Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search

http://www.marco.org/2617546197

by ihodes • 16 years ago

327 178 16 years ago

shadowpwner2• 16 years ago

Please, not a rehash of what we've been reading for the last couple weeks.

macrael• 16 years ago

I do find it interesting how this has become a meme, but I think that Marco has added something interesting to the discussion. I like his categories of searches, and the decision he outlines google as needing to make.

But, really, if you don't want to talk about this subject anymore, close the tab.

shadowpwner2• 16 years ago

Apologies. I skimmed through the first few paragraphs and thought that it was a summary. I was attempting to help HN cut back on multiple posts on the same old content. Ah well, I guess I won't be doing that any more.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

Wonder how many duplicate topic and mostly duplicate content articles we're going to see about how Google provides duplicate content and duplicate topic answers to searches?

My irony meter is pegging.

ivankirigin2• 16 years ago

It is a public debate whose nature is similar discourse that focuses in on an approximate truth. Your comment is especially unfair when directed at such a consistently high quality blog.

wonderzombie• 16 years ago

Could the OP be referring more specifically to HN? HN is akin to a curated system, and of course there are plenty of duplicate submissions on HN.

I'm not expressing an opinion one way or the other. Rather, that was my take on his comment, which amused me.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

I apologize. My intent was to use sarcasm to comment about the nature of internet publishing and curating in general, and I believe it came across as criticism towards this author or work. That was not my intention. In fact it was just the opposite.

There is a lot of trash that gets returned in a Google search at times, yes, but there are also a lot of authors out there simply taking a subject and providing their own unique spin on it. Every time somebody publishes -- anything at all -- they open themselves up to exactly the types of criticism the author of this pieces makes about other publishers on the net. I saw other commenters doing this on HN about this particular article and the irony struck me as astounding. The only thing I would have added to his piece is a discussion about exactly what he means as "bad" or "good", since everybody fills in the blanks with their own prejudices when these concepts are mentioned, and that's not a good thing for purposes of the discussion.

I should have known better than to try to be subtle. Humor almost never consistently works the way you want it to on the net. Always backfires in some fashion.

ergo982• 16 years ago

One solution may be for Google to radically change their algorithms and policies for web search to de-emphasize phrase-matching and more strongly prioritize inbound links and credibility.

Inbound links and the calculated "credibility" from the same are what killed the web the first time around. There was once a democratized web era when that actually worked -- when millions of people had their little Goecities pages and were linking the cool stuff -- but in the modern era it's 99% consumers who cast no votes, and the last 1% is extraordinarily incestuous circular link love: Marcos links to Coding Horror who links to Daring Fireball who links to Scoble who links to Marcos, etc.

People with neither information or authority end up being the credible authority on matters they have aren't authorities on. Scoble a few years back pointed out the fact that according to search engines he was the most important Robert in the world. That is a frightening concept.

We will move from an era of search engines to an era of expert engines. Many of the questions I used to "ask" Google I now ask of Wolfram Alpha, and its approach has turned out to be quite useful. Expand that computer knowledge more broadly, and improve the human syntax parsing. and we'll have a winner. Several such systems are built around computer learning of the wikipedia corpus.

mlinsey• 16 years ago

Several such systems are built around computer learning of the wikipedia corpus.

Any ones in particular that you've found work well?

aheilbut2• 16 years ago

Cuil, of course!

michaelbuckbee• 16 years ago

Powerset worked well enough that Microsoft bought them for $100 million.

retube• 16 years ago

I noticed recently that Google has started to give explicit answers to some search queries - e.g http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=json+content+type

ergo982• 16 years ago

Yup, that is exactly that sort of "machine knowledge" that is beneficial.

I suspect where their algorithm isn't somewhat sure of the answer it essentially does A:B testing with users -- a while back I asked it who the governor of Illinois was and it replied Blagojevich (long after he was ousted). I pointed it out to a friend and they tried and got Quinn. In both cases it gives you the option of flagging whether it is wrong, though it seems suspect to let people who are asking the question in the first place declare its rightness, beyond egregiously wrong answers.

noibl3• 16 years ago

In a lot of the comments around this lately, people have been saying that this is something Google can fix, or needs to fix.

I would suggest that the content farms' success in gaming specifically Google's algorithm was an inevitability (whatever the current state of the arms race) and the only thing that will weaken the effectiveness of their techniques is to expose their business model to a greater range of algorithms. If you have three or four search engines all working on slightly different principles, it becomes a lot harder to game them all with the same content, even if gaming any one of them would be trivial. In other words, competition in the SE space at the algorithmic level is something we sorely need to see.

In parallel, my suggestion for one new search engine to add to the mix: a crawler for unsubsidised content. That is, the results consist solely of pages that don't carry advertising of any kind. This wouldn't exclude ecommerce sites but would exclude most kinds of affiliate marketing. Subscriber-only sites could pay to be indexed at a flat rate, though guaranteeing that this fee wouldn't affect rankings might be tricky. Alternatively a journal-access style of subscription model could see the SE paying the content site owner when one of its paying users consumes their information.

nostrademons2• 16 years ago

http://xkcd.com/810/

The ideal solution would be to make it so that the easiest path for someone trying to abuse Google is simply to be constructive. If your abuse is what people want anyway, then you've won. It's sort of like capitalism: assume that people are nasty sonuvabitches who will lie and cheat their way to fame, money, and power, and then make it so the easiest way to get those is simply to make things that other people want.

