5 ms·

Looking forward to testing this on all the searches I do that gives me heaps of spam results. Seems that Google's focus on search spam has more or less disappea

by Ueland 5y ago

Looking forward to testing this on all the searches I do that gives me heaps of spam results. Seems that Google's focus on search spam has more or less disappeared. What I've seen a alot of the last few years is sites with simply copied content republished on new domains. And I don't mean just some text, I mean the whole website. Take this search for example: https://www.google.no/search?q=nrk+site%3A.it https://www.google.no/search?q=nrk+site%3A.it It show's a bunch of Italian domains with mostly spam based on Norwegian content. This content regularly ranks high when searching for Norwegian cotent.

nisa 5y ago
gitmemory or these translated stackeroverflow clones are a pain - the original result doesn't even appear anywhere in the results - it's the same in german. Overall google result quality declined a lot from my perspective (and colleagues also agree) in the past years. the info-boxes and sidebars are often just plain wrong (wrong product, wrong answers) - have to add quotes to every other query but these also don't seem to work - websites that used to be indexed disappear and I get lot's of noise and outright spam websites with redirection spam (I've tested on Linux with different browsers, unlikely that it's hijacked). Not sure what's going on - I guess they made a lot of progress in NLP with BERT and other models and nobody internally want to see the drawbacks?
- Akronymus 5y ago
  > it's the same in german. reminds me of msdn, where I always search in english through some search engine, then get the german version presented with a SMALL button to turn it to english.
- lolinder 5y ago
  Gitmemory et al are awful. They've made me think seriously about the plausibility of building a custom search engine. From what I've heard, the biggest problem with building a general-purpose search engine seems to be the index—indexing the entire web requires data centers many times larger than most can afford, and deciding what is relevant in such an index requires excessive training data. But while working, I typically only want my search engines to search the same 200-odd sites (GitHub issues, Stack Overflow, MDN, language docs, high-quality technical blogs, etc.) It's too many to know which "site:" query to use, but it's a small enough set that it should be a manageable problem for an upstart search engine. It also seems like this is likely true in many domains. Taking on Google directly by trying to build a general purpose search engine seems to be a non-starter (most competitors just crib off of an existing player, and don't do much better). But a bunch of sharded search engines for specific domains could theoretically outperform Google/DDG/Bing within their respective domains, because the human using them has already narrowed the domain down dramatically. They wouldn't dethrone Google (general search is always going to be needed) but they could compete for a segment of traffic.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
This is the real information apocalypse. Machines cloning knowledge ad infinitum with increasing amounts of real content drowning in an endless ocean of... ads; Economic propaganda. Until content itself is cryptographically signed, there's no verifying where it come from or how true it is, if it ever were.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  > Until content itself is cryptographically signed At which point you have to determine which signatories to trust. Which is the same issue we currently have - which publishers (ie websites) should the search engine trust (ie rank highly)? So really what we need is a more robust method of attributing publisher quality. Except that perception of quality varies drastically between different consumers. Also, most solutions you might propose quickly start looking an awful lot like a distributed web of trust but no one has ever managed to pull that off at scale so far.
blackcat201 5y ago
Same in chinese search results for programming related question, most of the time I get was some bad translation from stackoverflow or github issue. Now I had to rely on browser plugins to automatically remove these domains from search results.
vodkapump 5y ago
This shows me almost exclusively pinterest results. A website I've never in my life used, but for some reason always get recommended to go to by google. Sad to see NRK being abused like this tho
raxxorrax 5y ago
They certainly promotes established newspapers. If you search for a term that is in any capacity part of a prominent news cycle, you can forget the results.
lgats 5y ago
So glad I'm not the only one experiencing the abundance of .it TLD spam. I've seen this rotating around different country-level TLDs, .de & .bg spam domains were filling the results previously. I suspect some big-name spammer rents domains for a short period while they're pending expiration.
- lgats 5y ago
  Several of the .it spam results are provisioned by 'Hosting Concepts B.V.' A company perhaps also involved in some shady prescription med domains: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openprovider-www4rxmedorg-and-more https://www.fda.gov/consumers/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openpr... https://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openprovider-wwwchemists-shopcom https://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/hosting-con...

