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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

903 points by oarth 5y ago

chovybizzass 5y ago
is this real?
chovybizzass 5y ago
I've been using https://search.brave.com https://search.brave.com for a few weeks. Most of the time I find what I need.
- devmunchies 5y ago
  Yes me too. have like it better than DDG.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Their news scroll is also better than average.
l0b0 5y ago
WHOIS shows it's registered four weeks ago by someone in Riga, Latvia.
- rataata_jr 5y ago
  Tal's ghost is trolling now?
hayksaakian 5y ago
Interesting because it shows that bounce-back is a more significant ranking factor than before. It seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)
- ma2rten 5y ago
  I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.
  - purplepatrick 5y ago
    I agree. Tons of sites employ the bounce-back avoidance tactics, and these don’t particularly help their ranking (in fact, lots on non-ranking sites do it — presumably just to keep you on the page)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wokwokwok 5y ago
    Who knows? It's a black box after all. ...but, you know. Can you see anything else they're doing that would give them that kind of ranking? These pages are just piles of crap, and google is pretty good at filtering that sort of stuff out. If it was that easy, google would be filled with spam everywhere. The chance that someone did something random thats very uncommon (block back) and it happened to be a super effective signal to google seems: a) like an edge case they didn't think of b) like it'll get fixed pretty fast c) not that unlikely. Compared to, say, the idea that some random spammers have built a network of incredibly sophisticated ML-generated pages that can subvert googles algorithms which seems: a) not substantiated by any obvious content on the pages b) requires a very high level of sophistication which seems totally lacking c) very unlikely ...but I mean, who knows right? We're all just speculating. I guess it'll get fixed soon, and we'll never know.
    - Miraste 5y ago
      Everyone and their mother blocks back buttons. Major news sites do it. There is no way that's what's ranking them this high.
      - chopin 5y ago
        Sites should be punished into oblivion for doing this. Why do browsers even allow it? Is there a legitimate use-case for this? I am maintaining an SPA and the only thing I do is trying to not pollute history. But I'd never try to block the back button.
pope_meat 5y ago
Gotta give it to these folks, good hustle.
NorwegianDude 5y ago
I've noticed this daily. Would be interesting to see the actual content. Based on the small snippets in the search results, it takes content from other sites, like large Norwegian news sites, and somehow outranks them hard. I wonder what the Google Search Console looks like for that domain, considering that it's probably getting millions worth of free traffic. EDIT: After looking more at it, it's insane how much it ranks for and how well. Straight up brand names seems to be the hardest to compere with, at least larger ones. Those seems to be around page 4-5 for me. Some brands I was unable to find at all, but ironically another .dk domain showed up in it's place that did the same thing. There is also some .it domains using the same content. I've found that it takes contents from multiple sources and glues it together in sometimes great ways. Like one sentence from this page, another thing from that page. Maybe this is some ML that collects content and pieces a lot of it together sentences or half sentences to one large article? It's clearly from completely different sources, but about the same thing. Example: "wash car" Result in google: "A dark winter with snow and salt is hard on the car, and it's extra important to wash the car" - Collected from one article. <some other text> "Keep the pressure washer at 30-50 cm from the car..." - From another article. Ironically, there is like 11 results all tied to this thing outranking the original articles(those are last), even if it's medium to large sized well known companies selling for billion(s) of dollars each year in Norway. Sometimes it goes from one thing and switches to something completely unrelated, so I guess the spammers still have something to improve. Weird.
jessaustin 5y ago
TFA talks about Google testing with "unknown IP", but doesn't mention any testing done by the author with cookies cleared or in incognito mode. This seems basic.
- finnh 5y ago
  What do you expect incognito to change? That would presumably show the same content the author is seeing. Only Google sees the content that drives the ranking. It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    I stopped using google for search because I noticed the filter bubble it was building around me. Perhaps that wasn't maintained by cookies, but in that case I wonder what it was...
  - QuietCF 5y ago
    For all we know (as the OP doesn’t mention trying incognito) the OP could have malicious software on their device that hijacks their browser to manipulate search results
    - feikname 5y ago
      that's easily verifiable doing the searches yourself; a search for "hvor ofte bør man dusje" in my english google, conencting from brazil shows havfruen4220.dk as 6th and 7th result, which is pretty high for a spam website "hvordan regne prosent" shows 2 dk websites www.humanrebels.dk, and havfruen4220.dk as 9th and 10th results could be since the OP clicked on these links to find out google made his personal algorithm show even more of this stuff thus, I imagine a never ending cycle of even more spam could easily be generated, specially for an innocent user
    - aembleton 5y ago
      Does incognito prevent malicious software from hijacking your browser?
paxys 5y ago
I doubt it's some crazy sophisticated SEO hijacking operation. Probably a result of a small data set (Norwegian language web pages), specific search terms (Norwegian brands, companies), and lots of keyword stuffing. Most of the examples the author pointed out were from pages 5-10 of Google results, which are probably worthless for ad revenue anyways.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Osiris 5y ago
  He specifically pointed out that it's ranking in the top 10 for nearly every search he did.
- rchaud 5y ago
  This type of scraped-content websites were common for English language searches back in 2010 or so. I believe the 'Panda' algorithm update eliminated them from English searches.
- tyingq 5y ago
  It does rate a pretty good chuckle recalling old Google blog posts about their various uber-sophisticated anti-spam ML algorithms and how black hat SEO just wasn't possible anymore.
kostecki 5y ago
Interesting that Latvians picked a danish domain for norwegian content. Especially since you can't just hide behind domain privacy protection.
mmaunder 5y ago
Catch22 though. If you eliminate bounce back, you have to rank to get the ranking signal into Google. So how did they rank in the first place? I haven’t tried to reverse what they’re doing but I don’t think the author quite figured it out. Interesting phenomenon though.
wdrw 5y ago
Interesting, the image seems to contain characters from a Russian childrens' cartoon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikoriki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikoriki )
- aasasd 5y ago
  Yup, these very guys: https://s5.cdn.teleprogramma.pro/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/be422517a10caaede0ded7cad822527d.jpg https://s5.cdn.teleprogramma.pro/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/... A rather non-sequitur choice, like everything else with this thing I guess.
- mads 5y ago
  They are using different images. A month or so ago it was some guy tied up on a chair with some russian text on top of the image. There are a lot of these domains (ptsdforum.dk, verdes.dk, momentsbykruuse.dk from the top of my mind). Always Danish domains and always registered by the same person in Riga.
- incrop 5y ago
  And the girl on the left is from comedy clip "Foreign language courses in Balashikha" https://youtu.be/wrYFUBA2kUA https://youtu.be/wrYFUBA2kUA
janmo 5y ago
I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are expired domains that have been bought. For example if you check havfruen4220.dk on archive.org you can see that it appears to have been a legitimate business website before. https://web.archive.org/web/20181126203158/https://havfruen4220.dk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181126203158/https://havfruen4... How do they rank so well? I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently. On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago. It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher. Edit: Here is what the content of such a site looks like: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bk0VsMv9Dc4J:https://fabiobonardi.it/de-at/10969558256+&cd=9&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bk0VsM...
- kostecki 5y ago
  This definitely looks like an expired domain that was bought. Havfruen seems to be a restaurant in the city of Korsør - which conveniently have the postal code of 4220.
- nmstoker 5y ago
  I presume "GPL" was an autocorrect from the intended "GPT" right?
  - janmo 5y ago
    Correct, it was a typo
    - dylan604 5y ago
      I don't know. I've tried reading the GPL2 & 3, and a lot of it just sounds like lawyer gibberish to me that could easily be attributed to GPT
fny 5y ago
Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
- estebarb 5y ago
  I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result. I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
  - fy20 5y ago
    I noticed this in my country when searching for somewhat less common parts (electronics, car parts, tools, etc). The first few results are for online retailers in my country, and then after that it's full of domains with paths such as /sale_12345678. The domain sounds somewhat promising, and the description sounds good - other than it often being a quantity of 10 - but when you click the link it just redirects to AliExpress.
  - ffffwe3rq352y3 5y ago
    I find that using another search engine in that kind of situation is extremely useful! If I'm searching for more mainstream stuff google usually is great but when I'm going for more specialized topics duck duck go will usually bring up some different links!
    - foobarian 5y ago
      Welp, time to dust off that HotBot codebase and get it running again! /s
    - HideousKojima 5y ago
evolve2k 5y ago
Before I accessed the article I was hopeful from the title that “The Mermaid” was some hot new search engine out of Norway.
- dotcommand 5y ago
  Same here. But sadly the title would have been 'Google purchases "The Mermaid" for $X'... Given their near $2 trillion market cap, I doubt any search engine would be allowed to stay hot for too long.
- mromanuk 5y ago
  Same for me
  - spicyramen 5y ago
    +1
nkozyra 5y ago
> The simple solution would be to test sites regularly with an unknown IP and common user agent to check that a site isn’t just showing content to Google and gives real users something completely different. That would stop this. Surely Google does this, right? Given that - in theory - showing different content to Google versus non-Google should result in a penalty, anyway ...
- not2b 5y ago
