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Reports Of Google's Demise Exaggerated
Google's advantage, of course, is that its page-ranking means that the Web sites you find are less likely to be affected by how many keywords they can cram in, and more by which other important sites are linking to them. The theory is that lame sites won't be linked-to by important sites, and that therefore they won't show up high in your search results. And the theory usually works pretty well, which is why Google is my preferred engine.
The GeekPress article says that a search on "Liv Tyler nude" has as its top results some links all going to the same site which has Liv Tyler (allegedly) nude. Well, OK then. If you think that's a problem.
Google's CTO Craig Silverstein comments that that particular search query doesn't, "as far as we can tell, have any good results -- in our spot check, for instance, we couldn't actually find any Web sites that show Liv Tyler in the nude. When there are no good results out there, Google's results can be somewhat arbitrary, so it's not particularly surprising this site was first."
When I randomly checked the names of more popular actresses, plus the word "nude," the supposed-scam in question didn't pull down any especially good hits.
This was confirmed by the adult site itself. When I e-mailed its representative, he claimed their ranking for more popular celebrities like Cindy Crawford and Pamela Anderson were way down the Google list: 22nd, 38th, and worse.
And, protesting the "scam" label, he pointed me to a good article on bridge pages. The technique they're using is a popular method of getting hits which -- as long as the destination pages bear relevance to the search terms, which they here do -- is in the gray area usually considered aggressive self-promotion. It's a trick more or less ignored by the search engines until it's combined with other less-savory tricks.
(That article, and most of searchenginewatch.com, makes for fascinating reading if you're interested in the arms race for your eyeballs being fought between engines and webmasters.)
Also, the adult site operator says his site has gotten only 400 hits a day from all the bridge pages they've set up. It's hard to argue that just a few hundred clicks over to Jane Doe nude represent an extraordinary hijacking of the search term "Jane Doe nude."
Google does refine their algorithm, which incidentally like all search engines' is kept secret to avoid giving Web-spammers an edge. You may remember last year's joke of the search "more evil than Satan" pointing (mistakenly, of course) to Microsoft's homepage. As their founders comment in the recent MIT Technology Review interview, this was a little embarrassing for them, and the engine was tweaked to fix it.
And Google's CTO isn't ruling out more tweaking in the future:
In any case, we know our scoring scheme isn't perfect -- even when the sites in question aren't trying to fool us -- and we're always working to improve it. Often the problem isn't, "Why did this bad site score high?" but rather, "Why did these other good sites score low?"
We're always looking at queries that give strange-looking results to get a better understanding of how our scoring can be improved. Whether the "xnude" queries will result in tweaks to our scoring, I can't say, but we'll certainly be adding them to the test cases we look at.
Short version: the arms race continues; Google still kicks butt.
Yeah, I bet you will!
Ok, let me this straight. Google is going to employ people to 1)look for porn on the Internet, 2)decide which is the best porn, and then 3)improve their search engine to rank it properly.
I'm sure I can find quite a few volunteers in my workplace who are already doing 1 & 2. I bet they'd love to have this job.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Basically I like the scoring on Google, and I like the absence of commercials, but it looks to me like they didn't finish the job
Somebody wrote about a scam on Google, but it turned out to be completely ineffectual and nothing of any real importance.
Liv Tyler nude.
Just thought you'd like to know.
Liv Tyler nude.
Ayup. Stuff that matters.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I think this needs to be checked into further. I would personally like to offer my services to Google to verify the accuracy of all possible searches regarding popular actresses, the word "nude", or related terms.
Google if your listening, feel free to contact me, I can send a resume and get to work immediately. I can also send your a detailed report regarding several popular actresses and some research I've already began working on in my spare time.
Before Google, I'd given up on search engines. To but it bluntly, the things were shitful. Rarly would a search constantly find main useful sites, and stuff totally offtopic was commonplace.
Then I heard on Geeks in Space Rob and co rant about Google coming out of beta. I mustn't have read /. enough around then, but I went to this 'Google', and what I fould was the holy grail of search engines.... or something.
