Blekko Bans 1.1 Million Spammy Domains Via New Algorithm | Hacker News Reader

Blekko Bans 1.1 Million Spammy Domains Via New Algorithm

techcrunch.com

39 pointssolipsist13 comments

I believe it's more of a PR stunt. Few weeks ago they banned 20 big sites which they considered spam like ehow.com and experts-exchange.com. Now I do agree that these sites do not have top notch content, but I am able to find my answers on these sites on frequent basis.

Hmmm. I notice that our site is now not on Blekko (an absolutely zero-spam zero-ads tool). Thanks, Blekko; really winning me over.

I think it's great that they're doing something so obviously common sense. If anything undoes Google it will be their dogmatic approach. Blekko can exploit that.

Yeah there is really no point taking exactly the same approach as Google, maybe Microsoft have the resources to do that (although still a long way back) but for a startup I think it would be impossible without some form of new take on things.

They should publish the list of blocked domains and let people decide whether banned sites are really spamy.

I believe it's here: http://blekko.com/ws/+/topspam

Although that includes some "normal" sites too that simply prevent crawling.

It still ends up including a lot of legitimate sites I recognize for crazy reasons. The main DNSSEC site, dnssec.net, and he security blog dshield.org are both apparently "mfa" ("made for adsense"), the musician deadmau5.com is "spam", and boonex.com, the author of the Dolphin CMS, is a "malware-domain".

With that kind of hit rate, I have to wonder how many of the 1.1M domains they banned were errors. :/

Search is so broken. The web was a better place 5 years ago, before Google started to lose to the seos and spammers.

I wish you could see all the queries you made and their results 5 years ago, try them again and see if the results got better or worse. My bet is on better.

Having just visted TC for the first time in a while - is commenting only possible via facebook now?

devcomments.com and mahalo.com are still there, wonder which spammy domains got blocked.

I like what they are doing in theory - it makes a lot of sense, but Blekko has a LOT of issues... like surfacing a domain that we got rid of 7 months ago, and showing sites that have nothing to do with the intended search (apart from a similar domain name).

Details: http://feefighters.com/blog/?p=4554

This exact same comment and link appears on the TechCrunch post. I'll attribute it to bad form instead of blogspam.

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