardly any.
A major complaint is that there used to be good free reviews of commercial products that could be easily found.
That is not "all the information". Information about the current round of commerically advertised products is something like 5-10% of all commerce (or less).
And we are entering a world where "all the information" is what we do all day, what we say, how we react to different stimuli.
That is the real review sites - why do people take this train and not that, why is that park safe and this one full of muggings.
We need to solve the Google problem not because we want blogging like it's 2009 but because epidemiology is about to open humanity's eyes. And it's going to hurt if we don't make it free and open.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#399I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve and that Google is not incentivized to solve. Google wants you to click on ads at the end of the day, full-stop. Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. Ot…
> I think building search vertical that are hand-curated would be very interesting to see.
That was my inspiration behind a side project I made a few years ago — a decentralized, hand curated "search engine" [0]. Never got beyond the side project stage. But I see promise in this in the future. Eventually we'll figure out that moderated crowd-sourced curation is better than the best machine learning. The filtering capabilities have to be pretty sophisticated to make it work, though.
Re: Search engines and SEO spam
#400I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve and that Google is not incentivized to solve. Google wants you to click on ads at the end of the day, full-stop. Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. Ot…
> So, I like others to use keywords like "reddit" or "forum" to get to real humans who I trust and intentions are not to sell via affiliate links.
And therein lies the problem. Reddit makes very little money. Forums probably make negative money nowadays. Google has decided to demonetize the organic internet and subsidizes SEO crap and AMP or whatever dumb thing their signals consider valuable. We get what we incentivize, and right now the incentives in almost all of tech are pretty atrocious.