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That would make sense if so many easy to detect low hanging fruit like blog spam, scraped stack overflow pirates, and listicles didn't make it to the top. Those

That would make sense if so many easy to detect low hanging fruit like blog spam, scraped stack overflow pirates, and listicles didn't make it to the top. Those are easy for google to de-rank and yet they don't.

IndexPointer 5y ago
There are billions of dollars on stake from both sides, search engines and spammers, in an endless arms race that has been going on for more than 20 years. Trust me, it's beyond naive to say fighting webspam is a low hanging fruit problem.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Why should I trust you? I trust my own eyes. I regularly see spam sites that get to the top of results that are seen by many people for months. These could be filtered with a one line change.
caconym_ 5y ago
What's the source for it being easy? It seems easy, from the perspective of a human looking at results, but I'm not sure how much that's worth given the scale and complexity of the problem.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Captchas are way harder to solve than it is to detect these sorts of poor results. Google should have absolutely no problem building a classifier that could scale to solve the problem. But as you said, it's not worth it to them, but for the reasons of losing revenue rather than scale and complexity.
- Kavelach 5y ago
  Just block the domain. At first, you can block manually, but we know Google doesn't like doing things that way. Fortunately, they have a lot of heuristics to find sites like that; usually the content is just copied from another source. And since they scrape the web all the time, they should know which content has appeared first where. But the issue isn't that they can't; the issue is that they don't want that. Why the sites with copied content exists? To earn money through ads. What earns Google money? Ads!
  - IndexPointer 5y ago
    Any simple heuristic has false positives, meaning they'll end up taking down legitimate sites that had repeated content for a good reason. Say, for example two sites quoting text from the us constitution. The second one to be crawled would be considered to be spam copying the first one and removed from web results. Then you'll get comments on hacker news complaining that Google is censoring it for political reasons. And any simple heuristic is quickly reverse engineered by SEOs, who will find a way to mask it as legitimate. tl;dr it's a hard problem.
    - Kavelach 5y ago
      They could use the heuristics to build a list of domains to block and then have someone review it. After doing it for a long time, they could build a neural model on top of that, and automate it. As I have said, the reason they don't do it is not because they don't have the skills and know-how.
- dpacmittal 5y ago
  Kagi filters all of that out. If an upstart can do it, Google with its unlimited resources can do it too
  - caconym_ 5y ago
    Kagi seems to be in closed beta, so I wasn't able to test this claim even on an anecdotal level.

IndexPointer 5y ago

There are billions of dollars on stake from both sides, search engines and spammers, in an endless arms race that has been going on for more than 20 years. Trust me, it's beyond naive to say fighting webspam is a low hanging fruit problem.

colordrops 5y ago
Why should I trust you? I trust my own eyes. I regularly see spam sites that get to the top of results that are seen by many people for months. These could be filtered with a one line change.

caconym_ 5y ago

What's the source for it being easy? It seems easy, from the perspective of a human looking at results, but I'm not sure how much that's worth given the scale and complexity of the problem.

colordrops 5y ago
Captchas are way harder to solve than it is to detect these sorts of poor results. Google should have absolutely no problem building a classifier that could scale to solve the problem. But as you said, it's not worth it to them, but for the reasons of losing revenue rather than scale and complexity.
Kavelach 5y ago
Just block the domain. At first, you can block manually, but we know Google doesn't like doing things that way. Fortunately, they have a lot of heuristics to find sites like that; usually the content is just copied from another source. And since they scrape the web all the time, they should know which content has appeared first where. But the issue isn't that they can't; the issue is that they don't want that. Why the sites with copied content exists? To earn money through ads. What earns Google money? Ads!
- IndexPointer 5y ago
  Any simple heuristic has false positives, meaning they'll end up taking down legitimate sites that had repeated content for a good reason. Say, for example two sites quoting text from the us constitution. The second one to be crawled would be considered to be spam copying the first one and removed from web results. Then you'll get comments on hacker news complaining that Google is censoring it for political reasons. And any simple heuristic is quickly reverse engineered by SEOs, who will find a way to mask it as legitimate. tl;dr it's a hard problem.
  - Kavelach 5y ago
    They could use the heuristics to build a list of domains to block and then have someone review it. After doing it for a long time, they could build a neural model on top of that, and automate it. As I have said, the reason they don't do it is not because they don't have the skills and know-how.
dpacmittal 5y ago
Kagi filters all of that out. If an upstart can do it, Google with its unlimited resources can do it too
- caconym_ 5y ago
  Kagi seems to be in closed beta, so I wasn't able to test this claim even on an anecdotal level.