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This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1 spot means x% of market share, so

This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1 spot means x% of market share, so a perfectly legitimate strategy is duplicate your entire hardware 5x, since now you're not 1/10th of the leading edge, you're 5/15 instead. Especially when the costs of spinning up a new instance are low, but you're going a lot via a small increase in share.

vecter 5y ago
It’s more profitable to run identical clones of the same strategy N times?
- Traster 5y ago
  Yes, it costs you $5 to run a website so just run tonnes of them and hope 1 wins. Or $500 to run a trading system, but the difference between payoffN/T and payoffN+1/T+1 is greater than 500. Assuming obviously that you have a trading system that is more or less as good as everyone else’s and N is the number of systems you’re running and T is the number of systems in the market
alkonaut 5y ago
Day one of "writing a reasonable search engine" would be to kill sitespam, no? Any time you see N sites with the same or very similar content, you should assume immediately drop the rank of all but a small slice at the top. You can choose to keep the one with most trusted incoming link (regular pagerank) but also you could just trust the oldest one in your index! For example: there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites. They just post the SO answers with their own ads. But I don't want that site. So how on earth can Google show the clone sites on top of the true StackOverflow? You'd think they have systems in place with hundreds of thousands of canary queries and "known expected rankings" such that IF one of the fraud sites manage to trick their system, they can just swiftly patch it to restore order and bury the clone sites after page 100. But no.
- Volker_W 5y ago
  > there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites I never saw a single StackOverflow clone site in my life.
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    I think it depends on location, browser config and other things. As a another comment said, I generally get SO pages at top, but these pages with same title appear next. I thought they were different forums where there were different answers but they were just SO clones.
    - Volker_W 5y ago
      That would explain why I cannot reproduce most of the problems here.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    These days I see more clone results than actual SO results for some queries. It’s been a thing for years See e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 But lately (last 6 months maybe) it exploded.
    - Volker_W 5y ago
      All of the clone sites you linked are dead links now.
      - alkonaut 5y ago
        Yes that was a five year old HN post so it was the crop of SO clones from 5 years ago. They constantly change. Example from now: https://coderedirect.com/questions/190779/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-winform https://coderedirect.com/questions/190779/changing-the-color... They even have the same url fornat and everything. Actual result https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-winform https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-co... Here I took a random SO post and searched for a sentence in an answer. This result is in the top 5 results (in this case the real SO result was above - but not rarely the impostor sites are above)

vecter 5y ago

It’s more profitable to run identical clones of the same strategy N times?

Traster 5y ago
Yes, it costs you $5 to run a website so just run tonnes of them and hope 1 wins. Or $500 to run a trading system, but the difference between payoffN/T and payoffN+1/T+1 is greater than 500. Assuming obviously that you have a trading system that is more or less as good as everyone else’s and N is the number of systems you’re running and T is the number of systems in the market

alkonaut 5y ago

Day one of "writing a reasonable search engine" would be to kill sitespam, no? Any time you see N sites with the same or very similar content, you should assume immediately drop the rank of all but a small slice at the top. You can choose to keep the one with most trusted incoming link (regular pagerank) but also you could just trust the oldest one in your index! For example: there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites. They just post the SO answers with their own ads. But I don't want that site. So how on earth can Google show the clone sites on top of the true StackOverflow? You'd think they have systems in place with hundreds of thousands of canary queries and "known expected rankings" such that IF one of the fraud sites manage to trick their system, they can just swiftly patch it to restore order and bury the clone sites after page 100. But no.

Volker_W 5y ago
> there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites I never saw a single StackOverflow clone site in my life.
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  I think it depends on location, browser config and other things. As a another comment said, I generally get SO pages at top, but these pages with same title appear next. I thought they were different forums where there were different answers but they were just SO clones.
  - Volker_W 5y ago
    That would explain why I cannot reproduce most of the problems here.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  These days I see more clone results than actual SO results for some queries. It’s been a thing for years See e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 But lately (last 6 months maybe) it exploded.
  - Volker_W 5y ago
    All of the clone sites you linked are dead links now.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      Yes that was a five year old HN post so it was the crop of SO clones from 5 years ago. They constantly change. Example from now: https://coderedirect.com/questions/190779/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-winform https://coderedirect.com/questions/190779/changing-the-color... They even have the same url fornat and everything. Actual result https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-winform https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-co... Here I took a random SO post and searched for a sentence in an answer. This result is in the top 5 results (in this case the real SO result was above - but not rarely the impostor sites are above)