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No Press Is Bad Press Even Online

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-you-don't-have-anything-nice-to-say dept.

otter42 writes "The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank."

12 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Haedrian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This shows the failure of how hyperlinks works and how the page rank algorithm works.

    The Page rank algorithm determines how useful a site is based on the amount of hyperlinks TO the website. Each count is multiplied by how reputable a website is - so if its a huge website which brings in millions of users - then its more likely to be reputable than a website on a free host which gets 10 hits a year.

    Now the problem with hyperlinks is that there is no semantic information attached to them - if you place a link on a page - there is no way to mark it as "This is a dangerous page" for example, or "This guy is an idiot, someone shut him up" or "This is an adverstiment, they have nothing to do with us". So the crawler notices a reputable website is linking on another site - and gives points accordingly.

    The best solution is to add semantic information to hyperlinks - but that's not supported yet...

    1. Re:Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Haedrian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Natural Language processing is one of the hardest problems there are in ICT.

      If only Search Engines could actually understand the Natural Language we type our websites in - then we wouldn't even need to research anything, just ask the Search Engine and get the correct answer - already pre-filtered and understood.

      Won't be happening very soon - because there are tons of ways of saying the same thing.

      "The following website gives irreputable medical advice - which could be dangerous for health. [Link]"
      "[Link], [Link2], and [Link3] - one of the three scam sites which were detected by [Reputable site]"

      The second one is a very interesting problems, how do you mark it? Without marking reputable site as well?

    2. Re:Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Google and other search engines understand rel="nofollow" attribute in links

      Yeah - but how many authors understand it? How many use it?

    3. Re:Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hamlet prequel?

      What a piece of work, this A.C.? How funny in posting,
      How comedic in faculties, in form and typing,
      I would express admiration by action to this Anon Cow, sans apprehension,
      But I'm not Mod!

    4. Re:Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      What really needs to happen is that they need to stop looking at language and create models for what is the emotional content of each context they are measuring and what it is pointing at.

      Spoken like a psychologist. Did I misunderstand "emotional context", or are you suggesting emotionless people (sociopaths) shouldn't be capable of thinking and communicating? Emotion is not a way to describe thought. Even if you meant emotion is the most abstract, primitive thought, I still have to disagree. Things measurable as emotional responses are present without a brain or central nervous system, in simpler lifeforms. Emotions are basically a physically decentralized reflex coordinating different cells of an organism in response to stimulus, because any appropriate coordination improved their survival and the trait got passed on. It makes sense human beings could survive with a lot less emotion than other organisms, because we have an additional mechanism for coordinating our actions. For example, no emotional incentive for procreation would be bad, but an emotion lacking human could choose to regardless but other creatures under those circumstances would probably avoid it.

      In fact, I'm sure the reason people can "read" pedophile and react appropriately by another person's standards, is due to their lifetime of experience involving other people. Because if Mike read it, and responded with nonsense, then you know Mike is illiterate or your brain's NL processing isn't the same as his. If Mike wasn't illiterate, he could explain his response, and you could work out an understanding, retry or fail.

      In the end, the only way anyone would accept NL processing as being accurate, is if it was an algorithm that modeled them specifically. And everybody has their own. Otherwise, (using the earlier example) pedophiles would be disappointed or non pedophiles would be appalled.

    5. Re:Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Calydor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And how exactly do you suggest doing that on, say, a consumer forum using very limited BBcode? The moment you don't have control over the code generated on the page you may as well give up on being fancy.

      --
      -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
    6. Re:Hyperlinks and Pagerank 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that if we could find a way to somehow model knowledge and emotion, we could use it to do some pretty cool things with it including natural language processing. But they might disagree with your statement that researchers are "starting with the wrong idea" by focusing on "parsing strings".

      Bottom line is that for the time being, NLP frameworks that apply probabilistic methods to process text (and pretty much ignore the underlying semantics) are orders of magnitude more effective at real-world tasks than any attempts to solve the problem from the approach you suggested. We've gotten useful new technologies (machine translation, spam filters, news aggregation) and we've learned a lot in the process. How is that "starting with the wrong idea"?

      Posting anon because I already modded some comments in this discussion.

  2. Nofollow? by WPIDalamar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perhaps review sites should add nofollow attributes to their external links

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

    Maybe just for negative reviews?

  3. Re:The kneejerk reactions by Blue+Stone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Let's not forget CitiBank who apparently didn't give a shit that someone fraudulently closed the woman's disputed charge.

    I have an account run by CitiBank, and this has made me decide to close it - before I get subjected to their don't care approach.

    --
    Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
  4. Blaming Google? by MDMurphy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Reading the article I had to shake my head at the complaints that "Google should do something". Do they think the phone book people should boot him out or circle his name in red too?

    I've seen people complain in online forums about ads or intrusive product placement in TV shows and movies. And what do they do? They mention the product or company 3-4 times in their rant. On threads where I've commented I've tried to encourage people not to name the specific product or company in their rant, but too many clueless people out there. You hate the placement but remember it well enough to bitch about it online. Advertiser searches for online comments and finds many, so the campaign was successful.

    Heck, the Times article just boosted the guy's profile even more! There wasn't just one mention of the company, but many, increasing the rank. Of course the company name is still likely to just show up in a search for the company not the brand names.

    So the guy is an ass, but all the clueless people who want to blame someone else ( Google ) and not do research on a company but just buy whatever is claimed to be the cheapest. They may not be getting what they deserve, but they did contribute to their problems by their lack of due diligence. "Too good to be true" is still a true statement. If you find something online where everyone has it for about the same price but someone magically has it much lower you're asking for trouble. That's when you really need to check on the reputation of the seller.

  5. 4Chan assemble by frap · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wouldn't wish 4Chan's wrath on my worst enemy but it sounds like this guy needs a taste of his own medicine to me.

  6. I do not doubt the ranking by epseps · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But I do doubt that it is good for his business.

    He claims that using google maps to stalk angry customers combined with harassing phone calls threatening rape helps his business with Search Engine Optimization from generating negative reviews.

    His techniques match those of Brooklyn based discount camera and electronics retailers of a few years ago, with the object of the personal phone calls being to get a few $100 more out of suckers who think they are getting the best price on something. These camera scammers used to have multiple websites, cheap cameras listed and they would call and threaten customers using "Italian" names. Then complaints would mount and they would leave and move on to the next website, but I do not think they earned much money by doing this.

    One reason I doubt Borker (hilarious name) is making loads of cash on this is because he handles the phone calls himself, that means there are not many calls (he answers "Eyewear" in the same way the camera guys used to answer the phone "Photography" or "Cameras") but I do believe he is making money off of something. Perhaps it is his other company that is referenced in older whois lookups of his websites called AOSI, which appeared to be a search engine optimization company. I am not sure the company has the same name now, but that might explain why he was happy to be interviewed about his crappy businesses.

    Oh, and I really doubt his Wall Street story too. He used to have an office at 305 Madison Avenue which is a temporary office / mobile office rental address. He formed "OpticGenius.com" and ran it from there. I do not know too many "Wall Street" people who give up their jobs and devote themselves to running scams from home or temporary offices as a better source of income.