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In 2010-2012, google results were peak content farm stuff too. Then they fought it actively, in 2013 they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance c

In 2010-2012, google results were peak content farm stuff too. Then they fought it actively, in 2013 they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results. Content farms that worked by stuffing keywords and working in rings to boost their page rank went away almost overnight. And then dark SEO found its way around it again. And now we have a new cesspit, but it looks like Google doesn’t give a shit anymore. They only change the number of ads interspersed among search results. Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess.

newsclues 4y ago
I’d love the inside story on how from a user perspective Google search went to shit.
perceptronas 4y ago
My guess would be that they are working on it. At their scale, it is hard to imagine them having technical difficulties removing SEO garbage from results. It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
- antisthenes 4y ago
  > It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe I think a regular, non-adblocked google search may result in almost the entire first page being ads. At this point, the ads are probably more relevant to the average user than whatever seo-spam "top x of y" would have been there on the first page. At least ads lead you to the product directly rather than make you visit another shady ad-infested site in the interim.
Avamander 4y ago
> Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess. There are uBlock filter lists that help filter out generated content from search results, such as https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
- buildsjets 4y ago
  A note of thanks, gentle user.
- gruez 4y ago
  I subscribe to this filter, and while it's useful, it only covers a subset of the content farms out there. We really need a general purpose filter list for this sort of stuff. The sites I've been seeing more of lately are Q&A pages that have a few dozen questions with no rhyme or rhythm, and whose answers seem to be GPT-3 generated or scraped from other sites.
magicalist 4y ago
> they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well). I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure. Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.

newsclues 4y ago

I’d love the inside story on how from a user perspective Google search went to shit.

perceptronas 4y ago

My guess would be that they are working on it. At their scale, it is hard to imagine them having technical difficulties removing SEO garbage from results. It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe

antisthenes 4y ago
> It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe I think a regular, non-adblocked google search may result in almost the entire first page being ads. At this point, the ads are probably more relevant to the average user than whatever seo-spam "top x of y" would have been there on the first page. At least ads lead you to the product directly rather than make you visit another shady ad-infested site in the interim.

Avamander 4y ago

> Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess. There are uBlock filter lists that help filter out generated content from search results, such as https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

buildsjets 4y ago
A note of thanks, gentle user.
gruez 4y ago
I subscribe to this filter, and while it's useful, it only covers a subset of the content farms out there. We really need a general purpose filter list for this sort of stuff. The sites I've been seeing more of lately are Q&A pages that have a few dozen questions with no rhyme or rhythm, and whose answers seem to be GPT-3 generated or scraped from other sites.

magicalist 4y ago

> they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well). I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure. Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.