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Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results
krou writes "The Guardian's tech blog is running an interesting piece on Google's next big challenge, which is dealing with the spammers it helped create. 'Google is the 900-pound gorilla of search, with around 90% of the market (excluding China and Russia), and there's an entire industry which has grown up specifically around tickling the gorilla to make it happy and enrich the ticklers.' They quote Paul Kedrosky who notes that 'Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.' Whether searching for reviews, products, businesses, or even conducting academic research, scraper sites are ranking higher than original content. The article speculates that Google may try fix the problem but, from Google's perspective, most of these type of sites use AdSense ads, and generate revenue for Google (89% of clicks come from the first page of results), so Google may not have an incentive to change things too much. Alternatively, people could stop using Google, 'because its search is damn well broken... The question is whether it would be visible enough — that is, whether enough people would do it — that it would show up on Google's radar and be made a priority.'"
They could also fix the spam filter they've added to Blogger that you can't disable. It's hilarious to see legitimate posts get flagged and hidden while Chinese clothing spammers and porn spam gets through.
Compared to what exactly? I find Bing's results to be far more broken so that rules out Bing and Yahoo. What's left?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Why is slashdot providing us with opinions? News = facts and context. Gossip = Some facts, some context, lots of opinions. "because its search is damn well broken..." -- do not want to hear.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
It's all very well designing the perfect search engine (and the rest of the baggage that sits in the right margin), but interested parties will always try to break it to their own ends.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It would be great if google would only follow their own guidelines.
But for now, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam!!!!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
are left in shock and awe as soon as consumers find a better option and flock away in huge numbers. There will be no customer loyalty for Google if we continue to get served up crap. A bunch of clicks now may see revenue for Google now, but they'll feel the bottom line fall out from under them like a hangman's trap when 60%-80% switch to another search engine that focuses more on the science of search than the profitability of it (like Google used to be).
So which is it? Is Google a gorilla or a snake? Make your mind up!
The thing is thought that the other search engines before Google were terrible in this regard.
Before Google the SEO business was rife with dodgy practices. It was only when google showed that these dodgy practices were not going to help get to the top of their results that the SEO market grew up and started being more constructive for the web as a whole.
Before this they would just do whatever they could to game their clients page higher up the ranks using whatever means they could just to get their clients page hits. This was a nice easy metric that clients could easily track and understand with minimum of technical knowledge. Their customer to visitor ratios might have been going down as the page hits went up but this was very hard to track before the whole web metric industry grew up. One might even say that the web metric industry owes much to Google in this regard as now any money spent on SEO and advertising usually needs to be justified by also spending money on tracking too.
I dont read
The whole reason Google rose to dominance was that 10 years ago it was doing a far better job of hiding the spam results than its now-mostly-defunct major competitors. Since then, spammers, scammers, and pranksters have been trying to game the results, often with noticeable effects.
I am officially gone from
People wont change while theres nothing better to change to...
I still don't "see" these issues with google that supposidly exist, I know others dont see these issues iether who aren't as web savvy as me, but if they DO exist, it's only when something better comes along that people will switch, I tried bing..... and couldn't even get it to find microsoft security essentials when searching for mse as its normally know.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Another problem people have with Google is Ad Grinders. They people spam web sites with false clicks throughs which generates revenue for the site owner. In exchange, Google gets a high number of impressions plus click through revenue. Its a win for scammers and its a winner for Google (on two fronts).
I've repeatedly caught Google failing to catch EXTREMELY obvious click through fraud. And when reported, they only corrected a tiny percentage of it. Which makes it very, very clear, Google has no desire or incentive to catch or prevent fraud as it currently makes then at least double digit percentages (likely as high as 20%) of their yearly ad income.
To largely avoid Ad Grinders, never, ever, never allow Google to automatically place your Ads. Their algorithms specifically focus on sites where abuse occurs specifically because your ads are getting both a high number of impressions and click through rates. The more precise you are with ad placement, the less likely Google will be able to defraud you.
Rest assured, if you are allowing Google to automatically place your ads, you are being scammed.
I don't have this problem - when I search for things on Google, I get relevant results from real pages. Either I regularly search for things that nobody scrapes, or there's actually some skill involved in getting relevant results that most people can't be bothered with.
The biggest problem I've had of late searching on Google is trying to find reviews of hardware and getting ninety billion pages trying to sell it to me with 'Be the first person to review this product!" I need to find a different keyword on that.
This really bothers me because it's so easy to get tricked when the first ten pages of Google search results contain fake reviews from many different domain names. Maybe this is where the new "search engine optimization" industry is heading absent proper controls?
