3 ms·
Don't forget the asinine translation sites with page descriptions like "Have you ever wondered what the Sinhalese word for 'monitor lizard' is[1]? Millions of u
by bandrami 3y ago
Don't forget the asinine translation sites with page descriptions like "Have you ever wondered what the Sinhalese word for 'monitor lizard' is[1]? Millions of users have searched for this. In this page you will find..." at which poing the summary cuts off. Somebody generated those in an afternoon with a set of concordances and a Perl script, and they've been sucking traffic ever since.
[1] For the curious, "Thalagoya" for the terrestrial species, "Kabaragoya" for the swimming species
- xxr 3y ago“You won’t believe how many words the Sinhalese have for monitor lizards!”
- JoshTriplett 3y agoAnd the sites that list every possible phone number in a given area code, just so that they'll be a search hit for someone searching for a phone number. Zero value provided there.
- Szpadel 3y agothose are usually for "is this a spam" vote, so I would argue that there is some value there
- JoshTriplett 3y agoI'm not talking about the ones that provide a user-contributable database of "what business owns this number, is it spam"; those are great. I'm talking about sites that just list all possible phone numbers in a range, for SEO purposes, with no useful information about each number, and then try to sell you access to their invasive databases of personal information.
- rycomb 3y agoHa! Somewhat unrelated, but that reminded me of a homeless guy in Portland whose intro line was "do you know how you say dragonfly in Spanish?", to which I responded "libélula" (I knew it because Spanish is my mother tongue). Interesting, he seemed kinda pissed off, as I spoiled his soliciting routine. Maybe he's the human version of those sites!
- vintermann 3y agoAnd if you click through, you'll find that they don't have the Sinhalese word for monitor lizard, but you can contribute it for them to monetize.
- nraynaud 3y agoI see automatic translation of normal websites a lot too. I'm French and doing some home renovations, and according to google our houses are built in a way that is vastly different from my experience on the ground, and it's really frustrating, because our regulations and customs are different, and I really need to do things the local way.