I agree. Tons of sites employ the bounce-back avoidance tactics, and these don’t particularly help their ranking (in fact, lots on non-ranking sites do it — presumably just to keep you on the page)
...but, you know. Can you see anything else they're doing that would give them that kind of ranking? These pages are just piles of crap, and google is pretty good at filtering that sort of stuff out.
If it was that easy, google would be filled with spam everywhere.
The chance that someone did something random thats very uncommon (block back) and it happened to be a super effective signal to google seems:
a) like an edge case they didn't think of
b) like it'll get fixed pretty fast
c) not that unlikely.
Compared to, say, the idea that some random spammers have built a network of incredibly sophisticated ML-generated pages that can subvert googles algorithms which seems:
a) not substantiated by any obvious content on the pages
b) requires a very high level of sophistication which seems totally lacking
c) very unlikely
...but I mean, who knows right?
We're all just speculating. I guess it'll get fixed soon, and we'll never know.
You could do a slightly more difficult, less direct sequence check on the specific user.
If they circle back around to Yandex in N time and go hunting for the same query or similar query, then you can rank the prior attempts as not having been ideally helpful (downrank the result/s they clicked through to when they last searched for that query two minutes ago).
Makes sense, does DDG do the same? If yes isn't that against their "We don't track users" mantra? If no how do they improve their results while missing such a powerful signal?
I would be fairly certain that DDG isn't itself tracking users in a manner that they can use that ranking approach. They don't need to.
If you do a search for the same terms in DDG vs Bing, you'll find that the results are very similar. DDG lets Microsoft do the dirty work of abusively tracking users to max out on ranking factors, and then DDG reaps the benefit. DDG doesn't need to get its hands dirty, because someone else is doing so much of that for them.
By leaning so heavily on Bing, DDG is a blood diamond merchant of privacy. They might not own the mines or directly command the labor, however they're quite happy to buy the blood diamonds to further their own profit afterward. And DDG's users go along with the scheme, because buying into the con helps them sleep better at night. It works like this mentally: those users over there (at Bing) are having their human right to privacy violated, I know it's going on, and I directly benefit from the search data training as I use DDG, but hey at least it's not me being abused, so I can do my virtue signal dance and sleep well at night comfortable in my compartmentalization.
Would be interesting to see the actual content. Based on the small snippets in the search results, it takes content from other sites, like large Norwegian news sites, and somehow outranks them hard.
I wonder what the Google Search Console looks like for that domain, considering that it's probably getting millions worth of free traffic.
EDIT:
After looking more at it, it's insane how much it ranks for and how well. Straight up brand names seems to be the hardest to compere with, at least larger ones. Those seems to be around page 4-5 for me.
Some brands I was unable to find at all, but ironically another .dk domain showed up in it's place that did the same thing. There is also some .it domains using the same content.
I've found that it takes contents from multiple sources and glues it together in sometimes great ways. Like one sentence from this page, another thing from that page.
Maybe this is some ML that collects content and pieces a lot of it together sentences or half sentences to one large article? It's clearly from completely different sources, but about the same thing.
Example:
"wash car"
Result in google:
"A dark winter with snow and salt is hard on the car, and it's extra important to wash the car" - Collected from one article.
<some other text>
"Keep the pressure washer at 30-50 cm from the car..." - From another article.
Ironically, there is like 11 results all tied to this thing outranking the original articles(those are last), even if it's medium to large sized well known companies selling for billion(s) of dollars each year in Norway.
Sometimes it goes from one thing and switches to something completely unrelated, so I guess the spammers still have something to improve.
TFA talks about Google testing with "unknown IP", but doesn't mention any testing done by the author with cookies cleared or in incognito mode. This seems basic.
What do you expect incognito to change? That would presumably show the same content the author is seeing. Only Google sees the content that drives the ranking.
It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.
I stopped using google for search because I noticed the filter bubble it was building around me. Perhaps that wasn't maintained by cookies, but in that case I wonder what it was...