  The problem is that paywall sites already do this: Google sees the article, others see a paywall.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
agency 5y ago
This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?
- sp332 5y ago
  Yes, and more non-spam email is getting filtered as spam. Also, a mailing list I was unable to unsubscribe from and marked as spam at least 5 times kept being delivered to my inbox.
- philiplu 5y ago
  Not just you. Something changed two or three months ago. Never really saw spam for years before that; now 3 or 4 mails a day.
- javier2 5y ago
  Yes, a few days I've even had 5 different spam emails in the inbox.
- beart 5y ago
  I'll chime in as well. I forward everything from gmail to another account I have. I pretty much never got any forwarded email for years because the gmail account is only really used as an identity for google services. A few months ago I suddenly started to get a significant amount of spam forwarded for no known reason.
bash-j 5y ago
The last time I accidentally installed malware on my computer was when the top Google result pointed me to a site masquerading as the official site for the software. That thought me a lesson to pay attention to the domain name.
tapland 5y ago
I imagine it's done in a similar way to how reddit circumvents searching for results from certain dates. I don't like anyone messing with google results.
weird-eye-issue 5y ago
Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for: Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale. For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" which has 207k searches per month in Norway and is rated as 0 (out of 100) for being easy to rank for. Usually when a keyword has that amount of searches it would be incredibly hard to rank for, I've never seen anything like this. So what is happening here looks like they are just taking advantage of a market with really low competition keywords.
- NorwegianDude 5y ago
  Interia is a large polish web portal, from what I could find. Norwegian people doesn't know it, but polish people might. There is probably around ~2 % polish people in Norway. It also ranks as #1 for me. It's in polish too, so basically only ~2 % of Norway would understand it. However, the weird thing it that it steals content from articles, and then outranks them. Most pages seems to be boosted, maybe as a result of it being new. (Most content is just hours old) Could you check these too? (exactly the same thing, but newer, it seems) www.mariesofie.dk nem-varmepumper.dk Clearly reused domains.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    The keyword data was based on searches in Norway alone, it is an order of magnitude higher in Poland. In Norway almost anybody could rank for that keyword if they tried due to the difficulty being different based on location and language.
- Ueland 5y ago
  Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool. But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad wasteful.
dhosek 5y ago
The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.
- mattwad 5y ago
  UBlacklist is a plugin that does this. It's so great to be able to hide all those sites that just cache Git issues and SO posts.
  - nickysielicki 5y ago
    Oh man, this plugin is going to save me hours of time over the next 30 years. Goodbye forever, cplusplus.com
  - RileyJames 5y ago
    Just to add to that, uBlacklist has a power feature called subscriptions. Which is massively under utilised. It enables a collaborative effort in blocking spam / low value domains. If you make a block list, please submit it to the list I’ve made: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist (There’s no great subscription discovery as yet)
  - dhosek 5y ago
    I installed it and it's—ok? For search results where the spam overwhelms the signal (it used to be able to do a decent reverse phone lookup by putting a phone number into Google), you end up with empty pages or mostly empty pages in the search results. Better than nothing, but it really should be a feature from the search engine, not a browser plugin.
- eitland 5y ago
  I used to have a text document on my desktop containing a list of domains that contained autogenerated content, each with a minus in front, like: -stupidautogeneratedcontent1.com -stupidautogeneratedcontent2.com etc I figured sooner or later Google would pick up the signal but I think instead they just started ignoring my "- requests" as I stopped using them. edit: or maybe they fix the problem. Spam sites used to be a problem during the early decline of Google. I think what happened was that problem actually almost disappeared for me and was replaced by irrelevant results from non-spam-sites Edit: mahalo.com was one of those, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
Goety 5y ago
I will remain steadfast in my support from Google forever and always.
knolax 5y ago
More reasons why a global search monopoly is suboptimal. Smaller markets like this are just going to get neglected and maintained just enough that a better alternative can't compete. Google search is basically useless for any language other than English.
- aembleton 5y ago
  Surprisingly no one has created another search engine that targets another language other than yandex
onepunchedman 5y ago
Wow, the Norwegian on those scam web sites is actually perfect. Never seen that before.
- Ueland 5y ago
  That's because it's real content that they have stolen and just republished. In SEO circles one like to say that original content is king. Well, not so much after all.
onepunchedman 5y ago
The language in those scam articles is actually perfect, first time I've seen that.
kristofferR 5y ago
Yeah, I experienced this same spam domain for some searches I did yesterday. It's everywhere.
punnerud 5y ago
I live in Norway and don’t have this problem now. I had a similar problem about a year ago on my MacBook Air because of some software that altered my Google results in all of my browsers. Don’t remember the name of it, but something smelled fishy when the results was different from the ones on my phone.
- oarth 5y ago
  Pretty sure affects you too as it's the same for me, on multiple networks, multiple user-agents, multiple devices and so on. Simply just trie one of the examples like "hvordan regne ut prosent"(how to calculate percentages) or, I don't know..."DNB aksje"(DNB stocks, DNB being the biggest bank in Norway). Sure enough, both ranks on the first page or as the one of the top results. (One is now using the www.nem-varmepumper.dk domain, that is the same thing). EDIT: Now the DNB one moved from 2 and 3 place to page 2. Things are moving around quickly.
  - punnerud 5y ago
    You are right, it also affects me. «hvordan regne ut prosent», https://www.havfruen4220.dk https://www.havfruen4220.dk is rank 5 and 6. «DNB Aksje», https://www.havfruen4220.dk https://www.havfruen4220.dk is rank 10
    - nolito 5y ago
      In Denmark here. The first does not give havfruen4220 results. The second does >DNB aktie< in 6th place
Crazyontap 5y ago
Can somebody else who is in Norway can confirm this? It could be simply be a malware injecting this. Would be great to eliminate this possibility
- intarga 5y ago
  I’m in Norway, and I tried the first search “rema 1000” without getting any spam results on the first two pages… That doesn’t entirely eliminate the other possibilities though, google search isn’t deterministic, and the domain could have been reported since the article went up.
  - NorwegianDude 5y ago
    Searches like "REMA 1000"(just a very well known brand name) seems to be the best case scenario, even according to the article(page 5). I've noticed that the ranking of the results changes really often.
- Ueland 5y ago
  Can confirm this is not malware, Google has a huge spam problem, see my previous comments.
- knidoyl 5y ago
  I'm in France and shearched for the how often thing, it returned themermaid on second page
- sleepyhead 5y ago
  It's not showing for the example search (Rema 1000) for me right now, but I did a search yesterday, about a person/company and the result was news related content, and ended up with a site with the same image. However I can't find havfruen (mermaid) in my browser history so they must use other domains as well.
- javier2 5y ago
  It is not happening with the example from the article for me, but I have seen this practice ruin my search results in varying degree over the past 6 months. Some times entire keywords will just be broken because there are so many fake sites.
bigpeopleareold 5y ago
I hate dealing with this and now refuse to use Google now when I saw patterns in search results while I was researching common things (like housing) in Norwegian, here in Norway. I rarely use Google these days, but I thought for a second that Google might be better with search results than DDG in Norwegian, but this stuff is aggravating. This is one of those where they screw around with history that you just have to start fresh again on whatever you were doing instead of going back. edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian.
- bigpeopleareold 5y ago
  Just want to add to my comment also that it is not limited to havfruen4220.dk, but clarifies a general pattern. I tried a couple of search terms like 'mattilbud rema 1000' and found more .dk domains on the second page (nem-varmepumper.dk, humanrebels.dk) - two things that have nothing to do with food.
- eitland 5y ago
  > edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian. Another big one is that Norwegians like Germans write words together, just one example from one of the stupid ads: "Spesial Reportasje" is a dead giveaway not only because of the capitalization.) (Oh well, sadly because of pressure from Words incompetent spell checker over years and lenient teachers this is getting worse. I fear we are seing compound damage here as kids that got away with this are now becoming teachers...)
  - eru 5y ago
    In German there was actually quite a lot of historic development about whether to write words together or separate or with hyphens. The current state of formal German will surely not be the end of history. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita#Geschichte https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita#Gesch... (Might need Google Translate, if you don't speak German.)
yfkar 5y ago
I've lately noticed that searching Google for topics related to gardening in Finnish often gives me some scraped and machine translated pages from Russia. Really annoying that totally useless content is so high up in the results.
Ueland 5y ago
I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their proxy traffic towards many sites I managed. I could easily document their behaviour. In the same time, I wrote a crawler that visited their sites over a long, long time. I learned that they kept injecting hidden links to other sites in their network, so I did let my bot look at those also. By this time, I also got a journalist with me that started to look at the money flow to try and find the organisation behind it. My bot found in excess of 100K domains being used for this operation, targeting all of westeren Europe. All the 100K sites contained proxied content and was hidden behind Cloudflare, but thanks to the position I had, I managed to find their backend anyways. We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down. Oh, and the journalist? He did find a Dutch company that was not happy to see neither him or the photographer :)