Obviously, we're not there yet, and a lot of these spam pages are fairly useless to visitors.

noibl3• 16 years ago

The problem is that it's a tug-of-war situation and in a tug-of-war, you win by passing a minimum threshold; there's no such thing as a runaway victory. Rather than leading to a kind of informational meritocracy, what you're talking about leads to the situation we're in now, where content that is perceived by some proportion of SE users as 'good enough' grows at a rate that is much faster than natural, and drowns out all other content.

If you take advertising out of the equation then the motives for producing general-topic content revert to what they were a few years ago: personal expression, free expert opinion, community discussion, journalism in search of subscribers.

gojomo• 16 years ago

a crawler for unsubsidized content

Note that this doesn't require an all-new crawl/engine: just for an existing engine to offer an advanced operator that filters ad-drenched pages from results. Even just an operator that eliminated AdSense sites would be a big win for some queries.

noibl3• 16 years ago

While technically feasible, this would rule out a large number of high quality content sites which are currently ad-supported. For example, specialist community forums often carry ads just to cover costs. You need to allow for a different funding model for sites like that, such as subscriptions.

cap4life3• 16 years ago

While I agree that we need to see more algorithmic competition in this space, I fail to understand how any of these new SEs would generate revenue apart from the current ad-supported/PPC model. If these SEs continue to use ads to make money, then the problem of content farm spam would simply migrate to these sites. All they would need to do is to figure out how best to game the new algorithm.

boreacrat• 16 years ago

Just got a mail from Duck Duck Go that they're already working on that one:)

randrews2• 16 years ago

This kind of worries me.

On the one hand, Google isn't the best web search tool. I've switched to DuckDuckGo, and so has everyone who's seen me use it. But, I think Google still provides a valuable public service: indexing the entire web and handling that much traffic is not an easy task, and a lot of other things (like DDG) depend on that humongous cluster.

So on the one hand I want to see the best search engine win, but on the other hand if Google goes out of business (or more likely, starts losing money and canceling projects) then I'm afraid it'll take a lot of things out with it, with no clear replacement.

poutine• 16 years ago

Indeed perhaps time to give duckduckgo a try. They seem to actively filter out all ad sites. I've been going nuts in the past couple months with google searching for technical solutions to problems, command clicking on links to open in tabs and discovering that most are clone ad sites from a question on stackoverflow.

randrews2• 16 years ago

It was these that won me over: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html . Most of the time I know what general sort of thing I'm looking for, and I'm happy to give the search engine hints if it'll help. Even if I don't, it'll essentially flat-out ask me what sort of thing I want, and then give me more specific results: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ruby

But, I mean, I'm doing all this by typing it into Chrome's address bar. And a lot of the time, DDG is just returning results from Google's API. I want to use DDG, but I want to make sure Google still exists because I need it even if I don't use it.

ntoshev• 16 years ago

DuckDuckGo uses the index and ranking of Bing, not Google.

patio112• 16 years ago

I think people, possibly including me, get irked with Demand Media et al more because they're more successful than we think they deserve to be rather than because they actually decrease the value of the SERPs. For SERPS where DM ranks well, the results prior to DM existing generally pretty much sucked. Maybe that is a Google issue, maybe that is an Internet issue (memo to Internet: middle aged women exist, please write for them, kthxbye), but for whatever reason, if you routinely Googled for [how do i make a blueberry pie] every week for the last ten years I don't think you ever had an awesome search experience.

DM pages are adequate for much of what they rank for, in much the way that USA Today is an adequate newspaper, your local state school provides adequate degrees in history, etc etc. They're adequate in a scalable manner, though, and they understand Google much better than the average publisher, which means they get visibility in excess of what some people might expect.

P.S.

Demand Media: http://www.ehow.com/how_2933_make-blueberry-pie.html

Virtuous publishers on the Internet: http://www.pickyourown.org/blueberrypie.php

If I wanted to bake a blueberry pie, I'd go for that second page every day of the week, but it is highly non-obvious to me that it is a better result qua search engine result than the DM page. I love this example because I think Google fundamentally doesn't think [how do i make a blueberry pie] is looking for a blueberry pie recipe. Most searches will not actually convert to pies. For the 98% of searchers who merely want to satisfy their pie voyeurism need, the DM content may well be better.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

(memo to Internet: middle aged women exist, please write for them, kthxbye)

Many years ago, when I was working at Joseph Beth Bookstore (where I suspect Borders stole a lot of their ops manual ideas from) management there told me that the primary demographic there was middle aged women. Middle aged women often have disposable income. Many of them are married homemakers and have tons of spare time. I suspect much of Oprah's success is built on that demographic.

If I were Oprah, I'd position her cable channel as just a part of her latest "new media" venture -- just one outlet for Oprah branded content. In her shoes, I'd make diverse investments in mobile and in TV-integrated platforms. I'd offer advertisers packages for reaching all those different outlets simultaneously. If Oprah does this, I'd recommend working with her. If she can't see this path clearly, then I'd recommend disrupting her.

PaulHoule2• 16 years ago

My mother-in-law used to be an Oprah fan but she recently 'cut the cord' with the cable company. Personally I think people like her could really enjoy an experience like Digg or Reddit if all the stars aligned correctly.

eitland• 16 years ago

Good point.

On the other hand it took google more than a couple of weeks to get rid of kods.net, too. Where ehow is readable, kods was, as far as I could tell, just a lot of computer generated oracle words mixed from other sources.

awongh• 16 years ago

I think I see where you're going, but I disagree. To me, link #2 is superior even if I just want pie voyeurism. (mainly, it has instructional pictures) I would click on #2 every time.

