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Google is apparently struggling to contain an ongoing spam attack
- cmcconomy 3y agoRecently almost every YouTube ad I get is a poorly made deepfake of elon musk telling me about an amazing secret investment opportunity. Google is losing the plot
- sadhorse 3y agoMost ads I see on YouTube are very dubious and poorly made. A reasonable ammount are plain fraud. It is very frustrating going to "ad center" and reading about how the advertiser did not verify his identity.
- bombcar 3y agoLucky, those sound amusing. All I get is the same damn advertisement for the Internet provider I already have. You’d think they’d be able to say “Google don’t send this ad to our customers.”
- dylan604 3y agos/is losing/has lost/
- otikik 3y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of “annoyance” metric for the ad selection algorithm. The idea being: show a certain demographic the same annoying ad again and again, and they might end up paying just to get rid of ads. I’m pretty sure Spotify does this.
- malfist 3y agolol, recent spam attack in the past few weeks? Hah. Google's been 98% spam for well over a year now. Try googling "What is the fifth book in the wheel of time series" and see what you get? All spam.
- thedaly 3y ago> Try googling "What is the fifth book in the wheel of time series" and see what you get? All spam. Google gave the correct answer. Didn't see any spam.
- orbital-decay 3y agoI tried that and it all seems pretty relevant to the Fires of Heaven in particular. (name/description, wikis, book stores, discussions etc)
- kernal 3y agoI just did and got The Fires of Heaven along with an Overview, Summary and Reviews. Are you sure you’re not using Bing?
- n_plus_1_acc 3y agoGoogle "wheels of time", skip the results about the TV series (ca. 3), open the wikipedia page and go to the " novels" section.
- ykonstant 3y agoSo... just go to wikipedia.
- jbm 3y agoI took a series of screenshots but they all seem fine to me? Wikipedia, Goodreads, Fandom.com and MacMillan Publishing; these all seem to be reasonable results. I could share the whole page if I could find a place to upload my screenshots (RIP imgur)
- summerlight 3y agoIt's probably good to check with a guest browser session before making this kind of strong claims.
- amitp 3y agoI tried googling "What is the fifth book in the wheel of time series" and got 1. Wikipedia - The Fires of Heaven 2. Amazon - The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, Book 5) 3. a bunch of videos which I skipped over 4. Wheel of Time Wiki - The Fires of Heaven 5. Macmillan Publishers - The Wheel of Time, Books 5-9 6. Goodreads - The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, #5) 7. Novelnotions - Book Review: The Fires of Heaven (maybe this is spam?) 8. Esquire.com - Wheel of Time Books in Order (not specific to book 5) 9. FictionDb - Wheel of Time Series in Order (not specific to book 5) 10. Barnes And Noble - The Fires of Heaven I am wondering how different everyone's results must be. [Also, I don't know how to format a list on HN…]
- seydor 3y agoyoutube search is problematic. i very often get videos on top that are auto-generate spam with AI narration and random clips (often completely irrelevant to the subject). there are videos i know that aren't shown even when i search with title and channel name. Google wants to be too relevant , to the point it s unusable
- sadhorse 3y agoAlso recommend. Others liked. Recommend for you. Shorts section. Search is unusable.
- twisteriffic 3y agoRecently getting pimple poppers and onlyfans when searching for small engine repair. It's better than the Rogan and IDW spam I was getting a few weeks ago.
- rightbyte 3y ago> Recently getting pimple poppers Ye for like two weeks. Searching for Lady Gaga or whatever, get those disgusting video thumb nails in the result. It is impossible to not look at the thumb nails since they are so disgusting. I wonder if that feeds the ranking somehow?
- bombcar 3y agoExactly why they work. It’s all about the almighty ad dollar.
- nubinetwork 3y agoRoel Van De Paar broke it several years ago. https://you.tube/Olkb7fYSyiI https://you.tube/Olkb7fYSyiI
- kredd 3y agoI mean, when we get public posts like this one where someone boasts how they’re spamming to get hits through SEO — https://x.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509 https://x.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509, I can only imagine it’s happening in larger quantities behind the scenes.
