In a year's time you'll still be reading the same complaints about search quality though for the simple inescapable fact that there is little incentive for anyone to write impartial and authoritative reviews for anything that is isn't just a random hobby.
What you may witness is less amazon affiliate posts and more made for AdSense posts - such as those recipes that begin with a random love story, for example.
I like to write impartial and authoritative reviews for things that aren't just a random hobby of mine. Especially on anonymous forums. This could be good, or it could make advertisers start spamming forums with more fake accounts.
I was sure they announced Big Plans years ago to combat content farms, to the point of e.g. browser add-ons so you could report these things. Either they just didn't work and the content farms outsmarted them, or they stopped caring. But it does feel to me like Google was a lot stricter 5-10 years ago than they are now.
In the interim they tried to push AMP, but had to admit finally that it's more to keep people inside their ecosystem than make the web faster/better.
Hopefully this helps when looking for genuine product reviews / suggestions.
The only way to get half-decent reviews at the moment is to append "reddit" to your search query, otherwise you get pages full of comparatives that haven't tested any of the items they recommend.
I don’t know what “Reddit stops caring” means. Currently most moderation is done by an insular unpaid group of redditors. There is already lots of stealth promotion/ad posts, astroturfing, and trust issues. There is not inherent way to fix the inevitable breakdown, it’s a societal problem of greed and dishonesty, and you can’t easily just “ban bots”.
I’m mostly worried that they’ll disable the “old.reddit.com” trick to get the old layout. Finding information in reddit threads is a complete chore with the new design, which only a few comments displayed at a time.
Nice, I just realize I am not alone. Plus, their "material design" is another graphical catastrophe. I can't look any Google product because of this, notably Android.
Remember the original gmail horrible emojis? They were also sort of blobs with wide bottoms. But they eventually changed to something closer to normal. https://search.brave.com/images?q=gmail++emojis
Google doesn’t write recipes, dedicated and passionate cooks write blogs with recipes in them.
I guarantee you that none of them are aiming to provide just a grocery list or instructions, they definitely enjoy writing their story as well. They’re building their own cookbook essentially, not a bunch of lists.
Or, more likely, they are just SEO optimising by providing a lot of prose (which Google has historically prioritised in search rankings) - the same way as all those AI-generated article summaries on the astroturfing sites
How do you propose anyone (Google or humans) differentiate between 500 mostly-similar recipes for brownies? I think HNers look at food blogs with a very depressing robotic expectation.
This is what algorithms like PageRank were originally designed to do. Once upon a time the popular brownie recipes are the ones that everyone linked to, or the ones on the cooking sites that everyone linked to.
To be clear, I don't really care if the person wants to put their life story on their recipe site. I am annoyed that they are forced to do so in a really mechanical and disingenuous way just to make a Google algorithm happy - and as a result I lean heavily on the recipe sites that have alternate marketing channels/revenue streams (i.e. Serious Eats, ChefSteps, etc)
I am sorry, but I believe you are mistaken. Recipe sharing worked one way for all of history until it became profitable to game the search engines by adding story-like content.
Could you source anything that proves this? I’ve always seen personalised stories with recipes, save for barebones websites that are aggregators and not personal blogs. Maybe consider food writing the same as technical writing? Nobody wants to read a dev blog with just snippets of code, they want the story too!
@yunohn ? You think ppl searching for 'food blog stories outweighs' the people searching for food recipes?
Im honesty asking since. In my mind (i could very well be wrong). I. would think there are more ppl interested in 'how to make Great brownies' , then there are ppl searching for 'the backstory of the great brownie recipe' ?
Yet the results i get from my searches are more inline with if i searched for backstory of recipes.
Hell maybe im just searching with the wrong keywords ??
No, I’m saying Google doesn’t make the internet. Content creators want to add their own story and vibe to a simple recipe. You are free to use recipe aggregators that don’t, or make your own content?
I _think_ OP is referring to the fact that most sites are forced into writing really long form posts because the format is "encouraged" by Google.
I don't know the ins and outs but my understanding is that if you don't follow the Google format then you recipe drops way down in Google search results.
IANAL but wouldn't you just get a copyright on the story and somebody could still extract all the necessary information for preparing the meal and publish it as a simple recipe?
Why would they care about copyright? The sites these recipes sit on are ad-funded. Copyright would matter if they were selling these as books, not for free online where anybody can copy it, save it as a PDF etc.
It got so bad that I'm actually taking my own notes on topics again and trying to build up a personal knowledge database. Maybe it's not such a bad thing...
You don't want medical advice from reddit though. At least the university websites are trustworthy enough to decide if you need to see a doctor.
Maybe a no-filler health info website could be viable if it spread by word of mouth and not via Google. After a while it should become well-ranked on Google anyway, like Wikipedia or StackOverflow. Getting it to that point is a chicken-and-egg problem though.
A tool that records the sites you visit and makes their content searchable locally would be pretty nifty. It'd be a MITM, which isn't awesome, but if it's not a managed service that might not be so bad.
You'd need something like RSS to only download the useful contents. You could probably same a few forums' contents on a 500GB SSD if you stuck to text and used an efficient format.
The last couple of years have seen renewed interest in the search space and a lot of new comers in the market targeting the content search vacuum left behind by Google. Looks like they are finally waking up to the threat and ramping up their public relations. Too late Google, too late. Your veiled, corporate attempt at building a narrative around your product is not going to work. I have burnt many a neuron over the years using your product over and acquired an unrelenting PTSD from you. Thankfully I have found a cure and can breakup with you finally. You have a good one.
Hah. Just another day, someone sent me this link[1] which took images and text from my page[2] for the Google query "linux check disk space". Here is the thing my page doesn't even appear on Google. The ripped page points to the source[2] and has a link back to the original images. These scammers know how to game Google with their AI-driven sites, and they adopt it faster than Google rolling out new changes. I hope Google fix this issue.
DMCA notices are unpopular with the crowd here, but when your content is plagiarized and other people are profiting off of your work, I'd recommend the following workflow:
* Use Copyscape and perform automated plagiarized content detection.
* Automate the sending of DMCA notices to Google and the website host (using captcha solving services, if necessary).
Attribution does not exempt an author from the need to get permission. Baring a few edge cases, such as fair use, a copying without permission is still a copyright violation, attribution or not.
Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement.
"Plagiarism" is not a legal thing: it's not a crime codified in law and doesn't appear in laws [1]. Instead, usually it's a violation of some internal code, e.g. a school's or newspaper's policy of integrity. As you say indeed, usually these policies only consider something plagiarism if there is a lack of (clear) attribution.