However, if #2 is buried on the 3rd page of results like it sometimes is, then I would not....

There is however, a definite gradation of google spam. ehow is somewhere near the top... domain squatters somewhere near the bottom...

bambax17• 16 years ago

> [how do i make a blueberry pie]

You know very well that this is not how search works. You don't "ask a question" to the search engine like you would ask your grandmother.

You type in words that you expect to be in the pages you're looking for, and the search engine lists pages that actually contain ALL of those words.

One of the main improvements of Google in the very early days was that it used the AND operand by default, whereas competing search engines used OR by default, resulting in an incredible amount of noise.

In essence, searching for "how do i make a blueberry pie" (with quotes) should return only spam, because only spammy and SEO optimized sites would contain the phrase as such. A real recipe would maybe contain the phrase "how TO make a blueberry pie" but not "how do i..."

- - -

I think your point was that "middle aged women" don't know any of this.

It would be arguable (probably wrong, but still) that people who don't know this, who didn't make the effort to understand a little how all of this works, deserve the spam they get.

There is a good way to discriminate between good and bad content, and that is to know a little about what you're searching in order to search for words that will be present in good quality content and NOT in spammy pages.

For example, it's reasonnable to expect a good recipe to give instructions in metric system as well as imperial; if you add "celsius" to the search then the second (informative) recipe arrives first:

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+make+blueberry+pie+cel...

patio112• 16 years ago

I think your point was that "middle aged women" don't know any of this.

No. That is overbroad, untrue, and would be very injurious to my professional reputation. I said that the Internet is skewed away from producing content responsive to their needs, which is about as controversial as saying that they are slightly underrepresented on HN relative to, I don't know, twenty-something males.

Non-technical users frequently use natural language search. The experience for natural language search is fairly poor. There are many classes of search which offer poor experience, but it is the one which leaps to my head first because I deal with non-technical users every day.

people who don't know this, who didn't make the effort to understand a little how all of this works, deserve the spam they get.

Words cannot express the depth of my distaste for this position. I will accept that "Google screwed up" or "I screwed up" if one of my users has a suboptimal Internet experience (which starts at Google because Google is the Internet and ideally ends at my site), but I cannot accept that she is responsible if she has a poor user experience. We've got the teams of PhDs, the highly paid SEO consultants, and the lifetime of building an accurate mental model of how the devil box works. She wants to teach kids to read, not learn magic incantations. It should -- "should" in the sense of "would be optimal for the business", "would be optimal for society", and "as a moral imperative for computing professionals" -- just work for her.

andrew1• 16 years ago

> You type in words that you expect to be in the pages you're looking for, and the search engine lists pages that actually contain ALL of those words.

It's not as simple as that though is it? Otherwise how would those GoogleBombs or whatever they're called work where searching for 'warmongering idiot' or something turn up George Bush's biography on whitehouse.gov. I think search result quality is a bit more involved than just testing whether a page contains a set of words.

brc• 16 years ago

"You don't "ask a question" to the search engine like you would ask your grandmother."

It doesn't matter one jot 'how search works'. What matters is how the majority of their users think it works. And they think it works by asking a question. So publishers need to work with that.

rmc2• 16 years ago

I think your point was that "middle aged women" don't know any of this.

No. The web (and computers) should adapt to us, humans. Not the other way around. If people want to search for a question, then that's the correct way to search.

The reason 'spammy' sites show up high for that query is because they are better at knowing what people are searching for.

halostatue• 16 years ago

I am reasonably search-savvy, and when I am starting to research something out of my comfort zone, I often start with a "how do I…" search. I sometimes find exactly what I need with it, but more often I get enough information to perform other, better searches.

Your assumption that people don't search that way is dead wrong, though: I've seen many non-technical people do just that sort of search. My mother being one.

I know: the plural of anecdote is not data and all, but I'm fairly certain most people don't think of search the way you suggest.

pvg• 16 years ago

I don't know what a 'SERP' is but I don't think anyone shows up at Google bright and early in the morning with the burning desire to deliver the 'USA Today' quality of search. In fact, we had it before Google came along and it left much to be desired.

I don't know much about blueberry pie searches either or if the quality of Google results is really in decline. It seems pretty reasonable to expect original content (StackOverflow) to show up before copies of the same content. Or the top search engine to aim for a quality standard above 'USA Today'. Otherwise we can just use USA Today instead of Google.

newman314• 16 years ago

SERP = Search Engine Result Page

nervechannel• 16 years ago

The StackOverflow scrapers ranking higher than SO is the thing that most irks me about the big G at the moment. That and all the sites like wareseeker that just act as pointless aggregators of FLOSS download sites or forum sites.

Last time I tried Bing though they weren't any better, and DuckDuckGo had really low coverage. Maybe it's time to try again.

true_religion• 16 years ago

Picking Virtuous over Demand Media is your opinion.

Personally, I've been using eHow's results for cooking for about half a year now.

I don't need pictorial aids for cooking--I know how to cook. What I need is a recipe, and a series of concise steps to follow. It's easy to toss it up on the laptop or table, then glance at every so often to make sure you haven't strayed too far from the recipee.

Demand Media is like a virtual cookbook, Virtuous is like calling your parents for help and having them hold your hand through every step.

jpwagner• 16 years ago

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

aheilbut2• 16 years ago

I'm not quite sure how it will happen, but at some point I think it will be beneficial to commoditize the underlying crawl and index data, so that there can be more domain specific focus and more diverse sources of innovation applied to solving this and other search problems. One or two sources trying to be all things to all people and all problems isn't going to scale.