For all we know (as the OP doesn’t mention trying incognito) the OP could have malicious software on their device that hijacks their browser to manipulate search results
that's easily verifiable doing the searches yourself;
a search for "hvor ofte bør man dusje" in my english google, conencting from brazil shows havfruen4220.dk as 6th and 7th result, which is pretty high for a spam website
"hvordan regne prosent" shows 2 dk websites www.humanrebels.dk, and havfruen4220.dk as 9th and 10th results
could be since the OP clicked on these links to find out google made his personal algorithm show even more of this stuff
thus, I imagine a never ending cycle of even more spam could easily be generated, specially for an innocent user
I doubt it's some crazy sophisticated SEO hijacking operation. Probably a result of a small data set (Norwegian language web pages), specific search terms (Norwegian brands, companies), and lots of keyword stuffing. Most of the examples the author pointed out were from pages 5-10 of Google results, which are probably worthless for ad revenue anyways.
This type of scraped-content websites were common for English language searches back in 2010 or so. I believe the 'Panda' algorithm update eliminated them from English searches.
It does rate a pretty good chuckle recalling old Google blog posts about their various uber-sophisticated anti-spam ML algorithms and how black hat SEO just wasn't possible anymore.
Catch22 though. If you eliminate bounce back, you have to rank to get the ranking signal into Google. So how did they rank in the first place? I haven’t tried to reverse what they’re doing but I don’t think the author quite figured it out. Interesting phenomenon though.
They are using different images. A month or so ago it was some guy tied up on a chair with some russian text on top of the image.
There are a lot of these domains (ptsdforum.dk, verdes.dk, momentsbykruuse.dk from the top of my mind). Always Danish domains and always registered by the same person in Riga.
I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality.
It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it.
If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions.
Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are expired domains that have been bought.
I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently.
On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago.
It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher.
This definitely looks like an expired domain that was bought. Havfruen seems to be a restaurant in the city of Korsør - which conveniently have the postal code of 4220.
Typically Google has a warming/trial period for new large content sites, after their search bot is introduced to the content and has spidered its way through the site.
For example there used to be a very common content farm system, that was structured like like this:
So when people searched for sites by domain name, the zillions of low traffic long-tail results of this farm system would be all over Google's results.
What it would present on the page is a mess of data about nytimes.com, such as traffic, or keywords pulled from the site header, maybe a manufactured description (or pulled right from the site head), sometimes images / screenshots of the site. Anything that could be stuffed in there to fill up enough content to get Google to not do an automatic shallow content kill penalty on the content farm. This worked for several years very successfully until Google's big algorithm updates, 9-10 years ago or whatever now (Penguin et al.). You could just build a large index of the top million domains (eg Alexa and Quantcast used to provide that index in a zip file), spider & scrape info from the domains, and build a content farm index out of it and have a million pages of content to then hand off to Googlebot.
So initially such a farm will boom into the search rankings, Google would give them a trial period and let out the flood gates of traffic to the site. Then Google would promptly kill off the content farm after the free run period expired and they had figured out it was a garbage site.
I still occasionally see this model of content farm burst up into traffic rankings, and it's usually very short lived. It makes me wonder if that's not more or less what's going on with the Mermaid farm.
.it pages are used in Norway too, but I'm not sure it's something GPT-ish that's being used. Whole sentences are copied word for word from other articles.(might be a small dataset it's trained on?)
It could of course be that its something similar to GPT that is trained on all the content it could find and then writes articles, cause it's clearly messing up sometimes, form the small piece of content available at the search results page.
I'm not sure if this is an ML race and the reason we're not seeing the same thing in English is because Google might understands English better than spammers. While in Norwegian and German it's the other way around?
Clearly freshness is a large part of it. Google seems to have indexed millions upon millions of pages tied to this in the last 24 hours.
