Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Wikipedia comes up as the second site. Google is doing OK. If the holocaust industry doesn't like their SERPs, they can mobilize their chain of holocaust museums to get better ranking. In fact, they've already done this; the Washington holocaust museum is now in the third result position.

Stormfront ("White Pride World Wide") has been around for years, and kind of a joke. Post-Trump, they're more mainstream. Stormfront gets a high ranking because they've been saying this for decades and they're now getting traffic from the alt-right. So they have both popularity and stability, which Google's algorithm likes. They're not gaming the algorithm. They just lucked out on a political trend.

If you want to see gaming of Google's algorithm, search "binary option". Binary options are basically a scam.[1] There are a vast number of binary option web sites and companies, mostly affiliates of two back-end companies in Tel Aviv. They plug binary options and each other endlessly, disseminate recent financial news to get traffic, and appear as an entire ecosystem of bogus info. That's gaming the algorithm. Wikipedia is in the top position at the moment, with a rather negative article on binary options. (This despite massive efforts by the binary option industry to get favorable Wikipedia coverage, including offers of $10,000 for anyone who could "fix" certain articles.)

[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-...

The "holocaust industry"? It may just be because I lost family in the holocaust, but this can't be an acceptable thing to say here.

Norman Finkelstein, author of "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering"[1] coined that phrase. He lost ancestors to the Nazis.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008GZ4J76/

A book arguing that the Holocaust has been exploited is not justification for denying the Holocaust happened, and it's insidious to insinuate such.

Its disgusting to say that if Google is leading people to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen, the people who profit from it happening should just invest in better SEO.

I had never heard this term so I looked it up: the only usage of the term Google points to in the first couple pages are in specific reference to Norman Finkelstein's 2000 book of that name. The author himself lost family in the Holocaust.

I don't have an opinion on whether or not it's acceptable to say here, but thought it might be relevant context given that I didn't know what precisely the term implied.

EDIT: Whoops it looks like the parent commenter himself provided the context in between me starting and finishing this comment.

Stormfront has 100 murders credited to its users. It's not a joke.

> "binary option".

I heard than name before. Isn't related to something called "The Aussie method" , or "The Irish method" which are well-known scams.

A binary option is a bet on whether something (a stock, the price of gold) will go up or down. Doesn't matter by how much; it's a straight win or lose. The binary option scam industry takes such bets, for periods as short as 30 seconds. This appeals to the part of the population that likes slot machines. Fake binary option brokers such as Banc de Binary aren't really brokers; they're the house against which their customers bet. There's nobody else on the other side of the transaction. They don't tell their customers that.

Often, the house cheats. Something like 97% of people who "invest" in binary options lose all their money. The ones who win usually can't collect.

The SEC and CFTC have booted most of these guys out of the US and clawed back money from some of them. But they're active in Europe. Cyprus is willing to let them operate, and that passports them into the rest of the European Union. Israel doesn't let them scam Israelis, but is OK with them scamming the rest of the world. This has become politically embarrassing to Israel and there's a bill in the Knesset to shut down the whole industry. The industry is preparing to switch to FOREX.

Long multi-part expose in the Times of Israel: "The Wolves of Tel Aviv".[1] This is an Internet scam. It's so brazen that they have a convention. A reporter went to it.[2] SpotOption is the platform behind most of the industry. ClickSure's ad network ropes in new customers. Quotes from the convention:

“SpotOption is a technology company, okay? Everyone is responsible for checking regulation in the jurisdiction where they want to work. I am here to tell you what options you have technologically.” - Tammy Levy, SpotOption’s director of marketing.

“We’ve worked very closely with the forex and binary industry over the last, I would say, six months. We saw great results with a few of the advertisers, and it’s really a growing industry for us.” - Liset van Oosterhout, Twitter account exec.

Google and Facebook also gave presentations at that convention.

For large-scale gaming of Google, the binary option industry leads the way.

[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-... [2] http://www.timesofisrael.com/as-victims-pile-up-the-binary-o...

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