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- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24I dunno... Maybe the "Bogus Brigade Page Patrol" at Google.
Some guy whose job is to type "free porn", "free roms", "free torrents" into google and if you site doesn't have such material within 5 mouse clicks and no typing then you are delisted right then and there.
Now that would be the ultimate job in the universe. - dclowd9901, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15"What the world needs now is someone with global reach, clean search results, and thoroughly authenticated ad servers."
I thought it was Love, Sweet Love. - TheWorkz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Possibly a user moderated search engine feature where people with accounts could report bogus websites to assist in the filtering process. When a certain amount of negative reports are filed on a website, The search engine company could investigate. Just a thought. Make it more like an "undigg" feature to search engines.. When I run into BS pages, I would love to be able to report..
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Yeah, what we need is a searchable repository where people submit websites and readers can vote for that site, comment on it, and in turn rate those comments. I would really digg a site like that.
- TheSolomon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9ryanmetcalf- That's not a bad idea. Rather than going the full Wikipedia route, you could simply add a button next to each link that would function similar to the "thumbs down" here on Digg. There would be no "thumbs up" option to help limit artificially increasing a page's rank, and the thumbs down option would only be available to users who have logged in with their Google account (to hopefully limit meritless thumbs-down floods).
You can easily switch between the "filtered mode" and the "raw mode." Enough thumbs-down votes on a page would result in that page being filtered from the results of those users using the filtered option. Plus, Google could even keep track of your individual thumbs-down votes so pages you've marked as bad would be filtered from your results, regardless of how many thumbs-down votes it has from everyone else.
Since you have to log in using your Google account, thumbs-down vote spamming could result in suspension of the Google-account in question. If the abuses occur using a Google account linked to Gmail, Google could even terminate an entire linked chain of Gmail accounts, in the event one person kept sending invites to themselves to create bogus Google accounts only for spamming.
Sure, there'd be a lot of overhead involved with this... but given how Google will keep track of your bookmarks, search results, etc., it seems like it already has the groundwork laid for this kind of system. This kind of system wouldn't take care of all the problems... but it could go a long way to stem some of the more rampant bogus web pages. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Do people understand how big of a number 1 billion is? much less 5 times that?
I will tell you one thing, even just looking for the search terms above, no way even a huge team of people can personally go through 5 billion pages, even without looking at click depth. What ever is done will have to be automated. A guy also doesnt post 5 billion webpages without automation either.
And if it isnt a human or even if it is, people will find ways arround it.. we need intelligent computers...ofcourse their first solution to spam will be to get rid of the humans. - dmron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Here's the real problem.... the fact that Google could be fooled into indexing 5 BILLION pages within a three week period, all from the same domain, is absolutely unreasonable. NO WEBSITE EVER CREATED has even close to that many unique pages/urls. Remember just a few years ago when all the search engines used to brag on the front page about how many pages they had indexed? Last time I saw it, I think Google had around 20 billion, and that was supposed "all" of the web pages out there. And now I'm hearing that they indexed 5 billion unique results for ONE WEB SITE.... something just doens't click. I can't believe that Google doesn't have something in place to prevent this *****. One extremely obvious measure would just be to cap the amount of subdomains for a web site to something like 1000... there are no legitimate web sites that could possibly need more than 1000 sub domains, and if there are, well tough titties to them, ya know? No reasonable web site needs that many sub domains.
The article mentions all these sites you find like 12321.something.13kj3j13jk2.com, where the "something" is the keyword that generates that ads and pagerank. I've seen many sites like this in google's results in the last 3 or 4 months, and now this article comes along and explains it (well actually I read about it somewhere else a few days ago too), it's really depressing.
DO SOMETHING GOOGLE! THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! :P - rikcat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Google should add the ability for users to vote on if the results returned are vaild and not the SEOized crap that floats to the top of much of googles results. SEO's are killing organic search.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You could have user ranked links, better yet phd ranked links and reference links to journals and books. Its time to put value back into the information age.
- fani, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I have switched back to Yahoo.
For the past month or more, I've noticed that Google's searches are mostly about commercial sites and not really good matches. Also a search found 1 match in Yahoo but 0 in Google ( Search query "Moto V3c on COM4 The phone is not responding while transitioning mode from none to modem" )
And with Google results being severely contaminated these days with eizq2.org etc. its not working for me.
I like Yahoo. works for me. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Go ahead and question the value of stories that question the value of everything else you buy into on the internet. Fact is these kind of topics really need to be addressed sooner than later. Its a nice idea for free random information to be posted all over the place, but the value is as only good as the source, and it appears that no one cares about the source anymore.
- towelsoaker, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6For a ready example, just try searching for anything at all relating to car parts, say, "toyota spark plugs". You instantly get thousands of results full of obviously harvested and randomly stuck-together bits of text, and not one actually has anything to do with learning about or purchasing spark plugs for a Toyota. It's been like this for a couple of years, and I still haven't figured out how and why these BS sites make money, or why they can't be stopped.
- funkytaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4They had that in the '90's. It was called "Yahoo! Directory", then people en masse decided quantity over quality was better.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Wiki is part of the problem in this case. We have to think how to go beyond that.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3there are greasemonkey scripts, that remove alot of the famously offending sites out of google search.
there is also this cool extension called site advisor, that is user reviewed like you suggest. http://www.siteadvisor.com/download/ff_preinstall.html - jiminoc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I have stopped using google because of this... it's interesting that they're the cause of their own demise. By having adsense be so popular people are flooding their search engine with useless results. yahoo and msn are way better at the moment.
- noGoodNamesLeft, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5@vertinox; No, it would get *very* boring *very* quickly.
- ryanmetcalf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They coul do something like Wikipedia where all new pages and the existing database was edited by peers. Loads of people who had way too much free time to moderate. They should create a duplicate copy of their data (yes I know that's a psychotic amount of data, but keep listening) and then let people try peer moderating the duplcate copy of the data and see hwo they do, and how cleaned up the search becomes.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2and http://digg.com/technology/How_One_Spammer_Got_BILLIONS_of_Pages_into_Google_in_3_Weeks
- Senseless, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Clickfraud isn't the only big problem Google has - they are dropping the ball on the tons of bogus sites that are just shell sites designed to serve Adsense Ads. A couple of months back, I wanted to reserve a particular domain name for a specific site I wanted to build, but upon checking it, I saw an existing site serving Adsense ads everywhere. The site was listing forum posts as if users were members, but there were no login boxes, nothing to indicate real users were there or that there was an actual forum. I investigated and found the owner was stealing posts - from google groups! - and just listing them to make the site look real.
I reported it to Google - twice. They never responded personally and in fact said it's their policy not to respond to individual violations. I've checked this offending site several times since, and it's been operating the same with no interruption. So Google allows this garbage to go on, and let fradulent operators rake in Adsense revenues while at the same time blocking out people who want to start real sites with real value to users. I'm pretty disgusted at this, and at most of my experiences with Google customer service, frankly. - roadkill001, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sounds kinda like Stumble http://www.stumbleupon.com/
- Firefly, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I think this is the beginning of Google's downfall. I'm a Google addict, but I see no easy way out of this one. Google is going to get sued left and right over this problem, a bit like the asbestos litigations... it never truely goes away. They have benefited from fraud, and have not provided sufficient safeguards to ensure PPCs are legitimate. This will be an uphill battle for Google.
- AjiNIMC, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I think http://www.hedir.com is the way to next world. A community is scanning the web for useful sites.
- TDot1980, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2YTMND has way more than 1000 subdomains, and it's (well, sort of!) legit. Sounds like you've got quite the hard-on for Google and are pissed at people dissing her!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Its called an encyclopedia check it out. The real kind.
- Brigadier, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
- Roscoe1976, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"How Billions of Bogus Pages Undermine Search Engines and The Web"
Yeah they are called blogs that spam the search engines using keywords to make money off Google Adwords. - Kickboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There are many webhosts that put their customers on subdomains, and they have well over 1000 subdomains. So it is VERY possible, and very common, for a legit website to have lots of subdomains.
Although the fact that Google indexed far more than it should have, the fact the Googlebot indexed 5 -BILLION- pages in 3 weeks, on just ONE website, is an extraordinary accomplishment. Everyone was so busy getting mad at google for indexing a fake website, they didn't stop to think about the sheer horsepower required to index such a website. I imagine this is the reason google took that index counter off their website, because they couldn't keep it up to date with all the new pages being indexed every second.
Granted, they should have saftey features in place to prevent this, but now that the community has brought this issue to light, I garuntee google will do something about it.
On another note, this article brings up a issue that's been bugging me. Everyone's talking about click-fraud, and how google is "doing nothing to prevent it". Which is total *****. I know, from first hand experience, google does catch click-fraud. My AdSense accounts for my website have been cancelled twice on a count of click-fraud. Both times within just 2 weeks of my account being active.
So to all those saying Google does nothing about click fraud: You're an idiot. - LunchB0x, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@Brigadier Because someone with the resources to publish on dead trees has a real world reputation and a set standard to follow. If they consistently publish biased or incorrect material they loose the resources to keep publishing on dead trees. As publishing online takes far fewer resources and as yet there is not clear set standard for how to publish or even what to publish the dead trees version will always be more authoritative than smellycat234's article edits on wikipedia.(although I'm sure shes a nice person).
- towelsoaker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Whoa. Something's up.
Sure enough, you Google "toyota spark plugs" and you get actual sites now. This definitely wasn't the case last week.
Two days ago, I searched for "corolla transmission cooler" and got nothing but crud. I just tried it again a minute ago, and whaddya know -- actual info.
Someone at Google has DEFINITELY been working on this issue very recently. I, for one, am impressed. - funkytaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2As much as I liked Google until early 2005, I'm about to switch back to Yahoo!. I see no reason not to.
- Muddle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If your site makes money off of anything other than it's own content it's a trash site...