- pepy 5y ago
  Do you want to get to the bottom of this? A friend of mine is a top Dutch lawyer with an interest in these things.
  - Ueland 5y ago
    This was two years ago and the network is now (to my knowledge) gone.
    - pepy 5y ago
      alright, thanks for the clarification
- avian 5y ago
  > We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down. As someone that tried reporting spam sites because they were using content scrapped from my website, I'm not surprised. Cloudflare has a policy that they will not stop providing their IP hiding/reverse proxy services to anyone, regardless of complaints. The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it. They say "we're not a hosting provider" as if that's an excuse that they can't refuse to offer their service. I'm sure many spam websites would go away if they couldn't hide behind Cloudflare.
monday_ 5y ago
Not sure how relevant this is, but the animal characters in the top image are from a Russian children hit cartoon "The Smesharicks" (literally "The Laughballs").
- snickersnee11 5y ago
  Also, the left image of a woman from a russian meme from a tv show.
fergie 5y ago
Norwegian here- I haven't seen this at all- maybe the author has been somehow "fingerprinted" and targeted?
- aembleton 5y ago
  Have you tried in a private window to check that you're not fingerprinted?
claroclinic 5y ago
Well this is happening in all countries
rapind 5y ago
> I think that Google uses stats on whether the user continued checking more results for that specific search query to determine if the visited result answered the user. God I hope not. If Google does do this, it sounds like a really dumb idea, which will ultimately create widespread usability issues. I can already envision SEO consultants recommending this for their clients if this is believed. Doesn’t look like it according to https://www.seroundtable.com/google-browser-back-button-rankings-23415.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-browser-back-button-rank...
gnyman 5y ago
Pet theory (disclaimer that I know very little about SEO) would be that the website with the cloned content loads fast and does not load 4 MiB of javascript, thus beating the original content in ranking mostly because of the speed, which is I believe a important factor in Google rankings (and getting more important). And add to that the some link spam and preventing the visitors to return not get any bounce back... Either way, I can't help to be a bit impressed by the SEO spammers outsmarting the people at Google. (Edit: and I don't mean to say they are smarter or anything, just that they only need to find one weakness in the algorithm while the people working to improve it needs to make it works for everything.)
- jmiserez 5y ago
  Once the hard requirement on speed impacts the quality of results it no longer helps me as a user. I'd rather have the sites invest their time in good content and wait a few seconds rather than get fast but low quality SEO-ed results. Same with AMP, the quest for speed doesn't make my experience faster if I still load the original page (which is often still necessary).
techaddict009 5y ago
Someone has probably found some kind of SEO Hack or Some 0 Day in Google serp. There are plenty of .it domains doing similar in Google USA serps.
rataata_jr 5y ago
Havfruen, brought to you by mountain trolls from Finmark.
- sleepyhead 5y ago
  There are no mountain trolls in Finnmark, they live further south as the mountains in Finnmark are not very big.
  - rataata_jr 5y ago
    Have you met them? Please tell yes.
    - sleepyhead 5y ago
      Yes just go to Jotunheimen and you will find them. But don't go if you are Christian. Call Troll Security Service if you need help.
      - rataata_jr 5y ago
        Takk mann. Det er ok, jeg er Hindu.
known 5y ago
Isn't it due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
StreamBright 5y ago
Same in Hungarian. Google is full of spam and nobody cares. The top hits are auto-translated garbage for many searches.
mlang23 5y ago
It seems google has lost its ability to block spam effectively. Since a few months, I notice an increase amount of outright scam being promoted on YT. I even got a ad for a fake Musk telling people to invest in a shady bitcoin scheme. Knowing that Google is willing to let these slip through just to maximize their ad revenue is really a warning sign that this company, no matter how large it might be by now, should not be trusted anymore.
the_biot 5y ago
For all that Google search has been utterly crap for going on a decade now, I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. I like DuckDuckGo for now, but I imagine as they get bigger they're going to be a target for these kinds of spam just the same.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Google search has been a brochure for a long time now
- raverbashing 5y ago
  Even worse, getting this kind of spam through to DDG (Bing?) seems easier than on Google It seems DDG is worse at finding the more authoritative sites about a subject compared to Google.
  - shuger 5y ago
    That's an advantage. Since google tuned up their engine to treat authoritative results as better their searches became absolute dogshit. You search for a very specific thing and all the results are big sites that have said something that contains two of the 6 words you search for in a completely generic article that helps you none. My favorite is when your query contains a word that is the very essence of what you search for and google chooses to display results without it so you have to do extra click "yes I actually want to search for what I said I want to search for".
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  Is there really any difference between DDG and Google when it comes to SEO spam? If there is, I sure haven't noticed in spite of using both, often for the same search terms. It seems to me that the techniques used to spam Google's index work just as well on Bing's index.
- rvba 5y ago
  Because they automated anything and you cannot contact any human from quality assurance.
keyme 5y ago
Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated software and keygens, detailed instructions for a variety of useful things. That was the golden age of the web. These days, all the "interesting" data on the Internet is all inside closed Telegram chats, facebook groups, Discords or the rare public website here and there that Google doesn't want to index (like sci-hub, or other piracy sites). The data that remains on SERPs is now also heavily censored for arbitrary reasons. "For your health", "For your protection". Google search is done.
- omega3 5y ago
  > And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.
  - spaniard89277 5y ago
    Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either. What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap. Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site beforehand, which is another problem.
    - soco 5y ago
      Yeah, I also try DDG first then and only if not okay I go !g. Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing? They could have shown advertisements also in their "classic" search (let's call it like that) so I'm really at loss - what was in it for them to change??? Germans have a word for that "verschlimmbessern" (or even two words - kaputtreparieren) which means breaking something by trying to make it better.
matsemann 5y ago
Yeah, I've seen this domain a lot lately. But I've complained about the Norwegian results for years [0]. For most searches there will be a result that's just keyword spam ranking high. Retried my "pes anserinus bursitt" search now 2 years later, and two results are spam from havfruen, and there are some other results from https://no.amenajari https://no.amenajari .org which is also just translated and scraped content for all languages google seems to love, as I've seen it for years. A third domain I often see as well is "nem-varmepumper". Apparently a site about heat pumps has content on everything. Can't fathom Google not catching this.. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621099
- porbelm 5y ago
  When I try that search, havfruen is seventh place. NHI and other good results at the top. YMMV a lot with Google results. For me, it's usually great where DDG is kinda crap, but not as bad as... shudder ... bing
  - fogihujy 5y ago
    With DDG, I found this thread. Google set to Norway as region/language found nothing from havfruen4220.dk, unless I specifically added site:havfruen4220.dk in the search. My guess is that someone at Google reacted.
    - matsemann 5y ago
      Almost all my searches from the last days still show havfruen as a result somewhere. My pes anserinus above. Or "obos fellesgjeld" from a ~week ago which was when I noticed the pattern first. "monstera jord" gives lots of translated blogspam, and then a row of havfruen results. Switching language on Google has basically no effect. Sometimes I want to find Swedish results for a thing with the same name, but no matter what I do I get Norwegian results ranked first. So don't think this is easily emulated from abroad.
      - fogihujy 5y ago
londons_explore 5y ago
It's the hooking of the browser back button in a way that Google does not detect which is the real 'trick'. Anyone who can do that can rank as high as they like for any search query.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  To expand on this: A very strong ranking signal is how many of the users that click a search result are sufficiently satisfied with the information they have found to end their search. A good proxy for this is how many people don't click the 'back' button to see other results. Google is already aware of sites which hijack the back button. Their crawler detects this, and if they find it, they throw out the figures of how many people click the back button. So if you can find a way to hook the back button so nobody can click back, while stopping google thinking you have hooked the back button, then your page will keep creeping up the rankings. Google detects back button hijacking with their crawler (by rendering the page in Chromium and seeing the effect when hitting the actual back button), but this is circumvented by presenting the crawler different html. (or making sure the page behaves differently in their crawler, potentially by checking things like the model of the graphics card - googles crawlers don't yet support most of WebGL 2.0, and also simulate playing audio at the wrong rate) Google also detects how many real users click back. If it's zero, then thats a warning flag. So I'd guess the back-hijacking logic is only activated ~80% of the time.
rwmj 5y ago
I've also seen this, but from a different side. I have Google Alerts for many open source projects that I run, but in the past few years these alerts have become all but useless. Spammers scrape genuine pages from all over the place (including ones containing references to my projects) and put them into scammy ".it" domains. These appear both in Google Alerts and high up in Google Search. So alerts and search both become useless. The scam appears to be that when you visit these web pages they say you're the billionth (or whatever) visitor to Google and you've won a prize, just type in your bank details. This has been going on for years now, so I don't have much confidence that Google is able or willing to fix it.
qwerty456127 5y ago