Seems like not a new thing. Here is a warning tweet from beginning July from Danish Cybersec guy @peterkruse who saw his name coming up for a different domain owned by the same registrant as havfruen4220.dk
Interesting, I've been seeing the same spam for Norwegian searches, but with the domain nem-multiservice dot dk, or nem-varmepumper dot dk - presumably another legitimate business' domain that expired and was grabbed by the scammers. Visiting those domains show the same graphic as shown in the article.
Almost any search in Norwegian will have obvious scam sites like these in the top 10 results.
Other domains part of the same scam that show up in my results today: mariesofie dot dk, bvosvejsogmontage dot dk
Yup. Those domains are the same thing, and redirects to the same thing. There are even more domains.
Never seen anything on this scale before. I can search for basically anything(tax rules, baking, stocks, property, hygiene...) and Google will most likely show those domains somewhere.
The content seems taken from other websites and mixed in a nonsensical way. It comes up frequently in my search results.
www.xspdf.com has completely unrelated content and seems a separate business.
Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result.
I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
I noticed this in my country when searching for somewhat less common parts (electronics, car parts, tools, etc). The first few results are for online retailers in my country, and then after that it's full of domains with paths such as /sale_12345678. The domain sounds somewhat promising, and the description sounds good - other than it often being a quantity of 10 - but when you click the link it just redirects to AliExpress.
I find that using another search engine in that kind of situation is extremely useful! If I'm searching for more mainstream stuff google usually is great but when I'm going for more specialized topics duck duck go will usually bring up some different links!
Search engines seem to be stuck between serving two roles: 1. An easily accessible directory of mainstream information, and 2. A specialized tool to find the diamond in the rough. It seems like it has to be a tradeoff, it can't serve both roles equally well.
"The alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. Its origin comes from George Orwell's "1984", in which the memory hole was a small incinerator chute used for censoring, (through destroying), things Big Brother deemed necessary to censor."
> I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking
Tools are not to blame here, it's like blaming the compiler for the behaviour of an application. Starting with the training data and ending with how the model is used in deployment it's the blame of people who made it, not of the neural architecture. The architecture itself can learn anything you throw at it, good or bad.
Atleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords).
Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showing me results for diving.
We ignored your search query and showed you results our highest paying customers / advertisers paid us to show you instead.
I don't know of a good general internet search engine, so I tend to stick to the sites I know will provide answers that'll work for me, which is a shame for discovering new content.
I play a game with google search: I take something very mainstream like a movie title, let's say 'Reservoir Dogs'
And change something in it, to say 'Reservoir Cats' for example.
Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'!
Even putting something opposite or unrelated to the highly mainstream result will have no effect.
Its completely entirely ridiculous and makes the search engine seem like a facade.
Although I'm familiar with your point, I literally just searched for the term you mentioned, navigated all the way to page 6 and every single result was specifically for Reservoir Cats proper, none of them even mentioned Reservoir Dogs in the title, only in the description for some of them.
the same, maybe someone at google read this and fixed it reaaalllly quick.
If I search for Palp fiction it shows me pulp fiction results but asks if I really meant Palp fiction, if I say yeah I really meant that it shows me Palp fiction with a message did you really mean pulp fiction.
on edit: some of the palp fiction is headline palp friction.
I searched diving suit thickness and it provides to correct information as the first result...the diving suit thickness for different temperatures. Not sure why you are not getting that information
Odd. When I try that search[1] I'm seeing good results. There's a onebox telling me how thick a suit I need for different temperatures, followed by a bunch of articles on the topic.
This exactly. I’ve been researching specific house repair issues and just get nothing but content spam. Whenever I want specific information I find myself adding “reddit” to the query string, which will usually turn up a thread with links out to the actual answer.
Said it before and I’ll say it again, when Reddit finally becomes inaccesible via searches we will have lost a huge and very useful database of succinct information.
You haven't noticed that reddit has become substantially search inaccessible a number of months back?