However copyright is encoded in law and copyright infringement is a crime. The linked page clearly violates the copyright of OP.
Yeah no, automated DMCA notices should never be a thing. The shoot first ask questions later mechanic of DMCA notices is bad enough but at least have the decency to verify the claims you are making.
My Google experience would be improved immeasurably if there was a way for me to block domains after I decide I never want to see them in my search results again.
I've been burned in the past by relying on extensions like these, which only work until Google change their HTML and then the extension author is (understandably) burned out and doesn't update the extension, and eventually I just give up and uninstall it... I'd be a lot happier if this was a core Google Search feature. But I understand that Google don't make money by blocking their (paying) customers (spammers who run ads) from their search results.
Searching for Python API docs and getting w3schools and geeksforgeeks results is frustrating. Is there a solution to this problem? Maybe even a browser extension?
Another poster has already suggested `uBlacklist` so I won't waste bandwidth by repeating the link, but I want to underline the utility of this extension, because it's transformed my experience of using Google search for code problems.
Before using this, I was finding the first page of my search results were overwhelmed with StackOverflow-scrapers, which returned SO answers reformatted into some sort of garbage and unreadable 'blog-post'.
Nowadays, after blocking twenty/thirty/fifty(?) of these sites, I get to where I want as fast as I did 10 years ago.
You can also use it to block paywalled and clickbait content. For example, you can safely ignore anything from cnet.com or digitaltrends.com. There's a few niche-specific sites in my blocklist.
Letting you blacklist a site is one thing. They could improve upon it by letting people downvote/upvote pages and then using their extensive information vault to decide who is somewhat reputable or just similar to you.
I mean, I am 40 years old programmer/entrepreneur interested in sports and traditional board and card games. I like nice restaurants and hotels and even sometimes write Google reviews on them. I have my Gmail account since the beginning and I am paying YouTube and Google services customer. I am using Google phones since the Nexus. Google knows who I am, what I like, where I visit. It's pretty good at estimating revenue of my company. What about using the info for something useful for once and just show me pages people like me liked and don't show me pages people like me think are spam/scam? Please?
That may sound promising on paper, but I give it at most 6 months before an up/downvote manipulation SEO industry emerges and starts destroying any burgeoning improvements in the quality of search results.
Of course, not the same but the Google News thing on Android lets you say you're not interested in this suggestion or don't show me this news source again.
cnr.it is a domain which belongs to the Italian Research Council, and that subdomain seems to be a blog by the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems.
These are not scammers, it's probably an amateur researcher which published that information in a blog which is usually read by no-one. Probably it wasn't even meant to be public. But because of the prestige of the domain, it becomes first in relevant searches.
If you track down the author and send him a quick mail, I'm 100% sure they'll help.
Honestly, a researcher should know better to not plagiarize or to give attribution better than that. This is core in their job. If they do exactly this in their papers, it's going to be bad for them and they know it.
It's good they linked to the original post and that the link is the first thing we see, but nothing says that it's the source, and no paragraph explains that the content comes from elsewhere.
I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.
I see no malicious intents, it's probably done in good faith, but meh.
To the author: did you try to reach out? I'm sure something can be done about it if it bothers you. I expect the author of this copy to be receptive.
> I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.
Quite possibly an easy way to preserve the content in case the original goes offline and to share it with colleagues. Perhaps they wanted to link to it from some long-lived or even printed material. Not saying it’s the best way to do so, but it’s plausible and not malicious.
It’s plausible and not malicious, understandable too, but it's not hard to say it in a sentence at the beginning of the post.
This is a public blog, not some internal website.
Anyway, my previous comment probably sounds harsh because it is the way I wrote it (because I previously worked in a research lab, so I kinda feel disappointed), but I still consider this a minor fuck up and it happens to everyone, for sure.
> it's probably an amateur researcher which published that information in a blog which is usually read by no-one.
Ah, but this is the new method of SEO trickery and credential scamming. Publishing a 'guest post' on a high-ranking blog subdomain of a trusted instititution. There was a story of someone doing this on Harvard University's blogs, which I can't find right now.
But I found something even better. An actual UpWork posting promising to publish your crap on Chapman.edu's university blog:
Maybe the bootleg page could be a source of inspiration?
It has a garbage/content ratio of 32 (the browser downloads 32 bytes for every byte of content) while the original page has a 400 ratio (the browser downloads 400 bytes for every byte of content). It's borderline denial of service attack against the visitor.
The original also has a slow aggressive cookie box that is unnecessary as visitors can be spied on using server logs, no need to have cookies for the spy infrastructure. The bootleg has no cookie box (though does set a couple of gratuitous cookies, and does load one gratuitous googleanalytics.js, so maybe it does the right thing in a non-compliant way).
Maybe all these factor make the original page look "less good" to google quality ranking? (which would be ironic given Google's general leadership of the Orgy of Waste school of web design.) Also if google starts ranking such pages up they may expose themselves to class action lawsuits as users could ask for a refund for the power, hardware and telecom bills incurred in being lead to load them?
> Also if google starts ranking such pages up they may expose themselves to class action lawsuits as users could ask for a refund for the power, hardware and telecom bills incurred in being lead to load them?
Sorry, but this is completely insane. Search engines should most certainly and definitely not ever be liable for linking to original sources for such a stupid reason. This American pro-litigious attitude has to stop.
No, they are the ones allowing companies become such behemoths that other sovereign governments have to step in and rule over to keep some kind of data privacy for their citizens.
Sure, it's tongue in cheek, but there is a tragedy of the commons in there: whatever massive waste devs and their employers inflict on society goes unpunished because there is no incentive to change that behaviour. Was suggesting some activist subvert computer misuse laws to fix this. Primary legislation or big tech using its weight would do as well.
In the physical world one can't dump a rusty aircraft carrier on someone else's lawn and get away with it. Should be the same in tech.
> In the physical world one can't dump a rusty aircraft carrier on someone else's lawn and get away with it. Should be the same in tech.
Google's search results are most definitely not your lawn, nor are heavy websites very much alike to rusty aircraft carriers. Or however this analogy is supposed to work anyway.
Cool, so will the relevant wiki page, which is almost certainly both the most linked to and most desired page for almost all "thing" searches, go back to being result #1 instead of buried under content farms, copyspam, and Medium trash?
> Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core metrics.
