mvandemar

Dunno, I am seeing the same link in screenshots on reddit and twitter but neither archive.is nor archive.org has a copy of it.

Jinx!

We added a placeholder since there are rumours swirly, and they're from reputable sources - coincidentally the timelines for releases (around 2 months) align, and it's on a Monday, so it's highly likely.

But it's all speculation atm!

via: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kvoobg/comment...

Not sure where you get the "one step removed" bit. It is a content farm, at least in the places where it isn't simply copies of Wikipedia or autogenerated text.

The results may be directly measured but they are not real time. Click on the 7 Day view and you can see that the latest numbers are from Feb 22, before the change was rolled out. You would have to wait until Sunday or Monday, I would think, before seeing the difference.

Actually, I was wrong. The results are US only, so (for now, anyways) you can view what the results looked like before the update by changing the language parameter (&hl=) or the &gl= parameter in the url. For instance, pre-algo rankings (Mahalo #1):

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...

Same query after the update (Mahalo at #7):

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...

kalvin, there would be no way to do that unless you were prepared and happened to store the queries beforehand. However, if you take a look at the Alexa page for one of the sites in question you can see what some of the top queries were that used to bring those sites traffic, and then manually go see where they rank now. For instance, Mahalo used to be in the #1 spot for many of the queries listed on it's page:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mahalo.com

If you look now though you can see they are at #5 for [mcdonalds coupons] (which is still higher than they deserve), #6 for [how to play guitar], more than 5 pages deep for [bed bath and beyond], etc. Check ehow.com and you can see similar results no longer ranking:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ehow.com

Ok, I know no one is going to see this, but in looking for this thread I just discovered that the original one I was discussing is now showing up in the "Popular" list, albeit at #147 (5 votes in 10 hours). So obviously if anything was going on earlier, it's been reversed. It's even outranking this thread.

It's pretty rare that my site shows up here, and my actual readership isn't huge, so I don't think that is the case. Any way to find out though?

When you say #38 you mean this discussion and not the article that someone submitted today, correct? Is that what you think happened then, it was simply voted down? Who would be able to confirm or deny it then? I just went through all 690 submissions visible from the homepage onward and didn't see the one someone submitted today at all. You would think it would show up somewhere in that list, wouldn't you?

And, of course, I just realized - if it is a moratorium on discussing HN itself, then there is a chance that this post will never get seen (or answered) either...

They also probably should have tested to see if it happened with results other than the ones in the #1 spot.

This makes a lot of sense, and would have be easy enough for Google to test as well, creating some tiny, brand new, never before heard of test search engine that Bing would have no reason to copy, see if the same thing happened.

They just shut off the cell networks too:

http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egyp...

Sad, a caller from an hour ago said they expect to have their phones disconnected also, which would render this useless, I think:

http://twitter.com/speak2tweet/status/32197204739362816

Firesheep, which allows people worldwide to steal other people's Facebook passwords over public wifi, comes out in October and they still don't redirect to https login by default. Zukerburg's fan page gets hacked with a message pertaining to Facebook's investors and they close the loophole that allowed it to happen in 1 day. Of course.

No, they also banned sites like MegaUpload (Google Suggest stops at the "u") and Rapidshare (which is causing collateral damage, since they stop suggest at the "i" with that one).

No, they are already being crawled and indexed by Google. Jason was lying about that. He banks heavily on the fact that it takes significantly more energy for others to check his facts than it does for him to make them up.

re: But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for".

Yes, it is, the searcher doesn't know that though. That's Google's job, to rank the most relevant sites to the query. If those coupons are what the user is looking for then that site is what should come up first.

I also want to add that at this moment Savings.com does indeed outrank Mahalo.com for that query. While this may change (and based on past experience with Mahalo's empty pages many of them will outrank other sites that are higher quality eventually), that is not what the bulk of the issue is. Those Savings.com feeds are not "human powered" anything. They are exactly the kinds of pages that Jason told Matt Cutts he had removed from his site. They are the antithesis of what Jason claimed his site was all about just 4 days ago. That's the main issue.

Savings.com != Mahalo.com. There is no reason to rank Mahalo... if that is the site being looked for then rank Savings.com instead.

It is what is known as a "thin affiliate" site, and it adds a layer of navigation to the user and middleman payouts to the advertiser, lowering user experience and driving up advertiser costs.

This is very much a critique against Google, but more towards the pass that they keep giving Jason. Jason is most definitely not playing the game better than most, and in fact his violations of Google's quality guidelines are in many cases way more blatant than other spam sites, and are definitely more high profile... yet for some odd reason Google refuses to penalize them. Other sites belonging to honest webmasters get penalized on a daily basis, yet Jason appears to be immune.

Wait a minute...

"Our ultimate objective is to delete the data consistent with our legal obligations and in consultation with the appropriate authorities."

Delete the data that they are legally required to? If it was accidentally collected in the first place, why keep any of it?

When I go a suitable period of time with no Wordpress 3.0 users contacting me for a de-hacking job, then I will upgrade. :)

Sorry about the hijack, but you're not on Rackspace, are you? Wordpress sites there have been getting hacked quite a bit lately, it looks like they have a security issue.

There are 14 questions on a site with 308 indexed pages, such as:

http://www.starwarsanswers.com/travel-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/language-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/health-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/home-garden-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/wedding-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/dance-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/black-belt-test http://www.starwarsanswers.com/mahalo-profile

Are those Markovian chains, or is someone actually writing that stuff?

You are absolutely correct. However, at that point it becomes an ethics issue. If these are financially motivated search results without disclosure then it becomes a whole different ball of wax. If they are deliberately screwing up their relevancy algorithm in the name of a bottom line then people need to know that.

That's been done though. Pretty much everything they rank for is from self-voting, manipulation that is contrary to the "democratic nature of the web" that Google wants to leverage. There are plenty of queries that demonstrate that, ones that Matt has indeed been shown.

Yep, sure as hell is. He's hosting at Rackspace Cloud based on his DNS servers:

http://whois.domaintools.com/bothsidesofthetable.com

They have a rather large security issue at the moment, he is simply one of many:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/06/14/rackspace-ha...

And it would be almost kind of ok if they actually said, hey, we're victims here too... instead of their actual ongoing response to their customers of "it's not our problem".

Yes, publicly they are making some (very limited) concessions that this is an issue they need to deal with, but I am still hearing about customers getting 0 help from GoDaddy's support. Even when they did admit to the problem not being the customer's faults they tried watering it down with "well, look... it's not just us. Other hosts got hit too".

The other hosts, however, aren't laying claim to being the "world's largest hosting provider", nor are they spending millions on the next Super Bowl commercial that might better be spent on, oh, I don't know... maybe fixing the problem...?