Google changes the rules to close old loopholes, spammers start gaming the new rules. The media is shocked that a massively profitable business category is capable of changing to meet the new challenges, unlike the *AA groups.
I've noticed Google getting less and less effective all the time. I do a search, and 3/4 of the sites are 'fake' results that send me to ad pages with their own (totally useless) search results.
On important searches, I often spend 10-15 minutes tuning my query to help eliminate those sites so I can get to the real results.
Hey, Google - here's a free idea for you... do domain lookups on all your listings, and adjust PageRank based on who registers the domains. That should work for a few months before they start taking care to register each new domain with unique contact information.
People used to say the same thing about AltaVista. It was the best search engine of its time, and people thought it was untouchable. Then BAM, Google comes in and fucks them up royally.
Some other search engine will eventually come along. They will provide a better service, and people will migrate away from Google.
Is he complaining about actual content being churned out, or scrapers, which just plagiarise real sites? Please google, get rid of the scrapers, you'll clean up the internet in one fell swoop.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Google is now responsible for a fairly large portion of the plain old spam I get. As in, their computers send it. Their latest gimmick is a new "feature" of Google Groups:
1. You can't send emailed abuse reports, they don't process those.
2. You have to go to the group's home page and click "Report This Group".
3. But you can't unless you're logged into a Google account, and your Google account is a member of the group. Otherwise, you just get the "you must be a member of this group to see this page" page.
4. You can directly navigate to groups.google.com/abuse/, but...
5. They don't do anything about spam reports anyway.
Similarly, they are apparently rapidly becoming a world leader in Usenet spam, because they don't have any particular objection to people posting spam. Or, if they do, it has not yet risen to the level of the kind of objection that results in doing something to stop it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
"Google's next big challenge, which is dealing with the spammers it helped create."
Except, "No." Creating a profitable system does not mean one helped to create policy-infringers, law-breakers, and exploiters. If we accepted that irrationality, we could say that young, pretty boys and girls create child rapists, cars with windows spontaneously generate car thieves, and political systems create thieving dirty politicians. But that's not true.
Exploiters and criminals are created through a combination of their own high expectations, the lack of opportunity (by their standards), and their lack of ethical conviction. They only act opportunistically or impulsively on exploitable situations.
For the last couple of months I've been using Duck Duck Go with great results, and with much less spam than Google. Plus you get warm fuzzies from using it. Written in Perl on top of FreeBSD, respects your privacy and supports all manner of yummy syntax.
Couple that with zero click info such as:
define sfumato 12 usd in eur 12 cm in inches
I find myself not missing Google in the slightest when it comes to search.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
russia and china make up 21.5% of the worlds population - i am sure the 90% result will skew a lot more with these included.
This puzzled me: "profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons"
I'm thinking, "Mesothelioma suits? What's that, a protective suit you wear when you're working around asbestos?"
Before Google came up I realized he was talking about lawsuits. Gees, lawyers and businessmen talking sure confuse this old nerd sometimes. To a businessman, "suit" is what lawyers bring, to a nerd, it's usually protective gear.
If you go talking about RAM here, I'm going to think "memory". If you're talking about trucks, you need to say "Dodge RAM". If you're talking about Mesothelioma suits, you need to say "Mesothelioma lawsuits unless you're talking about protection from asbestos.
Free Martian Whores!
This is what happens when you don't have competition... Bing and yahoo just don't return decent results compared to google even with these issues.
Google does have competition. You named two of them. Baidu and Yandex are the more serious ones.
The fact that search spam is not a solved problem is not due to lack of competition. All search engines are competing for the best (least spammy) results. It is a really hard problem. If you disagree, feel free to get very rich by solving it yourself. You don't even need to build a large company to compete directly. A startup with a spam filter that improves search by 5% would easily get bids to be acquired for a lot of money by more than one of the companies you named.
So why bother creating any content if some asshole is just going to come rip you off?
While using Google during the holidays, I was having the first three pages of result filled with those damn click-through sites. This morning I tried the same search keys and they are no longer in the results. I think the spammers were taking advantage of everyone taking holiday leave at Google.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I see 3 problems with normal people using google:
- Normal people can't tell the diference a scam and a honest page. The preferences are reverted, what you know is the honest page of a hacker (peple like Stallman, or the homepage of a project like MediaWiki) will look scary and dangerous, while will love a page full of flash ads, that probably are tryiing to install spyware.