While this is almost trivially true based on what we know of (the world, big tech companies, Google in particular, etc), do we have direct supporting evidence for this?
I'm not sure this whole drive towards 'original content' makes sense. It encourages people to make long rambling pages that don't get to the point
In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was almost always the first result on various topics
What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly just filling up paragraphs for google like "so you want to learn about oranges? an orange is a great type of fruit. here's a bunch of text about oranges being described in historic literature"
I think there's a different driving factor that. I've heard of a metric that is how long you spend on a given URL. Not sure how they gather that data, probably only gathered from Chrome users.
Anyway, from what I've heard, that's the reason recipe sites have started posting 4 pages of drivel about the dish before getting to the actual recipe.
Or so I've heard, I don't really have any good sources for this, could just be hearsay
Or, Google Analytics. Or Google ads. Or, if you return to Google and try other links for the same query. Or if you return to Google and refine the query (e.g., a new search where the term is within a predefined threshold of word vector similarity)
There are plenty of ways to approximate time spend on link.
A couple of months ago I read on various SEO blogs (they all seem to mostly copy and paste each other with little original research) that these days it is less about keywords and technical things like semantic html, but if and how long people engage with the search result.
E.g. if a link to your page is shown to the user in search and they don't click or they return to search page too quickly, Google sees this as a signal that the result was not helpful.
If it's based on length of engagement this does explain the trend towards verbosity I've noticed. I assumed the long leading paragraphs and introduction and background sections were just excuses to keep dropping the keywords in, but I guess it's to make me have to spend a lot of time reading and scrolling to get to the meat of the answer.
I guess that means we can use adds and tracking against itself. Any time you go to a webpage that is ad heavy quickly leave. Over time they get ranked down until they shape up or die.
This resonates with me so freaking much. I am disgusted by how every bit of information on webpages seem to be buried between paragraphs of empty EMPTY talk and even when they seem to get to the point, most of the time there is no real information there. Sorry, this had to come out. We really need better search engines.
Yes, but if it's truly social it won't be easy. There need to be ways to see who did what and filter them out and various groups / spheres of influence. Just like in real life.
If it is a hidden algorithmically social function then of course it will be gamed.
But IRL there are certain people whose advice and recommendations you value and those whose you ignore. And in other cases you can easily ask the source of other information to find out if it is high value or not. MLM is the gamification of the IRL social structure and it's fairly easy to opt-out.
That's what search needs, a way to see the path information took to be presented to you and a way to filter it.
Unfortunately right now, so much of the best information is in Facebook groups, post and comments. The interface there is absolutely horrible though and not designed to provide you information, but to maximize the amount of ads that come across your screen.
The same is true for video information. It's not easily searchable or digestible. The web peaked when information was predominantly text form and not fragmented into walled gardens.
> Yes, but if it's truly social it won't be easy. There need to be ways to see who did what and filter them out and various groups / spheres of influence. Just like in real life.
Appending site:news.ycombinator.com instead of Reddit?
There is an extent they can go to with account verification where gaming is not very feasible.
Can you create a fake account with a verified credit card number, verified phone number, passport, drivers license, account history consistent with human usage, Google One subscription, etc.? You probably can, but doing it at-scale is going to be quite costly.
Can you get a lot of people to install a piece of software and then use their account instead? Could you even pay those people per hour of usage of their account?
My understanding from reading a number of articles about this "helpful content" update from Google is that they want to get rid of pages like what you describe and instead prioritize pages that get right to the point. So perhaps you'll get what you are asking for.
This is true of most non-fiction literature as well (self-help and business books especially), so I'm not sure if Google can necessarily discourage people from adding unnecessary padding.
Google is already scraping bits of website content and showing it to the user as a "featured snippet". Nobody is going to write short pages if Google can already rob you of a click so easily.
I have no problem with that if it can also read my mind and serve up what I need. Until then, I want the option to correct their generous recommendations.
You have just described the typical content-farm page created to game Google. I hope this update is going to lower the ranking of those pages (pages that usually have an ad every paragraph or more).
Every site needs a commercialization score and a way to filter them down. Number of ads should be a dead give away, but that's antithetical to Google's business.
Yeah, I was going to suggest the same: farm-factory sites are easily identifiable by the number of Ads, especially on the doubleclick.net domain. But maybe for Google in the long-run would be a net positive to ban those sites anyway, due to better "organic" results and how people will see Google results.
Feels like the early days of the internet when the computer savvy knew how to find what they were looking for (possibly even using early google) and everyone else was condemned to sifting through trash to get something useful. These days I find myself reaching more often for specialised search like going straight to wikipedia or amazon if I want to get a direct answer.
Encourages people to make long rambling pages which don’t get to the point? Ever seen YouTube, it’s exactly the same. 10-11+ min videos saying almost nothing because it’s the most lucrative length. The internet of today is just everyone gaming everything for a dollar.
At least Youtube has a timeline (with sometimes even chapters) that let you jump ahead. The thumbnails are also a good indication on what type of content you can expect from a video.
In the case of Youtube, the video thumbnail itself is usually a strong enough signal as to whether it's worth watching.
Enormous swathes of the platform are filled with gossip channels (politics, crypto, stonks, celebrities, music) hosted by clout chasers desperate to be seen as authorities on that topic.
Of course there can be good content inside of these categories, but you can generally tell which channels are "optimized for engagement", i.e. run like a business, and those are more amateurish and perhaps more authentic.
I sometimes search for specific keywords in the transcript of the video to directly jump to the point in very long videos. Otherwise i just click at the middle & judge.
Wikipedia doesn't bring in adsense dollars, I'm surprised it is usually still on the first page (frequently it isn't for disease searches, which have some of the highest ad spends).
The dissonance is between Google's native perception and external reality:
reality 1: The www exists. Google indexes it, analyzes it and delivers it to users. Users like certain things, like original content.
reality 2: Google's ranking policies/algorithms influence the web. The "original content" that exists in a world without Google is different to the content that exists in a world where Google ranks such web pages more highly.
Google refuse to see or present themselves in the role that they actually occupy. They avoid thinking of the search algorithm as encouraging or discouraging anything. It's just analyzing.
On youtube, This mindset is even more loopy, because on youtube they actually own the platform. The recommendation engine or whatnot implements what is clearly a new policy, Youtube pretends that there was no policy to change in the first place.