For every country/market somebody should better make a search engine to compete with Google. Now this is a chance for Norway.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Used to have https://www.kvasir.no/ https://www.kvasir.no/ but now it's just a skinned Google. sesam.no (not valid domain anymore) was an engine made by some a big Norwegian company back in 2005 or so. Norway used to be big in search. FAST got acquired by MS back in 2008.
- sleepyhead 5y ago
  We had a fast one but Microsoft bought it and shut it down.
qwerty456127 5y ago
I'm surprised to find out people actually return to the search results page using the back button. Whenever I am serious enough (enough to keep looking after the first link I click does not satisfy me) about finding something I always Middle-Click or Ctrl+Click the links to open them in new tabs.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Artefact of mobile use perhaps? "Open in new tab" is slightly harder on a phone or on a tablet.
- chimen 5y ago
  People are easily "surprised" these days
tvirosi 5y ago
Google search seems to have gotten significantly worse lately (sometimes to the point that it's barely usable). From scams like these (I've seen others) somehow getting a foothold, to a lot of internal "unbiasing" skewing the results towards googles political stance (usually totally irrelevant to my query). It's gotten to the point that I barely google anymore other than for things I already know what the results will be.
nolito 5y ago
According to DK-hostmaster (https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/da/find-domaenenavn https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/da/find-domaenenavn) its registered to Ance Dzerina. Ieriku iela 37, dz. 32, LV-1084 Riga, Letland At 2. juli 2021 Thats pretty fast to work so well. But i see lots of this, with other domains, when searching and have done for years so nothing new here i think.
golergka 5y ago
This image features characters from Smeshariki animation series, hugely popular in Russia in the last 15 years.
ubercore 5y ago
FWIW, I just tried these searches (am in Norway) and didn't see that domain in the results.
hoppla 5y ago
The recaptcha process should be reversed. The sites should prove to humans that it’s content is not generated by bots.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Perhaps a search engine that deranks pages that monetize visits (like ads) would be a good first step.
ricardo81 5y ago
Poor man's cloaking curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0' 'https://havfruen4220.dk https://havfruen4220.dk' > 1.html curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk https://havfruen4220.dk' > 2.html diff 1.html 2.html 7d6 < <script>var b="https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; ( /google|yahoo|facebook|vk|mail|alpha|yandex|search|msn|DuckDuckGo|Boardreader|Ask|SlideShare|YouTube|Vimeo|Baidu|AOL|Excite/.test(document.referrer) && location.href.indexOf(".") != -1 ) && (top.location.href = b); </script>
- gvb 5y ago
  The "diff" output (above) needs an extra line break to avoid HN automatic line wrapping. The output of the diff command is: diff 1.html 2.html 7d6 < <script>var b="https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; ( /google|yahoo|facebook|vk|mail|alpha|yandex|search|msn|DuckDuckGo|Boardreader|Ask|SlideShare|YouTube|Vimeo|Baidu|AOL|Excite/.test(document.referrer) && location.href.indexOf(".") != -1 ) && (top.location.href = b); </script>
belter 5y ago
The mermaid mentioned in the article seems to be either a terribly amateurish operation or a very sophisticated sting. They can be easily traced to a block of flats in Latvia but since their registered phone its a Toy Store in Riga...I am going to go with probably stolen identify operation and a sense of humour on their part instead of the real operation of some 12 year in Riga...
algismo 5y ago
Just tried Google.no from my computer (Norwegian IP (Larvik area)). Nothing similar. I see “normal” search results. In any way, I stopped using Google stuff 5 years ago. Never looked back since then, so my search history is kind of clean, maybe that changes their algorithm behavior. Recommend to switch to DuckDuckGo:)
classified 5y ago
If the mermaid took it, does that mean Google search is resting with the fishes?
franze 5y ago
In a similar note: https://www.autosuggest.net/ https://www.autosuggest.net/ currently approaching a lot of websites in the german market. "We help you to receive high-quality visitors from search engines, generate conversions and build your brand. To achieve these results, we ensure your website / company is recommended for specific keywords by the search engine's autocomplete function."
zulrah 5y ago
I've noticed another trend recently where it seems that some websites write content for google SEO instead of optimized for human readability. E.g.: I've seen my exact search phrase repeated mutiple times and then a very long article about the topic when what I searched was a simple question with a few words answer.
gonab 5y ago
Google has a problem when HN becomes an issue tracker
sublimefire 5y ago
It is interesting as you cannot see the content which is being indexed. Suspect only bot does. If I understand correctly this is the sequence of events from the bot's perspective: ## read robots.txt `curl 'https://havfruen4220.dk/robots.txt https://havfruen4220.dk/robots.txt'` ## use pointer to a sitemap.xml curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no.xml https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no.xml' > sitemap.xml ## read more sitemaps curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no-1.xml https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no-1.xml' > sitemap1.xml Other sitemaps contain a pointer to a "webpage" eg: https://havfruen4220.dk/no/7a28855e4714dd14 https://havfruen4220.dk/no/7a28855e4714dd14 ## read web pages Each location in a sitemap has a "lastmod" of today/yesterday so bot returns there everyday. In addition each webpage has a "<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">" But if you visit each of those pages then it shows you a cartoon image. It seems the actual indexed content is visible only to the bot. ## But how is actual content being rendered? The question is, what conditions (request params/headers) result in the actual content being rendered? The bot needs to evaluate it. Suspect it is some combo of checking if the requester is an actual google bot, maybe by looking up the IP https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/verifying-googlebot https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
Schnurpel 5y ago
If I would run a global infrastructure company like Cloudflare, I also would not take any sides, and leave my service open to anyone. The world is full of people who get upset about something. However, if I declare a hands-off policy, it must be truly hands-off. Cloudflare kicked off Switter https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudflare-sex-workers-banned https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla..., it banned 8Chan https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ , it banned the Hacker News https://mobile.twitter.com/thehackersnews/status/669001836058181633 https://mobile.twitter.com/thehackersnews/status/66900183605... . That’s not how hands-off works.
- notRobot 5y ago
  To be clear, that's not HN, but The Hacker News, a different website, known for... dubious reporting.
cnxsoft 5y ago
Google is garbage. I once complained a website stealing my contents and other people's contents was ranking very highly in Google. I was told I'd better fixed my website before looking at "competitors". Part of that was true, but at the time the person did not seem to care at all of spammy content delivered by Google.
manceraio 5y ago
They will get probably outranked on the next big Google update.
tikiman163 5y ago
I'm kind of curious why he's so concerned about this? They've never managed better than ninth most relevant and in most cases they didn't even make the first page of result. Any advertising person will tell you, if you aren't in the top 3 results (basically the top result now that paid ads automatically get the top 2 spots on nearly all searches) your odds of being seen and clicked on drop to almost nothing. Are they potentially doin harm? Sure. Have the successfully managed to trick anybody with this? I'd be extremely surprised if they're getting more than a dozen people clicking through from being the ninth result in a day,and when people see they've been redirected to an advertisement the majority of people immediately click away. This isn't like clicking on a fake prorn site that redirects to cam girls with viruses hidden in all the downloads. It's random unrelated searches redirecting you to blatant ads for cryto currency. The kind of people who are young enough to know what crypto currency is and how to buy it, also know how to spot a redirect to a fake website.
- burnished 5y ago
  These kinds of scams are a stochastic process. They don't work on your average person, they only work on vulnerable people. Heres the catch though, everyone is vulnerable at some point in their lives. This is where the stochastic process comes in, they don't need to get you when you're strong, they just need to test enough people enough times to catch them in a vulnerable moment.
fleddr 5y ago
Makes you wonder what happens when AI can write "passing" articles. Useless to the reader, but too close to tell for the crawler.
cratermoon 5y ago
The Norwegian pinterest
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
My guess is they get away with it because it's a non-English query and most of the people working on these problems aren't looking at their localization. A big issue in general for global tech companies is that they don't usually handle things outside the US/English context particularly well. This often crops up in that political space, where for instance, something contentious like gun sales might get pulled from Google globally even though the political concern with them is mostly limited to the US. An SEO-fighting Googler might at a glance have no reason not to think that could be a really relevant or popular site in your country.
Matsta 5y ago
I had a look at this, and it looks to me like it's a 301 from another domain. Typically when domains get a manual penalty (primarily for spam), they drop in rankings overnight. So to counter this, you register a new domain and redirect it and overnight, your rankings bounce back. This technique is super common for blackhat sites like illegal streaming sites. If the redirect is done as a meta refresh, then you can block it in your robots.txt from being picked up from SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush etc. These types of sites are called doorway pages and have been around for ages. They are most popular in Russia and on Yandex, but you do see them on Google for super longtail keywords with 0 competition. The other important thing to remember is that doing SEO in any language that's not English is a walk in the park. Lots of SEO influencer types have case studies showing how much extra traffic they get by translating their content. [1] [1] https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-trend/ https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-trend/
siproprio 5y ago
I've seen this trend in other places too: For example, Microsoft routinely deletes negative feedback from GitHub issue for vs code.