Blekko's slashtags are a good start, but it needs to go much further.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

It’s impossible to do any meaningful product research with Google.

Right now, I often start my product research within Amazon. However, that's only a start, as Amazon isn't great for everything. For large appliances, Consumer Reports is a good starting place. I guess I'm an example of the switch from search engines to "expert" sites.

yhlasx2• 16 years ago

Why people complain about product researches, there is "google products" where you will be searching only products, not any spam.

bambax17• 16 years ago

Amazon is great but search on Amazon doesn't work too well; what works very well is to use Google and restrict the search to Amazon:

site:amazon.com some product

petercooper• 16 years ago

Decreasingly? This has been a rollercoaster for years. I was more of a Webmasterworld regular a few years ago than now but around 2005-2006 a lot of people thought Google had gone to pot.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/04/google_bigdaddy_chao... http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3040496.htm http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2006/apr/6.html http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34407.htm http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/feedback-webspam/

Plus ça change..

apedley• 16 years ago

I think the integration of social media is a possible solution. Recommendations and likes (from Facebook) or other places are hard to artificially jack up and can also offer great results if it ties them to your friends. I like the direction Bing is going with this. It is the only way I can see to get large human edited results of the web.

Unless Google develops highly advanced AI (which is a possibility) computer algorithms can be gamed. Humans can be gamed as well but because we are all so different I don't think there is a single approach that would fool a large segment of the population at once.

rjvir• 16 years ago

"Recommendations and likes (from Facebook) or other places are hard to artificially jack up"

If recommendations and likes are added to Google's algorithm, people will find ways to artificially jack them up. For example, marketers have aligned networks of Digg users to increase the amount of Diggs. I find it hard to believe that Demand Media and others will not be able to artificially inflate Facebook likes.

jacques_chester• 16 years ago

A first step would be to hide the queries data (especially trending queries). It was an interesting curio but its major consumers now are spammers.

ivankirigin2• 16 years ago

Could it possibly be at google is in the middle of an innovator's dilemma?

Twitter, hacker news, tumblr, and quora are all really shitty google replacements. But I use them to get certain kinds of information. It isn't enough to justify a radical change at google -- especially if they are even slightly focused on maintaining revenue.

There must an an opportunity for a more curated experience where the browsing behavior of a few thousand selected people can be used to juice authority. I don't think the human editors need to know they are doing that job. Maybe they should use chrome data for this.

prawn• 16 years ago

Is there a huge incentive for Google to improve if a lot of the content farms are monetised by AdSense and actually return Google money?

You could argue that they might lose their spot as the default search engine for a lot of people, but Microsoft has presumably thrown a huge amount of money and expertise at the problem and hardly dominated. I suspect this is not going to be a significant problem for Google in a hurry.

FiddlerClamp• 16 years ago

My guess for the near-to-mid term is celebrity curation.

I keep thinking about how Roger Ebert, after decades of movie reviews, started branching out into political (anti-Tea-Party) commentary and other articles. If you knew that a trusted brand (for many) like Ebert was curating home TVs, or projectors, or blank DVD media in an unbiased way, wouldn't you want to see what he had to say?

Or Thomas Dolby on audio equipment, Sting on Tantric books, and so on. They'd make money through affiliate links or even subscriptions.

stretchwithme• 16 years ago

I have to say there's some truth to this. Why is it that I increasingly must search through the search results just to find the site that originally published the string returned in the first 3 to 8 results?

I don't want to patronize all these sites repackaging content created by others, yet they continually appear before the creator.

gallerytungsten• 16 years ago

One wonders if Google is becoming the new Yahoo. If so, a big opportunity for the likes of DuckDuckGo and other nimble searchers. Today's upstarts can also run on the cloud, sidestepping the need to build Google-scale data centers (at least initially).

tumult• 16 years ago

Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem has a section that talks about how the 'reticulum' (the internet, in the book's fictional world) was overrun with false copies of documents with slight changes made to them. 99.99% of all of the information on the internet was spam.

A huge industry of commercialized systems connected to the internet for the sole purpose of filling it with spam, and then the corporations would sell back filters and knowledge of which documents weren't spam to customers. Eventually, the algorithms used to modify documents developed a malicious edge, so that the thousands of spam copies of an original document would be deceptive in ways that would harm people (e.g., in Marco's electrical plug wiring example, the document would have been modified so that it could get you killed by telling you to touch the wrong wire or something.)

Inevitably, it spiraled out of control, and a sophisticated system of social trust and ranking was put in place by IT workers and systems administrators, which are a caste and race of people in the fictional world.

Good book. Prescient, even.

jf• 16 years ago

It wouldn't be the first prescient thing Neal Stephenson has put in a book. Whenever I see Google Earth, I think of Snow Crash.

astrange• 16 years ago

What do you mean? I don't remember any of the interesting parts of Snow Crash being about 3D globes with search results on them.

acon• 16 years ago

Since Google Earth was inspired by Snow Crash I'm not sure you can classify it as prescient in the same way.

andrewljohnson2• 16 years ago

This is much ado about nothing. Google has a few search problems, and they always have, and they always improve.

Also, if Marco is going to list some problems, how about listing some problem searches? I search for what he lists, and the top result is fine in most cases, and debatable in others.

