Bing Jail
dariusz.wieckiewicz.org
dariusz.wieckiewicz.org
Lately I've been using phind but for general knowledge or ambiguous problems. I'm afraid I'm being forced to go back to google for searches...
This has been bothering me as well, but has been the case for as long as I know. For those who haven't seen this yet, try:
"hacker" "news" -"hackers"
I don't remember an example query, but in the cases where I needed it the most (it's relatively rare that I have no idea what other keywords might occur and I have to fall back to this negative selection in the first place) it seems to work the least well, often more than half of the results (starting with the top result) include the forbidden word(s).
There was also a case where more results included the forbidden word after adding it as an exclusion criterion. I should start writing these down...
People noticed their traffic was trending downward last year, and they responded by removing their publicly facing traffic page entirely (formerly here: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic).
> I was hoping they were busy building their own search engine the past several years, but it doesn't seem they have been.
I assumed this as well. If Google could do this in the late 90s and iterate into the 2000s why can't DDG be able to do it over a decade in the 2020s?
Maybe DDG has figured out some business model and don't want to mess with it or something.
Well, part of it is there is a lot more content to index now, which means you need a lot more resources to get started.
* Between 2022-06-02 (https://web.archive.org/web/20220602142058/https://duckduckg...) and 2022-06-08 (https://web.archive.org/web/20220608024746/https://duckduckg...) they removed the graph. It was showing queries leveling off just under 100M/d.
* Between 2022-11-18 (https://web.archive.org/web/20221118045948/https://duckduckg...) and 2022-12-06 (https://web.archive.org/web/20221206080717/https://duckduckg...) they took the page down entirely.
Indeed, in the startup world it is wide knowledge that you should buy whatever you can buy - never build. I'm guessing DDG took this approach also. At some point though, I've seen companies get to where aren't actually offering anything of value. Brand value can be high so some companies can float on brand alone, but it's quite a risk. Especially in DDG's case, relying on a third party (especially one that directly competes with you!) is a dangerous practice. By all means leverage the data you have access to, but if you're not improving significantly on it or aggregating or something, you're just rolling dice.
https://dariusz.wieckiewicz.org/quidco/
The big question is if Bing will reindex it later, assuming this is the problem content (who knows).
Sidenote: What is "cashback shopping"? I'm familiar with credit cards that do that but not websites. Is it scammy?
If you buy products from a store via a referral link, the referee gets paid a portion of the price. Cashback sites are organised around this principle, with referral agreements with a large number of stores. They share some of the earnings with the buyer. They are commonly used in the UK.
Human systems were never designed to be as inner connected as they are now. I'm not talking about computer networks, I'm talking about our social systems and things like dunbars number. How do you codify one cultures social expectations in a system that works over the world wide web? How do you design a system that can be attacked by anywhere in the world at any time? If you're connected, you have one degree of separation to everyone else.
A system like this will experience such a huge amount of bullshit asymmetry that the cost of electricity and bandwidth to determine your truthiness quotient is a significant operating cost. The first moment any deviance is detected in your response you will be banned simply because the system cannot afford to do otherwise.
The attacker doesn't care about your Bing listing, it's an unintended coincidence of an attempt to get your site deindexed from Google search that doesn't work.
Google ignore bad links to your site, Bing don't.
After two years I can confidently conclude that MS have done a great job of hiding this 'defect' and virtually nothing regarding the root cause.
In my experience, the sites come back on their own eventually but with a lot of really weird URLs being indexed first (a sure sign of the original attack).
/s
Whatever is causing it -- I hope it is fixed soon.
> curl -i http://news.ycombinator.com/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://news.ycombinator.com/https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7538
It does seem possible/likely that Bing doesn't understand this though and only understands 301...
I’ve reported that and lost lots of time and hope that something can be done.
- Some kind of anti-annoyance filter for (for reCAPTCHA or something?) https://filters.adtidy.org/windows/filters/237.txt
- An anti-anti-adlock list: https://github.com/bogachenko/fuckfuckadblock/blob/master/fu...
- Something about some kind of Indian ISP (?) injecting code into domains: https://github.com/sudotman/indianadblock/
If one of these lists got picked up by an abuse filter somehow, that'd explain why search engines and malware filters would throw a fit about your site.
The same thing happens with Pinterest, too. They will just randomly ban sites and hide pins that link to them. Then they come back later
This was/is a problem with Google (search, youtube, gcp etc.) where people's income relies on these services and the company just doesn't care. I've seen a bunch of posts on HN about problems like this where the comments are full of other people sharing similar stories.
It's depressing, but the takeaway is to be smart about keeping content separate between domains and being prepared for the hammer to fall at any moment.
I'm curious as to whether or not you think Google should care.
I've seen many, many cases (as I'm sure, have you) of Google (as well as all the corps that got fat on the backs of their products'^W users' PII, browsing histories, social connections and personal health information -- what do you think Google is doing with all that non-HIPAA protected data from FitBit? --, not just Google) making sure their customers are well taken care of, at the expense of their users.
They never seemed to care before, why should they start now? In fact, if they did start to care about their users, management would likely be ousted tout de suite, as it would negatively impact the stock price and profits.
Google is a profit-making organization and, as such, they rightly (from the perspective of investors/Wall Street) optimize for profit, regardless of the impact to users/impact on their users' profits.
Does that stifle commerce and innovation? Absolutely. But Google (and pretty much all for-profit organizations) only care about the health of their own businesses, not anyone else's.
In an effort at 'reductio ad absurdum'[0], I posted this[1] in a different discussion here:
If flooding every gmail user's inbox with Goatse[1] every six minutes would
increase revenue (and/or stock price), a billion people would be intimately
familiar with a stranger's rectum. And GOOG would laugh all the way to the
bank.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum [2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35555781
[2] Upon further reflection, the actions I mention aren't all that absurd, rather the object in the example I gave of those actions are so.