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The SEO spam has gotten much worse on DDG the past year or so, they pop on Google every now and then as well. Google on the other hand has a page of ads before

The SEO spam has gotten much worse on DDG the past year or so, they pop on Google every now and then as well. Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results. My experience is that if DDG can't find what I'm looking for, then neither can Google, it's just that I'm still much quicker to second guess the results on DDG, compared to Google. It's a little weird, you'd think that it would be easy to spot the sites that just copy text from Stack Overflow or the Python documentation and drop them from the index entirely, but apparently not.

prox 5y ago
Googles results top 10 results are usually all ad ridden sites that have a high fluff (ads and banners / dark patterns) Yeah, the content is there, but with a ton of hoops to jump through.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Guess which search engine also happens to run a web advertising network?
  - Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
    Exactly this. !g is basically evil in more ways than you'll ever know.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  The first 3 or 4 a always ads usually. I look for a lot of "best of" and I just automatically click past the first page or two because I know they are going to be SEO spam with some semi honest reviews about something, and another blurb that says the product I'm looking for is thte best.
ravenstine 5y ago
I've noticed something similar, but I'm not sure if it's SEO spam so much as something that may have changed with their algorithm. I could swear that DDG used to strictly honor wrapping terms in quotes, but now it behaves extremely loosely with quotes, often returning things that contain nothing that was quoted without making it clear if it's doing that because it found no matches. Quotes are kind of a niche feature, but to me the change in behavior likely reflects something that affects all searches.
- not2b 5y ago
  Since they mainly rely on Bing, maybe Bing has made a change.
- sefrost 5y ago
  I think Google and recently DDG think they’re doing me a favour by ignoring my quote marks. They’re not! If they think they only have poor results with quote marks then show me them and tell me that. If they don’t have any results with my quote marks then tell me that. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s like asking someone in the street for directions and they’re embarrassed they don’t know the way so point you in a random direction. Not helpful!
  - eitland 5y ago
    > It’s like asking someone in the street for directions and they’re embarrassed they don’t know the way so point you in a random direction. Not helpful! This is an extremely good explanation of what is going on and why it drives me crazy. I argued this with a search engine employee once and he said others had told him they expected them to do this. Well, here's the point: If you go this direction the engine become unusable for certain jobs. If - on the other hand one respect user queries one maybe also have to tell users how to get the results they want. That is a tradeoff, I admit that. But one of the solutions builds a fantastic tool that might require a tiny tiny bit of training. The other solution builds a toy that also works as a tool in simple cases. Why do search engines go that way? Seems to be short time optimizations all the way: - making it absolutely idiot proof means more usage - annoying power users doesn't have any effects until alternatives exist. Now however Kagi exist and I have left DDG (and Google but they only used to be a fallback anyway) and I will go around tell everyone there is a new search engine in town - and I will enjoy it!
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      > making it absolutely idiot proof means more usage Perhaps that's what analysts and management believes publicly within search companies, but I don't think even normies believe that crappy search results is better than none. There's a few things that may be happening that explain why filler search results creates more engagement. A non-power-user may perceive a search engine that returns crappy results to have more pages indexed over a search engine that returns no results for the same query, even though the latter would return more accurate results for a different query. Users may also return to the search engine more because they click on these filler results expecting to find what they want, but they don't, so they click on the back button and click on another result. I suspect that analysts may conveniently omit this information when presenting their fancy graphs showing increased engagement to management, and that's because I've seen this sort of shenanigans in real life. Management either way may just not care as long as the ads being displayed in search results are being viewed or clicked more often.
ghosty141 5y ago
> Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results. I've become almost dependant on uBlock Origin for adblocking. Thus this isn't a problem for me but I agree with the general problem.
- samstave 5y ago
  Have you visited your Gmail inbox lately... WTF happened? When Google bought Postini, the spam filter got awesome... Somehow, in the last 12 months - google has been infecting my inbox with spam... Whats funny is that MANY people used to have yahoo or hotmail dumpsters for spam/sign-ups etc... but now gmail is my spam dumpster, and protonmail is my pref. --- EDIt: After thinking on it a sec.. I think I know whats up: Inboxing. Recall how Friendster, HI5, tagged, etc "scaled" -- by being a stupid platform for you to effectively give your details and contacts to so they could scale. Lets not forget what v.01 social media was -- They were all spammers only harvesting email databases... which for ad rev is what built them Clearly, Google is trying to harvest more ad-rev through killing their spam filter. Do no evil, much?
  - bryans 5y ago
    It's actually worse than that. They haven't been catching their outgoing spam, either -- I receive tons of spam from fake Gmail accounts these days. So glad that we've all spent billions of hours clicking on buses and traffic lights to convince Google we're humans, when it clearly does nothing to stop botting.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Next version of Captcha: Click the spam subject lines

prox 5y ago

Googles results top 10 results are usually all ad ridden sites that have a high fluff (ads and banners / dark patterns) Yeah, the content is there, but with a ton of hoops to jump through.

