4 ms·

Ah, the old "Step one: create a general purpose artificial intelligence."

lumost 5y ago
No general AI required. Simply count the number of ads in the text. For a top ten site I’d also expect a certain degree of interesting vocabulary which loops in industry jargon. I’d also expect spam sites to use similar syntax/sentence structure for all products. Lastly if I can follow the links and get references to the final products, then I can estimate how similar the product description is to the product. I’d expect most customers looking at top tens want something more than what they get from searching a retailers site. Heck, many legit top lists include dedicated YouTube videos visually inspecting the products and reviewing them - cross referencing blogs to YouTube channels and validating that the YouTube video is of some production quality (likes/views/youtube Spam detection) could strip down a ton of spam.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > Simply count the number of ads in the text. What is an ad?
  - lumost 5y ago
    Something served from double click or other major ad network
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      That does absolutely nothing to address the affiliate problem, nor does it catch advertorial or "native ads" as they sometimes called. Ignoring all content served by ad brokers is no more sufficient than browser ad blocking extensions. It helps, but you don't get an ad- and distraction-free result.
      - FabHK 5y ago
        Plus, as soon as you make that a metric that is penalised by Google, how long do you think it'll take until ads are distributed from some rotating nondescript domains? (See Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law )
        cratermoon 5y ago
        Don't spammers already do a lot of domain cycling? Doesn't NextDNS already ignore domains less than 30 days old, for exactly this reason?
      - lumost 5y ago
        Most affiliate spam sites that I see cover the page in intrusive advertisements to maximize revenue. Penalizing intrusive ads would certainly have some effect. This is also referring to penalizing rankings so that the entire page gets downranked rather than simply blocking ads in your browser.
        cratermoon 5y ago
        It still wouldn't do much because as soon as Google starts to try to identify sites full of ads by some criteria, shady sites are going to start serving ads in some other way. It's already hard enough to distinguish ads in some sites that have gone with native ads or advertorials.

No general AI required. Simply count the number of ads in the text. For a top ten site I’d also expect a certain degree of interesting vocabulary which loops in industry jargon. I’d also expect spam sites to use similar syntax/sentence structure for all products. Lastly if I can follow the links and get references to the final products, then I can estimate how similar the product description is to the product. I’d expect most customers looking at top tens want something more than what they get from searching a retailers site. Heck, many legit top lists include dedicated YouTube videos visually inspecting the products and reviewing them - cross referencing blogs to YouTube channels and validating that the YouTube video is of some production quality (likes/views/youtube Spam detection) could strip down a ton of spam.

cratermoon 5y ago
> Simply count the number of ads in the text. What is an ad?
- lumost 5y ago
  Something served from double click or other major ad network
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    That does absolutely nothing to address the affiliate problem, nor does it catch advertorial or "native ads" as they sometimes called. Ignoring all content served by ad brokers is no more sufficient than browser ad blocking extensions. It helps, but you don't get an ad- and distraction-free result.
    - FabHK 5y ago
      Plus, as soon as you make that a metric that is penalised by Google, how long do you think it'll take until ads are distributed from some rotating nondescript domains? (See Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law )
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        Don't spammers already do a lot of domain cycling? Doesn't NextDNS already ignore domains less than 30 days old, for exactly this reason?
    - lumost 5y ago
      Most affiliate spam sites that I see cover the page in intrusive advertisements to maximize revenue. Penalizing intrusive ads would certainly have some effect. This is also referring to penalizing rankings so that the entire page gets downranked rather than simply blocking ads in your browser.
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        It still wouldn't do much because as soon as Google starts to try to identify sites full of ads by some criteria, shady sites are going to start serving ads in some other way. It's already hard enough to distinguish ads in some sites that have gone with native ads or advertorials.