- bhartzer 3y agoGoogle actually shut that down pretty quick. That 'loophole' doesn't exist anymore. Pro Tip: if you're going to boast on how you're spamming Google, then expect it to be shut down, especially if it's a hole in their algorithm.
- kredd 3y agoI’m actually curious, how did Google do that? The guy who did it did it in a very obvious way, but I’m assuming you can just schedule a lot of posts that would drop once a day, make the AI to use different language structures and change the underlying AI model in general (e.g. switch between OpenAI, Mistral and whatever) and slow drip submit the posts. How would Google know they’re “mass generated”?
- mrwiseowl 3y agoThe original poster of that Tweet (Jake) admitted they got a manual penalty. Also, clearly Google didn't fix it because if not Google wouldn't be 'overwhelmed' with this current spam attack going on. If you look into the attack it's mass generated absolute spam garbage pages on hundreds if not thousands of separate domains. So it is definitely not fixed.
- mrwiseowl 3y agoDid they really close the 'loophole' though? Jake said on Twitter they were actually hit with a manual penalty. So doesn't seem like it's patched. Seems like if he didn't boast about it they'd still be doing well.
- yetanother12345 3y agoI would have thought it well known by Search Engine Journal that at intervals Google implements changes that in one way or the other influences what kind of sites are rated in which way... And that, at times of change this may lead to very substantial changes in ranking, sometimes letting a lot of "irrelevant"/"lower quality" (...all this is subjective to some extent) results flow to the top for certain queries, even for a prolonged period of time... Back in the day these algo updates were quite the thing to monitor and discuss on certain SEO-related sites... That said I only comment out of casual interest as I stopped using Google more than a decade ago.
- nvr219 3y agoWhat do you use now for all the various things? I cut google out for most things but still use their search from time to time (and of course have to use google docs but that's because the people I'm collaborating with are on google)
- calamari4065 3y agoKagi. Startpage is a good wrapper for Google if you care about privacy. (Or it was, I haven't checked in many years) DDG is worse than google, IMO. Bing works, I guess, but I trust Microsoft almost as much as I trust google. At this point I've given up on Google. If I can't find it in kagi after a bit of effort, I'll either work around it or ask a person I know in the given field. God, the internet sucks so much now. I miss the early 2000s :(
- hedora 3y agoI’ve found ddg is much better than google, but switched to kagi, which is better still. For queries that fail on kagi, I check ddg and google, but it never helps. Kagi’s FastGPT works well on queries where the search engines fail, but is worse at search on average.
- calamari4065 3y agoDDG has been much more aggressive about replacing my query with whatever their algorithm decides I meant. They support no advanced query operators, not even double quotes. A search engine that ignores my query and shows me something else is not super valuable to me
- amluto 3y ago> The spam site was checking for Googlebot IP addresses. If the visitor’s IP address matched as belonging to Google then the spam page displayed content to Googlebot. > > All other visitors got a redirect to other domains that displayed sketchy content. Years ago, Google had an explicit policy that sites that showed different content to Googlebot than they showed to regular unauthenticated users were not allowed, and they got heavily penalized. This policy is long gone, but it would help here (assuming the automated tooling to enforce it was any good, and I assume to was). More recently, Google seems totally okay with sites that show content to Googlebot but go out of their way not to show that content to regular users.
- altdataseller 3y agoI think they did this because lots of publishers show paywalls to people but still want their content indexed by Google. In other words, they want their cake and eat it too!
- amadeuspagel 3y agoAnd of course many of these publishers are politically powerful, and are the trusted sources that google wants to promote over random blogs.
- colordrops 3y ago[flagged]
- ithkuil 3y agoDo you think there exists only one class of people with money and that they all have a unified narrative to feed us with?
- colordrops 3y agoNo, and my statement doesn't necessarily imply that.
- freediver 3y agoI opened the article from a computer in school library that didn’t have ad-block. Nearly crashed the system. I seem to remember times when SEJ was reputable, can not even describe what this is.
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- hmottestad 3y agoI’ve switched to Kagi a couple of months ago. Every once in a while I struggle to get good search results, but then I check Google and it’s not any better there. It’s not always the greatest at promoting the sites I like, but I’ve already started boosting and pinning various domains to tailor the results to my own preference. Still using a lot of other google stuff including gmail and maps. Just not search anymore.