by Ueland 5y ago

nisa 5y ago

gitmemory or these translated stackeroverflow clones are a pain - the original result doesn't even appear anywhere in the results - it's the same in german. Overall google result quality declined a lot from my perspective (and colleagues also agree) in the past years. the info-boxes and sidebars are often just plain wrong (wrong product, wrong answers) - have to add quotes to every other query but these also don't seem to work - websites that used to be indexed disappear and I get lot's of noise and outright spam websites with redirection spam (I've tested on Linux with different browsers, unlikely that it's hijacked). Not sure what's going on - I guess they made a lot of progress in NLP with BERT and other models and nobody internally want to see the drawbacks?

Akronymus 5y ago
> it's the same in german. reminds me of msdn, where I always search in english through some search engine, then get the german version presented with a SMALL button to turn it to english.
lolinder 5y ago
Gitmemory et al are awful. They've made me think seriously about the plausibility of building a custom search engine. From what I've heard, the biggest problem with building a general-purpose search engine seems to be the index—indexing the entire web requires data centers many times larger than most can afford, and deciding what is relevant in such an index requires excessive training data. But while working, I typically only want my search engines to search the same 200-odd sites (GitHub issues, Stack Overflow, MDN, language docs, high-quality technical blogs, etc.) It's too many to know which "site:" query to use, but it's a small enough set that it should be a manageable problem for an upstart search engine. It also seems like this is likely true in many domains. Taking on Google directly by trying to build a general purpose search engine seems to be a non-starter (most competitors just crib off of an existing player, and don't do much better). But a bunch of sharded search engines for specific domains could theoretically outperform Google/DDG/Bing within their respective domains, because the human using them has already narrowed the domain down dramatically. They wouldn't dethrone Google (general search is always going to be needed) but they could compete for a segment of traffic.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

This is the real information apocalypse. Machines cloning knowledge ad infinitum with increasing amounts of real content drowning in an endless ocean of... ads; Economic propaganda. Until content itself is cryptographically signed, there's no verifying where it come from or how true it is, if it ever were.

d110af5ccf 5y ago
> Until content itself is cryptographically signed At which point you have to determine which signatories to trust. Which is the same issue we currently have - which publishers (ie websites) should the search engine trust (ie rank highly)? So really what we need is a more robust method of attributing publisher quality. Except that perception of quality varies drastically between different consumers. Also, most solutions you might propose quickly start looking an awful lot like a distributed web of trust but no one has ever managed to pull that off at scale so far.

blackcat201 5y ago

Same in chinese search results for programming related question, most of the time I get was some bad translation from stackoverflow or github issue. Now I had to rely on browser plugins to automatically remove these domains from search results.

vodkapump 5y ago

This shows me almost exclusively pinterest results. A website I've never in my life used, but for some reason always get recommended to go to by google. Sad to see NRK being abused like this tho

raxxorrax 5y ago

They certainly promotes established newspapers. If you search for a term that is in any capacity part of a prominent news cycle, you can forget the results.

lgats 5y ago

So glad I'm not the only one experiencing the abundance of .it TLD spam. I've seen this rotating around different country-level TLDs, .de & .bg spam domains were filling the results previously. I suspect some big-name spammer rents domains for a short period while they're pending expiration.

lgats 5y ago
Several of the .it spam results are provisioned by 'Hosting Concepts B.V.' A company perhaps also involved in some shady prescription med domains: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openprovider-www4rxmedorg-and-more https://www.fda.gov/consumers/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openpr... https://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/hosting-concepts-bv-dba-openprovider-wwwchemists-shopcom https://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/hosting-con...