A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques • Hacker News Board

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#41

Post by epi0Bauqu » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 1:22 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this at DuckDuckGo, that is crawl, identify and delist over 60M domains. I think it works pretty well and is certainly a value add, but it is not immediately obvious to new or even many old users.

Just a heads-up for you, and I'm sure you get this all the time, but I'm a new DDG fan. The first time I tried it some months back, it was eh-OK, but not compelling enough to pull me away from Google. In the meantime though, I've gotten more and more frustrated with Google's results -- due in part to link-spamming sites -- that DDG has become a lot more compelling. It's my default search provider now. One question th…

Thx for the heads-up. This is very helpful feedback.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#42

Post by frossie » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 2:08 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #36

frossie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Google will address this, and soon. I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it. A lot of people switched from Altavista (remember them?) to Google overnight - because of better search result…

> I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. Honest question, because I'm a recent DDG convert (and I'm not exactly an "early adopter" of anything) ... what do you think of its search results for this? A DDG search of "camera reviews" gave http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/ for its top hit, and the site actually seems pretty useful to me.

You know, I keep forgetting about those guys.

I have just switched my firefox search to them so I can give them an honest try.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#43

Post by shadowsun7 » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 2:09 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #36

frossie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Google will address this, and soon. I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it. A lot of people switched from Altavista (remember them?) to Google overnight - because of better search result…

> I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. Honest question, because I'm a recent DDG convert (and I'm not exactly an "early adopter" of anything) ... what do you think of its search results for this? A DDG search of "camera reviews" gave http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/ for its top hit, and the site actually seems pretty useful to me.

Dpreview is a great site. So - yes, I'm going to go check DDG out soon. Thanks, thaumaturgy.

PS: Whether or not DDG returns the specific Dpreview site for a specific camera model is still up in the air, I suppose. But I'll remember DDG as an alternative the next time Google results are getting in my way.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#44

Post by frossie » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 2:12 AM UTC

ddemchuk wrote: post #32

frossie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Google will address this, and soon. I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it. A lot of people switched from Altavista (remember them?) to Google overnight - because of better search result…

"There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it." Wait...what? Come on, you don't honestly believe that, do you? Google's algo is a huge step up from the days when you can stuff your meta keywords to get up to the top of the previous SE's. It's in Google's best interest to find the best content to return f…

They have an ad network to cater to first, searchers come second.

I'd like to think that isn't true. But if it was, my point stands - as a searcher, I am willing to go somewhere where the searchers come first. Search is not a lock-in. Changing search engines is almost painless.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#45

Post by shadowsun7 » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 2:13 AM UTC

ddemchuk wrote: post #17

ryanhuff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not specific to Mahalo, but I certainly care about search results quality. My recent experience searching out answers to my Android programming questions (doing my first app) have led to frustration as the Google results appear promising, but upon clicking through, I find garbage aggregator websites. This may be a problem on all search engines, but its driving my domain-specific searches to sites like Stack Overflow.…

Everyone wants high quality search results, of course. But like I said in my OP, Google is a for profit company that depends on high traffic keyword searches and high volume publishers to maintain their livelihood. It's not that far of a stretch for them to not necessarily be dying for "quality" search results as much as we are. If the lower quality results are making them money, it would be against their own busines…

I don't think you're right here - Google's stated aim has long been to provide the best search experience for its users. Nothing it has done in the past, empirically, has shown that it wants anything otherwise. Even Cutts's response in the article above exposes such thinking.

To Google, what's best for the company is best for its users. Bing (and now DDG) are hot on their heels, and so it doesn't make sense when you claim that there's a split between what Google wants and what we want, which are better search results, etc etc.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#46

Post by geuis » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 4:21 AM UTC

geuis wrote: post #6

Hackaday is not a site that was created in the last year.

In the list of urls that are in the search results includes hackaday. It's not the only one. I was actually curious about how some of those sites had the mahalo content on them. Some of them are older than mahalo.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#47

Post by smiler » Fri, Jun 18, 2010, 10:35 AM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #35

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this at DuckDuckGo, that is crawl, identify and delist over 60M domains. I think it works pretty well and is certainly a value add, but it is not immediately obvious to new or even many old users.

Just a heads-up for you, and I'm sure you get this all the time, but I'm a new DDG fan. The first time I tried it some months back, it was eh-OK, but not compelling enough to pull me away from Google. In the meantime though, I've gotten more and more frustrated with Google's results -- due in part to link-spamming sites -- that DDG has become a lot more compelling. It's my default search provider now. One question th…

Remedy for this is to bookmark a site you like :)