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Google Fires Back About Search Engine Spam
coondoggie writes "The folks at Google are taking issue over spam and the quality of Google searches, which some claim has gone down in recent months. Today on Google's official blog, Principal Engineer Matt Cutts said, 'January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English.' Cutts also explained that the company has made a few significant changes to their method of indexing."
But it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the information I really want/need in my searchs.Maybe it is time to change your metrics.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Every time I search for something these days I get some ridiculous set of non-results due to the fuzzy matching. I search for "TIPC layer3" google nicely finds me results about TCP Layer3 because google thinks I must have typo'd something. This happens constantly with one or two letter off searches where the search results I get are adjusted because the alternative ranks higher.
Google's search is not getting better, it's getting more and more 'Clippy' every year.
Google has a dilemma. If their search engine takes you directly to the place you want to go, they don't make any money. For a good analysis of this, see "Google Sucks All the Way to the Bank", by Jill Whalen She is, unfortunately, right. It's essential for Google's success that some of their own ads be more relevant than their search results. Part of their revenue comes from sending users on a side-trip to AdWords-heavy pages. We've measured this, using a browser plug-in which reports AdWords appearances to us. About 36% of domains with AdWords (counting domain names, not traffic) are what we consider "bottom feeders", junk sites with a commercial purpose but no identifiable business behind them.
On the local search front, spam in Google Places is even worse than in their main search results. This, though, appears to be due to ineptitude, not malice. Google added a business search system to Google Maps a year or two ago; that's what Google Places really is. You've been able to go to a Google Maps page and search for businesses for some time now. Few people knew this.
Then, in October 2010, Google merged the map search results into their main search results. "Places" results suddenly got top billing in Google. The "search engine optimization" (SEO) industry swung into action, and began spamming Google Places on a massive scale. (We have a paper on this, which has been mentioned by Techdirt, the New York Observer, etc. It's an amusing read.) Recommendation spamming, which had been going on for a while at a low level, grew substantially once recommendations started affecting Google search results.
This, incidentally, is why Blekko won't work. If they get enough market share to matter, techniques will be developed to spam them into meaninglessness.
Stopping web spam is technically quite possible. We do it by finding the business behind the web site, and doing some automated due diligence. We check business records, SEC filings, BBB ratings, and Dun and Bradstreet to verify business legitimacy. We down-rate most of the junk. We try to err in the down-rating direction, taking the position that it's the job of a company to demonstrate their legitimacy by using their real name and address on their web site, which has to match real-world business records. Our demo site demo site for this shows what search is like if you take a hard line on spam.
Our approach requires more of a hard-ass attitude than Google's business model can perhaps afford. With Bleekko making Google look foolish, though, and Bing slowly improving, Google may have to actually do something that works, even if it cuts into revenue from the spam.
if you add -site:example.com it removes all hits from that site. I have noticed recently that I no longer have to exclude sites that I used to, such as those that just copy excerpts from other message boards.
Perhaps they are watching.
In this context, spam means web sites that don't actually contain any real content, just junk text, lists of keywords, etc., together with paid links or banner ads and the like. They won't answer any question you may have, unless you are asking to see more spam. There is more and more of this crap, and it dominates some web search queries.
I've certainly noticed the quality of searches going down recently, at least for less common searches. I regularly search for oddball system files, software, drivers, etc, the first few pages of results are often very scammy looking sites devoid of actual content and what I am looking for is a dozen pages in. Often these results trump even official big company web sites. Heck while half asleep I used Google to search for OpenOffice, clicked the first link, clicked a big download button, and when trying to install it later I realized whatever I downloaded was certainly *NOT* OpenOffice. (Don't know what it was, I deleted it quickly)
Here's a great example of returning pages that don't contain what you're searching for.
Search for +open +cat +mug +frame
The first link only contains 2 of the 4 terms.
Returning a page that does not contain a required search term is a failure state.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Actually it does, the description text is hidden until some user actions are taken. A ctrl-f on the page may not return results for the terms, but viewing source and ctrl-f does.
insight through the mind