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It started off strong, nicely illustrating the background leading to this mess, but then the conclusion falters, in particular the accusation of: "Don’t the mak

by jonex 7y ago

It started off strong, nicely illustrating the background leading to this mess, but then the conclusion falters, in particular the accusation of: "Don’t the makers of Search Engines know this? Of course they do. It’s just not in their interest to bring clarity." without any suggestions on what they could be doing to achieve that clarity. To me, it sadly seems like a losing war between the SEO-spammers and the search engine developers. There's no law of nature making it possible to separate fake content from true content. If The spam is good enough, I'm not even sure a human can do it. Maybe the concept of trust-less content distribution will have to come to an end at some point and we will start ranking searches based on more or less manually maintained trust graphs?

saagarjha 7y ago
> If The spam is good enough “Good spam” is just real content.
- jonex 7y ago
  Yes, more or less. But with the difference that it doesn't even attempt at being true. We've been spoiled by the internet of old, where geeky types wrote blogs and created web sites sharing their intricate knowledge of their favourite topic. Of course there's a fair share of conspiracy theorists and incorrect ideas, but it was generally in good faith and somewhat easy to filter. Now you won't find those anymore, instead we get SEO-optimising sites with text sourced via Fiverr resembling meaningful content but without any ambitions whatsoever of correctness nor meaningfulness. Best case, it just ends up in frustration as you realise that it's just filler, worse case, it actually misleads you with some made-up fact that you couldn't see any reason to lie about.
- ksclarke 7y ago
  > “Good spam” is just real content. Harvested and put on somebody else's site that is covered with ads.
- luckylion 7y ago
  No, it's not. Good spam looks like real content, but isn't accurate. It's an article about the most eco friendly kitchen appliance that reads just fine, but littered with factual inaccuracies and exists solely to give the impression that somebody has taken the time to write an actual article on the topic. It's often below GPT2 level, and I'm sure we'll have great fun with autogenerated SEO content in the future.

by jonex 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

> If The spam is good enough “Good spam” is just real content.

jonex 7y ago
Yes, more or less. But with the difference that it doesn't even attempt at being true. We've been spoiled by the internet of old, where geeky types wrote blogs and created web sites sharing their intricate knowledge of their favourite topic. Of course there's a fair share of conspiracy theorists and incorrect ideas, but it was generally in good faith and somewhat easy to filter. Now you won't find those anymore, instead we get SEO-optimising sites with text sourced via Fiverr resembling meaningful content but without any ambitions whatsoever of correctness nor meaningfulness. Best case, it just ends up in frustration as you realise that it's just filler, worse case, it actually misleads you with some made-up fact that you couldn't see any reason to lie about.
ksclarke 7y ago
> “Good spam” is just real content. Harvested and put on somebody else's site that is covered with ads.
luckylion 7y ago
No, it's not. Good spam looks like real content, but isn't accurate. It's an article about the most eco friendly kitchen appliance that reads just fine, but littered with factual inaccuracies and exists solely to give the impression that somebody has taken the time to write an actual article on the topic. It's often below GPT2 level, and I'm sure we'll have great fun with autogenerated SEO content in the future.