5 ms·

Search Engines are Parasites

6 points by mroman 17y ago

barrkel 17y ago
Sounds like a lot of dodgy rationalization for some pretty shady practice.
- mroman 17y ago
  "shady" refers to a moral or legal issue . . . these are technological issues, and need to be thought of as such.
  - prodigal_erik 17y ago
    He's talking about lying to search engine operators to trick users into seeing different content than they actually wanted. That's not capital-E Evil, but certainly unethical, wasting those users' time and making everyone's search results less useful.
    - mroman 17y ago
      No, he's not talking about that. Please quote him on it if he is.
      - prodigal_erik 17y ago
        > a technology that serves different content to search engine spiders and to human visitors, based on visitors' (human or otherwise) IP address. This requires special software (such as the stuff we have developed, hint, hint!) > You can now optimize those phantom pages for better search engine rankings at your own discretion, and noone will be the wiser. Deceiving the search engine to tamper with its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught. > users can always, and actually will, vote with their mice on whether your site's high ranking was justified and relevant to their search They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users. > Ethical behavior only makes sense amongst equals. And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in another tragedy of the commons.
        mroman 17y ago
        Ah, I finally got a reply link to your post. "Deceiving the search engine to affect its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught." Indeed. Yet that obviously does not automatically imply deceiving the users, as you erroneously stated earlier. Doing so would be stupid, as in serving up porn for bridge search results, for example. "They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users." Incorrect. You misunderstood what he stated. By saying "vote with their mice" he is referring to whether or not users purchase products or otherwise "convert". Granted, this interview does not cover his stance on DECEIVING the users. The following one does: http://www.searchethos.com/fantomaster-response.html http://www.searchethos.com/fantomaster-response.html "Deceptive cloaking (again: solely viewed from the surfer's perspective) is self-defeating" "And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in the tragedy of the commons." Interesting that you would drag morality into an exclusively technological issue. I won't address this, as it has no place in this discussion.
        prodigal_erik 17y ago
        They are deliberately making search results less useful. If this became widespread we would have to abandon search engines entirely. That's the same as the ethical argument against spam.
krakensden 17y ago
This guy is selling software that generates "topical fillertext related to your targeted keywords and search phrases, implementing predefined keyword densities, randomized page descriptions"... In other words, he's the parasite here. Instead of saying "make things people want" he's saying "don't do any work, just be really loud and leech content".
- mroman 17y ago
  "In other words, he's the parasite here. Instead of saying 'make things people want' he's saying 'don't do any work, just be really loud and leech content." That's interesting. Where did you get that from? If you had read the entire article, you would not have reached that erroneous conclusion.
dminor 17y ago
Yeah, you probably won't get banned from Google, but who really wants to take that risk?
- mroman 17y ago
  That is a good point, and needs to be considered. From what I have read about their technology however, there are ways to substantially mitigate that risk.
- CodeMage 17y ago
  When people start being afraid of one company, that's the best indicator that the said company really needs some serious competition in the market.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
fantomsurfer 17y ago
The search engines are the parasites. They are making billions of $$$ using other people content.
- agazso 17y ago
  Without search engines how would you find that content?
  - fantomsurfer 17y ago
    I don't say that they are useless. Point is that they are crawling the content, wasting bandwidth without paying for it. The engines make the big money, not the webmasters.
  - mroman 17y ago
    I think the issue is not so much that they exist, the issue is that they profit greatly from content created by others without paying said others a single penny.

6 points by mroman 17y ago

barrkel 17y ago

Sounds like a lot of dodgy rationalization for some pretty shady practice.

mroman 17y ago
"shady" refers to a moral or legal issue . . . these are technological issues, and need to be thought of as such.
- prodigal_erik 17y ago
  He's talking about lying to search engine operators to trick users into seeing different content than they actually wanted. That's not capital-E Evil, but certainly unethical, wasting those users' time and making everyone's search results less useful.
  - mroman 17y ago
    No, he's not talking about that. Please quote him on it if he is.
    - prodigal_erik 17y ago
      > a technology that serves different content to search engine spiders and to human visitors, based on visitors' (human or otherwise) IP address. This requires special software (such as the stuff we have developed, hint, hint!) > You can now optimize those phantom pages for better search engine rankings at your own discretion, and noone will be the wiser. Deceiving the search engine to tamper with its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught. > users can always, and actually will, vote with their mice on whether your site's high ranking was justified and relevant to their search They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users. > Ethical behavior only makes sense amongst equals. And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in another tragedy of the commons.
      - mroman 17y ago
        Ah, I finally got a reply link to your post. "Deceiving the search engine to affect its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught." Indeed. Yet that obviously does not automatically imply deceiving the users, as you erroneously stated earlier. Doing so would be stupid, as in serving up porn for bridge search results, for example. "They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users." Incorrect. You misunderstood what he stated. By saying "vote with their mice" he is referring to whether or not users purchase products or otherwise "convert". Granted, this interview does not cover his stance on DECEIVING the users. The following one does: http://www.searchethos.com/fantomaster-response.html http://www.searchethos.com/fantomaster-response.html "Deceptive cloaking (again: solely viewed from the surfer's perspective) is self-defeating" "And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in the tragedy of the commons." Interesting that you would drag morality into an exclusively technological issue. I won't address this, as it has no place in this discussion.
        prodigal_erik 17y ago
        They are deliberately making search results less useful. If this became widespread we would have to abandon search engines entirely. That's the same as the ethical argument against spam.

krakensden 17y ago

This guy is selling software that generates "topical fillertext related to your targeted keywords and search phrases, implementing predefined keyword densities, randomized page descriptions"... In other words, he's the parasite here. Instead of saying "make things people want" he's saying "don't do any work, just be really loud and leech content".

mroman 17y ago
"In other words, he's the parasite here. Instead of saying 'make things people want' he's saying 'don't do any work, just be really loud and leech content." That's interesting. Where did you get that from? If you had read the entire article, you would not have reached that erroneous conclusion.

dminor 17y ago

Yeah, you probably won't get banned from Google, but who really wants to take that risk?

mroman 17y ago
That is a good point, and needs to be considered. From what I have read about their technology however, there are ways to substantially mitigate that risk.
CodeMage 17y ago
When people start being afraid of one company, that's the best indicator that the said company really needs some serious competition in the market.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

fantomsurfer 17y ago

The search engines are the parasites. They are making billions of $$$ using other people content.

agazso 17y ago
Without search engines how would you find that content?
- fantomsurfer 17y ago
  I don't say that they are useless. Point is that they are crawling the content, wasting bandwidth without paying for it. The engines make the big money, not the webmasters.
- mroman 17y ago
  I think the issue is not so much that they exist, the issue is that they profit greatly from content created by others without paying said others a single penny.