You folks think Google sucks? I don't. It's awesome, and I rely on it more everyday.

johnny22• 16 years ago

It really depends on what you're searching for. I purchased an handset that runs android in september and was hoping to find out when it would be upgraded to a newer version of android. The first 2 pages were almost completely filled with the same article.

to be fair though, I tried the same search on duckduckgo and bing and got mostly the same results.

I was just expecting google to be better than that.

andrewljohnson2• 16 years ago

Sounds like an obscure search, and if you aren't going to list the search terms you tried, it's really hard to judge whether it's user error or Google error. Google is only psychic to a point.

lhnz• 16 years ago

It's a lot less good than it used to be.

fhars3• 16 years ago

What really irks me in the last few month is that google increasingly doesn't actually answer my questions. More often than not, none of the results on the first page contain all of my search terms, and most of the time it is the most specific term that it is missing everywhere. Or the big G has replaced that term with something completely unrelated. I have to prefix every search term with a + if I want to get a result quality that is even remotely similar to what use to be the default.

Matt_Cutts8• 16 years ago

Example searches? That's the most constructive way to help us improve.

muuh-gnu• 16 years ago

Isn't it telling that you, if youre speaking on behalf of google i.e. working there on search, dont even know where your weaknesses are dont know where to even begin? If you have to rely on community input to even spot a direction for improvement you probably are in deeper trouble than all these articles suggest. Would Google even be where it is today if they hadn't spotted a weakness and improved it a decade (or more) ago?

I've personally mostly given up google for basically _any_ kind of product search, because it reminded me of going through my spam-riddled email inbox before my provider hat spam filters (or before I switched to gmail). Before that, I've had to give up the Google Groups Usenet interface because it was so cluttered with spam, that it wasnt even funny any more how useless it was, and Google _still_ kept associating its name with it.

If you have to, kick the spammers out manually, to prevent users jumping ship, until you eventually sort it out algorithmically.

Edit: When you downvote a posting I put time in to write, you could at least tell me what downvoteworthy I actually did, so I can refrain from doing it in future, since it is in our common interest to avoid downvoting and being downvoted. So, can you please elaborate in hindsight?

bambax17• 16 years ago

Another story on the front page of HN today documents how the original paper linking vaccine to autism was a fraud (a downright lie).

Interestingly, when one searches for just "vaccine autism" in Google here are the titles of the first 4 results:

Medical fraud revealed in discredited vaccine-autism study

MMR vaccine controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'No evidence' for autism-vaccine link (cnn.com)

Journal: Study linking vaccine to autism was fraud - Yahoo! News

There are zero results from content farms in the first 20 results.

So, curiously, on such topics, content from content farms is completely filtered out by Google.

(If one searches for the same topics only on ehow.com for example, the results talk about a "controversy" and say nothing about an actual fraud).

Is the filtering the result of general Page Rank algorithms (pages on eHow on autism receiving less links than pages on cooking or wiring outlets) or are pages already weighted by topic, by Google? ("important topic" => "casual content" bad; "casual topic" => "casual content" ok)

fhars3• 16 years ago

Two examples I see in my history right now are

bsi +lnk scada +foof things i will not

In both cases the results (on www.google.com with a browser running with LANG=de_DE) without the plus are considerably worse, and foof is definitely not edible :-).

hispdcha• 16 years ago

Hi Matt,

I noticed you were looking for some examples to spam and thought I would show you some blatant spamming for some real estate searches. I got a job recently in a small town and noticed, as I was searching for real estate in the area, the same type of websites started popping up. I mean, these sites are horrible. I dugg further and I think I uncovered a pretty blatant spam ring. Here are the sites I have found thus far:

www.ogdenutahhomes.com www.utahhomesforsale.com www.kaysvilleutahrealestate.com www.royutrealestate.com www.ogdenrealestate.com www.tooeleutrealestate.com www.smithfieldutahrealestate.com www.utahcornerstone.com www.realestatelogan.com www.realestateinogden.com www.homes4saleinutah.com www.northernutahhomesearch.com www.searchcachehomes.com www.bountifuluthomes.com www.ogdenutahhomesforsale.com www.utahhomesforsale.mp www.loganrealestate.mp www.southernuthomes.com www.retireinlogan.com www.davis.countyutahrealestate.com www.alansharpbarker.com www.realestateprovoutah.com www.slcutrealestate.com www.homesforsalelogan.com www.cachevalleyfsbo.com www.cachevalleyhomesforsale.com www.homesinlogan.com www.homesinloganutah.com www.utahrealhomes.com www.searchloganhomes.com www.liveinlogan.com www.searchcachehomes.com www.providenceutahrealestate.com www.providenceutahhomes.com www.paw.utahcornerstone.com www.hyrumutahrealestate.com

All of these websites seem to be run by the same person. Feel free to pm me if you have any questions. Thanks!

Amnon• 16 years ago

Yes! Something changed in the search algorithm recently, for the worse. I search for X and get Y. Is this documented anywhere?

(I didn't know that a "+" prefix can fix this. Thanks for the info.)

moultano6• 16 years ago

We're working on it (as always.) There is a big improvement inspired by the stackoverflow post on its way shortly.

If people want to help out, the best thing to do is to post examples of specific queries. Those become the "fixed points" around which we can tune until we get it right. The more example queries the better, and I'll make sure they get to the right people.

