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Google, please do something with your ads and SEO-spam
- tommek4077 4y agoThey earn on both. Ads and the ad cramped seo stuff. So they probably wont change anything. And this is the case for the last ten years.
- imagetic 4y agoCan't say I'm ever surprised to see another "WTF Google" post. The search has degraded a lot over the years. With that said, I've tried to switch on more than one occasion and Bing might be the only alternative that worked for me. DuckDuckGo is always way off the mark, no matter how many chances I've given it over the years. Google still wins, even with the ads and spammy stuff.
- bluepoint 4y agoSome people here a few days ago recommended kagi, a paid service with a limited free option. I have been trying it and so far the results seem great!
- dylanowen 4y agoKagi has been amazing: verbatim mode that actually works, blocking sites you don't want to see, boosting sites you always want to prioritize, and lists of sites you can customize for specific searches.
- autotune 4y agoBased off your recommendation and others, and looking at the site and it’s features, I am going to sign up for a month and give it a real try. I’ve been using google since the beginning and it feels time for a change.
- boxed 4y agoI've switched. It's great at least for devs.
- ksidudwbw 4y agoBrave Search has done it for me
- carewell 4y agoI am surprised by how well it works. Makes me wonder if they do use Google or Bing indexes after all.
- JasonFruit 4y agoI've been using it, and it's not bad, but I do fall back on Google fairly often.
- xenospn 4y agoI thought DDG was mostly bing results at this point?
- mrobins 4y agoThis is entirely anecdotal but recently many top results in DDG read like they’re written by GPT-3 or the like. Half coherent sprawls of text that contain lots of random factoids but nothing novel or that actually answers the question.
- bityard 4y agoNo, this is just how most bloggers talk. /s
- 0x5345414e 4y agoKagi has been great for me
- more_corn 4y agoJust switch search engines.
- miguelazo 4y agoTo what? I'm unaware of any decent alternatives, unfortunately. I have all my defaults set to DuckDuckGo, but as soon as I search anything remotely uncommon, I end up having to switch to Google (although at least you can block the ad results with Ublock Origin browser extension).
- sli 4y agoI still have to fall back to Google sometimes but DDG covers a good 80% of my search usage just fine. Any amount of switching is better than none at all, even if just to push back against Google's hegemony however we can.
- helph67 4y agoThere are search engines that value your privacy. Qwant https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/ Ecosia https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/ and Start Page https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ This page may also help... https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has-the-best-results/ https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/02/07/which-search-engine-has...
- izacus 4y agoHow does their value of privacy fix the SEO and spam problem?
- permo-w 4y agovaluing my privacy is brilliant, and I’ve tried all these engines, but on all occasions I’ve had to go back to google because they’re just not good enough: poor results from anything longer than 2 keywords, no (consistent) quote search - which is a huge dealbreaker for me, no maps equivalent, no or little info about local businesses, and more. google is successful because it’s very, very good, and if it was easy to beat it, it would have happened by now. yes there’s a lot of seo spam, but 99 times out of 100, Google knows what I’m looking for, which I can’t say for the others
- Bellamy 4y agoGreat ending: "Hug me please." Love it.
- chopete3 4y agoThere is a simple way to show your frustration. 1. Buy Google stock 2. Google has to show more ads to keep market hype on stock price. 3. They will fill 2 pages instead of current one page with ads. And then 3 and 4... 4. You buy more stock and protect your down side. 5. They will insert 2-3 times more ads per video on youtube. At some point the average person will loose Google. You win big on stocks until then. /sarcasm - pls dont do this.
- bluepoint 4y agoI don’t know if everyone knows that SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is > the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
- UIUC_06 4y agoDo you think there's anyone on HN who doesn't know "If you don't know what something is, just type its name into your search engine?" this was on the first page of DuckDuckGo results for "SEO": https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo
- bluepoint 4y agoI was trying to save that search, but I accept your advice.
- tlogan 4y agoI looked the results for “remote work best practices” and they all seems a valid articles. Not really SEO spam. Which article is considered as not spam? HRB one? Really?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 4y agoI came here to say the same thing. They're a bunch of lists of exactly what the search term was looking for. And I've found these kinds of lists to be great jumping-off points in terms of getting an overview, whether I'm looking for remote work practices or humidifiers or types of mindfulness. If you want long, in-depth articles those usually come up when your search terms become more specific. For example, the first link includes a bullet point "One-on-ones and check-ins" for remote work... throw that into Google and it's a bunch of useful articles (not lists), the fourth one is from Harvard Business Review. As far as I can tell, Google's doing a great job in terms of organic results, and then it's adding ads on top and bottom because obviously it's got to pay the bills. I don't get the complaints at all.
- hienyimba 4y agoWhenever articles like these are published, I wonder who the Author thinks does the work of writing free articles on the Internet just for their pleasure. Content is expensive and is created by writers who must be paid. To demand quality articles from the Internet, you must be willing to pay for them. Nobody exists just to write free passionate articles on the Internet and earn no money from them.
- newZWhoDis 4y agoIt was that way for more than decade. The internet used to be nothing but passion projects
- Veen 4y agoPlus, Mr. Dubakov knows damn well why people write those types of articles. In fact, he's published quite a few shallow search optimized articles on the same Medium blog he's using to complain about the practice and on the Fibery blog. He does it to publicize his startup, just like most of the others. e.g. 10 Top Product Marketing Bullshit Things in 2022 Survival guide for an introverted CEO 10 worst interview questions 5 Biggest Problems in Software Development Overcoming fear of public speaking in 8 easy & honest tips
- rozhok 4y agoThose are not shallow blogspam. Those are actually good articles derived from the man experience.