903 points by oarth 5y ago

chovybizzass 5y ago

is this real?

chovybizzass 5y ago

I've been using https://search.brave.com https://search.brave.com for a few weeks. Most of the time I find what I need.

devmunchies 5y ago
Yes me too. have like it better than DDG.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Their news scroll is also better than average.

l0b0 5y ago

WHOIS shows it's registered four weeks ago by someone in Riga, Latvia.

rataata_jr 5y ago
Tal's ghost is trolling now?

hayksaakian 5y ago

Interesting because it shows that bounce-back is a more significant ranking factor than before. It seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)

ma2rten 5y ago
I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.
- purplepatrick 5y ago
  I agree. Tons of sites employ the bounce-back avoidance tactics, and these don’t particularly help their ranking (in fact, lots on non-ranking sites do it — presumably just to keep you on the page)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wokwokwok 5y ago
  Who knows? It's a black box after all. ...but, you know. Can you see anything else they're doing that would give them that kind of ranking? These pages are just piles of crap, and google is pretty good at filtering that sort of stuff out. If it was that easy, google would be filled with spam everywhere. The chance that someone did something random thats very uncommon (block back) and it happened to be a super effective signal to google seems: a) like an edge case they didn't think of b) like it'll get fixed pretty fast c) not that unlikely. Compared to, say, the idea that some random spammers have built a network of incredibly sophisticated ML-generated pages that can subvert googles algorithms which seems: a) not substantiated by any obvious content on the pages b) requires a very high level of sophistication which seems totally lacking c) very unlikely ...but I mean, who knows right? We're all just speculating. I guess it'll get fixed soon, and we'll never know.
  - Miraste 5y ago
    Everyone and their mother blocks back buttons. Major news sites do it. There is no way that's what's ranking them this high.
    - chopin 5y ago
      Sites should be punished into oblivion for doing this. Why do browsers even allow it? Is there a legitimate use-case for this? I am maintaining an SPA and the only thing I do is trying to not pollute history. But I'd never try to block the back button.

pope_meat 5y ago

Gotta give it to these folks, good hustle.

NorwegianDude 5y ago

I've noticed this daily. Would be interesting to see the actual content. Based on the small snippets in the search results, it takes content from other sites, like large Norwegian news sites, and somehow outranks them hard. I wonder what the Google Search Console looks like for that domain, considering that it's probably getting millions worth of free traffic. EDIT: After looking more at it, it's insane how much it ranks for and how well. Straight up brand names seems to be the hardest to compere with, at least larger ones. Those seems to be around page 4-5 for me. Some brands I was unable to find at all, but ironically another .dk domain showed up in it's place that did the same thing. There is also some .it domains using the same content. I've found that it takes contents from multiple sources and glues it together in sometimes great ways. Like one sentence from this page, another thing from that page. Maybe this is some ML that collects content and pieces a lot of it together sentences or half sentences to one large article? It's clearly from completely different sources, but about the same thing. Example: "wash car" Result in google: "A dark winter with snow and salt is hard on the car, and it's extra important to wash the car" - Collected from one article. <some other text> "Keep the pressure washer at 30-50 cm from the car..." - From another article. Ironically, there is like 11 results all tied to this thing outranking the original articles(those are last), even if it's medium to large sized well known companies selling for billion(s) of dollars each year in Norway. Sometimes it goes from one thing and switches to something completely unrelated, so I guess the spammers still have something to improve. Weird.

jessaustin 5y ago

TFA talks about Google testing with "unknown IP", but doesn't mention any testing done by the author with cookies cleared or in incognito mode. This seems basic.

finnh 5y ago
What do you expect incognito to change? That would presumably show the same content the author is seeing. Only Google sees the content that drives the ranking. It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  I stopped using google for search because I noticed the filter bubble it was building around me. Perhaps that wasn't maintained by cookies, but in that case I wonder what it was...
- QuietCF 5y ago
  For all we know (as the OP doesn’t mention trying incognito) the OP could have malicious software on their device that hijacks their browser to manipulate search results
  - feikname 5y ago
    that's easily verifiable doing the searches yourself; a search for "hvor ofte bør man dusje" in my english google, conencting from brazil shows havfruen4220.dk as 6th and 7th result, which is pretty high for a spam website "hvordan regne prosent" shows 2 dk websites www.humanrebels.dk, and havfruen4220.dk as 9th and 10th results could be since the OP clicked on these links to find out google made his personal algorithm show even more of this stuff thus, I imagine a never ending cycle of even more spam could easily be generated, specially for an innocent user
  - aembleton 5y ago
    Does incognito prevent malicious software from hijacking your browser?

paxys 5y ago

I doubt it's some crazy sophisticated SEO hijacking operation. Probably a result of a small data set (Norwegian language web pages), specific search terms (Norwegian brands, companies), and lots of keyword stuffing. Most of the examples the author pointed out were from pages 5-10 of Google results, which are probably worthless for ad revenue anyways.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Osiris 5y ago
He specifically pointed out that it's ranking in the top 10 for nearly every search he did.
rchaud 5y ago
This type of scraped-content websites were common for English language searches back in 2010 or so. I believe the 'Panda' algorithm update eliminated them from English searches.
tyingq 5y ago
It does rate a pretty good chuckle recalling old Google blog posts about their various uber-sophisticated anti-spam ML algorithms and how black hat SEO just wasn't possible anymore.

kostecki 5y ago

Interesting that Latvians picked a danish domain for norwegian content. Especially since you can't just hide behind domain privacy protection.

mmaunder 5y ago

Catch22 though. If you eliminate bounce back, you have to rank to get the ranking signal into Google. So how did they rank in the first place? I haven’t tried to reverse what they’re doing but I don’t think the author quite figured it out. Interesting phenomenon though.

wdrw 5y ago

Interesting, the image seems to contain characters from a Russian childrens' cartoon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikoriki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikoriki )

aasasd 5y ago
Yup, these very guys: https://s5.cdn.teleprogramma.pro/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/be422517a10caaede0ded7cad822527d.jpg https://s5.cdn.teleprogramma.pro/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/... A rather non-sequitur choice, like everything else with this thing I guess.
mads 5y ago
They are using different images. A month or so ago it was some guy tied up on a chair with some russian text on top of the image. There are a lot of these domains (ptsdforum.dk, verdes.dk, momentsbykruuse.dk from the top of my mind). Always Danish domains and always registered by the same person in Riga.
incrop 5y ago
And the girl on the left is from comedy clip "Foreign language courses in Balashikha" https://youtu.be/wrYFUBA2kUA https://youtu.be/wrYFUBA2kUA

janmo 5y ago

I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are expired domains that have been bought. For example if you check havfruen4220.dk on archive.org you can see that it appears to have been a legitimate business website before. https://web.archive.org/web/20181126203158/https://havfruen4220.dk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181126203158/https://havfruen4... How do they rank so well? I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently. On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago. It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher. Edit: Here is what the content of such a site looks like: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bk0VsMv9Dc4J:https://fabiobonardi.it/de-at/10969558256+&cd=9&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bk0VsM...

kostecki 5y ago
This definitely looks like an expired domain that was bought. Havfruen seems to be a restaurant in the city of Korsør - which conveniently have the postal code of 4220.
nmstoker 5y ago
I presume "GPL" was an autocorrect from the intended "GPT" right?
- janmo 5y ago
  Correct, it was a typo
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I don't know. I've tried reading the GPL2 & 3, and a lot of it just sounds like lawyer gibberish to me that could easily be attributed to GPT

fny 5y ago

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

estebarb 5y ago
I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result. I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
- fy20 5y ago
  I noticed this in my country when searching for somewhat less common parts (electronics, car parts, tools, etc). The first few results are for online retailers in my country, and then after that it's full of domains with paths such as /sale_12345678. The domain sounds somewhat promising, and the description sounds good - other than it often being a quantity of 10 - but when you click the link it just redirects to AliExpress.
- ffffwe3rq352y3 5y ago
  I find that using another search engine in that kind of situation is extremely useful! If I'm searching for more mainstream stuff google usually is great but when I'm going for more specialized topics duck duck go will usually bring up some different links!
  - foobarian 5y ago
    Welp, time to dust off that HotBot codebase and get it running again! /s
  - HideousKojima 5y ago

evolve2k 5y ago

Before I accessed the article I was hopeful from the title that “The Mermaid” was some hot new search engine out of Norway.

dotcommand 5y ago
Same here. But sadly the title would have been 'Google purchases "The Mermaid" for $X'... Given their near $2 trillion market cap, I doubt any search engine would be allowed to stay hot for too long.
mromanuk 5y ago
Same for me
- spicyramen 5y ago
  +1

nkozyra 5y ago

> The simple solution would be to test sites regularly with an unknown IP and common user agent to check that a site isn’t just showing content to Google and gives real users something completely different. That would stop this. Surely Google does this, right? Given that - in theory - showing different content to Google versus non-Google should result in a penalty, anyway ...

