Slashdot Mirror
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
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... ;)
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.
> Why not _force_ all pr0n sites to have a .xxx TLD?
.xxx?
.xxx?
Same reason as ever. Who gets to decide what's a porn site, and must go into
Take for example these categories:
www.tightskirtspage.com, appears to be dead (might have been a while). It used to be a free site for people that had a thing about tight skirts. Porn?
Feet. Lots of people into feet. Porn?
Lingerie/Swimwear sites. Porn? Are shops that sell this stuff not porn?
Actress of the month-fan-site. Porn? What if they'd done some porn in their "previous career" prior to getting to be a famous actress. Those shots will always appear on fan sites. Does the fan site then have to move to
And last, but not least: Who gets to chose? Some wacky Christian/Whatever fundie? Some drooling pervert?
Sure, it's a nice idea. I'm all for honesty in web pages, death to pop-up windows, and dont lie in your META tags, but you can't enforce it.
0.02,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
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 ...
Two honest questions:
Google uses some sort of metric-of-trust system that is supposed to prevent this sort of abuse. None of us know the internal mathematics of this system, so we don't know if self-referential loops are given no weight, or merely reduced weight.
Given that a search for "[celebrity] nude" has little information to go on, significantly less then "[celebrity] nude pictures", as demonstrated by your finding some interesting results like honest conversations, exactly how is Google supposed to tell that these pages are fake?
If one could see the trust metric on all of the search page hits, I'd lay money that as compared to the trust metric for Microsoft, none of those pages are very trustworthy. There are probably a couple of external links validating the "Nude Celebrity World News", and despite the self-referential loops in their pages, this slight boost may have been enough to give them the advantage over all of the other results you cite, which are meaningful only in the broad sense... I can't say any of the ones you cited are "definately" what "[celebrity] nude" would be searching for.
Thus, in all probability, we are looking at a "fraud" where on a 100 point scale that I'm making up right now, some site scams its way into giving itself an extra point. w00p! I don't think this scam could even come close to displacing the Microsoft Windows Home Page from the top result of searching for "Windows", which may have a trust of 99.9%. The only reason you can even see the effect of this "scam" is because you are plumbing around in the lowest trust areas of the Google database. In four weeks (or however long it takes Google to index these pages) I'll lay money that the top two hits for Liv Taylor nude will be this slashdot discussion and your site. The trust metrics of Slashdot and the one your site obtains by being linked from Slashdot will blow this "scam" out of the water.
Unfortunately, this discussion will also validate the Nude Celebrity World News (which is why I'm not linking to it here). In fact, this scam will work vastly better now that it's only two clicks from Slashdot. To really pull this off, you need trusted domain names, which we just handed them on a silver platter.
Looked at in this light, I think Google's reaction makes sense. I regret needing this lengthy explanation, but my questions are, what exactly do you think Google should do, and in light of the fact that the "scam" is probably almost (but not quite!) complete ineffective, why is this a problem?