>Google refuse to see or present themselves in the role that they actually occupy. They avoid thinking of the search algorithm as encouraging or discouraging anything. It's just analyzing.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
As an outside observer, it seems that Google recognizes that their search engine does have a "Heisenberg" effect akin to "measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the system"
E.g. the Google search ranking causes the rise of content farms. Google then fights back with a new revision to the algorithm to downrank them. That constant arms race between various blackhat SEO and Google's new algorithms was commented on many times by Matt Cutts (Google former head of search quality): https://hn.algolia.com/?q=matt+cutts
In a sense, I am overstating. Having an anti-spam team is obviously a recognition that SEO/Spam exists and that Google is trying to discourage or mitigate.
But Google is well beyond just attracting spam. Success in Google search rankings is, for many sites, the better part of online success. If Google ranks needlessly wordy recipes more highly than concise & useful recipes... then wordy recipes get written. It's not about ranking recipes anymore... it's about the effects google has on recipes. The recipes get written in a wordy fashion, because of the ranking system... not just ranked because of the writing style. Google is dictating the nature of online recipes with their rankings.
A few years back, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. Viral hits became much less common. The result has been to send many professional youtubers into a frantic grind. There's no point in taking time with a video, or trying weird ideas. It won't go viral anyway. A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished. There are tens of thousands of these youtubers, basically small businesses.
There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects. It's always communicated as it is here. I believe this is how Google execs actually think about the issues. As a quasi-spam problem to be mitigated with the next “helpful content update.”
>There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects.
Can you articulate what concrete actions Google could take that would address these 2nd order effects?
>, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. [...] A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished.
I've seen this repeated many times (especially from Youtubers making videos about "burnout") but the analysis about cause & effect seems incomplete. As one counterpoint, Ben Krasnow "Applied Science" channel slowed down from weekly uploads to a video every few months and yet his views and subscribers went up not down: https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos
My pet theory on the contradictory anecdotes: the Youtubers making videos on a topic with lots of competition from other Youtubers uploading every week -- such as fast fashion clothes shopping -- are the ones that seem to suffer if they slow down. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul
However, if you're making videos in niche topics with originality (maybe "weird ideas" as you put it), you won't be penalized by infrequent uploads. Many examples including Technology Connections, Applied Science, etc
So a different conclusion can be reached... if one makes a high quality videos, one can even upload just once a year and the Youtube algorithm won't penalize you.
I suspect some of the contradiction comes from whether you're measuring views per video or ad revenue per month.
If one youtuber produced a 32-minute video per month and got 500,000 views while another produced eight 4-minute videos per month and averaged 200,000 views per video, who do you suppose gets the most ad money? I'd wager the latter.
I think it’s more that nobody knows the policy. It’s all ML changes few people understand or can even communicate. I don’t expect google would explain if they knew how it worked, but they also cannot explain how their technology works.
IDK. I suspect this is less true than most acknowledge.
Black box or not, google are creating these systems, analyzing, optimising and implementing them. It's indeed hard or impossible to trace back individual examples and their whys. But the macro effects are visible and choices are made.
It's just easier to "blame the computer," internally or externally. It's just like bank employees merge always blame "regulations." In fact, whatever they are blaming is a policy created to implement that bank's compliance framework which exists to satisfy the regulator's goals and the bank's goals." Most of the time, the underlying regulation is distantly removed from whatever piece of bureaucracy is annoying the customer or employee. But, if it can be blamed on the regulator, it will be.
It's just easier, if at all possible, to blame an immovable and mysterious force rather than the more likely culprit: humans doing a bad job.
I hadn't thought that the reason they do this is to appear to have original content. It seems like distinguishing between the original source of information and a site that has a bunch of filler "original content" but just exists to republish/plagiarize some other site's content must be a difficult problem to solve.
Those types of rambling posts are clearly one of the targets of this update. From the Search Central guidance, here’s a question for site operators to ask themselves to “Avoid creating content for search engines first”:
> Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't).
This is especially annoying with recipes. There's usually a massive backstory that takes up 90% of the page. Some recipe websites even post a button to jump directly to the recipe, at least they're self-aware.
I used to search for recipes on the Internet. The spam became unbearable. Then I spent $30 on a cookbook, one recipe per page. Very happy with the outcome. Simple, fast, effective: it just works.
Happiness meta-rule: Throw electronics away, use analog equivalents instead.
An AI trained on the body of verified human knowledge that understands natural language could replace a good deal of the googling done by people.
In an ideal world, such an endeavor would be supported by governments all around the world (or a single "Earth government"), with yearly updates to keep up with the state of the art.
I've started just closing the tab. I don't give a shit that a certain country planted oranges and it gave them naval superiority, I want to know what types of oranges there are!
I agree. That's why I habitually add "wiki" to most of my search phrases in the first place, in order to circumvent the whole SEO trash and get to the point.
Google prolly cannot earn money simply by featuring high quality stuff like Wikipedia or nerd websites. Usually SEO farms spend money on Google to earn money. So that's why search really cannot improve in my opinion due to this conflict of interest.
> Last year, we kicked off a series of updates to show more helpful, in-depth reviews based on first-hand expertise in search results.
I find myself searching <product name> + "review reddit" to find real honest reviews. My anecdotal experience is that everything else is written by content creators who are given the product for free to use for a few days/weeks/months w/o going in depth.
I can assure you that 90% of these product review sites have never even used the product, and the content is almost always written by a $25/article writer from Upwork.
Awhile ago the company I used to work for used a local service that does 2 pieces of content per week for you for lime 50€ / month. Quality was shit but it did get us views and paying customers.
Same here. For more niche stuff, <product name> + "site:news.ycombinator.com" is standard practice. Or Algolia's HN search.
Another one is <product name> + "forum" or <product name> + <some trusted forum>.
I train myself to use DDG, but, to my own dissapointment, I end up with "!g <query> site:something-trustworthy.com" way too often.
For regular Google searches, I've had the feeling of being "scammed" for years, though. The "fishing devil" on the no-results page also feels like buttering up the user. I always subconsciously interpret this as a lightly humiliating, but cowardly way to say "we decide what you see, bro". But, YMMV.
Never wanted to bash anybody, but this has got to be the most negative post I've ever written on HN. Please, please, please, Google, give me the search results of around 2008-2010. Pages, pages, pages of results for almost any query. I worked as a journalist then, and googling was actually useful, even educational, in real life.
I use the "Search the current site" Chrome extension. You can just hop to a YC or Reddit page and click the search icon, but it works with all websites.
