Comments on: Improving Google

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:45:06 +0000

Actually, I’ve noticed an increase in search results that seem to be a “word salad” of unrelated phrases with a search term inserted into them on the fly. Also any particular searcher will soon start to notice that his searches from the prior week are suddenly started to show up inside that strange “word salad” of disjointed phrases.

I would agree with Google that seeking an automated solution is necessary for them and I certainly agree with your statement that its hard to get a machine to recognize content that has been artfully concocted by a spammer.

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:21:13 +0000

FG I also don’t understand why it’s so hard for Google, with the world’s biggest computer infrastructure, to simply weed out sites that a human can see are bogus. They always talk about scalability and I think they are willing to allow bad results while they figure out how to get them auto-rejected. The problem is not as trivial as it first appears because the spammer are very good at tricks. For example you can have a program generate fake “content” that is detectible by a human but is hard for a machine because it has trouble looking at the full context of a sentence or paragraph.

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:56:34 +0000

From Slashdot:
Google Watchdog reporting “Spam and virus sites infesting the Google SERPs” …Google’s index hacked. The circumvention of a guideline normally picked up by the Googlebot quickly is worrisome. None of the sites have real content and don’t appear to even be hosted anywhere. How did millions of sites get indexed if they don’t exist.

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 06:45:10 +0000

Perhaps we are at a stage where “mom and pop” sites simply cannnot obtain a sufficiently high ranking.

Even Google would agree that there are problems in this area. Often a searcher would ideally find a mom and pop site (e.g. a local rafting company) rather than a more sophisticated but less local and less relevant service provider. Yet the small sites are subject to forces far outside of their control, and as the link economy has changed it makes it hard for “real” sites to get free links from anywhere.

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 08:57:16 +0000

Well, ofcourse the obvious comment is perhaps neither of the two sites is worthy of mention and a properly constructed Google algorithm would reject the childish drivel of a third-grader as well as rejecting the slightly “better” spam-crafted site (but ofcourse would not reject comments about their grammar/grammer). Perhaps we are at a stage where “mom and pop” sites simply cannnot obtain a sufficiently high ranking. The rejection of ‘mom and pop’ quality is similar to a manufacturer terminating long-standing relationships with mom and pop franchisees unable to keep up with technological change.

Just as the site has a publicly identified contact person so too would spam mailers stop dumping all their complaint and bounceback traffic to dev/null? And anonymous authorship is somehow to be banned?

Transparency on adsense revenue figures might indeed help but I would doubt it will ever take place.

The Mobilegas Economy Run became useless when all competitors had the goal of gaining good results in the test calculations rather than actually having good mileage. Its just going to take much longer for good Google search rankings to destroy good Google search results.