not2b 5y ago
The problem is that paywall sites already do this: Google sees the article, others see a paywall.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

agency 5y ago

This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?

sp332 5y ago
Yes, and more non-spam email is getting filtered as spam. Also, a mailing list I was unable to unsubscribe from and marked as spam at least 5 times kept being delivered to my inbox.
philiplu 5y ago
Not just you. Something changed two or three months ago. Never really saw spam for years before that; now 3 or 4 mails a day.
javier2 5y ago
Yes, a few days I've even had 5 different spam emails in the inbox.
beart 5y ago
I'll chime in as well. I forward everything from gmail to another account I have. I pretty much never got any forwarded email for years because the gmail account is only really used as an identity for google services. A few months ago I suddenly started to get a significant amount of spam forwarded for no known reason.

bash-j 5y ago

The last time I accidentally installed malware on my computer was when the top Google result pointed me to a site masquerading as the official site for the software. That thought me a lesson to pay attention to the domain name.

tapland 5y ago

I imagine it's done in a similar way to how reddit circumvents searching for results from certain dates. I don't like anyone messing with google results.

weird-eye-issue 5y ago

Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for: Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale. For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" which has 207k searches per month in Norway and is rated as 0 (out of 100) for being easy to rank for. Usually when a keyword has that amount of searches it would be incredibly hard to rank for, I've never seen anything like this. So what is happening here looks like they are just taking advantage of a market with really low competition keywords.

NorwegianDude 5y ago
Interia is a large polish web portal, from what I could find. Norwegian people doesn't know it, but polish people might. There is probably around ~2 % polish people in Norway. It also ranks as #1 for me. It's in polish too, so basically only ~2 % of Norway would understand it. However, the weird thing it that it steals content from articles, and then outranks them. Most pages seems to be boosted, maybe as a result of it being new. (Most content is just hours old) Could you check these too? (exactly the same thing, but newer, it seems) www.mariesofie.dk nem-varmepumper.dk Clearly reused domains.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  The keyword data was based on searches in Norway alone, it is an order of magnitude higher in Poland. In Norway almost anybody could rank for that keyword if they tried due to the difficulty being different based on location and language.
Ueland 5y ago
Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool. But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad wasteful.

dhosek 5y ago

The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.

mattwad 5y ago
UBlacklist is a plugin that does this. It's so great to be able to hide all those sites that just cache Git issues and SO posts.
- nickysielicki 5y ago
  Oh man, this plugin is going to save me hours of time over the next 30 years. Goodbye forever, cplusplus.com
- RileyJames 5y ago
  Just to add to that, uBlacklist has a power feature called subscriptions. Which is massively under utilised. It enables a collaborative effort in blocking spam / low value domains. If you make a block list, please submit it to the list I’ve made: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist (There’s no great subscription discovery as yet)
- dhosek 5y ago
  I installed it and it's—ok? For search results where the spam overwhelms the signal (it used to be able to do a decent reverse phone lookup by putting a phone number into Google), you end up with empty pages or mostly empty pages in the search results. Better than nothing, but it really should be a feature from the search engine, not a browser plugin.
eitland 5y ago
I used to have a text document on my desktop containing a list of domains that contained autogenerated content, each with a minus in front, like: -stupidautogeneratedcontent1.com -stupidautogeneratedcontent2.com etc I figured sooner or later Google would pick up the signal but I think instead they just started ignoring my "- requests" as I stopped using them. edit: or maybe they fix the problem. Spam sites used to be a problem during the early decline of Google. I think what happened was that problem actually almost disappeared for me and was replaced by irrelevant results from non-spam-sites Edit: mahalo.com was one of those, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com

Goety 5y ago

I will remain steadfast in my support from Google forever and always.

knolax 5y ago

More reasons why a global search monopoly is suboptimal. Smaller markets like this are just going to get neglected and maintained just enough that a better alternative can't compete. Google search is basically useless for any language other than English.

aembleton 5y ago
Surprisingly no one has created another search engine that targets another language other than yandex

onepunchedman 5y ago

Wow, the Norwegian on those scam web sites is actually perfect. Never seen that before.

Ueland 5y ago
That's because it's real content that they have stolen and just republished. In SEO circles one like to say that original content is king. Well, not so much after all.

onepunchedman 5y ago

The language in those scam articles is actually perfect, first time I've seen that.

kristofferR 5y ago

Yeah, I experienced this same spam domain for some searches I did yesterday. It's everywhere.

punnerud 5y ago

I live in Norway and don’t have this problem now. I had a similar problem about a year ago on my MacBook Air because of some software that altered my Google results in all of my browsers. Don’t remember the name of it, but something smelled fishy when the results was different from the ones on my phone.

oarth 5y ago
Pretty sure affects you too as it's the same for me, on multiple networks, multiple user-agents, multiple devices and so on. Simply just trie one of the examples like "hvordan regne ut prosent"(how to calculate percentages) or, I don't know..."DNB aksje"(DNB stocks, DNB being the biggest bank in Norway). Sure enough, both ranks on the first page or as the one of the top results. (One is now using the www.nem-varmepumper.dk domain, that is the same thing). EDIT: Now the DNB one moved from 2 and 3 place to page 2. Things are moving around quickly.
- punnerud 5y ago
  You are right, it also affects me. «hvordan regne ut prosent», https://www.havfruen4220.dk https://www.havfruen4220.dk is rank 5 and 6. «DNB Aksje», https://www.havfruen4220.dk https://www.havfruen4220.dk is rank 10
  - nolito 5y ago
    In Denmark here. The first does not give havfruen4220 results. The second does >DNB aktie< in 6th place

Crazyontap 5y ago

Can somebody else who is in Norway can confirm this? It could be simply be a malware injecting this. Would be great to eliminate this possibility

intarga 5y ago
I’m in Norway, and I tried the first search “rema 1000” without getting any spam results on the first two pages… That doesn’t entirely eliminate the other possibilities though, google search isn’t deterministic, and the domain could have been reported since the article went up.
- NorwegianDude 5y ago
  Searches like "REMA 1000"(just a very well known brand name) seems to be the best case scenario, even according to the article(page 5). I've noticed that the ranking of the results changes really often.
Ueland 5y ago
Can confirm this is not malware, Google has a huge spam problem, see my previous comments.
knidoyl 5y ago
I'm in France and shearched for the how often thing, it returned themermaid on second page
sleepyhead 5y ago
It's not showing for the example search (Rema 1000) for me right now, but I did a search yesterday, about a person/company and the result was news related content, and ended up with a site with the same image. However I can't find havfruen (mermaid) in my browser history so they must use other domains as well.
javier2 5y ago
It is not happening with the example from the article for me, but I have seen this practice ruin my search results in varying degree over the past 6 months. Some times entire keywords will just be broken because there are so many fake sites.

bigpeopleareold 5y ago

I hate dealing with this and now refuse to use Google now when I saw patterns in search results while I was researching common things (like housing) in Norwegian, here in Norway. I rarely use Google these days, but I thought for a second that Google might be better with search results than DDG in Norwegian, but this stuff is aggravating. This is one of those where they screw around with history that you just have to start fresh again on whatever you were doing instead of going back. edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian.

bigpeopleareold 5y ago
Just want to add to my comment also that it is not limited to havfruen4220.dk, but clarifies a general pattern. I tried a couple of search terms like 'mattilbud rema 1000' and found more .dk domains on the second page (nem-varmepumper.dk, humanrebels.dk) - two things that have nothing to do with food.
eitland 5y ago
> edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian. Another big one is that Norwegians like Germans write words together, just one example from one of the stupid ads: "Spesial Reportasje" is a dead giveaway not only because of the capitalization.) (Oh well, sadly because of pressure from Words incompetent spell checker over years and lenient teachers this is getting worse. I fear we are seing compound damage here as kids that got away with this are now becoming teachers...)
- eru 5y ago
  In German there was actually quite a lot of historic development about whether to write words together or separate or with hyphens. The current state of formal German will surely not be the end of history. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita#Geschichte https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leerzeichen_in_Komposita#Gesch... (Might need Google Translate, if you don't speak German.)

yfkar 5y ago

I've lately noticed that searching Google for topics related to gardening in Finnish often gives me some scraped and machine translated pages from Russia. Really annoying that totally useless content is so high up in the results.