Here is a what you should add to search request to find mostly old style forum discussions: inurl:forum|viewthread|showthread|viewtopic|showtopic|comments|"index.php?topic" | intext:"reading this topic"|"next thread"|"next topic"|"send private message"
This is a really useful tip, many thanks. It has probably largely been a personal comfort zone, but I haven't dug much deeper than site: or ext: operators in recent years. A lazy habit. Also, strangely, I have always had doubt as to the real efficiency of the OR operator in web search (maybe it has yielded unsatisfactory results in some distant past, and for different engines, not only Google; hence the prejudice). I didn't even know that the "pipe" symbol should actually work for that.
Your example is a really good one, because it illustrates the power of OR remarkably well. The key is using it to combine several different operators, not just duplicating a single one, e.g. "query site:a.com | site:b.com". That has been my main way of digging deeper over the years, along with "#" to specify a date range.
Interestingly, in case of "query site:firstsite.ee|secondsite.ee" the "|" doesn't seem to work, I get zero results. Why is that? To narrow down the results based on both the domain name and top level domain, I have to add the inurl: operator. E.g. "query inurl:firstsite|secondsite site:.ee"
Strangely, "piping" is the essential thing I do on the Unix command line every day. I haven't put (that) much thought into using Google's "|" operator in a similar vein, that is, to combine several (3-4) different operators. Possibly partly because one used to get pages and pages of results even with very simple, single-operator queries.
Time to refresh my memory about Google's search operators, I guess. Thanks again for sharing this example.
At this point, I'm not sure how many of the Reddit reviews are valid, either.
Marketers may be dumb, but they're not stupid - all it takes is a few people to notice Google starting to add "reddit" to their autocomplete, start looking around, figure out what's going on, and then suddenly the whole "SEO"/marketing spam sphere is aware of it and will start making sockpuppet accounts.
I agree. It's a cat and mouse game. At some point Reddit reviews will no longer be trustworthy. I have some techniques to weed out some reviews. For example I was considering a Synology ds220j for home use so I looked for negative reviews on /r/nas /r/synology and /r/homelab.
> tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people
By my understanding, this should hopefully cause Pinterest pages to disappear from image searches too, but by my experience, they're a big site so Google will have made an exception for them.
And it should likely deal with those StackOverflow 'clone' sites which sometimes rank better than StackOverflow itself.
On YouTube, there is an option called "Don't recommend channel". I wonder why Google doesn't have a similar option. Or even better, a "Recommend me this website as the first option" button. It would useful to avoid spammy sites and to benefit the good ones. To avoid gaming the algorithm, Google can't take this data into account to benefit/punish websites on search results. The button has the only purpose to customise the user experience one by one. Over time though, and organically, spammy sites would get less traffic. Eventually, they would be forced to shut down (lack of ad revenue).
That's great, until they decide to nix it or you want to migrate your list to another search engine. I wish we could decouple these choices from the website providers. A web browser that puts the user back in control.
There is no reason to think that a paid search engine like Kagi will get rid of one of it's signature functionality, but if you're interested in an extension for browser: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
These days there is no shortage of tools that monitor SERP fluctuation, and if this update brings about _significant_ impact it will be talked about everywhere.
And I fully expect spammers to go ballistic once their content gets obliterated.
Did they go ballistic when Google introduced the Panda update in 2010, killing many of the the web-scraped, machine-generated blogspam that was poisoning search results? No, they moved on to fresh territory like Youtube, gaming the recommendation engines. And they eventually came back to the web to poison results with hordes of awful 'best bicycle for fitness in 2022' type afilliate marketing sites.
How does "more original content" doesn't sound like potential shitty results for a given query? We've already seen tailoring doesn't work universally and people often times want concrete results.
A little OT, but is there a name for that design style that Google is using here? I'm talking about the bearded dude at the top of the article, with glasses and a phone in his hand.
I've seen it more and more during the last few years, from ads around the city I live in to hipsterish magazines. There's something about it that has started bugging me the wrong way, I find it kind of infantilising but at the same time trying to "sell" me something as an adult (an insurance product, a "life is good" vibe because goofy drawings, that sort of thing). Or maybe I'm seeing too much into it.
Later edit: I'm talking about visuals like this one [1], which, looking at it again, I find quite similar in style to the one Google is using (hence my question, there must be a trend or something).
It's reminiscent of socialist realism -- with a modern, tech twist. The favored art-style of woke companies. It's their vision of utopia: a rainbow of skin tones, but everyone belonging to the same global monoculture.
I don't buy it. Google search of basic programming concepts give almost always as top results sites like geeksforgeeks and other Indian proto-spam sites with very obnoxious sign-up floats covering up everything, while the content is almost copy pasted from docs or other sites. Google rarely gives you the official documentation or tutorials at the top. You have to restrict with site: (to the point I have "search engines" doing just that "site:").
It seems there's a new one I haven't seen before called appdividend blog, from India too. And another one "DelftStack", allegedly from Netherlands (tweets from 2019 and weird lack of info). programiz, from Nepal (you have to dig to find it).
What should these search pages give, in order: Official documentation, then Stack Exchange and similar, then real people's blogs, and at the very bottom on page 25 these spammy copy-n-paste sites/blogs.
Google is full of developers, so they have to know about this but for some reason the company does nothing about it. Almost like the company is fully driven by ad revenue and doesn't want users to find actual content.
It is a paid service, so probably not for everyone, but have you tried Kagi? It lets you 'pin' specific sites to the top, rank sites higher, rank sites lower, or block them entirely
I'd like more search filters like that, they should be composable with logic expressions. For example, "forums" or "eu" (all EU national domains, so you can find a product that is easy to ship), but you could extend it with page categories like "reviews", "recipes", "python", "js", "in/out_top_1m", "blogs", not to mention verticals like "shopping", "hotels", "tickets".
Especially for the shopping category Google dropped the ball. When I am, wallet in hand, ready to buy a widget, why doesn't it do the best to help me find it? Isn't that the essence of search? Or just to search again and show more ads?
Such a failure of experience to try to use Google. Behaves like the doctor who secretly wants people to be sick so he can have more business.
But the writing is on the wall. Dialogue based search agents are coming, snippet based search is on the way out. The language models become better and better, they can even do sub-searches. The trend towards natural language based search is being accelerated by the mobile phones who lack proper keyboards and large screens.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadWhat you may witness is less amazon affiliate posts and more made for AdSense posts - such as those recipes that begin with a random love story, for example.
In the interim they tried to push AMP, but had to admit finally that it's more to keep people inside their ecosystem than make the web faster/better.
