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TLLtchvL8KZ | 4 years ago

I come across these sites so often it's not even funny.

Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5 in the first page of search results.

I'm assuming they're all ran by the same person, throwing as much ** at the wall knowing some will stick.

Many of my searchers now include "reddit" or "forum" at the end to filter out all the spam/crap.

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ethbr0|4 years ago

This feels like the underlying issue. Google may have stayed the same, or even slightly improved.

But the web, in the sense of quality:crap ratio, has gotten substantially worse.

This flood seems like the ultimate manifestation of turnkey hosting solutions.

Imho, we could do worse than reviving an idea from email's early days vs spam: negligible per-use charging. The idea was to tax emails at $0.0001 (or somesuch). Insignificant for actual users, but financially decimates high-volume, low-value spammers.

Jiro|4 years ago

The web is like that because content farms are optimizing the pages to be found by Google and Google doesn't know how to filter them out, so we really can't treat it as a problem independent of Google itself.

Avamander|4 years ago

In theory proof-of-work with increasing cost based on subjective untrustworthyness might work.

dceddia|4 years ago

This has been happening a lot with StackOverflow and GitHub pages lately. A lot of the times, the actual GitHub or SO link won't even be on the first page.

I'm surprised they haven't done some kind of manual pruning of junk like that, or maybe they have and it's not working... but on the surface it totally seems like they could implement something that says "GitHub has content X, and these other 10 sites are 99% the same, but we've flagged GitHub as an authoritative source so they'll always outrank the clones".

Maybe it's a fear of appearing unfair. Or maybe they secretly want to hurt Microsoft by turning a blind eye. Or maybe this is actually a much harder problem. If I had to guess it's probably #3. But as a user of search it's frustrating to find the clones ranked above the real stuff.

manmal|4 years ago

Can’t they just look at where they first encountered the copied content?

toss1|4 years ago

Yup, just found this morning that an article my wife wrote on a very obscure legal topic was stolen, reformatted, and posted on some "life hacks" sort of site. It shows up #3 in the DDG results. At least her originals are still #1 and #2.

Meanwhile I have in my inbox in the last 24h at least a half-cozen emails looking to do SEO work for my company website.

Web = untrustworthy? YUP

I'd happily pay for a serious version of 1999 Google, but updated to filter out anything advert based, and search for exactly what I want.

Search is such a fundamental function, and we've done the experiment and the advert model fails - it needs to be just another utility.

ClumsyPilot|4 years ago

"Different website. Different title. Exact same content. 4 or 5 in the first page of search results."

If only google was smart enough to figure this out