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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.'"
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."
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
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
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.
Believe it or not it's easier to be a good ad company if you're also a good search company. One doesn't have to suffer to the benefit of the other. It's easier to sell a product if it's a good product.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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/
Some other search engine will eventually come along. They will provide a better service, and Google will swallow them up like a ripe, juicy tomato.
FTFY
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
"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.
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!
If someone does, who will find out about it first: users or Google? If Google finds out first, they just have to stop the revenue-generating pollution to a degree that they remain best, and no one will ever know that the newcomer had briefly been better.
For all its "brokenness" Google just has to remain best and they'll win. And if that brokenness is a result of allowing noise because it makes them money, rather than a technology limitation, then it's something they have control of. I wouldn't bet on Google losing any time soon.
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!
There are two reasons for this, only one of which you can do anything about. The first is synonym matching. That's where you search for something like, I don't know, "website" and it will match "web page" as well. (I'm sure there are better examples). This is the one you can do something about, by putting +website, which forces it to appear as-is. You can also get this by putting a single word in quotes.
The second reason is that google matches not only text on the page, but also frequent text in anchors that link to it. That is to say, even if Slashdot didn't actually have the word "Slashdot" anywhere on it, it would still show up as the first match because of all of the people linking to it with the word Slashdot in their anchor text somewhere. This is the one that you can't do anything about. I do wish you could put something beside a keyword to tell Google to only show websites that contain that keyword, without any fancy stuff. (Though for all I know, maybe the + operator does that too...)
The third is that Google can't crawl every website every second. (Three, there are three reasons.) Dynamic pages will always be slightly out of date, so if a Slashdot article slips off the front page between being crawled and when you search, you'll be frustrated. That's mostly avoided because if you match, say, a Slashdot article, your top link will almost always be a link to the actual article+comments, rather than to the front page. Even still, if you find a match to a comment in a Slashdot article, when you click the link that comment might be collapsed, and thus will not show up in a text search unless the keyword was in the first handful of words. There are plenty of non-Slashdot examples as well, I'm sure.
Fourth, a fanatical devotion to the pope...four...I'll just come in again shall I?
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Good enough only involves being better than the competition. Which they were.
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
I think the point a lot of us are trying to make is that Google got where they are today by those means, but there's been a shift over the last couple years toward more short-term thinking. We all came to Google because they did what you said - they did search better than others.
The problem is that while not intentionally being evil (in my opinion) Google makes huge money from "Made for AdSense" type SEO garbage sites. If they took all those guys out, they'd make less. At the same time, they need to be careful they don't "AltaVista" themselves out of relevance.
Maybe not by intent, but by action/inaction, Google has betrayed those initial principles in favor of "what works and what makes money".
This whole article and discussion led me to doing so research on Google itself about blacklist features. For a period of time, if you used Google while logged in, you'd get this option to kind of down-rank search results/domains that popped up in your searches. Over time, the idea is that you'd get more relevant results and Google would learn about what folks found to be useful and not. Then, at some point about a year ago, they removed the ability to blacklist/demote/downlink in favor of "starring" good results.
I found lots of discussions on the Google support forums about folks asking for BlackList features, and when Google folks replied, they suggested using the - operator... even when folks time and time again said that they knew how to use the - operator but wanted a PERMANENT PERSONAL BLACK LIST, Google folks kind of ignored the issue or deliberately misunderstood, suggesting workarounds.
(January 2009 Google support thread)
I'm thinking someone's written a FireFox addon that would provide google searches, but automatically append " -scummydomain.com -crappydomain.com ... etx) to every search before sending. If they haven't I need to teach myself how to write one so I can make it.
The Digital Sorceress