A good way to get example queries is to look through your search history, which if turned on can be found here: http://www.google.com/searchhistory

Skywing• 16 years ago

Which stackoverflow post is this?

moultano6• 16 years ago

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-hous...

paraschopra• 16 years ago

I am sure you must be automatically tracking and analyzing queries where users go to page 2 and beyond. Or where they do not click on any result and instead change the query or abandon the page?

korussian• 16 years ago

Where's the best place to post sample queries?

moultano6• 16 years ago

Right here. :)

snissn2• 16 years ago

obviously you don't want this thread polluted with failed google queries, and them working properly on duck duck go, maybe you should offer a contact info, or even generate some sort of form, or even better have a 'this query didn't work right' button on search

moultano6• 16 years ago

rmoulton at google if you prefer to email, but posting here is fine too. There is a "give feedback" link a the bottom of the search results which produces a lot of good data, but very little of it is "problems HN folks have with search."

nostrademons2• 16 years ago

There is a "this query didn't work right" button on search - it's the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of a result page, which links to:

http://www.google.com/quality_form?q=foo

The problem is that it gets polluted by lots of people who have no clue that Google is not the Internet, or (for that matter) their neighborhood handyman that they found through Google and who did an awesome job repairing their windows. A lot of people don't make a distinction between "I found what I was looking for" and "What I was looking for worked out for me", which makes a lot of the feedback a little less than useful.

This thread is as good a place as any - I'm guessing that the URL will get passed around, the appropriate teams will read it and adjust their algorithms, and if DuckDuckGo gets to improve their algorithms too, great - it's one more good search engine that people can use.

marze2• 16 years ago

I would guess the general Google approach to this problem is to try to improve algorithms.

I wonder if a change towards "human input" might improve things more.

For example, what if the Chrome browser had a big feedback button so that if users wanted to help improve the Google search results they could rate the usefulness of the link they just followed?

Matt_Cutts8• 16 years ago

If it makes you feel better, our first experiment along those lines was in 2001: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~cutts/toolbarbeta.html

Back then (and with "Remove result" and SearchWiki) it had issues because we were trying to get people to recognize spam, and people weren't that good at recognizing spam techniques like hidden text. The more recent complaints we've had are more like "here's content I don't like." So maybe it's time that we tried something similar again.

dools2• 16 years ago

Hey moultano, I was just thinking about this problem: how can I tell that a site is spammy? Overwhelmingly, they look really really similar. For example, if you search for "diy solar homes" you'll see a wonderful example of some really spammy sites - they popup book offers on load, they have this kind of template where they have big garish fonts and a whole lot of information laid out carelessly on the page.

Then there's the "what you need, when you need it" category, and then there's the "put your google search in the title even though the page has no relevant results" category (mostly software download sites - ie. try searching for "application to use nokia e72 with itunes" you get this site filebuzz in the top two spots that has a whole lot of ads and a bunch of crappy non-related downloads).

So if you add a "uniqueness" index - ie. find ways to "semantically tag" not just the textual content, but the layout and font choices etc. of particular sites, that will catch the blatant affiliate spam bullshit (diy solar homes, what you need when you need it etc.) and then just figure out a way to prevent those "file buzz" type sites from sticking my search term in the title tags (I actually have no idea how this is done) you'll eliminate like 95% of the spam.

moultano6• 16 years ago

The top result for [diy solar homes] looks pretty good. http://www.builditsolar.com/ Looks like it has a lot of resources, though I don't know where it gets them or whether it has any claim to them. Was this one of the bad results for you?

schwabacher• 16 years ago

I think they could find your search terms from the referring url, but I am not sure how they are able to get their pages with your terms into the search results and get the terms into their meta description.

They must just have compiled huge lists of relatively specific search terms and have pages against each? But I would think this would be easy to identify and downrank..

It is a puzzle :/

bambax17• 16 years ago

Please don't dumb down Google. It happens all the time. It happened with stemming. It happened with "Instant". It happened, stealthily, quite a long time ago, when Google started to return results that contained most of the search terms, but not all, or when it returned results that contained words that appeared "in the pages linking to this page".

It happens when one tries to use allintext: and is identified as a robot (why??!?)

People should understand how to use a search engine instead of have machines (second-)guess what they're thinking.

People learn to drive; if people can't drive a car we don't give them a car that drives itself!

-- Oh, wait.

ghshephard3• 16 years ago

Great example - 35,000+ people a year die in the United States alone because of people's inability to drive safely.

Perhaps there is a better way.

kitsune__• 16 years ago

What happened to exact search queries:

For instance, if I search for "a-r" I receive results for "ar".

I hate this. It makes it impossible to filter irrelevant results.

Or try this query: "a-c" -"ac"

This will return 0 results.

cap4life3• 16 years ago

And this is where the downfall of Google begins. I also hate that some exact queries are being broad matched without my consent.

eli2• 16 years ago

I think your search terms are too short.

See "re-elect" -"reelect"

revorad2• 16 years ago

I just tried one of the example searches Marco lists and the result is very strange.

When I search for [2010 ira contribution limit], all the results are spammy. The real official answer (on irs.gov) doesn't even show up on the first page.

BUT, if I use Google Instant, it does show up as the first result. As soon as I hit Enter, it again disappears and only the spammy results remain.

The Instant guess suggests that it's because the IRS website ranks for the plural term with "limits" [2010 ira contribution limits], not the one with "limit".

nhebb• 16 years ago

When I search for [2010 ira contribution limit], all the results are spammy. The real official answer (on irs.gov) doesn't even show up on the first page.