- butz 4y agoA huge issue is when one is googling for some obscure issue or error message at work, and end up in a fake website with NSFW content or banners.
- pupppet 4y agoWhat really ticks me off are all these sites clearly scraping content from Stack Overflow that somehow end up near the top of the search results. How is there not an automated fix for this. Lemme help you out with this Googlers: If site content A == site content B, pagerank = -1.
- tintor 4y agoUsing that rule it would be very easy to derank any website.
- boxed 4y agoNot if the list of A sites was manually curated. Like stackoverflow and wikipedia. This isn't hard for shooting down a ton of sites.
- ericpauley 4y agoThen people could derank sites by copying them to stack overflow.
- plantain 4y agoSo both sites lose? That'll make manipulation easier than ever before. Or does the older site win? Frequently scraped / already popular sites will love that.
- pupppet 4y ago
- tintor 4y agoDuckDuckGo
- tremon 4y ago...has the same problem. There have been a few years where DDG/Bing's results were better than Google's for me, but nowadays DDG gives me the same blogspam results as Google used to do. I've mostly given up on general search engines, nowadays I use only site-specific searches. That means I won't find out about new motherboards other than those from MSI and Asus, and I won't know about python tooling unless they're listed on pypi, or maybe I will know it because it once featured on HN. I've never used browser bookmarks before -- it used to be that I would remember enough about a site that I could always find it in the first few pages of search results. Nowadays, for many things I don't even bother to search; if I forgot to bookmark it, it might as well never have existed. Frankly, it sucks. The endless quest for monetization has made it so that a large part of the Internet is now no longer discoverable for me. I eagerly await the return of curated directories, either in usenet or activitypub form.
- apple4ever 4y agoAnd its not just that: its going to the next page... and see literally the same results. It drives me crazy. The next page should be totally different results! I can go 10 pages in, and still see something from the first page!!
- tintor 4y agoMight start using bookmarks again.
- zach_garwood 4y agoIt works for me, so I switched and haven't looked back.
- gitgud 4y agoAnyone have any methods for avoiding this SEO nonsense? I generally prefix search query with `site:reddit.com` or `site:news.ycombinator.com` Which returns much better discussions about a question/topic, in those discussions can be genuinely great ideas and links
- tehwebguy 4y agoYeah, and for product reviews I only trust SlickDeals commenters. This funny tweet mostly covers it: > u can google ur questions about the world and get the CIA FBI answer or u can add "reddit" to the end of it and learn the truth https://twitter.com/literallysofie/status/1371899624491995137?s= https://twitter.com/literallysofie/status/137189962449199513...
- propogandist 4y agobe weary of astroturfing. Reddit has had this problem for over a decade and increasing popularity means more shills using the site to sway opinions. Aged accounts, karma boosting and fake comments/engagements are all common techniques to propagate a desired narrative
- my_usernam3 4y agoUnfortunately the game of cat and mouse between marketing teams, and potential consumers simply trying to research, continues.
- sefrost 4y agoUnfortunately I think the more this knowledge is shared the more those sites will be spammed. Look what happened to ad blockers - we told everyone about them and now so many sites have ad blocker blockers.
- paulpauper 4y agoor use https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ the problem with Reddit is for some stupid reason that has yet to be fixed and likely never will, Google shows reallllllly old reddit results but marks them as new.
- reaperducer 4y agoWhy would Google fix anything? Google makes money from keeping you clicking. If it shows you want you want right away, then it loses money. Keeping you on a treadmill chasing bits of cheese is how it became a billion-dollar company.
- permo-w 4y agoit became a billion dollar company by having a better index and search algorithm than anyone else the carrot on a stick came later
- d7z 4y agoIf you have page with a clean cut answer and a page full of repeated synonyms around the question prompt - the latter wins on Google. If you have a site full of Google ads and a site without google ads, the former wins Google search traffic. If you have a site with google analytics and one without the former wins. If you have a search engine should you be allowed to prioritize entries that use your advertising network, analytics software, payment methods, etc?
- paulcole 4y agoHolds envelope to head and does Carnac impression Name 3 things about SEO that aren’t true.
- fiatjaf 4y agoRecommendation: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoGod, those scrapers... You Google something & the results you get are c/p-ed from GitHub issues, with mangled formatting, and no link back to the original content. We need domain-banners back in Google!
- Animats 4y agoI'm beginning to think that someone might be able to knock off Google. Remember Myspace? They were #1 once. Then revenue went down and they compensated by putting in more ads. Then they became irrelevant. Broadcast TV did the same thing. Facebook seems headed down that road. Running a search engine isn't that expensive. Held down to 10% ad content and run with a modest staff, this could work out.
- t0bia_s 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668539
- anupamchugh 4y agoThe SEO spam is more prevalent in the programming space as recently published articles tend to shadow the older ones as long as they have the right set of keywords. Just Google “react node.js” and you’d see a low-quality post farming the top spot (with paid-product CTA links).
- richardsocher 4y agoyou.com CEO here. We let people give feedback on which major content blocks they want to see and soon will let developers add their own search-apps also. We believe in an open platform you can control, for the future of search.