Every reddit page while not logged in is full of hidden content from other unrelated pages. When you search, you'll get hits in these unrelated pages-- but when you follow the link it's not there (because it's on the unrelated pages).
Worse, the pages with the correct content aren't necessarily in the results at all because it was low enough in the thread that it was collapsed and wasn't visible to the search indexer.
It's not a total loss, but I'd say about 80% of my own comments are now difficult-to-impossible to find via search when they were easy previously.
Searching in Google has become all about shopping. Pure and relevant content is hard to find.
Even today here are bloggers outside who do not have a commercial affiliation with the goods/items/things they are blogging about. Such content is practically impossible to find in comparison to all the Amazon-affiliated pseudo-information conveying spoof-sites.
Pinterest is the worst as you cannot see the results without registering… How can it be a relevant search result! Fortunately -site:pinterest.com make it useable.
I have been struggling with the same issue recently. Results are much more narrower and they seemed to be leaning towards consumer goods items. Though I don’t remember when I ever bought something coming from Google search.
I couldn't agree more. More and more lately I've felt like the Altavista days. I know the information I'm looking for is out there, it's just not in the Google results page, which is plastered with unreadable stuff (paywalls, content farms), crap "content cards" in the results page, and sneakier and sneakier ads.
I'm not sure what the beginning of the end was for Google Search, but I think the day where they changed the ad background to white is a good candidate.
Google Search used to be like Chrome or Gmail - we know its wrong in the long term, but it's hard to stop using it because it just works so well.
But these days, not anymore. Search is a lot less sticky, and it is their golden goose they are messing with here.
Same here, I no longer can find anything sensible on Google, regardless how much I try to customize the search expression.
Additionally as polyglot it is very irritanting that Google tries to helpfully translate queries for me, thus I have to go to other search engines to actually find the article on the language I want.
Same here. But sadly the title would have been 'Google purchases "The Mermaid" for $X'... Given their near $2 trillion market cap, I doubt any search engine would be allowed to stay hot for too long.
> The simple solution would be to test sites regularly with an unknown IP and common user agent to check that a site isn’t just showing content to Google and gives real users something completely different. That would stop this.
Surely Google does this, right? Given that - in theory - showing different content to Google versus non-Google should result in a penalty, anyway ...
This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?
Yes, and more non-spam email is getting filtered as spam. Also, a mailing list I was unable to unsubscribe from and marked as spam at least 5 times kept being delivered to my inbox.
I'll chime in as well. I forward everything from gmail to another account I have. I pretty much never got any forwarded email for years because the gmail account is only really used as an identity for google services. A few months ago I suddenly started to get a significant amount of spam forwarded for no known reason.
The last time I accidentally installed malware on my computer was when the top Google result pointed me to a site masquerading as the official site for the software. That thought me a lesson to pay attention to the domain name.
I imagine it's done in a similar way to how reddit circumvents searching for results from certain dates. I don't like anyone messing with google results.
Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for:
Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k
SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k
These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale.
For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" which has 207k searches per month in Norway and is rated as 0 (out of 100) for being easy to rank for. Usually when a keyword has that amount of searches it would be incredibly hard to rank for, I've never seen anything like this. So what is happening here looks like they are just taking advantage of a market with really low competition keywords.
Interia is a large polish web portal, from what I could find. Norwegian people doesn't know it, but polish people might. There is probably around ~2 % polish people in Norway. It also ranks as #1 for me. It's in polish too, so basically only ~2 % of Norway would understand it.
However, the weird thing it that it steals content from articles, and then outranks them. Most pages seems to be boosted, maybe as a result of it being new. (Most content is just hours old)
Could you check these too? (exactly the same thing, but newer, it seems)
www.mariesofie.dk
nem-varmepumper.dk
The keyword data was based on searches in Norway alone, it is an order of magnitude higher in Poland. In Norway almost anybody could rank for that keyword if they tried due to the difficulty being different based on location and language.
Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool.
But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad wasteful.