- dilippkumar 3y ago+1 for Kagi. But also, for the past few months, I’ve completely stopped searching the internet. ChatGPT-4 does the job way more effectively and I don’t see why I would go back to searching the internet (assuming the chatgpt experience doesn’t get nerfed in some way).
- dvaun 3y agoAgreed. For getting a range of opinions Kagi is best for searching through forums, finding technical blogs, etc. For quick intros to technical issues GPT4 gives a decent summary if the topic has been around for a while. For going in-depth, though, I still rely on technical docs…
- te_chris 3y agoChatGPT is like living in an information tunnel. It’s amazing but it doesn’t replace search for me at all. Irony is when it does search, because it’s obviously just doing a quick crawl it actually makes things worse as it treats whatever shit it finds as authoritative - which, as anyone working on RAG knows, is a whole world of problems on its own. This is absolutely not to say that Google can be considered ‘good’ these days.
- graeme 3y agoYeah they merged browsing into ChatGPT and it worsened the experience. I dread seeing the browsing icon show up to a question as the ai will get dumber.
- Mizza 3y agoI realized the other day that I haven't Googled anything in over a month. And I guess even then, and before Google search was thoroughly enshittified, it was mostly just a convenient way to get to StackOverflow via my search bar, but now it's just ChatGPT for most quick queries I have.
- oglop 3y agoI stopped using google and switched to Bing about a year ago after they started doing more with ChatGPT. For the most part I’m much happier with how it presents what I’m looking for. It’s not perfect, but when I compare to google the few times I’ve been frustrated, it’s not any better and has to do with the topic, not search engine.
- jen729w 3y agoI’ve been a DDG user for years now, so I guess a bunch of my results come from Bing. I don’t generally compare to Google, so I can’t say for sure that the results are ‘as good’, but my experience sure as shit is better. I search for a thing and I get a page with links. Usually the thing I want is in the first page. Sometimes it isn’t, or I’m searching for something that I know is recent that Google probably has a later version of, so I just add the !g to the search and there I am at Google. It’s great. It works. It’s not stressful or horrible or annoying. I recommend it.
- visarga 3y agoI've been using phind.com, very good results install with https://www.phind.com/search?q=%s https://www.phind.com/search?q=%s
- rumblestrut 3y agoOver the past few years I’ve felt like Google itself is a spam attack.
- nubinetwork 3y agoThis. Google ads are spam, Google search is spam, Gmail is spam, YouTube is spam... Google gets their money. They don't care about anything else.
- thephyber 3y agoBaby: bath water. You are playing up the noise and playing down the signal. Search, Gmail, and YouTube are far from spam. There are obviously many scenarios/URLs that contain spam, but all 3 of those products are overwhelmingly useful.
- xp84 3y agoAfter 20 years of being taken for granted that search engines as we know them are equipped to solve the typical problems we throw at them, I wonder if the whole concept of an unsupervised web crawl as the input to a single purpose search engine will just die out. When I think about my typical web queries across the past year or two, it seems more and more likely that I'd be better off replacing Google with several purpose-built systems, none of which search the "entire web" (whatever that even means anymore). Technical queries? Just search StackOverflow and Github directly. Searching for a local venue of any kind? Search against a dedicated places database where new entries have to pass at least a cursory scrutiny. (Arguably Google Maps or Yelp already serve this purpose today, but I'm not sure if they have enough vetting today). Medical question? Search across a few sites known to be trustworthy. We have become accustomed to go to Google because it's more convenient to type in a movie title, "chinese restaurant philadelphia", "flights to miami 4/12/24" or "Error code 127 python" into the same single place, but something tells me we'd be better off if that one place made some LLM-assisted guesses of what kind of search it is, and then went to a specialized search that is curated. If we go back toward the DMOZ/Yahoo model of directories that humans curate, I wonder if we could even reverse the trend toward spam and clickbait that has been so lamented in recent years.
