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Comment by newacct583 | Hacker News Reader

> Google has turned into a cesspool.

All these same sites appear near the top of Bing searches too. There's nothing particularly Google-specific to this story. It's about SEO hacking that will work against anyone with a PageRank-style system.

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Indeed. I recently noticed this while relying on DDG for documentation for Common Lisp, a language I still learning. The top-ranking site for any Common Lisp function was an SEO scam site, where clearly someone had hired freelancers to take preexisting CLisp documentation and rewrite it – in poor-quality English – until it would no longer be detectable as copyright violation, then loaded it with ads.

(I just checked and this copycat documentation site has, thankfully, now been pushed down a bit in DDG results.)

Note that as I quite recently learned DDG has support for a bunch of bang-commands listed at [1]. There are a bunch of them for documentation sites for all kinds of programming languages, including a couple for lisp it seems like.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html

For learning Common Lisp, I highly recommend https://github.com/ashok-khanna/common-lisp-by-example

I think it's high time we had a webring resurgence. It's impossible to get anywhere with plain search anymore, what we need is curated websites that other domain owners are happy to say "I endorse the people running this site, so if like my stuff you'll like them too"

Id like to see. and be happy to post some various web rings and blogrolls..

One of the things that killed them imho is when google started penalizing sites that linked to some other sites.

This was compounded by the expired-domain market..

wordpress even took out linkrolls around that time, people that had them in sidebar widgets would have them disappear unless they installed a new plugin to bring them back.

Webrings that auto-add the "nofollow tag" I guess could make them okay for people again.

Might be cool to have a github type page with a list of rings to reccomend.. a script auto-pulls it into your page, adding nofollow - and then other people could copy your list or clone/fork..

If they can inject a random link into a page, why couldn't they also be able to inject a web ring link?

Isn't that what people go to social media for?

Social media is gamed the same way? Sharebots, etc

Do you suppose Web rings wouldn't be when there's money in it? There was plenty of that when they were just for fun.

It’s fundamentally about trust models. That is to say, about the audience.

Everybody gave up trusting webrings because Google provided better results. Now that Google results are shit, there’s room for other information vendors to come along, even if it’s in narrow areas.

Actually, HN is already this for me in some respects.

In my opinion this site is not really so different from, say, Reddit, beyond having more focused rules and being smaller. So I don't think my idea that social media have supplanted the Web ring is wide of the mark.

This is my view too. Yes, I’d love to go back to a time when Google’s algorithms were unknown enough for SEO to be futile but those days are gone and the problem isn’t limited to Google.

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