You need a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush for competitor analysis and keyword research. One trick with Ahrefs if you want to be frugal is to pay for the $7 trial and use it as much as possible during the trial to do your keyword research and cancel. Technically if you are efficient enough that trial could get you months worth of content at least.
The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.
I installed it and it's—ok? For search results where the spam overwhelms the signal (it used to be able to do a decent reverse phone lookup by putting a phone number into Google), you end up with empty pages or mostly empty pages in the search results. Better than nothing, but it really should be a feature from the search engine, not a browser plugin.
I figured sooner or later Google would pick up the signal but I think instead they just started ignoring my "- requests" as I stopped using them. edit: or maybe they fix the problem. Spam sites used to be a problem during the early decline of Google. I think what happened was that problem actually almost disappeared for me and was replaced by irrelevant results from non-spam-sites
More reasons why a global search monopoly is suboptimal. Smaller markets like this are just going to get neglected and maintained just enough that a better alternative can't compete. Google search is basically useless for any language other than English.
That's because it's real content that they have stolen and just republished. In SEO circles one like to say that original content is king. Well, not so much after all.
358 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadIt seems like they've manipulated rankings by locking people in to reduce their bounce-back stats (in addition to keyword-stuffed content)
...but, you know. Can you see anything else they're doing that would give them that kind of ranking? These pages are just piles of crap, and google is pretty good at filtering that sort of stuff out.
If it was that easy, google would be filled with spam everywhere.
The chance that someone did something random thats very uncommon (block back) and it happened to be a super effective signal to google seems:
a) like an edge case they didn't think of
b) like it'll get fixed pretty fast
c) not that unlikely.
Compared to, say, the idea that some random spammers have built a network of incredibly sophisticated ML-generated pages that can subvert googles algorithms which seems:
a) not substantiated by any obvious content on the pages
b) requires a very high level of sophistication which seems totally lacking
c) very unlikely
...but I mean, who knows right?
We're all just speculating. I guess it'll get fixed soon, and we'll never know.
I am maintaining an SPA and the only thing I do is trying to not pollute history. But I'd never try to block the back button.
If they circle back around to Yandex in N time and go hunting for the same query or similar query, then you can rank the prior attempts as not having been ideally helpful (downrank the result/s they clicked through to when they last searched for that query two minutes ago).
If you do a search for the same terms in DDG vs Bing, you'll find that the results are very similar. DDG lets Microsoft do the dirty work of abusively tracking users to max out on ranking factors, and then DDG reaps the benefit. DDG doesn't need to get its hands dirty, because someone else is doing so much of that for them.
By leaning so heavily on Bing, DDG is a blood diamond merchant of privacy. They might not own the mines or directly command the labor, however they're quite happy to buy the blood diamonds to further their own profit afterward. And DDG's users go along with the scheme, because buying into the con helps them sleep better at night. It works like this mentally: those users over there (at Bing) are having their human right to privacy violated, I know it's going on, and I directly benefit from the search data training as I use DDG, but hey at least it's not me being abused, so I can do my virtue signal dance and sleep well at night comfortable in my compartmentalization.
Especially not for terms that would have a personal vector, like an ambigouous 'Ruby Gems' or controversial 'effectivity of mouth mask'
Actually Metrika is quiet big even outside of ex-CIS countries, IIRC it's like 15% of GA in terms of number of sites.
Would be interesting to see the actual content. Based on the small snippets in the search results, it takes content from other sites, like large Norwegian news sites, and somehow outranks them hard.
I wonder what the Google Search Console looks like for that domain, considering that it's probably getting millions worth of free traffic.
EDIT: After looking more at it, it's insane how much it ranks for and how well. Straight up brand names seems to be the hardest to compere with, at least larger ones. Those seems to be around page 4-5 for me.
Some brands I was unable to find at all, but ironically another .dk domain showed up in it's place that did the same thing. There is also some .it domains using the same content.