The first result I get is is irs.gov. Then again, we know what a bunch of shysters they are, so you still might be onto something. ;-)

andyv• 16 years ago

I get irs.gov at the top as well, and all the results are relevant. Are you logged into google? If so try logging out and retrying-- it would be interesting to see if the results are tailored to individuals.

tsycho• 16 years ago

How about adding some sort of a feedback mechanism to search? For instance, when I search for something, maybe some way to mark a result as spam and optionally relevant?

The obvious problem is that spammers would attempt to game the feedback mechanism. But a combination of things like captcha to defend against robots, limits on how many times you can flag/upvote sites in a month (feedback credits), and exposing the feedback mechanism to only real, active-for-a-long-time users above a karma threshold (Google can definitely figure this out looking at the search history, gmail account etc), might be strong enough to beat the spammers.

You could start this as a Labs feature, and see if it works well.

kyle68842• 16 years ago

Hey moultano, what about specific sites within an industry that abuse big time with doorway pages and link farms? How can we report that to you? IN SERPs these domains are technically relevant to the search-term, but only show up high in the results because of their deceptive practices.

sdizdar• 16 years ago

I think the very first thing is to try to prevent malicious sites to be on the first page. For example, try searching for "lawsuit employment rejection". The very first hit is: jaysgrafx.com/char-tritan-energy-power-com-employment-san-marcos-tx-job/. Do not click on it (it forwards you 84bf4ada.logout3.cz.cc/).

iconfinder• 16 years ago

I don't think this is surprising - the top management seems more interested in building OSs and social networks. Search doesn't seem like their highest priority anymore.

Matt_Cutts8• 16 years ago

There's more people working on search quality than ever in our history. The PR team for search quality does a great job pitching stories about search quality, how it's hard, etc., but lots of reporters prefer to write about the shiny things (or more tangible things--you can hold a phone in your hand) rather than improving search quality.

But Google continues to work hard on improving search every day, even if that doesn't always get covered.

jv22222• 16 years ago

Maybe Google could scrape DDG on the fly for each search, then do a diff, and filter out any results that arn't in DDG... that would be the fastest way to remove spam ;)

Osiris• 16 years ago

One thing that I notice about the spam sites and scraper sites is that they often have very similar content and/or layout. What if Google was able to determine how similar certain sites where and consolidate those into a single result, like they do with Google News?

Then when I search for AMD Bulldozer news and there are 20 sites all with the same article, from the same date, I don't have to change my search parameters to show just the last month. Instead, it would determine that the content was similar, smash into a single result, and leave room for 9 more less-similar results that may better include what I want.

wheels• 16 years ago

I started writing out a comment on the somewhat heretical notion that biasing search results against AdSense click throughs would probably be a strong predicter for spam detection, but the comment got long enough that I folded it into a blog post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2074621

bambax17• 16 years ago

Isn't it possible that all of this recent bad press about Google would be a consequence of "Instant"?

Here's my thinking:

- to get good results, one needs to type as many relevant words as possible

- Instant encourages people to type less and less words (not even words: a few keystrokes and you're on)

But if you type very few words, or if you search for "frequent" queries (generated by Instant in response to your few keystrokes) then all you get is spam.

Spam is optimized for frequent queries, not very specific ones. Instant should be renamed Instant spam.

phpnode• 16 years ago

That's not really the case, plenty of spammers optimize for long tail searches because 1. they're easy to rank for. 2. they're easy to create ambiguous, autogenerated content for

bambax17• 16 years ago

> plenty of spammers optimize for long tail searches

But how do they do it? By nature, there are many more long tail searches than frequent ones, and each one is rarer (or unique).

How do spammers find them?

yhlasx2• 16 years ago

People just can't come up with right search queries and guilt search engine. I always find what i want via google.

cletus• 16 years ago

Sites like Demand Media see a gap for particular content and churn out cheap crap.

Blogs see an idea in the public consciousness and jump on the bandwagon with derivative posts.

Anyone see the parallel? ActualLy there is a difference: the DM writer got paid.

Product searches have been screwed for years. I've often wished I could filter out any price search engines and/or retailers from results. What's worse is that all these sites have places for reviews (of which there are never any) but hey the review keyword is there.

But as for this post there's nothing new here. It's a rehash of a bunch of other posts from the last month.

I can still find what I want with ease on Google. Am I just some kind of gifted searcher? I seriously doubt it.

It's like these posts are all making slippery slope arguments ("there are two content farm results in the first page. If this trend continues there will be 7000 content farm resets") rather than complaining sbout the actuality.

The other mistake made here is to assume Google's algorithm is static. This is false. It's a rapidly moving target.

Like another comment says: such noise (spam) isn't unique to Google so is the "problem" with Google's index or the Web itself?

If nothing else these posts all make the case that Google's index is algorithmic. I say this because at different times you'll see conspiracy theories about Google promoting certain properties over others.

Here's a question: if Google started blacklisting sites, how soon would the complaints of censorship or favoritism take?

bad_user2• 16 years ago

I agree with most of your points, but I would truly value Google providing me with the capability of blacklisting websites for myself.

Such a thing is already possible with just browser plugins, but I'd like that blacklist to follow me around and grow algorithmically (based on preferences of similar users), and hacking around a product's deficiencies is really not "voting with your wallet".

And in such a case Google couldn't be accused of censorship / favoritism.

radley• 16 years ago

I set up a second, filtered search using Google Custom Search and added it to my browser. I don't always use it, but it's easier to switch to when I encounter spammy topics (like code look-ups). It's pretty easy to blacklist fakes... and even useless SEO-heavy sites like experts-exchange, bigresource, etc.