The only way to get half-decent reviews at the moment is to append "reddit" to your search query, otherwise you get pages full of comparatives that haven't tested any of the items they recommend.
No one wants the back story for the "the best brownies", I want to know the ingredients, cooking temps (Celsius and Fahrenheit) and time.
I guarantee you that none of them are aiming to provide just a grocery list or instructions, they definitely enjoy writing their story as well. They’re building their own cookbook essentially, not a bunch of lists.
To be clear, I don't really care if the person wants to put their life story on their recipe site. I am annoyed that they are forced to do so in a really mechanical and disingenuous way just to make a Google algorithm happy - and as a result I lean heavily on the recipe sites that have alternate marketing channels/revenue streams (i.e. Serious Eats, ChefSteps, etc)
Im honesty asking since. In my mind (i could very well be wrong). I. would think there are more ppl interested in 'how to make Great brownies' , then there are ppl searching for 'the backstory of the great brownie recipe' ?
Yet the results i get from my searches are more inline with if i searched for backstory of recipes.
Hell maybe im just searching with the wrong keywords ??
I don't know the ins and outs but my understanding is that if you don't follow the Google format then you recipe drops way down in Google search results.
TBH I'm not entirely clear why the issue is so important to the people who publish these things, but clearly it is!
Otherwise, it is almost useless for most of the world.
1) Im mad cause now i need to google a convert query and author assumes the world is only full of U.S.A ppl
2) Mad cause I should know approximate conversion value, since I *think/claim" to be not a stupid person.
Both of the are usually false, in my case at least
Health and medical queries are the worst. The top results literally have the same generic content.
Maybe a no-filler health info website could be viable if it spread by word of mouth and not via Google. After a while it should become well-ranked on Google anyway, like Wikipedia or StackOverflow. Getting it to that point is a chicken-and-egg problem though.
Hah. Just another day, someone sent me this link[1] which took images and text from my page[2] for the Google query "linux check disk space". Here is the thing my page doesn't even appear on Google. The ripped page points to the source[2] and has a link back to the original images. These scammers know how to game Google with their AI-driven sites, and they adopt it faster than Google rolling out new changes. I hope Google fix this issue.
[1] Spam/scam page - http://blog.imm.cnr.it/content/linux-check-disk-space-comman...
[2] Original my page published on 2016-01-23 - https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-check-disk-space-command...
[3] Google search query - https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+check+disk+space
* Use Copyscape and perform automated plagiarized content detection.
* Automate the sending of DMCA notices to Google and the website host (using captcha solving services, if necessary).
"Plagiarism" is not a legal thing: it's not a crime codified in law and doesn't appear in laws [1]. Instead, usually it's a violation of some internal code, e.g. a school's or newspaper's policy of integrity. As you say indeed, usually these policies only consider something plagiarism if there is a lack of (clear) attribution.
However copyright is encoded in law and copyright infringement is a crime. The linked page clearly violates the copyright of OP.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects
I've been burned in the past by relying on extensions like these, which only work until Google change their HTML and then the extension author is (understandably) burned out and doesn't update the extension, and eventually I just give up and uninstall it... I'd be a lot happier if this was a core Google Search feature. But I understand that Google don't make money by blocking their (paying) customers (spammers who run ads) from their search results.
!py urlunsplit
redirects you to:
https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=urlunsplit
Before using this, I was finding the first page of my search results were overwhelmed with StackOverflow-scrapers, which returned SO answers reformatted into some sort of garbage and unreadable 'blog-post'.
Nowadays, after blocking twenty/thirty/fifty(?) of these sites, I get to where I want as fast as I did 10 years ago.
If anyone want to share other such lists, however subjective, I would be grateful
edit: found another one, https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation
I mean, I am 40 years old programmer/entrepreneur interested in sports and traditional board and card games. I like nice restaurants and hotels and even sometimes write Google reviews on them. I have my Gmail account since the beginning and I am paying YouTube and Google services customer. I am using Google phones since the Nexus. Google knows who I am, what I like, where I visit. It's pretty good at estimating revenue of my company. What about using the info for something useful for once and just show me pages people like me liked and don't show me pages people like me think are spam/scam? Please?
These are not scammers, it's probably an amateur researcher which published that information in a blog which is usually read by no-one. Probably it wasn't even meant to be public. But because of the prestige of the domain, it becomes first in relevant searches.
If you track down the author and send him a quick mail, I'm 100% sure they'll help.
I've worked at CNR.
There are plenty of scam pages, but specifically this one doesn't look like it
More like someone who didn’t care much about copyright or license decided to back up information they found useful in their personal blog.
It's good they linked to the original post and that the link is the first thing we see, but nothing says that it's the source, and no paragraph explains that the content comes from elsewhere.
I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.
I see no malicious intents, it's probably done in good faith, but meh.
To the author: did you try to reach out? I'm sure something can be done about it if it bothers you. I expect the author of this copy to be receptive.
Quite possibly an easy way to preserve the content in case the original goes offline and to share it with colleagues. Perhaps they wanted to link to it from some long-lived or even printed material. Not saying it’s the best way to do so, but it’s plausible and not malicious.
This is a public blog, not some internal website.
Anyway, my previous comment probably sounds harsh because it is the way I wrote it (because I previously worked in a research lab, so I kinda feel disappointed), but I still consider this a minor fuck up and it happens to everyone, for sure.
Ah, but this is the new method of SEO trickery and credential scamming. Publishing a 'guest post' on a high-ranking blog subdomain of a trusted instititution. There was a story of someone doing this on Harvard University's blogs, which I can't find right now.
But I found something even better. An actual UpWork posting promising to publish your crap on Chapman.edu's university blog:
https://www.upwork.com/services/product/5-high-da-dofollow-g...
It has a garbage/content ratio of 32 (the browser downloads 32 bytes for every byte of content) while the original page has a 400 ratio (the browser downloads 400 bytes for every byte of content). It's borderline denial of service attack against the visitor.
The original also has a slow aggressive cookie box that is unnecessary as visitors can be spied on using server logs, no need to have cookies for the spy infrastructure. The bootleg has no cookie box (though does set a couple of gratuitous cookies, and does load one gratuitous googleanalytics.js, so maybe it does the right thing in a non-compliant way).
Maybe all these factor make the original page look "less good" to google quality ranking? (which would be ironic given Google's general leadership of the Orgy of Waste school of web design.) Also if google starts ranking such pages up they may expose themselves to class action lawsuits as users could ask for a refund for the power, hardware and telecom bills incurred in being lead to load them?
