Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results 238
krou writes "The Guardian's tech blog is running an interesting piece on Google's next big challenge, which is dealing with the spammers it helped create. 'Google is the 900-pound gorilla of search, with around 90% of the market (excluding China and Russia), and there's an entire industry which has grown up specifically around tickling the gorilla to make it happy and enrich the ticklers.' They quote Paul Kedrosky who notes that 'Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.' Whether searching for reviews, products, businesses, or even conducting academic research, scraper sites are ranking higher than original content. The article speculates that Google may try fix the problem but, from Google's perspective, most of these type of sites use AdSense ads, and generate revenue for Google (89% of clicks come from the first page of results), so Google may not have an incentive to change things too much. Alternatively, people could stop using Google, 'because its search is damn well broken... The question is whether it would be visible enough — that is, whether enough people would do it — that it would show up on Google's radar and be made a priority.'"
People change.... only for something better (Score:3, Interesting)
People wont change while theres nothing better to change to...
I still don't "see" these issues with google that supposidly exist, I know others dont see these issues iether who aren't as web savvy as me, but if they DO exist, it's only when something better comes along that people will switch, I tried bing..... and couldn't even get it to find microsoft security essentials when searching for mse as its normally know.
Ad Grinders (Score:0, Interesting)
Another problem people have with Google is Ad Grinders. They people spam web sites with false clicks throughs which generates revenue for the site owner. In exchange, Google gets a high number of impressions plus click through revenue. Its a win for scammers and its a winner for Google (on two fronts).
I've repeatedly caught Google failing to catch EXTREMELY obvious click through fraud. And when reported, they only corrected a tiny percentage of it. Which makes it very, very clear, Google has no desire or incentive to catch or prevent fraud as it currently makes then at least double digit percentages (likely as high as 20%) of their yearly ad income.
To largely avoid Ad Grinders, never, ever, never allow Google to automatically place your Ads. Their algorithms specifically focus on sites where abuse occurs specifically because your ads are getting both a high number of impressions and click through rates. The more precise you are with ad placement, the less likely Google will be able to defraud you.
Rest assured, if you are allowing Google to automatically place your ads, you are being scammed.
What scrapers? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have this problem - when I search for things on Google, I get relevant results from real pages. Either I regularly search for things that nobody scrapes, or there's actually some skill involved in getting relevant results that most people can't be bothered with.
The biggest problem I've had of late searching on Google is trying to find reviews of hardware and getting ninety billion pages trying to sell it to me with 'Be the first person to review this product!" I need to find a different keyword on that.
Re:Playing the game changes the game (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it's like people believe we're playing a game of chess: you move your pieces to get into a new, better position, and eventually you checkmate your opponent and you win. They believe one day spam will go away, or that we can do something to eliminate it and that something is "broken" because there is still spam.
It's more of a game of Go. Occasionally your opponent makes inroads into your territory, and you block them off. Occasionally you make inroads into their territory. Sometimes they make life; other times you kill their invasion. The score and territorial control fluctuate up and down, but neither side is completely alive or completely dead until the game is over; and the Internet isn't anywhere near over.
As it stands, there is a lot of spam; but we've managed to wall a lot of it off and so most e-mail we see falls into spam buckets. The spammers have made small life in the corner and extended down the sides along the first line: they gain nothing and bother us significantly, but overall very little. They've made larger life along the opposite side, replying to Craigslist posts and spamming "adult" personals sites. You'd think trying to get sex off craigslist would get you hookers and spam for porn sites; but try selling a car or a guitar or looking for a Go club, you don't exactly get 3000 replies for adultsexhookups.com but you get 3 or 4 ... annoying.
mesothelioma (Score:3, Interesting)
This puzzled me: "profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons"
I'm thinking, "Mesothelioma suits? What's that, a protective suit you wear when you're working around asbestos?"
Before Google came up I realized he was talking about lawsuits. Gees, lawyers and businessmen talking sure confuse this old nerd sometimes. To a businessman, "suit" is what lawyers bring, to a nerd, it's usually protective gear.
If you go talking about RAM here, I'm going to think "memory". If you're talking about trucks, you need to say "Dodge RAM". If you're talking about Mesothelioma suits, you need to say "Mesothelioma lawsuits unless you're talking about protection from asbestos.
Re:It's bad now (Score:1, Interesting)
This is what happens when you don't have competition... Bing and yahoo just don't return decent results compared to google even with these issues.
Google does have competition. You named two of them. Baidu and Yandex are the more serious ones.
The fact that search spam is not a solved problem is not due to lack of competition. All search engines are competing for the best (least spammy) results. It is a really hard problem. If you disagree, feel free to get very rich by solving it yourself. You don't even need to build a large company to compete directly. A startup with a spam filter that improves search by 5% would easily get bids to be acquired for a lot of money by more than one of the companies you named.