Google CONSTANTLY gets great hits on resonable searches (resonable = not looking for porn and pathetic crap like that). Not only that, but Google loaded INSTANTLY.
Google brought me back to search engines, and made the web useful again. Google REALLY s a step above it's search engine competition. If you are one of those people that have traditionally always used one engine, give Google a shot - I swear you won't be disappointed.
The good folks at Google don't have any serach problems when I try, and I think this is a one-off. And considering the person was just looking for nude porn pics of some girl that there is probably no nude pics of (I don't know who the girl is... maybe there are), then Google can hardly be blaimed for crappy results - of course it can't find something that doesn't exist ;)
Anyway, enough Google ranting for now. Just remember, the fisrt time you use it, you'll know you are on to a good thing....
(Look at me, you'd think I was advertising... ;)
"Otherwise we won't be able to find anything on the web"
I know the gags about all web searchs returning at least one pr0n link, and they are exaggerated to a certain extent. There is some truth in it, though.
But the lack of honesty on the internet appalls me. As an old schooler (I remember gopher, before this new fangled www thingy), I'm used to being able to find things quickly, and only find things that are relevant.
With the proliferation of personal home pages, unscrupulous company webpages exporting lying meta tags, I'm disappointed in the web as it has turned out.
Pr0n sites are they best and worst thing on the internet. Best, not for the reasons you'd think, but because the pr0n sites drove the need for high quality image and moving picture compression, and provided the need for higher bandwidth availability. But now, they are ruining our internet, along with the spammers. That said, AllTheWeb does an excellent job at stopping "adult" links being returned from a search, and it's bastard quick, too.
Why not _force_ all pr0n sites to have a
What do you guys think?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
They already do.
An ad mans wet dream
Not long before companies can pay to have their products boosted to the top of the search results list...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
I partly agree. Unless you refine your searches, you get a load of crap. I myself use Altavista *almost* exclusivly (if it can't find what im looking for I'll go to others). I have found that if you know what combinations of words to use, and use '+' and '-' and quotes and wild cards, your searches can be very fruitful.
Ennui
Ennui
"I walk in the air, between the rain, through myself an
I mean, if I search for thermonuclar rocketscience essays and the first three hits are something like
Hot rocket science sluts
Thermonuclear rocket chicks
High IQ babes with glasses
Am I really likely to visit those blokes ? The Digital Hijack by etoy was brilliant in it's kind. But it was a statement,(actually the Ars Electronicas jury believed it was art), it was fun and it was subversive.
But going through the pain to make your smut site popular, well, I dunno...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I do run my own search engine.
I run websearches.net which is a topic based search engine. I use my own ranking system, but the great thing is you cannot spam it at all.
Why? Well firstly to be considered is must pass the theme check, then it checks for page spam (duplicated keywords, repeated patterns etc.) then it checks to see what level sites it links to and from.
You still get people searching for strange terms (you can never get away from those!!), but at least I have the luxury of laughing at how people use the system. Such as the amount of people who search for "Linux" on the Linux search engine! It's meaningless. It must be a linux site to get in the database in the first place.
Dragon.
Don't forget that Google has the 'cache' facility that allows you to see the page that Google has indexed. Display the cache, visit the page and if they don't match up - complain to Google.
:)
I think the Google cache is GREAT! Lots of sites go down mysteriously or pages are moved/missing and Google has them cached so you can see them. I've used it many times.
If you don't like the cache, don't use it!
And if you have the urge to complain to Google - don't. They'll probably just tell you to use the original URL.
rLowe
----- rL
I worked on a commercial web browser, and users would tell us their favourite porn sites weren't working. So we would have to look at them (for scientific purposes, stop giggling down the back) and tweak the rendering code to be a bit more tolerant of their often sloppy HTML or whatever trick they were trying to pull. Porn sites have always been way ahead of the curve in terms of Internet technology so if a browser will cope with them it will cope with most sites. We did find it highly amusing to be handed very formal looking project management sheets, which were then splattered with references to sites like 'sex.com'.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
This is fascinating, because the story has invalidated itself.
Some weirdarse self-referential hoffstadteriam net.paradox has gone down.
