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An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been sprea

• Ygg2 5y ago
  How bad is Google search? I had to search crates.io . Let me tell you. It's not the pinnacle of search. What I searched was `fast bitset implementation`. My results consisted of drill bits a stack overflow questions and a Baeldung article on hashSet vs long[]
• mrctte 5y ago
  Yeah, those pages are definitely auto-generated. Static site generation makes it possible for those types of pages (I call them "shims") to jump to the top of the results list. I wrote about it here: https://zestyrx.com/blog/nextjs-ssg https://zestyrx.com/blog/nextjs-ssg
  • TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    I don't see what static site generation has to do with it. You can spin up a huge number of shims even more easily with a dynamic site and a DB with a list of all the messages you want shims for.
    • mrctte 5y ago
      SSG gives you the best SEO because web crawlers can understand the structure of a static page with pre-populated content better than a dynamic site that relies on Javascript. The pages also load much quicker and score better on other metrics that Google uses. I would go so far as to say that SSG is a must for major publications or anyone serious about SEO. This sort of data-driven SSG is exactly what you are thinking of but it happens at build time so that the build output is static content that can be put behind a CDN.
      • TheCoelacanth 5y ago
        Absolute nonsense. You don't need a static site generator to serve up an HTML page instead of rendering with JS. People have been doing dynamic pages since before JS even existed. The difference in speed between running a simple script and reading a file is not large enough to noticeably affect SEO. Most of these sites are probably just using PHP, not any static site generator.
• baby 5y ago
  What happened to clubhouse?
  • keewee7 5y ago
    I have noticed that a lot of tech and startup clubs on Clubhouse were created by users from India and Iran. Today the clubs are still dominated by users from these countries. Nothing wrong with that but that also indicates the usual clickfarm spammers from developing countries had unfiltered access to Clubhouse from day 1. This might sound elitist but it's probably a good idea that C2C apps get their first batch of users and community leaders from high income countries before branching out to the rest of the world.
    • teatree 5y ago
      India is a young country with a 1.4B population, with a lot of engineers. I know the quality can vary from gemstones to tombstones but there is an active tech community. >This might sound elitist but it's probably a good idea that C2C apps get their first batch of users and community leaders from high income countries before branching out to the rest of the world. Why?
      • iqanq 5y ago
        For the same reason some apps (used to?) launch on iphone first.
    • vineyardmike 5y ago
      > it's probably a good idea that C2C apps get their first batch of users and community leaders from high income countries before branching out to the rest of the world. Unless they're targetting local communities with some sort of culturally relevant format, its good for their bottom line to target the most profitable customers of advertising anyways.
    • sss111 5y ago
      this is elitist and misinformed
• TLLtchvL8KZ 5y ago
  I come across these sites so often it's not even funny. Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5 in the first page of search results. I'm assuming they're all ran by the same person, throwing as much ** at the wall knowing some will stick. Many of my searchers now include "reddit" or "forum" at the end to filter out all the spam/crap.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5 in the first page of search results." If only google was smart enough to figure this out
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    This feels like the underlying issue. Google may have stayed the same, or even slightly improved. But the web, in the sense of quality:crap ratio, has gotten substantially worse. This flood seems like the ultimate manifestation of turnkey hosting solutions. Imho, we could do worse than reviving an idea from email's early days vs spam: negligible per-use charging. The idea was to tax emails at $0.0001 (or somesuch). Insignificant for actual users, but financially decimates high-volume, low-value spammers.
    • Avamander 5y ago
      In theory proof-of-work with increasing cost based on subjective untrustworthyness might work.
    • Jiro 5y ago
      The web is like that because content farms are optimizing the pages to be found by Google and Google doesn't know how to filter them out, so we really can't treat it as a problem independent of Google itself.
      • ethbr0 5y ago
        Fair. The fact that Google exists + the fact that Google serves a huge amount of traffic + the fact that Google is unable / unwilling to filter out content farms = incentive to content farm. If there were no Google though, we'd likely have the same thing. So I guess the only reality that avoids incentivizing them is one where (1) there is a massive traffic generator & (2) that massive traffic generator severely disincentizes content farms.
• tjchear 5y ago
  Might the inevitable arms race between bot writers and bot detectors be the missing accelerator for a general AI that has a predilection for top 10 white label brands of generic consumer products?
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Post truth society has arrived, trump was a symptom, not the cause. Combined with AI imitating speech and deepfakes, and technology of inplanting false memories, we will have the matrix, just not the wau we expected ^ ^
• TheKarateKid 5y ago
  Just as bad as the auto-generated pages are company blog pages whose SEO rigged post pretends to give "help" for a problem where the main solution is of course, using their product.
• achenatx 5y ago
  in google you can do site:reddit.com or even site reddit.com/r/subreddit I do this to search for items on craigslist across the country. This will force a reddit search.
• registeredcorn 5y ago
  I concur on the looking up technical errors bit directing you to auto-generated sites! I was recently trying to troubleshoot a very basic error message for Linux and was getting results and webpages that would list the error message in the title in some way, but then give instructions on "First, open up device manager", "Click Win+R to open windows command prompt", etc. Lots of untrustworthy ads. Different URLs, almost line-for-line identical webpages. This was something like the top four search results (that weren't sponsored ads).
  • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    I usually look for these hallmarks: 1) if this is from the project's own site, it's good. 2) if it looks like an archive of the project's mailing list, it's good. 3) if it looks like an internet forum, it might be good, or it might be just another poor soul asking the same question. 4) if it's on StackExchange, it's like on the forum, except your chances are slightly better. Karma must flow. 5) if it's on Reddit, it's like on the forum, except your chances of getting an answer are worse. 6) if it's a blog of some geek, sometimes it can be better than 1) and 2), or you might just get a straight answer. 7) in any other case it's most likely a SEO farm. Run. If I have a linux problem these days, google usually gives me the relevant piece of source code on Github from which the error message originates. Like, you're a big boy now, go figure it out yourself. It seems we're back to the early 2000s, when search engines not so much specialized in topics, but leaned heavily towards one type of content or the other. Holy hell, maybe one day Reddit's own search will be good enough so google can be ditched for good!
• brundolf 5y ago
  Free project idea for someone with more time on their hands than me: Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race. So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust. People used to curate lists of websites, which partly solved this problem but didn't necessarily scale. I wonder if that idea could be supercharged. Consider a browser extension that people install, which: a) gives users a button to mark a site as trusted/favorited b) tracks domains visited (and frequency) Then, separately, you can manually add people you know personally to your "network". You trust them, so anything they trust is also something you might be able to trust. Manual favorites could be weighted higher than frequently-visited sites, and both could be displayed inline next to links on all pages you visit. You could also see which people the trust in a given link comes from, in case some of them consistently have bad judgement about these things and you want to remove them from your list. Then, finally, you could create a personalized search-engine that only indexes the sites determined to be trusted by your personal network. Of course this would require placing a great amount of trust in the extension and service themselves, so maybe they would have to be open-sourced or self-hostable or something (a profit motive might create a huge amount of temptation to abuse the data). That's a stickier problem. Edit: There was a little ambiguity left here about transitive trust; “friends of friends” type stuff. I think if this went on for unlimited hops, we’d be back at square one. So maybe it only uses direct contacts, or maybe some small N of hops (where longer ones are weighted lower?). Maybe this would be configurable, not sure. Also re: privacy, maybe you could come up with a clever way to E2E encrypt the site visit data, even though it’s shared with many parties?
  • sdeframond 5y ago
    Interesting. Another "sticky" problem is how to make a living out of this I guess...
    • rsyring 5y ago
      Have the extension serve ads.
  • 5y ago
• dkarl 5y ago
  > "Step one: try turning your computer off and turning it back on again. This is usually a good first step, and you'll be surprised at how often..." This seems like a natural result of optimizing each search for revenue. Think of a search to solve an error message on your computer. There's a very small number of vulnerable people who are going to spend money as a result of that search, so optimizing for ads would mean tailoring the results specifically for those people, pushing them to sleazy sites where they might spend money on some kind of antivirus scam. The results are worthless to you, but who cares? You're worthless to Google when you're doing that kind of search. Try searching for something that people in your demographic spend money on, and the results will likely look better to you.
• hassancf 5y ago
  So when doing a search, we are searching in a place (Reddit) that’s being moderated by humans. Because doing a search in a place that’s not moderated by humans would generate too much noise. I think this kinda takes us back to the old times with Yahoo (and humans sorting the information) etc… A giant step backwards, if you ask me.
  • evanbubniak 5y ago
    Why do you consider it to be a step backwards?
• initplus 5y ago
  I want Google to allow me to specifically include/exclude mirrors from my search results. "Only show my the original source of this content", or "only show me mirrors of this content". I don't want to see the same result repeated 5 times across different stack overflow mirrors.
  • kovac 5y ago
    If it helps,there's an extension called ublacklist that you can blacklist results. I use this to permanently blacklist those sites with garbage.
  • MitziMoto 5y ago
    Google has publicly admitted they cannot reliability determine the original source of a peice if content. This is a big problem for content creators.
• facorreia 5y ago
  Google used to be better at filtering out garbage content like this. They have resources for detecting low quality content (e.g. all pages on this domain follow the same content-free pattern). I suspect that doing that wouldn't drive ad revenue up, so they don't bother.
• mizzao 5y ago
  What happened to Clubhouse? I just realized it was quite popular but now I haven't heard about it in a while. Can you link to a postmortem?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • mad182 5y ago
    It still exists, the last app update was uploaded yesterday, but it seems most of the users didn't stick around after the initial hype died down. I guess the early focus on monetization and trying to turn it into payment app didn't help.
• prawn 5y ago
  You forgot how the titles include things like "[SOLVED]" when there was no solution or "[Updated: 2022]" when it's clear nothing has been updated.
• friedturkey 5y ago
  Yeah, looking up technical stuff now for anything outside of very major tech is an absolute nightmare. It's nothing but auto-generated pages made of random parts of random forums posts smashed together under some weird url like tech-helb-4-yuodbajdasdasd99234029242.co.xyz.com.org. I've clicked on a few out of curiosity, immediately recognizing they were garbage from the description text, and it's just endless SEO links and completely random text. You'd think one of the richest companies on earth could make a freshman intro to CS-level spam filter. If they can't, then they truly do hire the most incompetent people on earth. If they won't, then they hire the evilest people on earth.