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Comment by bandrami | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget the asinine translation sites with page descriptions like "Have you ever wondered what the Sinhalese word for 'monitor lizard' is[1]? Millions of users have searched for this. In this page you will find..." at which poing the summary cuts off. Somebody generated those in an afternoon with a set of concordances and a Perl script, and they've been sucking traffic ever since.

[1] For the curious, "Thalagoya" for the terrestrial species, "Kabaragoya" for the swimming species

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Ha! Somewhat unrelated, but that reminded me of a homeless guy in Portland whose intro line was "do you know how you say dragonfly in Spanish?", to which I responded "libélula" (I knew it because Spanish is my mother tongue). Interesting, he seemed kinda pissed off, as I spoiled his soliciting routine. Maybe he's the human version of those sites!

And the sites that list every possible phone number in a given area code, just so that they'll be a search hit for someone searching for a phone number. Zero value provided there.

those are usually for "is this a spam" vote, so I would argue that there is some value there

I'm not talking about the ones that provide a user-contributable database of "what business owns this number, is it spam"; those are great.

I'm talking about sites that just list all possible phone numbers in a range, for SEO purposes, with no useful information about each number, and then try to sell you access to their invasive databases of personal information.

“You won’t believe how many words the Sinhalese have for monitor lizards!”

"Slow lorises hate this one simple trick!"

"Find hot lonely monitor lizards in your area today!"

I see automatic translation of normal websites a lot too. I'm French and doing some home renovations, and according to google our houses are built in a way that is vastly different from my experience on the ground, and it's really frustrating, because our regulations and customs are different, and I really need to do things the local way.

And if you click through, you'll find that they don't have the Sinhalese word for monitor lizard, but you can contribute it for them to monetize.

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