I assume the next step is that stories on how 'more evil than satan himself' *used* to refer to the microsoft homepage get top billing, and so on ad infinitum ...
Maybe I've been reading too much Iain Banks recently; I look forward to being able to say "free as in bandwidth and CPU time"...
Face it, corporate interests are vandalising the internet as we knew it, kind of like turning a sleepy village in South West England where people look after each other, don't need to lock their doors and play cricket together on Sundays into an inner city slum, manifest with crack whores, guns and drugs. Still, on the plus side, it's better than terminal only access over 3200 baud...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
For intstance The New York Times claimed that the New York Post ran a story called "Liar, Liar" about Al Gore. Looking for Gore and "Liar, Liar" brought up a pile of duplicate pro Gore pages so badly written that they might as well have been porn. It seems obvious that the Gore team knew this trick and that it worked.
Oh well, it's politics who cares right? Wrong. In fields closer to my heart, such as nuclear information, it's really a pain in the neck to find useful stuff. He who shouts loudest is not always best, and is more often just an ass.
Ultimately the best way of finding good sites has to be by getting humans to find them, but without requiring the huge expenditure of effort that actual directories need - even the Open Directory is nowhere near a full reference. This is what "favorites directories" like Blink and Backflip are about, as well as Alexa which uses information based on people's surfing patterns. Maybe an open source implementation of some of these, built into Mozilla, would be a good idea.
Who cares ? It's just spam porn.. if someone wanted to see Liv Tyler nude they'd have better luck just walking up to her and asking. The only people who can't grok the spam phenomenon shouldn't be told of Google anyway, it's too good for them. Just like we have safety scissors for clumsy kids, well we have safety (stupid) search engines (*cough*Altavista*cough*) for clumsy users.
Google should use a two-handed key combo for the "Search" button... No more one-hand-surfing AOL'ers.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
...do you have a link to a mirror?
BlackNova Traders
rob malda nude
The first ten results are a nice cross-section of opensource/geek sites - advogato, slashdot, the Sync, E2, Salon Mag.
But really, does anyone care if google's results on nude stuff are sub-optimal?
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
I get it now. But I still think we should be looking at image-recognition technology for search engines. Google should be able to tell the difference between real pr0n and "Liv Tyler nude." Anyway, wouldn't it be easy enough to filter out these rings of sites that link to each other? Except in the case of pr0n sites where everybody links to everybody else, of course. He with the most referers wins, it seems. How about he with the most free pr0n wins?
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
This is one of the best Slashdot writeups we've had in a long time. A well investigated story like this one is good journalism.
Thanks, jamie. And please - MORE STORIES LIKE THIS!
"Vandalising" is not quite the correct term, and it's a bit too subjective. One man's vandalism (graffiti) is another man's art. The problem is that there are a conflicting set of values in force here, just as there are in real life. Whilst absolutly despising commercialism in the "ads everywhere you look" sense, I understand that it underpins the economics of our society which allows me to live in a nice 2-bed city centre aparment, eat good food, have 2Mb/sec ADSL into my home (which is still rare in the UK), and in fact almost every technological advance made in the last 50 years at least has been due to commercialism.
:-)
In addition, without porn, warez, hacking, etc. we wouldn't have some of the most useful technologies around on the net for what we do in our day-to-day lives. Porn gave us streaming live video technologies, driven forward the requirements for better video and image compression, transparent cache engines, etc. whilst "warez" in all it's forms gave us not only the idea of "free" software, but DivX movie compression, requirements for bandwidth shaping in ftp servers, etc. and hacking gave us the motive to invent and make a standard protocols such as SSL, S/key, OPIE, etc. all of which have provided the basis for legislation (in the UK at least) for acceptance of digital signatures, etc.
It has often been said that the guys coming up with the porn sites are on the "bleeding edge" of technologies. This is because the market is so competitive, they are looking for new ways to get an edge over the next guy. It might have been streaming video, new ways to attract customer loyalty, those annoying windows that appear when you close a browser on a porn site, whatever. The point is, it didn't come about because it was porn, but because it's the most competitive industry currently on the net.
