71–80 of 437 posts
As an aside, anyone knows if you can still find "who links to?". I used to do this to hear how people feel about my site/app. I would do something like `link:foo.bar.com` I don't remember if it was link: or linkto: but it seems it no longer is supported? :(
I feel like Google could filter out a lot of SEO spam by simply ignoring or downranking heavy sites. Everything that loads more than "n MB" is probably bloated and made to trick you into buying something or generating traffic without providing value. Another method could be to analyze how many external requests a page makes and put that into the calculation. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think this might hel…
Google will never do it because those ads & analytics can be Google's and benefit their bottom line.
This is nitpicky but the tire changing page doesn't actually fit your rational for choosing .edu pages >Professors are paid generous salaries to share knowledge with the paying customers of the University (students). So, let’s find some paid unpaid University knowledge on how to change a tire by using our new trick! But the bottom of the page says >Prepared by: [students] For Dr. Bruce Magee's English 303 (Technical…
It isn't nitpicking at all, I had the same question and glad you uncovered this answer. I think site:*.edu is just one tool in your search toolbox that you should know about, but I wouldn't expect it to work for every topic. Still, I had never thought of it so I'm glad I read this article.
It's good, but not really _that_ often useful.
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I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq
While I might be a target audience for them and willing to pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure there isn't a market for it.
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I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq
While I might be a target audience for them and willing to pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure there isn't a market for it.
Counter example: "what is an iris" when wondering about anatomy brings up Wikipedia as the first link. Perfect. With the .edu trick the first link is about the flower, and there's nothing about the human eye anywhere on the first page of results.
First result https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921215133/http:/...
Short but description of the iris and the function in the eye.
For textual links 2 out of 9 responses for eye irises. and 7 out of 9 for the flower.
embedded in the same page is 'Images for what is an iris site:.edu' and 10 out of 10 of those links are for eye irises.
Switching over to image search the first 20 are all about eye irises.
Everything is based around SEO spam. If someone has a website, and they're producing content, their point is to monetize the browsing of the website itself, or promote their main product via the website.
This incentivizes a certain kind of content, which is marketing content.
These days I'm back to searching social networks like Reddit or Hacker News for (at least somewhat) unbiased information.
Google is a fuzzy-search address bar at this point for me.
I feel like Google could filter out a lot of SEO spam by simply ignoring or downranking heavy sites. Everything that loads more than "n MB" is probably bloated and made to trick you into buying something or generating traffic without providing value. Another method could be to analyze how many external requests a page makes and put that into the calculation. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think this might hel…
Thought the same, but it would be unfair to web sites that are actual web apps and are JS-heavy. Google is hopeless anyway, so here's something for the next search engine that wants to bring back the Web: downrank by the number of 3rd party domain requests, attempts of tracking, and possibly also popups.
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I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?
It doesn't matter what new model you come up with. As long as capitalism is around and pushing for ever increasing profits this kind of behavior will always be on the menu.