- themoonisachees 3y agoOn the surface this is a good idea, however this would turn wildly anticompetitive. Whether or not your site would have business on the web would be entirely dictated by whether or not you woul be correctly classified (or indeed classified at all) in this engine. if you wanted to start your own stackoverflow competitor for whatever reason, you would have a very hard time getting any traction. this is also true of current general purpose engines, but you still do stand a chance to be referenced well and hit high enough to still get traffic. the yahoo model collapsed for this very reason. back when you went to more than 5 websites to look at screenshots of the other 4, the directories would not necessarly show you the latest thing, because it wasn't on the list of sites manually added to each directory. i think the current problem with google isn't to do with spam. i think google has become complacent because their ads are on all the sites anyway, so the function of "maximize revenue per search" doesn't actually care if you find what you're looking for, because you will get shown google ads anyway, and will be coming back to google anyway. in fact, they probably get to show more ads by feeding you bad results, because then you're loading more pages. this didn't used to be the case when google search was on top of spam sites, but it doesn't feel like they're doing anymore algo updates to curb the current trend, and spam sites have caught on to what ranks higher in the results.
- ryukoposting 3y agoWhat's sad is that I didn't even notice.
- partiallypro 3y agoGoogle has become unusable in many circumstances, and it rewards spam. It claims it doesn't, but it does, a lot of SEO strategies now revolve around spamming the search engine with articles, pages, etc. Not for useful content, but for linkbacks, internal linking, etc. It is especially bad for geo-specific SEO strategies, where you're trying to have different page sets for different regions. Basically, how it was when Google first started and was easily gamed. Now people are spinning up 100s of pages and articles using AI and just spamming it. It has gotten bad, but the worst part is that you have to do it now in order to compete for keywords.
- whstl 3y agoYeah. Ten years ago Google was fighting those strategies involving content farms and abusive SEO with things like the Panda update, etc. Now it seems they don't care anymore. Since low-quality SEO ranks over legitimate sites, it forces those sites to pay for advertisement. This is very sad.
- pandacake 3y agoFor responsible scientists and researchers who've disclosed to Google how this is being used to execute large-scale phishing attacks, and Google opting to not fix it, this news warms our hearts. Spam on!
- fliggertiggy 3y ago[dead]
- djmips 3y agoWhen I googled redactle the first site was some fan site. The second was one of your sites (anybrowser). The third was Reddit which linked directly to your sites. Then came a pair of unlimited sites. Finally your .net site so not terribly deep and it also came in third in a away. All in all it's not ideal but not 'all spammy advertising sites'
- fliggertiggy 3y agoNice to know. There are actually several Redactle unlimited sites as someone was trying to impersonate my branding.
- qingcharles 3y agoThis reminds me of what happens when I search "coupon" on Twitter. I would love someone to explain why you just get a thousand pages of this: https://imgur.com/a/uzNNmuw https://imgur.com/a/uzNNmuw
- bombcar 3y agoLooks like it might be spam in a different character set or something.
- qingcharles 3y agoThe images are bizarre though too...
- dfgfek 3y agoThat image in your screenshot looks like coupon codes for Arabic web shopping sites.
- missblit 3y agoWell the text is HTML entities to escape ASCII text. "People being end with a person. Like everything in OUNASS ProMo CODE Onas OuNaS oNass cOuPOn DiscOUnt NoON SiVvl non toyou NaMshi" Here Sivvi, toyou, Namshi, noon, and OUNASS are all brands of shopping websites and you can see their logos in the image. Clearly this is some sort of keyword spam, though it's hard to tell more than that from your screenshot. It's also not clear why they'd bother to use HTML entities... a bug in the spam code? Or perhaps exploiting some parser differential between different twitter systems? Who can say.
- missblit 3y agoSo this is pure speculation, but more people should be aware of parser differentials (same thing as that email thing the other day) so let me say what I mean... Hypothetically say a website has an internal service to index posts for keywords for search, that just so happens to unescape HTML entities during keyword normalization due to a seemingly harmless bug. Plus a second internal service to identify keyword spam that _doesn't_ do any HTML entity unescaping (because why would you?) Then you could end up in a situation where a spammer uses HTML entities to avoid spam detection while still showing up in search results. They hope that the user ignores the nonsense text and just clicks their link based on the image (a list of big shopping brands in the middle east) instead.
