Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 359 posts

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#41

Post by Miraste »

wokwokwok wrote: post #11
ma2rten wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.

Who knows? It's a black box after all. ...but, you know. Can you see anything else they're doing that would give them that kind of ranking? These pages are just piles of crap, and google is pretty good at filtering that sort of stuff out. If it was that easy, google would be filled with spam everywhere. The chance that someone did something random thats very uncommon (block back) and it happened to be a super effecti…

Everyone and their mother blocks back buttons. Major news sites do it. There is no way that's what's ranking them this high.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#42

Post by power78 »

soheil wrote: post #20
ma2rten wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.

I wonder why Yandex opens every link in a new window. How can they track bounceback?

Doesn't the opening site have access to the child window/tab in Javascript? Can't it set events to fire when the window is closed?

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#43

Post by ffffwe3rq352y3 »

estebarb wrote: post #26
fny wrote: post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result. I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are…

I find that using another search engine in that kind of situation is extremely useful! If I'm searching for more mainstream stuff google usually is great but when I'm going for more specialized topics duck duck go will usually bring up some different links!

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#44

Post by philiplu »

agency wrote: post #31

This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?

Not just you. Something changed two or three months ago. Never really saw spam for years before that; now 3 or 4 mails a day.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#45

Post by NorwegianDude »

janmo wrote: post #23

I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are…

.it pages are used in Norway too, but I'm not sure it's something GPT-ish that's being used. Whole sentences are copied word for word from other articles.(might be a small dataset it's trained on?)

It could of course be that its something similar to GPT that is trained on all the content it could find and then writes articles, cause it's clearly messing up sometimes, form the small piece of content available at the search results page.

I'm not sure if this is an ML race and the reason we're not seeing the same thing in English is because Google might understands English better than spammers. While in Norwegian and German it's the other way around?

Clearly freshness is a large part of it. Google seems to have indexed millions upon millions of pages tied to this in the last 24 hours.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#47

Post by dotcommand »

evolve2k wrote: post #25

Before I accessed the article I was hopeful from the title that “The Mermaid” was some hot new search engine out of Norway.

Same here. But sadly the title would have been 'Google purchases "The Mermaid" for $X'... Given their near $2 trillion market cap, I doubt any search engine would be allowed to stay hot for too long.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#48

Post by weird-eye-issue »

Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for:

Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k

These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale.

For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" which has 207k searches per month in Norway and is rated as 0 (out of 100) for being easy to rank for. Usually when a keyword has that amount of searches it would be incredibly hard to rank for, I've never seen anything like this. So what is happening here looks like they are just taking advantage of a market with really low competition keywords.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#49

Post by tyingq »

paxys wrote: post #13

I doubt it's some crazy sophisticated SEO hijacking operation. Probably a result of a small data set (Norwegian language web pages), specific search terms (Norwegian brands, companies), and lots of keyword stuffing. Most of the examples the author pointed out were from pages 5-10 of Google results, which are probably worthless for ad revenue anyways.

It does rate a pretty good chuckle recalling old Google blog posts about their various uber-sophisticated anti-spam ML algorithms and how black hat SEO just wasn't possible anymore.
Post reply on HN