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My experience is the exact opposite: I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search results in the last few months. It feels like it increases when I acci

My experience is the exact opposite: I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search results in the last few months. It feels like it increases when I accidentally click a clone site. This happens for more than StackOverflow clones. Mailing lists, Linux man-pages, FAQs, published Linux articles, etc. all have clone pages that are obvious link farms (sometimes they even include ads that attempt to harm my computer) that rank higher than the "official" (or at least less-noisey) pages. Ideally, I'd like to completely remove domains from result as has been discussed elsewhere on HN. Hopefully this upcoming push for social networking that Google has will reintroduce a better-implemented "SearchWiki" feature...

lincolnq 16y ago
Try DuckDuckGo. Gabriel has been doing an aggressive job about removing unsavory domains and I've been fairly impressed. I think that Google probably can't be nearly as aggressive for political reasons.
- Sephr 16y ago
  The reason Google isn't doing the same thing as DuckDuckGo is most likely because manually banning a domain instead of improving their algorithms to avoid unwanted behaviors will only temporarily work, and only in select cases. There will always be new spam and content farm sites.
  - hessenwolf 16y ago
    There seem to be a small number of large content farms (perhaps suggesting economies of scale are pretty important). In this case, manually killing them will work well for Herr. Weinberg.
    - greglindahl 16y ago
      Over at blekko, we leave in a few large but marginal sites like eHow, and let users kill them with their personal spam slashtags. For smaller spam websites, we can frequently use Adsense IDs to kill them in groups.
pyre 16y ago
I think there is a disconnect in the scale at which you are both commenting: Comment #1: > I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. > <snip> > it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks > ago. Comment #2: > I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search > results in the last few months You can't argue against "things have gotten better in the last week" with "things have been getting worse for the last 6 months."

lincolnq 16y ago

Try DuckDuckGo. Gabriel has been doing an aggressive job about removing unsavory domains and I've been fairly impressed. I think that Google probably can't be nearly as aggressive for political reasons.

Sephr 16y ago
The reason Google isn't doing the same thing as DuckDuckGo is most likely because manually banning a domain instead of improving their algorithms to avoid unwanted behaviors will only temporarily work, and only in select cases. There will always be new spam and content farm sites.
- hessenwolf 16y ago
  There seem to be a small number of large content farms (perhaps suggesting economies of scale are pretty important). In this case, manually killing them will work well for Herr. Weinberg.
  - greglindahl 16y ago
    Over at blekko, we leave in a few large but marginal sites like eHow, and let users kill them with their personal spam slashtags. For smaller spam websites, we can frequently use Adsense IDs to kill them in groups.

pyre 16y ago

I think there is a disconnect in the scale at which you are both commenting: Comment #1: > I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. > <snip> > it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks > ago. Comment #2: > I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search > results in the last few months You can't argue against "things have gotten better in the last week" with "things have been getting worse for the last 6 months."