- paulpauper 3y agothis has been going on for years. Google makes money with ads. the quality of search results is almost irrelevant to its business model
- charcircuit 3y agoNo? Decreased search quality will reduce the number of searches people are doing which redcues the amount of ads Google can show. Decreased searches can come from not only people switching to another search engine, but also from people using the web less. Why look up something on the web when you can watch TikTok for a few hours?
- sgjohnson 3y ago> No? Decreased search quality will reduce the number of searches people are doing which redcues the amount of ads Google can show. I’m willing to bet that >90% of Google Search users aren’t even aware that alternatives exist. They are not suddenly going to stop using Google Search. There might even be a significant short-term increase in usage, for example, if they really need to go to page 5 to find the first relevant result.
- charcircuit 3y ago>They are not suddenly going to stop using Google Search They will use it less if it becomes a waste of time to try.
- ykonstant 3y agoThat is very far from my experience with non-tech people. My friends and students always google something, and almost inevitably fail to find it. Then they do it again, and again, and again. Over two years now I see specifically two people deterministically failing to find stuff through G search, and yet they still start with it in an almost Pavlovian ritual. Sometimes they will desperately scroll down, click on a blatantly irrelevant result and switch to facebook or some other bookmark aggregator of theirs to continue their brutally inefficient search process, thumb flick after thumb flick after thumb flick.
- jongjong 3y agoGoogle should be prioritizing sites which have fewer backlinks as it's proof that they didn't cheat and are likely higher quality. Or just random ranking; only require a certain low threshold of backlinks to establish baseline relevance.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoI’ve noticed an increasing number of sites that provide an insane amount of text to answer a simple question. They almost always follow some sort of structure where the actual answer to your question is all the way at the bottom of the page. Most of the content appears relevant on the surface, but when you actually read it, it’s completely generic junk. Stuff that a high schooler would use to fluff an essay to hit a word limit.
- gerdesj 3y ago"They almost always follow some sort of structure where the actual answer to your question is all the way at the bottom of the page." You have to scroll past the adverts - that's why they exist. These sites are generated from templates.
- hnbad 3y agoLately a lot of these seem to be actually generated with LLMs. You can usually tell from the high school essay structure, often ending with a paragraph along the lines of "in conclusion there are many benefits but also many drawbacks".
- hedora 3y agoThose sites predate llm’s. I often wonder how much better things like chatgpt would perform if their training data did not include seo spam.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoBlame Google. A few years back, they decided that “topical authority” was important, and a page that targeted as many keywords as possible was “better”. A bunch of SEOs published studies showing how pages with 2,000+ keywords ranked higher, and then the floodgates opened with every company fluffing up their pages with 2000 words of BS just to appeal to Google.
- politelemon 3y agoMany don't even have an answer. They simply conclude that they don't know, after having spent pointless paragraphs on filler. "Well there you have it" is a common expression I see.
- jongjong 3y agoThe fact that Google puts so much focus on content makes it sound like the Google algorithm has been corrupted. It's almost like a secret society where you need to do a secret handshake in order to get access. In this case you need to know the right word patterns to use in your content to get access to high traffic.
- franze 3y agoGoogle has give up on organic search. I am pretty good as that SEO stuff and I can't Google anymore as I can fathom really fast why a page ranks the way it does. And non of it has to do with accurate valuable information. Google is a marketplace, and they let most "engaging" results that adhere to a certain content structure win. By now most paid results offer more value for the users than the organic results. Cause thats what Google wants. Click the paid, ignore the crap.
- yukkuri 3y agoYeah that's not how I feel today when I searched for a local buffet by name and accidentally tapped the first, sponsored result which was Golden Corral, yuck. Definitely not "more value" to me
- sgjohnson 3y ago> Google is a marketplace No. Google is a glorified advertising agency who just wants to make the absolute maximum profit for the absolute minimum amount of work. > By now most paid results offer more value for the users than the organic results. Cause thats what Google wants. Click the paid, ignore the crap. Your first paragraph implies that the paid results are crap too?
- black_puppydog 3y ago[flagged]
- ThinkBeat 3y agoI have noticed that the quality of responses I get from Google searches appear to have been in steep decline for a long time. I have seen others comment on this as well. I cant say I know when the trend started. Could this have been running / going on for a long while without getting the scrutiny, it needed? Is this spam attack the final act?
