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Any technical issue, really. There's a ton of autogenerated content out there with low-effort troubleshooting tips. A lot of it is used as lead generation for s

Any technical issue, really. There's a ton of autogenerated content out there with low-effort troubleshooting tips. A lot of it is used as lead generation for scammy antivirus/antimalware/"cleaner" software, paid tech support, or outright tech support scams.

initplus 5y ago
These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Yes, I clicked the link because it exactly referenced my issue. But it's not helpful to just see the same 5 tips copy pasted from elsewhere by an algorithm.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- minikites 5y ago
  >These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Why? Google makes money from advertisements either way, it's not in their interest to improve search results. If anything, terrible search results make users more likely to click on ads, which now look better by comparison.
  - lupire 5y ago
    The entire reason Google is the most successful search engine is that people don't use search engines that behave this way.
    - MiguelX413 5y ago
      They obviously do use search engines, like Google, that behave this way.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Google became very popular very quickly because it gave much better results much faster. The more that Google allows quality to decline, the faster they approach a non-recoverable tipping point. Just ask Yahoo how quickly that can happen. Google may seem entrenched, but they have a shaky hold on search that is only as strong as its result quality. They are entrenched in advertising, but only because that's where searchers go to search. Users may be entrenched in other Google products-- Gmail, gcal, docs, etc-- but not search. Someone using all those other Google products could change their default search engine and have zero impact on the rest of their digital life. I'm shopping around for a preferred alternative right now, I just haven't settled yet.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      That was pre-IPO Google. That company doesn't exist anymore. Money is their God now. Every Googlers high salary depends on it.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        Yep, not disagreeing. My point is that a short term pursuit of money over at least a reasonable quality of search will destroy what they have built very quickly if quality gets low enough to make it easy for an upstart rival to have obviously better search results. And the evidence for that is in the history of their own rise to search dominance.,
    - minikites 5y ago
      >The more that Google allows quality to decline, the faster they approach a non-recoverable tipping point. Just ask Yahoo how quickly that can happen. Do you think we're in the same situation now as we were fully 20 years ago? I don't. Facebook killed MySpace, but Facebook is now too big to be disrupted, same with Google. The word "google" is a verb now. This is why the quality of their search results doesn't matter, people are too entrenched to switch now, which was not true in 2001.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
toeget 5y ago
That's why I append reddit, stackoverflow, superuser when I search for technical solutions. At least those sites are still full of user-generated content with good answers upvoted to the top.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  You know, I was joking the last few times the subject came up, but I'm getting seriously worried that the more people mention using that kind of trick on HN, the faster advertisers will catch on and start building reddit-based SEO strategies. Not sure how we should react :/
  - Camillo 5y ago
    Oh, it's no secret. Google's autocomplete will actually suggest appending "reddit" to certain queries. For example, let's take one of the most SEO-spammy queries imaginable, "best mattress 2021". Google will suggest: - best mattress 2021 - best mattress 2021 consumer reports - best mattress 2021 reddit - best mattress 2021 for back pain - best mattress 2021 wirecutter etc. But of course Reddit is already rife with shills. Not sure about CR.
    - sixothree 5y ago
      I remember in the late 2000's I had a CR account. I had two weeks left on the period I had paid for. But when I cancelled the account... poof. My access was revoked immediately. Very much not consumer friendly. I was done enough with their crap that I didn't even bother with an email.
      - Gracana 5y ago
        FWIW I signed up for CR recently when I was car shopping, and I canceled my subscription within the first month. They assured me that I would still have access for the remainder of the period. Of course, you're forced to subscribe rather than buy access for a set period, and they sent me a couple dozen emails during the time I was signed up, so they're not completely innocent... but at least that part felt reasonable.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
The last few weeks I've started noticing a very specific type of SEO that pops up when I'm doing technical search, where the first page will be a Stack Overflow result, and the 3rd or 4th result will be from some content farm, copy-pasted from SO, sometimes translated in French. It's a little unsettling.
- ihnorton 5y ago
  It can be worse than that when those sites get a full multi-line result billing whereas the original stackoverflow answer gets a single-line subheading under some other SO result.
- lupire 5y ago
  That's a years old scam, but occasionally a new site pops through Google's filters.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    I haven't gotten real SO as google result in years, only those content farms, constantly. Nowadays the same even happens for github issues, they're also mostly outranked by content farms copying from them. If I search on mobile, often all my results are these content farms. (Google used in English from Germany)
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  If you start getting a little esoteric in your searches you’ll get tons of results that are clearly crawled from personal blogs, and hosted on personal-blog-looking domains that redirect to godawful garbage. Especially bad on mobile because Google truncates the URLs.
bashtoni 5y ago
I keep getting results to a site 'gitmemory.com' which is just GitHub issues scraped. Super annoying that they outrank the actual GitHub issues they've taken the content from.
- sdoering 5y ago
  How is this not just spam and duplicate content. I remember when I was punished by G for duplicate content on my very small private blog when I was using jekyll and had the markdown sources and the code stored in GitHub. I didn't know of the canonical tag back than and was punished because the GitHub domain had more trust. It is sad, bit nowadays I often just directly jump onto page 3 at Google or use other "tricks" to get okayish results.

