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Spot-on. Google used to talk a good game about combatting search spam, but once Demand Media and the ilk called their bluff Google chose to fold and opened the

by gamble 16y ago

Spot-on. Google used to talk a good game about combatting search spam, but once Demand Media and the ilk called their bluff Google chose to fold and opened the doors to an industrial-scale search spam industry. They may have stumbled into it, but now they're in a bind because taking on the spammers would have an immediate and noticeable hit on their revenue - but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation.

jacquesm 16y ago
> but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation. That's already happened. I am pretty sure that this is not intentional though. What would sway me is if say 'bing' would have zero spam and google would have a whole pile of it. Is there any research confirming or denying that?
- gamble 16y ago
  Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
  - parfe 16y ago
    Yahoo is powered by Bing. What do you mean that DDG is basically yahoo?
    - gamble 16y ago
      DDG is built on Yahoo BOSS, (Build Your Own Search Service) Yahoo's white-label search engine API. DDG adds spam filtering and some custom indexing on top, but the bulk of their data comes from Yahoo's index. AFAIK BOSS is still Yahoo technology, not bing. There may be a plan to migrate BOSS to bing.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- notahacker 16y ago
  This is only an anecdotal example (using a string from unit tests I've got running in the background), but illustrates exactly the sort of search that Google has been copping so much flak for recently: http://www.bing.com/search?q=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22cant+be+blank%22&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n&sk= http://www.bing.com/search?q=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22can... (3 results from stackoverflow and github) http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=google#hl=en&expIds=17259,17311,24999,27586&xhr=t&q=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22cant+be+blank%22&cp=20&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22cant+be+blank%22&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=1cccc688c869882c http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&... (stackoverflow is admittedly at the top, github in the middle but there are plenty of scraper sites listed) 3 canonical results for Bing, whilst Google returns pages of duplicate scraper sites like eFreedom, Questionhub, Developer IT. Getting rid of these should be an easy decision. Lightweight content farms that probably satisfy many of their users queries are a trickier beast to deal with - banning Mahalo seems more like banning McDonalds. Bing does of course have a massive incentive to remove made-for-Adsense sites from their results, and after that rather unscientific test I feel inclined to give it more of a chance. (DDG, incidentally has one result more than Bing - which means that Gabriel needs to add Comanswer.com to his list of sites to block...)

by gamble 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago

> but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation. That's already happened. I am pretty sure that this is not intentional though. What would sway me is if say 'bing' would have zero spam and google would have a whole pile of it. Is there any research confirming or denying that?

gamble 16y ago
Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
- parfe 16y ago
  Yahoo is powered by Bing. What do you mean that DDG is basically yahoo?
  - gamble 16y ago
    DDG is built on Yahoo BOSS, (Build Your Own Search Service) Yahoo's white-label search engine API. DDG adds spam filtering and some custom indexing on top, but the bulk of their data comes from Yahoo's index. AFAIK BOSS is still Yahoo technology, not bing. There may be a plan to migrate BOSS to bing.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
notahacker 16y ago
This is only an anecdotal example (using a string from unit tests I've got running in the background), but illustrates exactly the sort of search that Google has been copping so much flak for recently: http://www.bing.com/search?q=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22cant+be+blank%22&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n&sk= http://www.bing.com/search?q=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22can... (3 results from stackoverflow and github) http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=google#hl=en&expIds=17259,17311,24999,27586&xhr=t&q=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22cant+be+blank%22&cp=20&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=shoulda+%22got+errors%22+%22cant+be+blank%22&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=1cccc688c869882c http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&... (stackoverflow is admittedly at the top, github in the middle but there are plenty of scraper sites listed) 3 canonical results for Bing, whilst Google returns pages of duplicate scraper sites like eFreedom, Questionhub, Developer IT. Getting rid of these should be an easy decision. Lightweight content farms that probably satisfy many of their users queries are a trickier beast to deal with - banning Mahalo seems more like banning McDonalds. Bing does of course have a massive incentive to remove made-for-Adsense sites from their results, and after that rather unscientific test I feel inclined to give it more of a chance. (DDG, incidentally has one result more than Bing - which means that Gabriel needs to add Comanswer.com to his list of sites to block...)