I've found that it takes contents from multiple sources and glues it together in sometimes great ways. Like one sentence from this page, another thing from that page.
Maybe this is some ML that collects content and pieces a lot of it together sentences or half sentences to one large article? It's clearly from completely different sources, but about the same thing.
Example: "wash car"
Result in google: "A dark winter with snow and salt is hard on the car, and it's extra important to wash the car" - Collected from one article.
<some other text>
"Keep the pressure washer at 30-50 cm from the car..." - From another article.
Ironically, there is like 11 results all tied to this thing outranking the original articles(those are last), even if it's medium to large sized well known companies selling for billion(s) of dollars each year in Norway.
Sometimes it goes from one thing and switches to something completely unrelated, so I guess the spammers still have something to improve.
Weird.
It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.
a search for "hvor ofte bør man dusje" in my english google, conencting from brazil shows havfruen4220.dk as 6th and 7th result, which is pretty high for a spam website
"hvordan regne prosent" shows 2 dk websites www.humanrebels.dk, and havfruen4220.dk as 9th and 10th results
could be since the OP clicked on these links to find out google made his personal algorithm show even more of this stuff
thus, I imagine a never ending cycle of even more spam could easily be generated, specially for an innocent user
A rather non-sequitur choice, like everything else with this thing I guess.
There are a lot of these domains (ptsdforum.dk, verdes.dk, momentsbykruuse.dk from the top of my mind). Always Danish domains and always registered by the same person in Riga.
For example if you check havfruen4220.dk on archive.org you can see that it appears to have been a legitimate business website before. https://web.archive.org/web/20181126203158/https://havfruen4...
How do they rank so well?
I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently. On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago. It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher.
Edit: Here is what the content of such a site looks like: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bk0VsM...
For example there used to be a very common content farm system, that was structured like like this:
https://domainsites.com/site/nytimes.com
So when people searched for sites by domain name, the zillions of low traffic long-tail results of this farm system would be all over Google's results.
What it would present on the page is a mess of data about nytimes.com, such as traffic, or keywords pulled from the site header, maybe a manufactured description (or pulled right from the site head), sometimes images / screenshots of the site. Anything that could be stuffed in there to fill up enough content to get Google to not do an automatic shallow content kill penalty on the content farm. This worked for several years very successfully until Google's big algorithm updates, 9-10 years ago or whatever now (Penguin et al.). You could just build a large index of the top million domains (eg Alexa and Quantcast used to provide that index in a zip file), spider & scrape info from the domains, and build a content farm index out of it and have a million pages of content to then hand off to Googlebot.
So initially such a farm will boom into the search rankings, Google would give them a trial period and let out the flood gates of traffic to the site. Then Google would promptly kill off the content farm after the free run period expired and they had figured out it was a garbage site.
I still occasionally see this model of content farm burst up into traffic rankings, and it's usually very short lived. It makes me wonder if that's not more or less what's going on with the Mermaid farm.
It could of course be that its something similar to GPT that is trained on all the content it could find and then writes articles, cause it's clearly messing up sometimes, form the small piece of content available at the search results page.
I'm not sure if this is an ML race and the reason we're not seeing the same thing in English is because Google might understands English better than spammers. While in Norwegian and German it's the other way around?
Clearly freshness is a large part of it. Google seems to have indexed millions upon millions of pages tied to this in the last 24 hours.
https://twitter.com/peterkruse/status/1410895961803665410
Almost any search in Norwegian will have obvious scam sites like these in the top 10 results.
Other domains part of the same scam that show up in my results today: mariesofie dot dk, bvosvejsogmontage dot dk
I wonder if it is related to this: https://www.dk-hostmaster.dk/en/news/dk-hostmaster-takes-102...
Never seen anything on this scale before. I can search for basically anything(tax rules, baking, stocks, property, hygiene...) and Google will most likely show those domains somewhere.
The content seems taken from other websites and mixed in a nonsensical way. It comes up frequently in my search results. www.xspdf.com has completely unrelated content and seems a separate business.
