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I remember the days of hiding text in the same color font as the background so that grepping would make your page the top result. So I’m not sure those days wer
by jader201 7y ago
I remember the days of hiding text in the same color font as the background so that grepping would make your page the top result. So I’m not sure those days were better.
The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources.
Maybe page rank (mentioned in a sibling response) helped address this, but then it’s really no longer just a dumb grep.
- userbinator 7y agoI remember the days of hiding text in the same color font as the background so that grepping would make your page the top result. A simple "-site:somesite.com" removes those, or just scroll past them. Keyword spam is easy to ignore because the title of the page, the domain, or the path often has nothing to do with what you're searching for, and the preview text is nonsensical. The dumber search is, the easier it is for the bad actors to game it and drown out the legit sources. The dumber search is, the easier it is for users to ignore the crap and find what they're looking for, even if it's not the first result. The "smart" omission of results has the effect of removing a lot of useful ones too. Google's claims that they have X number of results for a search is essentially meaningless if you can't actually see them all.