initplus 5y ago

These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Yes, I clicked the link because it exactly referenced my issue. But it's not helpful to just see the same 5 tips copy pasted from elsewhere by an algorithm.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
minikites 5y ago
>These results are incredibly frustrating. Google should de-rank these autogenerated tech troubleshooting sites. Why? Google makes money from advertisements either way, it's not in their interest to improve search results. If anything, terrible search results make users more likely to click on ads, which now look better by comparison.
- lupire 5y ago
  The entire reason Google is the most successful search engine is that people don't use search engines that behave this way.
  - MiguelX413 5y ago
    They obviously do use search engines, like Google, that behave this way.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Google became very popular very quickly because it gave much better results much faster. The more that Google allows quality to decline, the faster they approach a non-recoverable tipping point. Just ask Yahoo how quickly that can happen. Google may seem entrenched, but they have a shaky hold on search that is only as strong as its result quality. They are entrenched in advertising, but only because that's where searchers go to search. Users may be entrenched in other Google products-- Gmail, gcal, docs, etc-- but not search. Someone using all those other Google products could change their default search engine and have zero impact on the rest of their digital life. I'm shopping around for a preferred alternative right now, I just haven't settled yet.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    That was pre-IPO Google. That company doesn't exist anymore. Money is their God now. Every Googlers high salary depends on it.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Yep, not disagreeing. My point is that a short term pursuit of money over at least a reasonable quality of search will destroy what they have built very quickly if quality gets low enough to make it easy for an upstart rival to have obviously better search results. And the evidence for that is in the history of their own rise to search dominance.,
  - minikites 5y ago
    >The more that Google allows quality to decline, the faster they approach a non-recoverable tipping point. Just ask Yahoo how quickly that can happen. Do you think we're in the same situation now as we were fully 20 years ago? I don't. Facebook killed MySpace, but Facebook is now too big to be disrupted, same with Google. The word "google" is a verb now. This is why the quality of their search results doesn't matter, people are too entrenched to switch now, which was not true in 2001.
    - ineedasername 5y ago

toeget 5y ago

That's why I append reddit, stackoverflow, superuser when I search for technical solutions. At least those sites are still full of user-generated content with good answers upvoted to the top.

PoignardAzur 5y ago
You know, I was joking the last few times the subject came up, but I'm getting seriously worried that the more people mention using that kind of trick on HN, the faster advertisers will catch on and start building reddit-based SEO strategies. Not sure how we should react :/
- Camillo 5y ago
  Oh, it's no secret. Google's autocomplete will actually suggest appending "reddit" to certain queries. For example, let's take one of the most SEO-spammy queries imaginable, "best mattress 2021". Google will suggest: - best mattress 2021 - best mattress 2021 consumer reports - best mattress 2021 reddit - best mattress 2021 for back pain - best mattress 2021 wirecutter etc. But of course Reddit is already rife with shills. Not sure about CR.
  - sixothree 5y ago
    I remember in the late 2000's I had a CR account. I had two weeks left on the period I had paid for. But when I cancelled the account... poof. My access was revoked immediately. Very much not consumer friendly. I was done enough with their crap that I didn't even bother with an email.
    - Gracana 5y ago
      FWIW I signed up for CR recently when I was car shopping, and I canceled my subscription within the first month. They assured me that I would still have access for the remainder of the period. Of course, you're forced to subscribe rather than buy access for a set period, and they sent me a couple dozen emails during the time I was signed up, so they're not completely innocent... but at least that part felt reasonable.

PoignardAzur 5y ago

The last few weeks I've started noticing a very specific type of SEO that pops up when I'm doing technical search, where the first page will be a Stack Overflow result, and the 3rd or 4th result will be from some content farm, copy-pasted from SO, sometimes translated in French. It's a little unsettling.

ihnorton 5y ago
It can be worse than that when those sites get a full multi-line result billing whereas the original stackoverflow answer gets a single-line subheading under some other SO result.
lupire 5y ago
That's a years old scam, but occasionally a new site pops through Google's filters.
- kuschku 5y ago
  I haven't gotten real SO as google result in years, only those content farms, constantly. Nowadays the same even happens for github issues, they're also mostly outranked by content farms copying from them. If I search on mobile, often all my results are these content farms. (Google used in English from Germany)
eyelidlessness 5y ago
If you start getting a little esoteric in your searches you’ll get tons of results that are clearly crawled from personal blogs, and hosted on personal-blog-looking domains that redirect to godawful garbage. Especially bad on mobile because Google truncates the URLs.

bashtoni 5y ago

I keep getting results to a site 'gitmemory.com' which is just GitHub issues scraped. Super annoying that they outrank the actual GitHub issues they've taken the content from.

sdoering 5y ago
How is this not just spam and duplicate content. I remember when I was punished by G for duplicate content on my very small private blog when I was using jekyll and had the markdown sources and the code stored in GitHub. I didn't know of the canonical tag back than and was punished because the GitHub domain had more trust. It is sad, bit nowadays I often just directly jump onto page 3 at Google or use other "tricks" to get okayish results.