Ueland 5y ago

I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their proxy traffic towards many sites I managed. I could easily document their behaviour. In the same time, I wrote a crawler that visited their sites over a long, long time. I learned that they kept injecting hidden links to other sites in their network, so I did let my bot look at those also. By this time, I also got a journalist with me that started to look at the money flow to try and find the organisation behind it. My bot found in excess of 100K domains being used for this operation, targeting all of westeren Europe. All the 100K sites contained proxied content and was hidden behind Cloudflare, but thanks to the position I had, I managed to find their backend anyways. We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down. Oh, and the journalist? He did find a Dutch company that was not happy to see neither him or the photographer :)

pepy 5y ago
Do you want to get to the bottom of this? A friend of mine is a top Dutch lawyer with an interest in these things.
- Ueland 5y ago
  This was two years ago and the network is now (to my knowledge) gone.
  - pepy 5y ago
    alright, thanks for the clarification
avian 5y ago
> We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down. As someone that tried reporting spam sites because they were using content scrapped from my website, I'm not surprised. Cloudflare has a policy that they will not stop providing their IP hiding/reverse proxy services to anyone, regardless of complaints. The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it. They say "we're not a hosting provider" as if that's an excuse that they can't refuse to offer their service. I'm sure many spam websites would go away if they couldn't hide behind Cloudflare.

monday_ 5y ago

Not sure how relevant this is, but the animal characters in the top image are from a Russian children hit cartoon "The Smesharicks" (literally "The Laughballs").

snickersnee11 5y ago
Also, the left image of a woman from a russian meme from a tv show.

fergie 5y ago

Norwegian here- I haven't seen this at all- maybe the author has been somehow "fingerprinted" and targeted?

aembleton 5y ago
Have you tried in a private window to check that you're not fingerprinted?

claroclinic 5y ago

Well this is happening in all countries

rapind 5y ago

> I think that Google uses stats on whether the user continued checking more results for that specific search query to determine if the visited result answered the user. God I hope not. If Google does do this, it sounds like a really dumb idea, which will ultimately create widespread usability issues. I can already envision SEO consultants recommending this for their clients if this is believed. Doesn’t look like it according to https://www.seroundtable.com/google-browser-back-button-rankings-23415.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-browser-back-button-rank...

gnyman 5y ago

Pet theory (disclaimer that I know very little about SEO) would be that the website with the cloned content loads fast and does not load 4 MiB of javascript, thus beating the original content in ranking mostly because of the speed, which is I believe a important factor in Google rankings (and getting more important). And add to that the some link spam and preventing the visitors to return not get any bounce back... Either way, I can't help to be a bit impressed by the SEO spammers outsmarting the people at Google. (Edit: and I don't mean to say they are smarter or anything, just that they only need to find one weakness in the algorithm while the people working to improve it needs to make it works for everything.)

jmiserez 5y ago
Once the hard requirement on speed impacts the quality of results it no longer helps me as a user. I'd rather have the sites invest their time in good content and wait a few seconds rather than get fast but low quality SEO-ed results. Same with AMP, the quest for speed doesn't make my experience faster if I still load the original page (which is often still necessary).

techaddict009 5y ago

Someone has probably found some kind of SEO Hack or Some 0 Day in Google serp. There are plenty of .it domains doing similar in Google USA serps.

rataata_jr 5y ago

Havfruen, brought to you by mountain trolls from Finmark.

sleepyhead 5y ago
There are no mountain trolls in Finnmark, they live further south as the mountains in Finnmark are not very big.
- rataata_jr 5y ago
  Have you met them? Please tell yes.
  - sleepyhead 5y ago
    Yes just go to Jotunheimen and you will find them. But don't go if you are Christian. Call Troll Security Service if you need help.
    - rataata_jr 5y ago
      Takk mann. Det er ok, jeg er Hindu.

known 5y ago

Isn't it due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing

StreamBright 5y ago

Same in Hungarian. Google is full of spam and nobody cares. The top hits are auto-translated garbage for many searches.

mlang23 5y ago

It seems google has lost its ability to block spam effectively. Since a few months, I notice an increase amount of outright scam being promoted on YT. I even got a ad for a fake Musk telling people to invest in a shady bitcoin scheme. Knowing that Google is willing to let these slip through just to maximize their ad revenue is really a warning sign that this company, no matter how large it might be by now, should not be trusted anymore.

the_biot 5y ago

For all that Google search has been utterly crap for going on a decade now, I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. I like DuckDuckGo for now, but I imagine as they get bigger they're going to be a target for these kinds of spam just the same.

beebeepka 5y ago
Google search has been a brochure for a long time now
raverbashing 5y ago
Even worse, getting this kind of spam through to DDG (Bing?) seems easier than on Google It seems DDG is worse at finding the more authoritative sites about a subject compared to Google.
- shuger 5y ago
  That's an advantage. Since google tuned up their engine to treat authoritative results as better their searches became absolute dogshit. You search for a very specific thing and all the results are big sites that have said something that contains two of the 6 words you search for in a completely generic article that helps you none. My favorite is when your query contains a word that is the very essence of what you search for and google chooses to display results without it so you have to do extra click "yes I actually want to search for what I said I want to search for".
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
Is there really any difference between DDG and Google when it comes to SEO spam? If there is, I sure haven't noticed in spite of using both, often for the same search terms. It seems to me that the techniques used to spam Google's index work just as well on Bing's index.
rvba 5y ago
Because they automated anything and you cannot contact any human from quality assurance.

keyme 5y ago

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated software and keygens, detailed instructions for a variety of useful things. That was the golden age of the web. These days, all the "interesting" data on the Internet is all inside closed Telegram chats, facebook groups, Discords or the rare public website here and there that Google doesn't want to index (like sci-hub, or other piracy sites). The data that remains on SERPs is now also heavily censored for arbitrary reasons. "For your health", "For your protection". Google search is done.

omega3 5y ago
> And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either. What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap. Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site beforehand, which is another problem.
  - soco 5y ago
    Yeah, I also try DDG first then and only if not okay I go !g. Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing? They could have shown advertisements also in their "classic" search (let's call it like that) so I'm really at loss - what was in it for them to change??? Germans have a word for that "verschlimmbessern" (or even two words - kaputtreparieren) which means breaking something by trying to make it better.

matsemann 5y ago

Yeah, I've seen this domain a lot lately. But I've complained about the Norwegian results for years [0]. For most searches there will be a result that's just keyword spam ranking high. Retried my "pes anserinus bursitt" search now 2 years later, and two results are spam from havfruen, and there are some other results from https://no.amenajari https://no.amenajari .org which is also just translated and scraped content for all languages google seems to love, as I've seen it for years. A third domain I often see as well is "nem-varmepumper". Apparently a site about heat pumps has content on everything. Can't fathom Google not catching this.. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621099

porbelm 5y ago
When I try that search, havfruen is seventh place. NHI and other good results at the top. YMMV a lot with Google results. For me, it's usually great where DDG is kinda crap, but not as bad as... shudder ... bing
- fogihujy 5y ago
  With DDG, I found this thread. Google set to Norway as region/language found nothing from havfruen4220.dk, unless I specifically added site:havfruen4220.dk in the search. My guess is that someone at Google reacted.
  - matsemann 5y ago
    Almost all my searches from the last days still show havfruen as a result somewhere. My pes anserinus above. Or "obos fellesgjeld" from a ~week ago which was when I noticed the pattern first. "monstera jord" gives lots of translated blogspam, and then a row of havfruen results. Switching language on Google has basically no effect. Sometimes I want to find Swedish results for a thing with the same name, but no matter what I do I get Norwegian results ranked first. So don't think this is easily emulated from abroad.
    - fogihujy 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago

It's the hooking of the browser back button in a way that Google does not detect which is the real 'trick'. Anyone who can do that can rank as high as they like for any search query.

londons_explore 5y ago
To expand on this: A very strong ranking signal is how many of the users that click a search result are sufficiently satisfied with the information they have found to end their search. A good proxy for this is how many people don't click the 'back' button to see other results. Google is already aware of sites which hijack the back button. Their crawler detects this, and if they find it, they throw out the figures of how many people click the back button. So if you can find a way to hook the back button so nobody can click back, while stopping google thinking you have hooked the back button, then your page will keep creeping up the rankings. Google detects back button hijacking with their crawler (by rendering the page in Chromium and seeing the effect when hitting the actual back button), but this is circumvented by presenting the crawler different html. (or making sure the page behaves differently in their crawler, potentially by checking things like the model of the graphics card - googles crawlers don't yet support most of WebGL 2.0, and also simulate playing audio at the wrong rate) Google also detects how many real users click back. If it's zero, then thats a warning flag. So I'd guess the back-hijacking logic is only activated ~80% of the time.

rwmj 5y ago

I've also seen this, but from a different side. I have Google Alerts for many open source projects that I run, but in the past few years these alerts have become all but useless. Spammers scrape genuine pages from all over the place (including ones containing references to my projects) and put them into scammy ".it" domains. These appear both in Google Alerts and high up in Google Search. So alerts and search both become useless. The scam appears to be that when you visit these web pages they say you're the billionth (or whatever) visitor to Google and you've won a prize, just type in your bank details. This has been going on for years now, so I don't have much confidence that Google is able or willing to fix it.

qwerty456127 5y ago

For every country/market somebody should better make a search engine to compete with Google. Now this is a chance for Norway.

matsemann 5y ago
Used to have https://www.kvasir.no/ https://www.kvasir.no/ but now it's just a skinned Google. sesam.no (not valid domain anymore) was an engine made by some a big Norwegian company back in 2005 or so. Norway used to be big in search. FAST got acquired by MS back in 2008.
sleepyhead 5y ago
We had a fast one but Microsoft bought it and shut it down.