Perhaps we can make do without it all, but without highly competitive market places on the net, technological development will starve. This would be bad for all of us. I don't think even the Amazon vs. everybody else market is competitive enough to really push things along just yet.
To finish off, I'll also just remind you about the success of VHS and digital cameras. The reason why video recorders/players in the home along with video cameras were so successful was porn. Think what you like about people wanting to enjoy films at their leisure at home, but porn is what sold them. The ability to watch porn at home, at relatively low cost, was the key selling point. Digital cameras are the same. People want to be able to take saucy photos, but don't want them to be sent off for processing. Porn drove the market. I'm not saying it's right, or that it's wrong, but the only reason why you have a cheap webcam on your desk is because 3 million other people want to take photos of their girlfriend in stockings, in the same way that I have reasonably cheap bandwidth to my home is because half of the country wants to be able to download porn quicker. Remember that.
This is redundant, I know, but if you could tell me where that village is, I'd be interested - I refuse to believe that such a village still exists right now, just 150 miles from where I live. If it is there, I know where I'm moving next.
just go HERE
Trust me, it isn't goatshit or whatever
From Google's page:
Or from a recent interview with the inventor:
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
But they're not banner ads. Look at the samples. They're unobtrusive blue text boxes on the right hand edge, clearly labelled "Sponsored Links". IMO, Google has once again managed to maintain cleanness and usability, even while selling ads for specific phrases.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
The following links will direct you to the Liv Tyler nude site. This is only a test.
You would have to set many links to Liv Tyler nude. If you want to see her all nude, you'd have to click here, which would actually be slashdot. Making more links might make Liv Tyler searches return to slashdot.
That would be a little disappointing if you were searching for 'naked and petrified' and found 'News for Nerds. Stuff that matters'.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
They search for "Liv", "Tyler" and "nude" and get pointed to a porn site where they actually have Liv Tyler in the nude. Not only that, but the site is even free for annoying banners and pop-up boxes This sounds to me like some kiddies where looking for a filthy pr0n site with Javascript to broadcast their registry, but got a decent result instead! Ouch. Bummer. Surely a destructive blow to Google.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If you`re talking about Langley then hell yeah!
;)
Now it just returns stories on how if you enter 'more evil than satan himself' into google, you get the microsoft homepage.
This is fascinating, because the story has invalidated itself
Actually this story is about how a site that shouldn't be linked to from "trustable" pages appears as such. Google denies it because irrelevant sites are not linked from trustable pages.
And now, GeekPress and Slashdot have linked to this site. So they are making it worthy of appearing in Google!
Actually, it's all a plot. The celeb site managed to get traffic from GeekPress and the celeb site and GeekPress managed to get traffic from Slashdot.
These porn sites are really ahead of the rest in promotion. Hofstadter marketing!
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It seems as my other favorite Google Easter egg is gone as well.... "so long and thanks for all the fish" used to have Yahoo! as it's first result. They probably changed this when Yahoo started using Google.
I think "crappy software" used to go to Microsoft as well, and now that is gone.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"
this was a little embarrassing for them, and the engine was tweaked to fix it
Is anyone else offended by this? The algorythm was obviously working correctly. Many sites used those words to describe M$. When they say "tweak", they really mean "break" for political purposes. Remember how everyone said "That's cool, Google returns M$ for an evil search and they have the balls not to change it?" Well, it's time to take those kudos back.
Could someone start a free and open Google style engine with no "tweaks"? Let's not forget the whole Yahoo "Tweaking" as well.
I think this is pretty recent.
--
The shareholder is always right.
New way to generate mad hits:
1) Pretend you've scammed google
2) Get it published in the trade press
3) Wait for the slashdot effect to show up
Boom! 100,000 hits in 10 minutes, and all you need is one faked up naked natalie portman picture - customers for life!
I'm pretty sure there's a scam going on, but google's not the sucker...
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
In particuar, it addresses two claims:
1. There are no good results to a search for Liv Tyler nude. (Google)
2. The scam doesn't yield good Google results on popular actresses. (Slashdot)
You can find the response, titled Still Scamming Google at GeekPress. For the sake of my Slashdotted server, I'm reprinting it below:
***
Still Scamming Google
The Case of Liv Tyler
My article on Scamming Google has some unexpected results. The most interesting is that the folks over at Google deny that the scam has any significant impact on the accuracy and usefulness of Google search results.