I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
Google increasingly thinks it knows better than me what I'm looking for.
Or is there some thing that causes Bing to show different results? Perhaps the scammers build a network that targets google because it's bigger?
Memory Hole
"The alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. Its origin comes from George Orwell's "1984", in which the memory hole was a small incinerator chute used for censoring, (through destroying), things Big Brother deemed necessary to censor."
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Memory%20Hol...
Tools are not to blame here, it's like blaming the compiler for the behaviour of an application. Starting with the training data and ending with how the model is used in deployment it's the blame of people who made it, not of the neural architecture. The architecture itself can learn anything you throw at it, good or bad.
Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showing me results for diving.
I don't know of a good general internet search engine, so I tend to stick to the sites I know will provide answers that'll work for me, which is a shame for discovering new content.
Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'!
Even putting something opposite or unrelated to the highly mainstream result will have no effect.
Its completely entirely ridiculous and makes the search engine seem like a facade.
If I search for Palp fiction it shows me pulp fiction results but asks if I really meant Palp fiction, if I say yeah I really meant that it shows me Palp fiction with a message did you really mean pulp fiction.
on edit: some of the palp fiction is headline palp friction.
Side note: both duckduckgo and google gave me correct results for that specific search. Turns out "reservoir cats" is a movie and a simpsons episode.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=diving+suit+thickness&rlz=1C...
Every reddit page while not logged in is full of hidden content from other unrelated pages. When you search, you'll get hits in these unrelated pages-- but when you follow the link it's not there (because it's on the unrelated pages).
Worse, the pages with the correct content aren't necessarily in the results at all because it was low enough in the thread that it was collapsed and wasn't visible to the search indexer.
It's not a total loss, but I'd say about 80% of my own comments are now difficult-to-impossible to find via search when they were easy previously.
https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/
The Amazon affiliate program is definitely contributing to this problem.
Even today here are bloggers outside who do not have a commercial affiliation with the goods/items/things they are blogging about. Such content is practically impossible to find in comparison to all the Amazon-affiliated pseudo-information conveying spoof-sites.
It is spam pure and simple.
I'm not sure what the beginning of the end was for Google Search, but I think the day where they changed the ad background to white is a good candidate.
Google Search used to be like Chrome or Gmail - we know its wrong in the long term, but it's hard to stop using it because it just works so well.
But these days, not anymore. Search is a lot less sticky, and it is their golden goose they are messing with here.
Additionally as polyglot it is very irritanting that Google tries to helpfully translate queries for me, thus I have to go to other search engines to actually find the article on the language I want.
Surely Google does this, right? Given that - in theory - showing different content to Google versus non-Google should result in a penalty, anyway ...
Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k
These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale.
For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" which has 207k searches per month in Norway and is rated as 0 (out of 100) for being easy to rank for. Usually when a keyword has that amount of searches it would be incredibly hard to rank for, I've never seen anything like this. So what is happening here looks like they are just taking advantage of a market with really low competition keywords.
However, the weird thing it that it steals content from articles, and then outranks them. Most pages seems to be boosted, maybe as a result of it being new. (Most content is just hours old)
Could you check these too? (exactly the same thing, but newer, it seems) www.mariesofie.dk nem-varmepumper.dk
Clearly reused domains.
But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad wasteful.
It enables a collaborative effort in blocking spam / low value domains.
If you make a block list, please submit it to the list I’ve made: https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
(There’s no great subscription discovery as yet)
-stupidautogeneratedcontent1.com -stupidautogeneratedcontent2.com etc
I figured sooner or later Google would pick up the signal but I think instead they just started ignoring my "- requests" as I stopped using them. edit: or maybe they fix the problem. Spam sites used to be a problem during the early decline of Google. I think what happened was that problem actually almost disappeared for me and was replaced by irrelevant results from non-spam-sites
Edit: mahalo.com was one of those, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com