Slashdot Mirror
Google Juice
mpawlo writes: "I guess it is time to start using them bookmarks again, since favourite search engine Google seems to be on the verge of Altavista doom and search engine chaos. BBC News reports of Google bombing (often referred to as 'Google juice' by the infamous Crackmonkey subscribers). 'The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular webpages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases.'
There is also the sport of Google Whacking affecting your search results."
To make the game challenging, you can't quote the words (making them into a phrase). And they both have to be actual English words which Google itself recognizes (I think Google uses dictionary.com's dictionary, so you can doublecheck yourself there).
The more common the words, the cleverer the Googlewhack is considered to be -- few Googlewhacks use words you would consider "common."
Try it yourself, just think up two obscure words and type them into Google. If you get zero hits, you're too obscure, try again. Much more likely that you'll get 5 or 10 or 20 or 150 hits, in which case your goal is simple: get more obscure, until that number gets down to 1!
Perhaps the best solution, if things get too far out of hand, is to use the input of people who would be pissed off about crappy listings. That is to say, give users a free user account which could be used to give input on whats crap and whats not, then the Google admins could simply remove all the crap that rose to the top because enough users clicked a link that said, "This is crap!" Using this in conjunction with google's already strong engine would probably solve any problems, imho.
RFC1925
I've seen a few scoring systems that formalize this idea. Most start by multiplying the numbers of hits that each word would have gotten by itself. Personally, I like adding extra twists instead of trying to go for a high score. For example, alliterative whacks are harder to find because there are enough word lists out there that you're likely to get multiple hits on any two words that start with the same letter, so you have to pick words obscure enough not to be in the lists but real enough to be in the dictionary. It's a fun way to spend 5-10 minutes.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Assumming about 3,000,000 words in the English Language (http://www.wordorigins.org/number.htm), then we get about 8,999,997,000,000 possible two word combinations (correct that number if needed.) So, I would say it is some time before that is exhausted.
There is also a somewhat easy to prevent google from picking up the posted whack: post it as an image.
What?
Sounds to me like the fix for weblog bombing of Google *may* be a fairly easy thing.
Google could use the same method of rating that they do now to raise the importance of pages to also demote weblogs in importance. A way may be found to determine if a page is a Weblog and take it out of the equation.
Slashdot could be considered a weblog. Any page that allows a user to post a message with links embedded in it is a Weblog is it not?
Let Google's Deja worry about the Weblogs and then the user can opt to include the extra results or not.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
You have most likely inadvertently taken advantage of Slashdot to boost yourself up in the rankings. Merely being an active commentor puts your homepage link all over ... And loads of people link to slashdot. It isn't on the same scale as the blog tactic in the story, but it still can jack a "Matt Burke" (or any other non-famous name) to the top in about 50 posts.
Given just the example regarding the redirection of "talentless hack" to the guy's friends site clearly demonstrates that this is an abuse and degrades the value of Google as a search engine, versus being some sort of great democratic benefit. When I use Google to find search results, I'm looking based on content and relevance, not "How many online friends got together and Google bombed". Online, with manipulable systems like that, democracy doesn't work, and that was the whole problem with META tags which this is basically recreating. Even worse is that it doesn't even just have to be democracy: Many Blogger sites themselves have high rankings as a whole, and with some machination someone can individually set up thousands of sites and programmatically set-up Google bombs. Clearly Google will have to filter this out.
Google is like scientific measurements : If the process is affected by the measurement then it's tainted.
This does _nothing_ to undermind the relevance of Google's rankings. When you perform a search on Google and the first "hit" is one that has been juiced in this way you are getting a hit that a larger number of individual sites, all of which are respected by other sites, agree is important to the subject. That is the beauty of Google.
Yes, this effect can be choreographed, but the result is the same. All of the sites choreographed to achieve this result are voting that site A is relevant to subject B. If the sites involved consistently show bad judgment their ranking in Google are likely to decline and therefore their contribution to the Google ranking for subject B will lessen.
The fact that a large number of highly ranked blogs can drive a URL up the Google pop-chart is evidence of both the respect blogs are given and the power of Google's algorithms to find such non-corporate backed content.
