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Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so

Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so cocky as to think I have any idea what Google is fighting. There are a lot of very smart people from all over the world putting everything they have into getting to the top of that site. It's not a trivial task for them.

kizer 5y ago
Fair point. But again, that would be less of an issue if there were like 3 or 4 big search engines with different algorithms, all changing and adapting on their own schedules. Would be harder to game the system then.
motoxpro 5y ago
You're so right. It's sad that even if you remove 99% of something, to the outside it looks like you are removing 0% because you have no reference.
Nextgrid 5y ago
I disagree. Google has absolutely dropped the ball - I'm not saying that it's easy to algorithmically rank good/bad content, but they're not even trying. A stop-gap solution would be to simply penalize anything with ads. Legitimate websites will still have enough "SEO juice" (for the lack of a better term) to offset the penalty, but brand new copycats with otherwise no inbound links to them from other legitimate websites (and no other business model beyond scammy ads) will never be able to rank high, essentially removing the incentive from setting up these sites in the first place. Not to mention, these problems can be identified, prioritized and then tackled manually one-by-one. Stackoverflow copycats can be dealt with by downloading the SO data dump, parsing it and then severely penalizing any website where the bulk of the content matches the dump. Pinterest can be penalized by simply excluding it from image searches until they actually display the searched image without asking for login. So on and so forth. You can't win them all, and you can't train an algorithm to win every time either, but you can manually observe what's happening and deal with the biggest problems. The problem however is that the current status-quo is good for Google. They've got the monopoly on search (every other one is typically even worse when it comes to these issues), and spammy copycat websites happen to have Google ads or analytics so Google actually benefits from them too.
- Kiro 5y ago
  How do you know Google is not already doing all those things? You said it yourself, you can't win them all and we're witnessing the result of that. If Google truly did nothing it would be an unimaginable chaos.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Because I’m not seeing the results. Let’s ignore SO copycats for now because that solution requires at least a slight amount of effort and look at the elephant in the room - Pinterest. Dealing with it is a simple “if image_search and domain == pinterest.com then skip” and they’re not even doing that. They have a site that’s been polluting image search results for years, isn’t even trying to hide (unlike the SO copycats which could technically churn out an infinite amount of domains to work around bans) and they can’t even deal with that.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Well, quite. Why would a company that makes its money selling ads penalise sites that show its ads? And when you get to that state, you've pretty much turned the entire web into content marketing for your ad sales business. So - of course search quality suffers. Search quality is not the point.
MrWiffles 5y ago
Consider it from a management/budgetary point of view. Super smart people? Oh hell yeah, and I don't fault them for this one bit. But bean counters? Why the hell invest in hiring those people, or budgeting for search quality improvements, when you have essentially no competition to speak of? Makes more sense to put those same smart people on projects that correlate people's activities outside of Google with activities they can observe either directly or indirectly to create a more wholistic picture of the consumer for advertisers. Those are much harder problems to solve, especially now that the public is finally becoming slowly more aware of the massive abuses of privacy the bean counters like I described above have been pushing for years. At the end of the day Google doesn't exist for the good of the public, they exist to return the highest possible investment for shareholders. It's literally the opposite of their job to improve search quality when competition doesn't force them to (because investors see that as a waste of money that could have been spent on further eroding people's privacy to enable higher and higher ad revenues.)

kizer 5y ago

Fair point. But again, that would be less of an issue if there were like 3 or 4 big search engines with different algorithms, all changing and adapting on their own schedules. Would be harder to game the system then.

motoxpro 5y ago

You're so right. It's sad that even if you remove 99% of something, to the outside it looks like you are removing 0% because you have no reference.

Nextgrid 5y ago

I disagree. Google has absolutely dropped the ball - I'm not saying that it's easy to algorithmically rank good/bad content, but they're not even trying. A stop-gap solution would be to simply penalize anything with ads. Legitimate websites will still have enough "SEO juice" (for the lack of a better term) to offset the penalty, but brand new copycats with otherwise no inbound links to them from other legitimate websites (and no other business model beyond scammy ads) will never be able to rank high, essentially removing the incentive from setting up these sites in the first place. Not to mention, these problems can be identified, prioritized and then tackled manually one-by-one. Stackoverflow copycats can be dealt with by downloading the SO data dump, parsing it and then severely penalizing any website where the bulk of the content matches the dump. Pinterest can be penalized by simply excluding it from image searches until they actually display the searched image without asking for login. So on and so forth. You can't win them all, and you can't train an algorithm to win every time either, but you can manually observe what's happening and deal with the biggest problems. The problem however is that the current status-quo is good for Google. They've got the monopoly on search (every other one is typically even worse when it comes to these issues), and spammy copycat websites happen to have Google ads or analytics so Google actually benefits from them too.

Kiro 5y ago
How do you know Google is not already doing all those things? You said it yourself, you can't win them all and we're witnessing the result of that. If Google truly did nothing it would be an unimaginable chaos.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Because I’m not seeing the results. Let’s ignore SO copycats for now because that solution requires at least a slight amount of effort and look at the elephant in the room - Pinterest. Dealing with it is a simple “if image_search and domain == pinterest.com then skip” and they’re not even doing that. They have a site that’s been polluting image search results for years, isn’t even trying to hide (unlike the SO copycats which could technically churn out an infinite amount of domains to work around bans) and they can’t even deal with that.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Well, quite. Why would a company that makes its money selling ads penalise sites that show its ads? And when you get to that state, you've pretty much turned the entire web into content marketing for your ad sales business. So - of course search quality suffers. Search quality is not the point.

MrWiffles 5y ago

Consider it from a management/budgetary point of view. Super smart people? Oh hell yeah, and I don't fault them for this one bit. But bean counters? Why the hell invest in hiring those people, or budgeting for search quality improvements, when you have essentially no competition to speak of? Makes more sense to put those same smart people on projects that correlate people's activities outside of Google with activities they can observe either directly or indirectly to create a more wholistic picture of the consumer for advertisers. Those are much harder problems to solve, especially now that the public is finally becoming slowly more aware of the massive abuses of privacy the bean counters like I described above have been pushing for years. At the end of the day Google doesn't exist for the good of the public, they exist to return the highest possible investment for shareholders. It's literally the opposite of their job to improve search quality when competition doesn't force them to (because investors see that as a waste of money that could have been spent on further eroding people's privacy to enable higher and higher ad revenues.)