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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not sure Google can ever truly keep up with the volume of spam and low quality.

Are they really even trying? I see low-quality scraper domains which have ranked highly in their search results for years but never seem to be de-ranked despite just displaying content from GitHub or Stack Overflow. What those sites have in common is that they’re loaded with ad words ads, which suggests to me that there’s less willingness to act against them unless profits dip.

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Yeah I don’t think they are trying any more. I received a Google search result the other day that was a word for word copy of a SO answer - it even had “stack overflow” in the page title. The spammers weren’t even trying to hide the fact.

Nevertheless, the result ranked a couple of lines higher than the SO article it was a copy of. I mean, come on.

The amazing part is that you’ll probably get the same site a month or two from now. I am disappointed that Google doesn’t have a blocklist feature & you’d think they’d want the training data (although I imagine abuse could be a severe challenge).

They could at least let their users blacklist sites from their personal search results.

There are extensions that do this though, thank God.

Which extensions would you recommend for this?

uBlock origin in combination with a list like this one:

https://github.com/levymetal/filter-lists

uBlacklist allows manual blacklisting from Google Search. Somewhat useful for me.

One possible reason that Google doesn't offer a blocklist is that Google only provides a limited number of results per query. Given Google typically shows more than one result from the same domain, so with a blocklist, it would actually have to devote resource to find results from different domains.

Considering the lack of competition I can't blame them for not trying. Why spend the money? Nobody is going to use Bing lol.

You’re right of course, despite the fact that I personally use Bing indirectly via DDG.

That said, my personal anecdata is that, a few years ago, g! Google search results would often find things that DDG didn’t - but today, those results rarely help (hence my OP).

I am not super confident DDG has got better, but it certainly feels like Google’s quality has diminished.

This is surprisingly wise. Lack of viable competition led google to become decadent. They’re now facing a change in the environment that threatens their business model. Will they change or die? Probably a combination of the two.

That definitely worked for a decade but I have to say it’s rare that I find better results on Google than Duck Duck Go, which is a big change.

Of course we can blame them for not trying. Why spend the money? Because it's the right thing to do for humanity. But hey Google is not a charity, what matter is stock growth, therefore we're excused of throwing ethics and empathy out of the window as long as in the end shareholders have the comfortable monopoly which allows their investments to generate more wealth with minimum effort.

Google could probably easealy manually with like 10 FTE cut the SEO spam we see alot.

It takes time to get got ranking and it takes like 5 minute to 5s research to manually downrank a site. It would be a ever winning battle for Google.

But they don't care at all.

With blacklist extensions you can improve Google search alot with almost no effort.

They don’t care because they knew they were the only real option on the market. Outside of nerdy circles, no one knows about about duckduckgo, for instance. They also have a stranglehold on the developing world market through the dominance of Android and the fact that smartphones are the only computing device for most of these users.

Plus, poor search results means more searches and clicks, which means more revenue.

The day chatGPT can roll up its product in an easy to use Android app, that’s the day Google would be truly scared.

It's a metrics driven beast beset by interdepartmental rivalries. Even with competition I don't think they'd solve this problem.

It mirrors Amazon's absolute lack of care about fraud and spam on their platform.

Very good chance that it goes the way of Kodak - they have access to better tech, but it never gets implemented because it eats into their existing business.

They used to have a team called search quality. It was well respected inside the company and probably the reason google was good. I hear it has been disbanded.

I wonder if splitting Google into two companies could help. One doing just search and one doing just ads, with the condition that payments between them must be fixed and independent of the volume of anything.

I think so: Google‘s stagnation started after the Doubleclick merger. Getting the ad people not to be calling the shots seems like a key step for the long-term future of the company.

> I see low-quality scraper domains which have ranked highly in their search results for years but never seem to be de-ranked despite just displaying content from GitHub or Stack Overflow.

I flat don't even bother doing "X vs Y" type searches anymore when looking for a compare/contrast with two things. It's just not useful anymore for exactly the reasons you've stated.

The key is to add 'reddit' to your 'X vs Y' search query. That's all Google is to me these days. My Reddit search engine.

I'd guess that 50% of my google searches have 'wiki' in them. Thanks for the tip about adding 'reddit'.

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