Here's how, if interested: http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/

iworkforthem• 16 years ago

I am beginning to use this mode to Google search more, cut out a lot of the spams.

micaelwidell• 16 years ago

Couldn't part of this problem be solved with an algorithm that identifies when several pages have roughly the same content (ie. original wikipedia article + 5 copies of it elsewhere on the web) and then giving the oldest occurance in the index a much higher rank?

That would kill incentive to create these spam-sites and give the user the result s/he was looking for.

jeisc• 16 years ago

These bad search results are not an IT problem, they are the results of top Google executive policies: act like you want to be good and do better for the Google users but keep on serving up the same old stuff because it is tied to the revenue cow and the paying clients. This problem would never have existed if Google considered the end user experience more important than the advertisers.

jl6• 16 years ago

Why does Google no longer offer the option to permanently remove a specific domain from your search results? My personal search quality would be dramatically improved if I could specify even a short blacklist.

In fact, dear lazyweb: is there a browser extension or greasemonkey script that makes Google return 100 results at a time and then filters out the best 10 based on a blacklist?

eli2• 16 years ago

Set Google to return 100 results and then use a userscript or extension to filter them. E.g. https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ddgjlkmkllmpdheg...

bambax17• 16 years ago

It's easy to filter out spam once we identify it; so the question is: "what is spam"?

Some argue that content farms such as Demand Media aren't spammers, because the content they produce actually satisfies better the casual searcher than elaborate, savant exposés on the same subject. Casual content for casual searchers.

Others consider that content farms-issued pages are the epitome of spam: spam that doesn't look like spam, and that ends up cluttering search results. Spam is not irrelevance: spam is clutter.

A corollary to "what is spam" is: "who should make the call"?

Originally, Google tasked itself with making this call, and it did a pretty good job at it.

But why not me? It should be possible for Google to make a difference between "casual" and serious content, and then let the user decide which they prefer.

Well actually, that is already possible: it's called "reading level" and it's accessible in the advanced page.

Searching for "how to wire an outlet" gives ~12 M results, the first of which comes from about.com.

When filtering the search to display only "advanced reading level" results, there are only 264,000 results left, the first two coming from Wikipedia (and the 3rd and 4th still coming from ehow.com).

So Google already knows what is "casual content" and already lets users filter it out.

Maybe a simple solution would be to add the filter directly in the search results page instead of having it buried in the advanced options.

ja27• 16 years ago

Am I using a different Google than him?

I type in "how to wire an outlet" and all the top results look useful. Sure there are some ads embedded on the pages and the top hit is about.com with a 10-page slideshow, but every hit looks like it explains exactly how to wire an outlet.

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+wire+an+outlet

Even when I try the spammiest searches, it looks like they're returning pretty relevant results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=best+price+on+viagra http://www.google.com/search?q=wrist+watch+deals

spot• 16 years ago

i ignored these "google sucks because of spam" articles until this one. i tried his first worse example [large sensor compact camera]. almost all the results on the first page are good. #3 is suite101 which is one of these farms, but it actually contains good content too. so i will go back to ignoring these "google sucks because of spam" articles, unless one shows up that has some quantitative results.

jonknee• 16 years ago

I think search quality would go up if Google gave me the option of blocking domains from SERPs. I never want to see results from a content mill (eHow, Mahalo, etc) in addition to all the made for Adsense sites I come across less frequently. They could also use the collective blocking data to help tweak the spam filter.

PaulHoule2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if prioritizing links over keywords is really going to help matters.

I know a lot of 'little guys' who know something about a topic and can write prolifically, but who suffer under the delusion that 'If I build it, they will come.' Success in SEO is largely possible because 95% of webmasters have no idea how to promote content.

I've also developed 'digital libraries' for major academic organizations and a common thread there is a complete lack of interest in indexability. There's a lot of fantastic content trapped in the ivory tower because nobody considered the 'unwritten standards' for how the web worked.

A big part of the problem is that it's very hard to get legitimate links these days. You used to be able to get into the Yahoo directory for free, but now you have to pay a $300 a year bribe. Before 2000, it was common for people to create large collections of links they liked. Today, major players like Engadget have a policy of not wasting their PageRank on other sites. Afraid of spam, many blogs and forums are on a hair trigger to stop people from dropping links in comments, relevant or not.

If legitimate links are harder to get, that 'lowers the bar' for spammers.

A real answer to spam would be to strengthen the signal so it can break through the noise. It might be helpful to be able to get more feedback from web users about the quality of pages, but this is tough. The horrible truth is that there are more pages on the web than there are viewers, so even if you could get feedback from 10% of viewers, many pages would be badly undersampled. Spammers would also target any feedback channels that exist, and with low response and sampling rates, it might be easier to overload the feedback chanel than it is to create link noise.

Another answer is to beat Demand Media at their own game, the same way that Stack Overflow has beaten the spam sites that dominated programming questions two years ago.

mhb• 16 years ago

Isn't this how Facebook topples Google and completely dominates the internet? By incorporating your social graph into your search results, your relationships can influence what is returned by the search.

Suppose you could create some sort of "friend" list with HN users and that were used to prioritize your search results. If you get a result you don't like, click that you don't like it and the software will reduce the weights of the parts of your social graph which caused that result to be highly scored.

didip• 16 years ago

Google, can't you solve these problems with money?

Pay army of users pressing ham/spam buttons, mechanical turk style.

MichaelEdits3• 16 years ago

I was on the Internet long before Google showed up, and I'll be here long after Google is dead and forgotten.

Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search

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