I remember when people place links to software they liked for free., - LiquidPenguin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm puzzled about this. This kind of thing has been going on for *years*. Suddenly one guy manages to land himself 5 billion pages on Google in less than three weeks, it's just now getting to be a big deal? When I ran a Wiki, fully 2/3rds of the results on Google into my Wiki topics were from ***** sites like what this guy owns stealing my content and presenting it as his own to net more traffic for his advertisements. Do a search for my (RL) name and two of the results that come up are copycat pages. Searches for product reviews are guaranteed to turn up crap like this. I can do a search for a forum post on Google and find at least ten more results from ten other "sites".
Guys like this don't need to blocked or whatever. That just makes them work harder to find work arounds. What really needs to be done is they need to be dragged out into the street, shot and their mangled corpses planted on stakes as an example to the next ***** who decides to show his putrid existence on the Net. - Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Problem is, Google wants the adsense dollars from all those bogus Google ads on web pages. Opting into a filtered version of the search engine, modded down by users, could allow the company to collect revenue from bogus listings, yet still give users the ability to access peer-filtered content.
Who knows? A small fee to use the filtering option could provide a premium level of service to users who want it, while still providing the appeal of collecting adsense revenue from shady companies. I know I wouldn't buy the premium service, since I know a fake site when I see one, and know how to search using specific enough terms which screen out bogus hits.
Less savvy users would find value in paying for filtered content. - AncientWeird, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Among the 22 changes that might cause damage, Google lists 10 worries directly related to search and PPC:
Our ability to continue to attract users to our web sites.
The level of use of the Internet to find information.
Our ability to attract advertisers to our AdWords program.
Our ability to attract web sites to our AdSense program.
The mix in our net revenues between those generated on our web sites and those generated through our Google Network.
General economic conditions and those economic conditions specific to the Internet and Internet advertising.
Foreign, federal, state or local government regulation that could impede our ability to post ads for various industries.
New technologies or services that block the ads we deliver and user adoption of these technologies.
The costs and results of litigation that we face.
Our ability to manage click-through fraud and other activities that violate our terms of services. - samboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think Google was at their peak around 2002-2003; they did a lot to make sure that links were spam-free and that search results pointed to informitive non-spammy pages. They are going the way of Altavista these days; a lot of spam is in their search results and their searches are a lot less relevant.
- mandarin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Hmm someone in Google is going to get fired for this...
- ortel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Well, at least we know google reads digg ;)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1With almost 7,000 employees, I find it hard to comprehend how none of them noticed the junk cluttering up the search results. With an Alexa ranking of under 2,000 for just one of the domains, the guy was moving serious traffic and had rankings in hundreds of various topics from recipes to dogs to music... most times more than 3 or 4 results from the same domain on the same page.
- dmron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well, 99.99% of web sites do not have more than 1000 sub domains. Fine, make it 10,000, whatever. I was not saying to blacklist the site for having that many sub domains, just don't index them all by default. Maybe make it so the owner of the domain has to specifically request and be approved by a search engine before said search engine will index the rest of the sub domains. And something like YTMND.com doesn't really matter anyway, since the content generally isnt indexable.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1w3.org has the most indexed pages of any site with 530 million. being one of the oldest sites helps.
http://chronotron.wordpress.com/2006/02/18/googles-max-indexed/ - olegk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1>there are no legitimate web sites that could possibly need more than
>1000 sub domains, and if there are, well tough titties to them, ya know?
That's just wrong. Think about all co.uk domains. There are MANY valid domains that have hundreds of thousands of subdomains (think free hosting companies). - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2(Search Wiki = Swiki) Swikis could be an alternative:
Example:
Technology Industry Search Engine
http://technology-industry-search-engine-swicki.eurekster.com/ - funkytaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If there was an algorithm to catch this spam, it would have caught it, not published it then deleted it.
- d3m3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@powercow, divide it by 10,000 or 100,000 or probably 1,000,000 per domain and ban the domains. Then you have a much more reasonable number. No one is going to register 1 billion domain names.
- david, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Already added to the homepage once before.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Thats where it is going. Thats where the internet was. Its kind of ironic. People should get paid to collect and organize useful links based on how the public uses the links.
- Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sounds like a business opportunity. If the move against net neutrality gives ISP's the right to throttle back bandwidth against anybody they want to, won't companies have the right to "Cut off" any site suspected as being bogus?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Exactly, funkytaco. It was not an algorithm shift-- it was a manual ban. Want some more spam with that spam?
http://www.google.com/search?q=p0ker+forum
They aren't ranking as well as his others (yet). And then there is the problem of subdomains from legitimate sites:
http://www.google.com/search?q=wedding+forum&start=40
It isn't just Google, Yahoo! has this problem as well. I'd suggest trying Mindset from Yahoo:
http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/ - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Seriously, don't you think the database employees at Google would have noticed that 5 billion new pages, or nearly 30% of their current web index, suddenly appeared in 3 weeks from ONE SITE?
If I ran a database the size of Googles, and suddenly it grew in size 30%, I think I might want to at least check it out. But apparently nobody is even watching. I suppose they're more occupied with counting their stock options- Google employees sold over 7 billion dollars of stock in the last 12 months- more than the next 200 public companies in silicon valley COMBINED. (that includes yahoo, ebay, oracle, cisco, sun, etc etc) -
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