- Normal people are the target of spammers. If you search for tecnical problems with ocropus, you will see less spam targeted at you. While if you search something popular like soccer of music... you will see a lot of shit.
- Normal people and spammers have similar mindset. Want everything withouth paying. Don't have any tecnical moral or respect for internet. Is not his home, so see not problem is shitting here, making internet worse. This bias spammers and normal people to the same areas of the internet.
-Woof woof woof!
I certainly hope so. The most galling thing for me, a prolific original content provider (if I say so myself!), is seeing these scraper sites out-ranking me with domains years younger than my own and no visible effort at SEO, black hat or otherwise. It would be nice if AdSense actually enforced their policy of not being allowed on content used without permission.
If Google were serious about competing in enterprise search against vendors like Autonomy, they wouldn't have to worry about losing significant business here. Google's problems here are a direct result of the fact that they haven't spun off a unit that is really funded and operated like an organization that wants to get down and dirty with those customers.
Considering the amount of cash I've seen thrown at Autonomy (it would make Larry Ellison wet himself in excitement), I just don't understand it. Sure, it's not sexy and it's often bureaucratic as hell, but Google could easily afford to spin off their appliance unit into a software/service arm that operates independently of the main "cool" business.
I hadn’t noticed.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Manimal.
Google search results used to be reliable. You could refine your searches, based on previous search results, and progressively narrow your search until you get what you seek. Now you keep getting paid ad "search results."
I'm sick of this shit. Any ideas for an alternative search engine?
Google is the 900-pound gorilla of search, with around 90% of the market (excluding China and Russia)
You can do that? Well, in that case I'm the 900-pound gorilla of getting laid (excluding people who don't live in their mom's basement)
How about giving the searcher two more controls in 'Preferences'. First, a "radius" control, to set the discrimination for a tighter or looser match the the search criteria. That is, if I loosen the controls, I'll get more matches, but less accuracy. Conversely, I could eliminate anything that doesn't match, exactly, all terms.
Then, for some real fun, the Second control sets the "start page" to show results on, from 1 to 50, for example, or 'Random'. You may find yourself seeing some much less travelled sites, that still meet your criteria. Most important, it meets the "user option" test. Don't like it? don't use it!
Hey Google! This one's on me. You could probably have it all coded up by morning, right?
look what happen to myspace when facebook showed up. I don't think Google is too dumb to understand they have an interest in getting rid of search spammers.
It's a tough problem to which there isn't a single magical solution. My company hopes to mitigate at least some of these problems over time. The initial results from our website correlation system give us reason to hope that this problem can be solved.
Making the Internet a better place for everyone...Delineal
Google broken? It doesn't seem like it to me - most of the time the results I get are pretty relevant - and the few that aren't stand out enough that I rarely click on them. Maybe I'm not searching for highly profitable search terms? I know I'm not that interested in mesothelioma, for one thing.
...guess what's going to happen? You're going to be *the target* to hit for spam. That's the way spam works, volume. Email, Altavista, Google...it doesn't matter what the target it is, as long as it nets you the biggest audience. Additionally, every article I see that complains about Google search spam never uses any good examples.
Hmm, I googled iPhone 4 case. 3rd link...shopping results for iPhone 4 cases which has a huge list of different types of cases, places I can get them, local retailer locations, and so on. How is that "utterly useless?"
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
With other companies, you'd probably be right. However, over the years, I've noticed that Google doesn't strive for "good enough." It's why Google is one of the few companies I genuinely feel has earned their billions of dollars, and continue to do so. If "good enough" were good enough for Google, they would have been killed before they even got started good in the search engine game. Does anyone else here remember Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, and probably at least a half dozen other search engines that have fallen by the wayside? Do you think that it's just because people happened to randomly choose Google, or because they looked at the status quo and said, "We can do better."?
Also, does anyone remember what search engines were becoming? They were basically ad portals. Lots of "CLICK THE MONKEY!" banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, etc. In theory, this is what the advertisers loved, right? Google came along and said, "Hey, if we look out for the people using the search engine, even at the expense of short-term profits, we'll be huge and famous, and the money will come later." As you can see, it did.
I know I sound like a commercial, and I assure you that I don't work for Google and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way other than as a user. But it's one of the few major corporations that I really respect. Most companies, once they become giants, shift into the mode of protecting their assets by preventing innovation that could be a threat to their business model. Google, on the other hand, is doing everything they can to promote innovation and hard-core research and development. To date, they have done a hell of a lot for its users, even when they didn't have to, under the theory that long-term, it will all work out.