It should be noted that direct links as advertisements could get a rebound under Google. Why pay for a link that bounds through another domain when you could have, say, Slashdot provide a direct link to your site and therefore give you a Google boost? Does anyone know if the link from a site gets you any Google boost if it clicks through, say, a redirect through doubleclick?
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
A warning to those considering using Google's page ranking service (which tracks your surfing habits, which isn't a problem since it is very upfront about it.) Overall, it works pretty well and it has found several pages of genuine interest to me that I would not have found otherwise. Also, I have no reason to think that they're doing anthing sinister with the information (and I don't care.)
However, since I like slashdot so much (I assume that is why) it's been serving up advertisements for other projects that link to SourceForge whenever I run google searches; for example, the white supremacist publication the Free Occident, which is powered by SourceForge.
Now, I'm not one of those people who thinks Google should try and filter hate speech from search results. Likewise, I don't think that the Free Occident should somehow be prevented from using SourceForge's software - open source means open, Voltaire was right, etc. However, I think google should draw the line at serving advertisements for articles about how "If you hear about a 100-million-dollar swindle, then you know that it has to be a Jew."
I've dumped a copy of the html for the search result in my journal - paste the Extrans into an html file to see it in close-to original format. It appears from the first version in my journal that the ad appears ABOVE the search results - this is not the case.
Free Occident is a web log, but I find it far more worrisome that they've purchased an ad on google than if they were trying to blog some search term, like "White Power," or even "Occident."
Yes, I'm Jewish.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
All that's needed is one page with a list of those 3M words, and of course for google to index all of them as belonging to that one page.
Well, technically, two copies of that list would need to exist :)
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
There aren't 3 million words in the dictionary, most have around 600,000. There are many many wordlists all over, but according the website from the article posting, wordlists don't count.
What?
Yes, the Scientology Google ranking is well covered here: Operating Thetan
Big thanks to the Beckamn Institute at the University of Illinois for creating the VisIT software for the graphic demonstrations.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
- First, decide what kind of difficulty level you want, eq, pick a number from 2 - 10.
- Open your browser, and do brain.randomize();
- Pick N (where n stands for difficulty level) amount of characters from your brain.
- enter those characters with www and com concattenated to the beginning and to the end
- Hit enter
- And be amazed!!
On could also decide number of times to repeat this process and ++ each time a site is found and play the game with office mates so everybody will have a good timeyush
Google has always seemed to be driven by a happy medium of civic duty and profit.
.com advertising heydey? How are they able to cache the entire web supported on only adwords when every other search engine is losing money just caching their index? How are they able to be the grep of the web supported by tiny classified ads, while /. is not yet profitable supported by big ugly ads. Something doesn't add up.
I'm not trying to harass you personally, but this statement assumes that Google is making a profit. Are they really bringing in enough money with the adwords to fund their operation, or are they still operating on VC Baby Fat? If they are profitable, why are they trying to sell this corny $15,000 "Corporate Google" device? As the parent post said, Altavista tried that 5 years ago when they realized they needed more profits--it didn't help them much.
If they are making money, I ask: How is Google able to maintain the entire Deja usenet archives without ads when Deja wasn't able to maintain it profitably WITH ads in the
Google's ultimate downfall will come about because of financial reasons, not because their search results go to pot. Once the money well runs dry (after they sell the ping-pong tables at HQ), they will start trying all sorts of crazy schemes to stay afloat. Like becoming a portal. Like offering a personal google device. Like selling big ugly adds. Like offering premium subscriptions. Hopefully, they can sidestep the pitfalls experienced by their failed predecessors, but I bet that within a year, Google will look very different than it does today.
Has anyone tried creating whack Chains, where searches on
word_1, word_2
word_2, word_3
...
word_n-1, word_n
will each return a single match?
Then create whack Cycles which would consist of
word_1, word_2
word_2, word_3
...
word_n, word_1
Finally, whack Sets where choosing any two words from a pool would result in a whack?
The goal of each of these would be to make them as large as possible.