Sorry, but this is completely insane. Search engines should most certainly and definitely not ever be liable for linking to original sources for such a stupid reason. This American pro-litigious attitude has to stop.
In the physical world one can't dump a rusty aircraft carrier on someone else's lawn and get away with it. Should be the same in tech.
Google's search results are most definitely not your lawn, nor are heavy websites very much alike to rusty aircraft carriers. Or however this analogy is supposed to work anyway.
What is this referring to?
Sure, goatse people if they refuse to observe your requests if you feel like it.
[0] https://opensource.com/article/18/7/how-check-free-disk-spac...
Content farms run AdSense.
Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core metrics.
While this is almost trivially true based on what we know of (the world, big tech companies, Google in particular, etc), do we have direct supporting evidence for this?
Well you see already in ancient rome they made bread this way...............
[2 pages of story time]
AD
AD
AD
Ingredients separated by more Ads
In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was almost always the first result on various topics
What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly just filling up paragraphs for google like "so you want to learn about oranges? an orange is a great type of fruit. here's a bunch of text about oranges being described in historic literature"
Anyway, from what I've heard, that's the reason recipe sites have started posting 4 pages of drivel about the dish before getting to the actual recipe.
Or so I've heard, I don't really have any good sources for this, could just be hearsay
Or, Google Analytics. Or Google ads. Or, if you return to Google and try other links for the same query. Or if you return to Google and refine the query (e.g., a new search where the term is within a predefined threshold of word vector similarity)
There are plenty of ways to approximate time spend on link.
E.g. if a link to your page is shown to the user in search and they don't click or they return to search page too quickly, Google sees this as a signal that the result was not helpful.
If it is a hidden algorithmically social function then of course it will be gamed.
But IRL there are certain people whose advice and recommendations you value and those whose you ignore. And in other cases you can easily ask the source of other information to find out if it is high value or not. MLM is the gamification of the IRL social structure and it's fairly easy to opt-out.
That's what search needs, a way to see the path information took to be presented to you and a way to filter it.
Unfortunately right now, so much of the best information is in Facebook groups, post and comments. The interface there is absolutely horrible though and not designed to provide you information, but to maximize the amount of ads that come across your screen.
The same is true for video information. It's not easily searchable or digestible. The web peaked when information was predominantly text form and not fragmented into walled gardens.
Appending site:news.ycombinator.com instead of Reddit?
Can you create a fake account with a verified credit card number, verified phone number, passport, drivers license, account history consistent with human usage, Google One subscription, etc.? You probably can, but doing it at-scale is going to be quite costly.
Quite cheaply
Google is already scraping bits of website content and showing it to the user as a "featured snippet". Nobody is going to write short pages if Google can already rob you of a click so easily.
The update literally says they are working to get rid of the type of useless content you are talking about.
Enormous swathes of the platform are filled with gossip channels (politics, crypto, stonks, celebrities, music) hosted by clout chasers desperate to be seen as authorities on that topic.
Of course there can be good content inside of these categories, but you can generally tell which channels are "optimized for engagement", i.e. run like a business, and those are more amateurish and perhaps more authentic.
reality 1: The www exists. Google indexes it, analyzes it and delivers it to users. Users like certain things, like original content.
reality 2: Google's ranking policies/algorithms influence the web. The "original content" that exists in a world without Google is different to the content that exists in a world where Google ranks such web pages more highly.
Google refuse to see or present themselves in the role that they actually occupy. They avoid thinking of the search algorithm as encouraging or discouraging anything. It's just analyzing.
On youtube, This mindset is even more loopy, because on youtube they actually own the platform. The recommendation engine or whatnot implements what is clearly a new policy, Youtube pretends that there was no policy to change in the first place.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
As an outside observer, it seems that Google recognizes that their search engine does have a "Heisenberg" effect akin to "measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the system"
E.g. the Google search ranking causes the rise of content farms. Google then fights back with a new revision to the algorithm to downrank them. That constant arms race between various blackhat SEO and Google's new algorithms was commented on many times by Matt Cutts (Google former head of search quality): https://hn.algolia.com/?q=matt+cutts
Another example is the RapGenius punishment by Google to discourage content that tries to game the algorithm: https://www.google.com/search?q=rapgenius+penalty+google+ran...
Google often makes manual human intervention e.g. M Cutts team telling HN they're looking into RapGenius SEO hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658
Are those are not examples of Google understanding its effect on internet content that tries to game their algorithm?
I think the issue is that Google's algorithm isn't perfect -- and therefore it appears like they don't discourage bad content.
In a sense, I am overstating. Having an anti-spam team is obviously a recognition that SEO/Spam exists and that Google is trying to discourage or mitigate.
But Google is well beyond just attracting spam. Success in Google search rankings is, for many sites, the better part of online success. If Google ranks needlessly wordy recipes more highly than concise & useful recipes... then wordy recipes get written. It's not about ranking recipes anymore... it's about the effects google has on recipes. The recipes get written in a wordy fashion, because of the ranking system... not just ranked because of the writing style. Google is dictating the nature of online recipes with their rankings.
A few years back, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. Viral hits became much less common. The result has been to send many professional youtubers into a frantic grind. There's no point in taking time with a video, or trying weird ideas. It won't go viral anyway. A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished. There are tens of thousands of these youtubers, basically small businesses.
There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects. It's always communicated as it is here. I believe this is how Google execs actually think about the issues. As a quasi-spam problem to be mitigated with the next “helpful content update.”
Can you articulate what concrete actions Google could take that would address these 2nd order effects?
>, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. [...] A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished.
I've seen this repeated many times (especially from Youtubers making videos about "burnout") but the analysis about cause & effect seems incomplete. As one counterpoint, Ben Krasnow "Applied Science" channel slowed down from weekly uploads to a video every few months and yet his views and subscribers went up not down: https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos
Another yt channel that had a year between uploads and the views went up : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX7katl3DVmch4D7LSvqbVQ/vid...
My pet theory on the contradictory anecdotes: the Youtubers making videos on a topic with lots of competition from other Youtubers uploading every week -- such as fast fashion clothes shopping -- are the ones that seem to suffer if they slow down. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul
However, if you're making videos in niche topics with originality (maybe "weird ideas" as you put it), you won't be penalized by infrequent uploads. Many examples including Technology Connections, Applied Science, etc
So a different conclusion can be reached... if one makes a high quality videos, one can even upload just once a year and the Youtube algorithm won't penalize you.