- fluidcruft 3y agoFor me it started when they began to monkey with the search entries and "second guess" what I was searching for. My guess is that they lost track of unvarnished human interaction and things snowball from there. That's just my hunch. People gave up trying to actually rely on it. We've all learned that Google doesn't care. Basically it used to be optimized to be a sharp knife but now it's optimized to be a safety knife.
- crotchfire 3y agoMore like a spork, actually.
- maronato 3y agoIMO that particular aspect is what made Google stand out to the general audience. Most people don’t search by keywords, or optimize their queries to hint the engine. They just type a question and assume Google will make sense of what they meant. Google usually does that very well, and that high level understanding is not compatible with our keyword query expectations. To us that feels broken, but to the majority of people it’s working as designed. Instead I think search results have been getting worse for everyone because of SEO. Companies want to optimize for number of ads viewed, not quality of content, thus quality goes down in favor of clickbait and keyword stuffing. I don’t think there’s much Google can do here to resolve this issue. It’ll always be a game of cat and mouse between Google and companies using SEO to push more ads for less money.
- astrea 3y agoI feel like it’s been in decline ever since the introduction of Hummingbird
- ChuckMcM 3y agoWow, that's pretty impressive. I didn't experience a "Code Red" when I was at Google but this would certainly qualify. Bing is not affected so it is definitely something to do with rank injection. I am really really interested in the post mortem if it sees the light of day, although if it reveals exploits for ranking it will probably not be made public.
- mkaszkowiak 3y agoMeanwhile, my blog got some of its posts de-indexed in the latest Google update, despite trying to write high quality content.
- japanman185 3y ago[dead]
- nhggfu 3y agogoogle maps has been plagued with casino spam for a long time, and it seems to still be the case. eg (November 2022) https://usa-casino.com/casino-news/spammers-take-over-google-maps-pump-illegal-casinos/ https://usa-casino.com/casino-news/spammers-take-over-google... and right now I just tried a query from the article above "Alabama Casinos" on Google maps, and sure enough I see "Bovada casino" (offshore "illegal in US" casino) affiliate links in the third spot in the "locations" list. yuk.
- weare138 3y agoIt's gotten to the point we just need an open non-profit search engine.
- toasted-subs 3y agoIt's probably really hard to manage those things. Best of luck.
- telepathy 3y agoWhen "SEO" first became a trendy buzzword decades ago, I immediately thought "these are fraudulent efforts to artificially appear more relevant than you actually are to the search algo" - and then it became a multi billion dollar industry.
- sgjohnson 3y agoTo be honest, why would they care? If anything, this will help them sell more ad spots on Google Search.
- VladimirGolovin 3y agoWhatever. Not my problem anymore. I switched to Kagi + ChatGPT 4 and couldn't be happier -- though it costs me about $30 per month. I haven't tried Kagi's FastGPT yet. How does it compare with ChatGPT 4? Is it updated regularly? What is its knowledge cutoff date?
- tomjen3 3y agoIt’s useless. It’s much worse than a Google search.
- bitcharmer 3y agoFor a bunch of super smart people they sure run a shite service. I've received the same spam multiple times in the last few days. Marked as spam every single time. And each time they failed to identify the exact same message as spam. It's incredible how brain dead Google have become.
- MaryGab 3y ago[dead]
- LanzVonL 3y agoA couple years ago I created a new gmail, with a very long address. Didn't tell anybody, sign up with ANYTHING. Just parked it and let it sit dormant. Within a DAY I had my first spam. Google is an ad company and it's entirely reasonable to assume they are simply selling lists of their own email addresses. Same with Yahoo! Mail! Which! I! Ran! The! Same! Experiment! From! With! The! Same! Results!
- KomoD 3y agoAnd do you have any proof of that?
- LanzVonL 3y agoAmple but because it was one of the gmails I could create with an invitation generated by my own account, this was before you needed ID or anything but a link BTW, it would reveal my true life name which is my "mother" gmail address. I am one of those ass holes who got firstname.lastname@gmail.com as their address. I had a guy offer me $15,000 for my gmail.