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Wow. That's absolutely horrible. Looking at Google's search results, it's obvious that these tactics are rampant and really winning the war here. We need a ne
by throwaway13337 6y ago
Wow. That's absolutely horrible.
Looking at Google's search results, it's obvious that these tactics are rampant and really winning the war here.
We need a new search engine that cannot be gamed so easily. I know it's non trivial but the stakes are high as is the reward for making such.
This is a real engineering challenge. I'm excited about the problem space and opportunity.
- post_below 6y ago"a new search engine that cannot be gamed" So you mean a search engine that's 100% human curated? Or rather, a directory, it wouldn't really be a search engine. Any algorithmic signal can be gamed. Although I'd be curious to hear how I'm wrong about that.
- ISL 6y agoHumans are also readily gamed. See, for example, Troy.
- bigiain 6y agoAnd Reddit with the top 100 subs moderated by the same ~dozen people who are almost certainly making a living out of it from back channel advertising/marketing/bribery. And Wikipedia, where power tipping super editors can control whatever they want.
- swilliamsio 6y agoIs this a reference to the Iliad/Aeneid/Odyssey and how humans were gamed by gods into fighting each other pointlessly for ten years? Or is there something else called Troy?
- samatman 6y agoI have to assume this was specifically a reference to the Trojan Horse, although I like your interpretation better.
- TameAntelope 6y agoAm I crazy to think a "human curated X" is less impossible than we think it is, even at scale? Imagine if you could upvote/downvote Google search results, and got rewarded for being "right" or something...
- Meekro 6y agoI agree there has to be a way, but it'll have to be cleverer than what you suggested. App stores already rank apps based on user reviews, and reddit ranks posts based on user voting. Both are manipulated to hell, and I've read reports of third world sweatshops dedicated to churning out those reviews. Since the farmed reviews are written by humans, they don't get filtered by AI reading the text or watching people's mouse movements or whatever.
- TameAntelope 6y agoThe word "right" in my comment is doing a lot of work, heh...
- nwienert 6y agoIt only fails on large subreddits. The key is scale. Reddit still has the best content on the web despite a few scale problems.
- m463 6y agowhy wouldn't it be just as easy to game a human?
- smoldesu 6y agoThe issue with "human curated X" isn't the X-factor, but the "human" one. Even an upvoting system like you're suggesting can be abused by bad actors who want to bury legitimate results in favor of seedier ones. At the end of the day, your best bet is to take a combination approach: using RSS for news/reading is a pretty good upgrade, and switching to a decentralized search engine like searx will at least provide a benevolent result.
- deleted 6y ago
- rubyskills 6y agoThis used to exist and was called DMOZ. The search engines used to give more credit to dmoz sites at the time as well. There weren't enough moderators and gatekeeping was a big issue. I wonder if it could work today.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoThat also was abused - there where DMOZ category editors who took $ to add sites
- alasdair_ 6y agoYahoo was originally almost entirely human curated. I remember having to pay around $500 to get a business listing for a mortgage broker added.
- judge2020 6y agoEven though Google’s not bulletproof, I don’t think any search engine that indexes literally every page could be created to block all abuse.
- DylanDmitri 6y agoI think the real lesson is that under enough pressure every large system leaks. Anything that gatekeeps millions of real dollars (search engines, stock markets, Amazon reviews, insurance claims, etc) will constantly be exploited and patched by nature of the thing. Only "solution" is to decrease pressure, by say fragmenting market into 20+ search engines, so that SEO people can't realistically optimize for all of them at once. Some smaller scope things can be made completely watertight, for example mathematically proven cryptography, but even that often leaks to government pressure.
- danhak 6y agoI don't understand the implicit assumption that a new search engine that reaches Google's scale will be more adept at curtailing abuse.