I don't know why you have the idea that they're in it just to do "good enough," or that they'd sacrifice user experience for the sake of short-term advertiser happiness, but based on their past record, I'd say you're projecting a general impression of large companies onto one that breaks the mold, and you're wrong.
Let me Bing that for you...
ditto. Clusty is still clean..
1234
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
If you want to get information about how Drug $A interacts with Drug $B, Google's pretty useless - you mostly get sites that want to sell you drugs and list $A and $B, or at best lists of medical papers, usually scraped by reformatters, which have some paper on $A and another paper on $B. (Of course, if you want information on how Drug $A interacts with Drug $$V, then you're totally out of luck :-)
I've given up on Google and use Wikipedia for any medical information.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That article is about link spam, which is the older Google problem. The newer problem is "places" spam. Since Google merged Google Places results in with web search results, spammers have been hitting Google Places hard. Google Places spam involves both creating phony "place pages" and adding phony "recommendations". Recommendation spamming turns out to be easy and effective, easier than creating link farms.
For a good overview, see Mike Blumenthal's article on "Illusory Laptop Repair". He inserted a phony business into Google Places, locating it on a railroad crossing. He gave it some recommendations ("The best illusory repair shop ever!"). Search Google for "virus repair bradford pa", and there it is. Despite writeups of this in many SEO blogs, it's still live in Google.
Want to fix the problem? Google is trying to hire a "Program Manager, Evaluation, Search Quality".
Scrapers who are able to get a high search engine ranking have a reduced incentive for using AdWords.
Google's AdWords business depends on the quality of the search engine from several angles. A good search engine attracts searchers, and discourages the profit-motivated keyword stuffers, forcing them to use the paid channel. (Which they will want to do, even if reluctantly, if the search engine is popular!)
Google used to be good.
Now people keep using Google only because of its past reputation: because google has become a verb synonymous with searching the web. Many people don't even know that Google wasn't the first search engine or that there are others.
But Google knows very well that you can only ride on your brand for so long.
I think one thing they need to do is to listen to webmasters more and find some way to become more responsive to active spam reports, without consuming too many resources or opening /that/ system to abuse.
Used to be 800 pound gorillla, and now it's 900 pounds. Did they start feeding them McD's or something?
I call all BS, Google got popular because it had 0 graphical ads on its home page, not because it did a superior job in search. When looking for products EXPECT ANNOYING ADVERTISEMENTS. PS: The also got sued for putting in payed advertisements on the top results, loosing the do no evil reputation long ago.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Google vs the spammers reminds me of the Red Queen effect in evolution. Basically, google is in an arms race with spammers and other crooks. In order for their search results to remain relevant, google needs to be smarter than the spammers, and constantly on the lookout for any new methods. There is nothing they can 'solve' that the spammers wouldn't find a way around. Perhaps the only way we would ever be rid of spam results is with some sort of AI that automatically adapts to the spam methods. A Google Skynet, if you will.
The problem with that term is that you have to possess some degree of intelligence to actually be able to spell it
Now you understand why Google Search corrects misspelled words in queries. It increases AdWords' impression rate.
If you're talking about trucks, you need to say "Dodge RAM".
After the Fiat takeover, Chrysler separated the Ram truck division from the Dodge brand.
is the google shopping-search.
Since I don't let google execute code on my system
( too many google tentacles everywhere )
I go to froogle, search, get the error page, click the ~that didn't work: try this~ link,
then get the Web results, then click the Shopping link at the top,
and voila: shopping results.
Cheers!
So you don't have a problem with fake results appearing in your google results then complain about fake results in your google results?
Your second paragraph is EXACTLY what people are complaining about. Instead of searching for reviews and finding reviews you get countless filler sites that have zero content but get rated higher.
But to be honest, this has always been an issue and we are just getting more demanding. Most tech improves perceptibly over time but search engines are still stuck in the dark ages of 2000. Personally I have long believed there is a room for an engine that allows people to easily filter their searches and share their filters.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The writer's wit... it's as cunning as a fox!
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
but less spammy searches come from more keywords, sorta like how bing just added buttons to do so and called it a new feature.(and then a went to annoy me with their ads everywhere)
if google had a report "spam search" that just said add more keywords when u clicked it they be better at teaching this to people
warning pointless sig
motherfscking? I don't get it.
He's tired of all the mother file system checking spam results on this mother file system checking search engine?
I don't even think that's a proper sentence. Please be more verbose with what you're saying, and drop the censorship, we're all adults here. Okay, I love you, buh bye!