Nextgrid 5y ago
Guess which search engine also happens to run a web advertising network?
- Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
  Exactly this. !g is basically evil in more ways than you'll ever know.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
The first 3 or 4 a always ads usually. I look for a lot of "best of" and I just automatically click past the first page or two because I know they are going to be SEO spam with some semi honest reviews about something, and another blurb that says the product I'm looking for is thte best.

ravenstine 5y ago

I've noticed something similar, but I'm not sure if it's SEO spam so much as something that may have changed with their algorithm. I could swear that DDG used to strictly honor wrapping terms in quotes, but now it behaves extremely loosely with quotes, often returning things that contain nothing that was quoted without making it clear if it's doing that because it found no matches. Quotes are kind of a niche feature, but to me the change in behavior likely reflects something that affects all searches.

not2b 5y ago
Since they mainly rely on Bing, maybe Bing has made a change.
sefrost 5y ago
I think Google and recently DDG think they’re doing me a favour by ignoring my quote marks. They’re not! If they think they only have poor results with quote marks then show me them and tell me that. If they don’t have any results with my quote marks then tell me that. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s like asking someone in the street for directions and they’re embarrassed they don’t know the way so point you in a random direction. Not helpful!
- eitland 5y ago
  > It’s like asking someone in the street for directions and they’re embarrassed they don’t know the way so point you in a random direction. Not helpful! This is an extremely good explanation of what is going on and why it drives me crazy. I argued this with a search engine employee once and he said others had told him they expected them to do this. Well, here's the point: If you go this direction the engine become unusable for certain jobs. If - on the other hand one respect user queries one maybe also have to tell users how to get the results they want. That is a tradeoff, I admit that. But one of the solutions builds a fantastic tool that might require a tiny tiny bit of training. The other solution builds a toy that also works as a tool in simple cases. Why do search engines go that way? Seems to be short time optimizations all the way: - making it absolutely idiot proof means more usage - annoying power users doesn't have any effects until alternatives exist. Now however Kagi exist and I have left DDG (and Google but they only used to be a fallback anyway) and I will go around tell everyone there is a new search engine in town - and I will enjoy it!
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    > making it absolutely idiot proof means more usage Perhaps that's what analysts and management believes publicly within search companies, but I don't think even normies believe that crappy search results is better than none. There's a few things that may be happening that explain why filler search results creates more engagement. A non-power-user may perceive a search engine that returns crappy results to have more pages indexed over a search engine that returns no results for the same query, even though the latter would return more accurate results for a different query. Users may also return to the search engine more because they click on these filler results expecting to find what they want, but they don't, so they click on the back button and click on another result. I suspect that analysts may conveniently omit this information when presenting their fancy graphs showing increased engagement to management, and that's because I've seen this sort of shenanigans in real life. Management either way may just not care as long as the ads being displayed in search results are being viewed or clicked more often.

ghosty141 5y ago

> Google on the other hand has a page of ads before the real results. I've become almost dependant on uBlock Origin for adblocking. Thus this isn't a problem for me but I agree with the general problem.

samstave 5y ago
Have you visited your Gmail inbox lately... WTF happened? When Google bought Postini, the spam filter got awesome... Somehow, in the last 12 months - google has been infecting my inbox with spam... Whats funny is that MANY people used to have yahoo or hotmail dumpsters for spam/sign-ups etc... but now gmail is my spam dumpster, and protonmail is my pref. --- EDIt: After thinking on it a sec.. I think I know whats up: Inboxing. Recall how Friendster, HI5, tagged, etc "scaled" -- by being a stupid platform for you to effectively give your details and contacts to so they could scale. Lets not forget what v.01 social media was -- They were all spammers only harvesting email databases... which for ad rev is what built them Clearly, Google is trying to harvest more ad-rev through killing their spam filter. Do no evil, much?
- bryans 5y ago
  It's actually worse than that. They haven't been catching their outgoing spam, either -- I receive tons of spam from fake Gmail accounts these days. So glad that we've all spent billions of hours clicking on buses and traffic lights to convince Google we're humans, when it clearly does nothing to stop botting.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Next version of Captcha: Click the spam subject lines