If one youtuber produced a 32-minute video per month and got 500,000 views while another produced eight 4-minute videos per month and averaged 200,000 views per video, who do you suppose gets the most ad money? I'd wager the latter.
Black box or not, google are creating these systems, analyzing, optimising and implementing them. It's indeed hard or impossible to trace back individual examples and their whys. But the macro effects are visible and choices are made.
It's just easier to "blame the computer," internally or externally. It's just like bank employees merge always blame "regulations." In fact, whatever they are blaming is a policy created to implement that bank's compliance framework which exists to satisfy the regulator's goals and the bank's goals." Most of the time, the underlying regulation is distantly removed from whatever piece of bureaucracy is annoying the customer or employee. But, if it can be blamed on the regulator, it will be.
It's just easier, if at all possible, to blame an immovable and mysterious force rather than the more likely culprit: humans doing a bad job.
> Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't).
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co...
a) dont summarize other sites
b) dont write overly long articles just to make google happy
It's a shame a) is never helping with b)
Happiness meta-rule: Throw electronics away, use analog equivalents instead.
In an ideal world, such an endeavor would be supported by governments all around the world (or a single "Earth government"), with yearly updates to keep up with the state of the art.
I've started just closing the tab. I don't give a shit that a certain country planted oranges and it gave them naval superiority, I want to know what types of oranges there are!
Google prolly cannot earn money simply by featuring high quality stuff like Wikipedia or nerd websites. Usually SEO farms spend money on Google to earn money. So that's why search really cannot improve in my opinion due to this conflict of interest.
I find myself searching <product name> + "review reddit" to find real honest reviews. My anecdotal experience is that everything else is written by content creators who are given the product for free to use for a few days/weeks/months w/o going in depth.
Another one is <product name> + "forum" or <product name> + <some trusted forum>.
I train myself to use DDG, but, to my own dissapointment, I end up with "!g <query> site:something-trustworthy.com" way too often.
For regular Google searches, I've had the feeling of being "scammed" for years, though. The "fishing devil" on the no-results page also feels like buttering up the user. I always subconsciously interpret this as a lightly humiliating, but cowardly way to say "we decide what you see, bro". But, YMMV.
Never wanted to bash anybody, but this has got to be the most negative post I've ever written on HN. Please, please, please, Google, give me the search results of around 2008-2010. Pages, pages, pages of results for almost any query. I worked as a journalist then, and googling was actually useful, even educational, in real life.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-the-current...
Your example is a really good one, because it illustrates the power of OR remarkably well. The key is using it to combine several different operators, not just duplicating a single one, e.g. "query site:a.com | site:b.com". That has been my main way of digging deeper over the years, along with "#" to specify a date range.
Interestingly, in case of "query site:firstsite.ee|secondsite.ee" the "|" doesn't seem to work, I get zero results. Why is that? To narrow down the results based on both the domain name and top level domain, I have to add the inurl: operator. E.g. "query inurl:firstsite|secondsite site:.ee"
Strangely, "piping" is the essential thing I do on the Unix command line every day. I haven't put (that) much thought into using Google's "|" operator in a similar vein, that is, to combine several (3-4) different operators. Possibly partly because one used to get pages and pages of results even with very simple, single-operator queries.
Time to refresh my memory about Google's search operators, I guess. Thanks again for sharing this example.
Marketers may be dumb, but they're not stupid - all it takes is a few people to notice Google starting to add "reddit" to their autocomplete, start looking around, figure out what's going on, and then suddenly the whole "SEO"/marketing spam sphere is aware of it and will start making sockpuppet accounts.
That’s not gonna change.
Especially if you’re searching for local services above the fold will be ads then maps listings.
I get it. But that blog post is some 1984 shit. Hahaha.
By my understanding, this should hopefully cause Pinterest pages to disappear from image searches too, but by my experience, they're a big site so Google will have made an exception for them.
And it should likely deal with those StackOverflow 'clone' sites which sometimes rank better than StackOverflow itself.
These days there is no shortage of tools that monitor SERP fluctuation, and if this update brings about _significant_ impact it will be talked about everywhere.
And I fully expect spammers to go ballistic once their content gets obliterated.
Did they go ballistic when Google introduced the Panda update in 2010, killing many of the the web-scraped, machine-generated blogspam that was poisoning search results? No, they moved on to fresh territory like Youtube, gaming the recommendation engines. And they eventually came back to the web to poison results with hordes of awful 'best bicycle for fitness in 2022' type afilliate marketing sites.
You mean content farms? Oh yea, more of that please.
I've seen it more and more during the last few years, from ads around the city I live in to hipsterish magazines. There's something about it that has started bugging me the wrong way, I find it kind of infantilising but at the same time trying to "sell" me something as an adult (an insurance product, a "life is good" vibe because goofy drawings, that sort of thing). Or maybe I'm seeing too much into it.
Later edit: I'm talking about visuals like this one [1], which, looking at it again, I find quite similar in style to the one Google is using (hence my question, there must be a trend or something).
[1] https://www.reginamaria.ro/sites/default/files/inline-images...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...
https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckalegriaart/
http://clipart-library.com/data_images/177477.png
Guys in baggy suits and ties running through fields. You probably remember it from things like manual covers of scanners and stuff.
It seems there's a new one I haven't seen before called appdividend blog, from India too. And another one "DelftStack", allegedly from Netherlands (tweets from 2019 and weird lack of info). programiz, from Nepal (you have to dig to find it).
What should these search pages give, in order: Official documentation, then Stack Exchange and similar, then real people's blogs, and at the very bottom on page 25 these spammy copy-n-paste sites/blogs.
Google is full of developers, so they have to know about this but for some reason the company does nothing about it. Almost like the company is fully driven by ad revenue and doesn't want users to find actual content.
Nowadays I just append "site:reddit" to most of my queries (although I'm sure there's more and more paid/fake posts there as well)
Especially for the shopping category Google dropped the ball. When I am, wallet in hand, ready to buy a widget, why doesn't it do the best to help me find it? Isn't that the essence of search? Or just to search again and show more ads?
Such a failure of experience to try to use Google. Behaves like the doctor who secretly wants people to be sick so he can have more business.
But the writing is on the wall. Dialogue based search agents are coming, snippet based search is on the way out. The language models become better and better, they can even do sub-searches. The trend towards natural language based search is being accelerated by the mobile phones who lack proper keyboards and large screens.
O, wait. That's how the SEO hacking industry was born.