Slashdot, for example, quotes Google's CTO Craig Silverstein as saying that the Liv Tyler nude search doesn't, "as far as we can tell, have any good results -- in our spot check, for instance, we couldn't actually find any Web sites that show Liv Tyler in the nude. When there are no good results out there, Google's results can be somewhat arbitrary, so it's not particularly surprising this site was first."
As much as I love Google, I must disagree. I scoured through the first 30 results of the Liv Tyler Google to prove my point. Here are the results:
Index Pages: Most of the returned links were to the index page of a porn site, such as link #3 and link #6, both of which take you to the same JavaScript popup hell site. (I didn't bother checking the rest of these pages, because they obviously didn't have Liv Tyler nude on them.) These links are obviously not good Google results.
Scam Pages: Then there were the scam links, with fake discussions of Liv Tyler nude, such as link #1, link #2, link #4, and link #7. These links are also not good Google results.
Nude Liv: Google did, however, return some pages with Liv Tyler nude on them. The best page is probably link #5, which popped up after three scam pages and one index page. It has thumbnails of various movie shots of Liv Tyler in the buff. Link #25 and link #30 also has nude pictures of Liv. (I also noted two links somewhere between scam and the real thing, such as link #11 and link #21. These pages have non-nude pictures of Liv Tyler and a ton of links leading to various celebrity nude sites.
I also randomly checked a few of the low-ranked pages, with some unexpected results. For example, link #76 has a genuine discussion (!) of Liv Tyler's nude scene in Stealing Beauty. Link #116 has a nude picture along with a filmography. Link #174 is an Batman-ish erotic story with Liv Tyler playing "The Huntress." Link #192 and link #63 have fake nudes. Link #62 is a list of various Liv Tyler pages, some with a bundle of sexy images.
So, contrary to what the Google people say, there are good results for Liv Tyler nude. Google just isn't putting them at the top of the list.
Random Results?
But Google's problems do not end with the jumble of bad results for the Liv Tyler search. Google repeatedly puts the fake discussion pages of Nude Celebrity World News at the top of the search results in a huge number of searches for nude celebrities. But don't take my word for it. Google for yourself using the list of celebrities created by Nude Celebrity World News (modified to automatically search Google). You'll see the domains of www.jennifer-smith.com, www.news-in-review.com, www.find-thys.com, www.celebrity-locator.com, and www.celebrity-fans.com at the top of the list more often than "randomly."
Personally, I checked 50 of these searches, making sure to hit popular female celebrities like Meg Ryan and Heather Locklear. Here are my results:
3 searches yielded all top five search results (e.g. Kathy Bates).
9 searches yielded all top four search results (e.g. Bo Derrek).
16 searches yielded all top three search results (e.g. Linda Hamilton).
3 searches yielded both top two results (e.g. Lara Flynn Boyle).
1 search yielded the top result.
In all of the above searches, I just counted the set of top results, ignoring the matching results lower in the top ten.
Most importantly, however, is the fact that 16 searches for popular celebrities had at least one result in the top 10 (e.g. Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson, Nicole Kidman, Meg Ryan, Heather Locklear, Alicia Silverstone, and Sandra Bullock).
Only 2 searches did not yield any results in the top ten: Demi Moore and Jennifer Lopez.
These results are not random, as Google claims. Clearly, the sham discussion pages created by Nude Celebrity World News have worked their magic on Google. The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is in the search results.
So I stand behind my the point in my original article: Google has been fooled into repeatedly returning, as highly-placed results, pages which any human can identify as search engine spam.
***
About the Author
Diana Hsieh is the owner and co-editor of GeekPress, an irreverent filter for the most unique and interesting technical news of the day. She also sporadically writes and lectures on philosophy, Objectivism in particular. She can be reached via e-mail to diana@geekpress.com.
© 2000 Diana Hsieh. Permission to reprint will be granted upon request.
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
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