qwerty456127 5y ago

I'm surprised to find out people actually return to the search results page using the back button. Whenever I am serious enough (enough to keep looking after the first link I click does not satisfy me) about finding something I always Middle-Click or Ctrl+Click the links to open them in new tabs.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Artefact of mobile use perhaps? "Open in new tab" is slightly harder on a phone or on a tablet.
chimen 5y ago
People are easily "surprised" these days

tvirosi 5y ago

Google search seems to have gotten significantly worse lately (sometimes to the point that it's barely usable). From scams like these (I've seen others) somehow getting a foothold, to a lot of internal "unbiasing" skewing the results towards googles political stance (usually totally irrelevant to my query). It's gotten to the point that I barely google anymore other than for things I already know what the results will be.

nolito 5y ago

According to DK-hostmaster (https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/da/find-domaenenavn https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/da/find-domaenenavn) its registered to Ance Dzerina. Ieriku iela 37, dz. 32, LV-1084 Riga, Letland At 2. juli 2021 Thats pretty fast to work so well. But i see lots of this, with other domains, when searching and have done for years so nothing new here i think.

golergka 5y ago

This image features characters from Smeshariki animation series, hugely popular in Russia in the last 15 years.

ubercore 5y ago

FWIW, I just tried these searches (am in Norway) and didn't see that domain in the results.

hoppla 5y ago

The recaptcha process should be reversed. The sites should prove to humans that it’s content is not generated by bots.

ant6n 5y ago
Perhaps a search engine that deranks pages that monetize visits (like ads) would be a good first step.

ricardo81 5y ago

Poor man's cloaking curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0' 'https://havfruen4220.dk https://havfruen4220.dk' > 1.html curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk https://havfruen4220.dk' > 2.html diff 1.html 2.html 7d6 < <script>var b="https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; ( /google|yahoo|facebook|vk|mail|alpha|yandex|search|msn|DuckDuckGo|Boardreader|Ask|SlideShare|YouTube|Vimeo|Baidu|AOL|Excite/.test(document.referrer) && location.href.indexOf(".") != -1 ) && (top.location.href = b); </script>

gvb 5y ago
The "diff" output (above) needs an extra line break to avoid HN automatic line wrapping. The output of the diff command is: diff 1.html 2.html 7d6 < <script>var b="https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; https://havfruen4220.dk/3_5_no_14_-__1627553323/gotodate"; ( /google|yahoo|facebook|vk|mail|alpha|yandex|search|msn|DuckDuckGo|Boardreader|Ask|SlideShare|YouTube|Vimeo|Baidu|AOL|Excite/.test(document.referrer) && location.href.indexOf(".") != -1 ) && (top.location.href = b); </script>

belter 5y ago

The mermaid mentioned in the article seems to be either a terribly amateurish operation or a very sophisticated sting. They can be easily traced to a block of flats in Latvia but since their registered phone its a Toy Store in Riga...I am going to go with probably stolen identify operation and a sense of humour on their part instead of the real operation of some 12 year in Riga...

algismo 5y ago

Just tried Google.no from my computer (Norwegian IP (Larvik area)). Nothing similar. I see “normal” search results. In any way, I stopped using Google stuff 5 years ago. Never looked back since then, so my search history is kind of clean, maybe that changes their algorithm behavior. Recommend to switch to DuckDuckGo:)

classified 5y ago

If the mermaid took it, does that mean Google search is resting with the fishes?

franze 5y ago

In a similar note: https://www.autosuggest.net/ https://www.autosuggest.net/ currently approaching a lot of websites in the german market. "We help you to receive high-quality visitors from search engines, generate conversions and build your brand. To achieve these results, we ensure your website / company is recommended for specific keywords by the search engine's autocomplete function."

zulrah 5y ago

I've noticed another trend recently where it seems that some websites write content for google SEO instead of optimized for human readability. E.g.: I've seen my exact search phrase repeated mutiple times and then a very long article about the topic when what I searched was a simple question with a few words answer.

gonab 5y ago

Google has a problem when HN becomes an issue tracker

sublimefire 5y ago

It is interesting as you cannot see the content which is being indexed. Suspect only bot does. If I understand correctly this is the sequence of events from the bot's perspective: ## read robots.txt `curl 'https://havfruen4220.dk/robots.txt https://havfruen4220.dk/robots.txt'` ## use pointer to a sitemap.xml curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no.xml https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no.xml' > sitemap.xml ## read more sitemaps curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html http://www.google.com/bot.html)' 'https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no-1.xml https://havfruen4220.dk/sitemap-no-1.xml' > sitemap1.xml Other sitemaps contain a pointer to a "webpage" eg: https://havfruen4220.dk/no/7a28855e4714dd14 https://havfruen4220.dk/no/7a28855e4714dd14 ## read web pages Each location in a sitemap has a "lastmod" of today/yesterday so bot returns there everyday. In addition each webpage has a "<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">" But if you visit each of those pages then it shows you a cartoon image. It seems the actual indexed content is visible only to the bot. ## But how is actual content being rendered? The question is, what conditions (request params/headers) result in the actual content being rendered? The bot needs to evaluate it. Suspect it is some combo of checking if the requester is an actual google bot, maybe by looking up the IP https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/verifying-googlebot https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...

Schnurpel 5y ago

If I would run a global infrastructure company like Cloudflare, I also would not take any sides, and leave my service open to anyone. The world is full of people who get upset about something. However, if I declare a hands-off policy, it must be truly hands-off. Cloudflare kicked off Switter https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudflare-sex-workers-banned https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla..., it banned 8Chan https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ , it banned the Hacker News https://mobile.twitter.com/thehackersnews/status/669001836058181633 https://mobile.twitter.com/thehackersnews/status/66900183605... . That’s not how hands-off works.

notRobot 5y ago
To be clear, that's not HN, but The Hacker News, a different website, known for... dubious reporting.

cnxsoft 5y ago

Google is garbage. I once complained a website stealing my contents and other people's contents was ranking very highly in Google. I was told I'd better fixed my website before looking at "competitors". Part of that was true, but at the time the person did not seem to care at all of spammy content delivered by Google.

manceraio 5y ago

They will get probably outranked on the next big Google update.

tikiman163 5y ago

I'm kind of curious why he's so concerned about this? They've never managed better than ninth most relevant and in most cases they didn't even make the first page of result. Any advertising person will tell you, if you aren't in the top 3 results (basically the top result now that paid ads automatically get the top 2 spots on nearly all searches) your odds of being seen and clicked on drop to almost nothing. Are they potentially doin harm? Sure. Have the successfully managed to trick anybody with this? I'd be extremely surprised if they're getting more than a dozen people clicking through from being the ninth result in a day,and when people see they've been redirected to an advertisement the majority of people immediately click away. This isn't like clicking on a fake prorn site that redirects to cam girls with viruses hidden in all the downloads. It's random unrelated searches redirecting you to blatant ads for cryto currency. The kind of people who are young enough to know what crypto currency is and how to buy it, also know how to spot a redirect to a fake website.

burnished 5y ago
These kinds of scams are a stochastic process. They don't work on your average person, they only work on vulnerable people. Heres the catch though, everyone is vulnerable at some point in their lives. This is where the stochastic process comes in, they don't need to get you when you're strong, they just need to test enough people enough times to catch them in a vulnerable moment.

fleddr 5y ago

Makes you wonder what happens when AI can write "passing" articles. Useless to the reader, but too close to tell for the crawler.

cratermoon 5y ago

The Norwegian pinterest

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

My guess is they get away with it because it's a non-English query and most of the people working on these problems aren't looking at their localization. A big issue in general for global tech companies is that they don't usually handle things outside the US/English context particularly well. This often crops up in that political space, where for instance, something contentious like gun sales might get pulled from Google globally even though the political concern with them is mostly limited to the US. An SEO-fighting Googler might at a glance have no reason not to think that could be a really relevant or popular site in your country.

Matsta 5y ago

I had a look at this, and it looks to me like it's a 301 from another domain. Typically when domains get a manual penalty (primarily for spam), they drop in rankings overnight. So to counter this, you register a new domain and redirect it and overnight, your rankings bounce back. This technique is super common for blackhat sites like illegal streaming sites. If the redirect is done as a meta refresh, then you can block it in your robots.txt from being picked up from SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush etc. These types of sites are called doorway pages and have been around for ages. They are most popular in Russia and on Yandex, but you do see them on Google for super longtail keywords with 0 competition. The other important thing to remember is that doing SEO in any language that's not English is a walk in the park. Lots of SEO influencer types have case studies showing how much extra traffic they get by translating their content. [1] [1] https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-trend/ https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-trend/

siproprio 5y ago

I've seen this trend in other places too: For example, Microsoft routinely deletes negative feedback from GitHub issue for vs code.