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malfist

lol, recent spam attack in the past few weeks?

Hah. Google's been 98% spam for well over a year now.

Try googling "What is the fifth book in the wheel of time series" and see what you get? All spam.

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I tried googling "What is the fifth book in the wheel of time series" and got

1. Wikipedia - The Fires of Heaven

2. Amazon - The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, Book 5)

3. a bunch of videos which I skipped over

4. Wheel of Time Wiki - The Fires of Heaven

5. Macmillan Publishers - The Wheel of Time, Books 5-9

6. Goodreads - The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, #5)

7. Novelnotions - Book Review: The Fires of Heaven (maybe this is spam?)

8. Esquire.com - Wheel of Time Books in Order (not specific to book 5)

9. FictionDb - Wheel of Time Series in Order (not specific to book 5)

10. Barnes And Noble - The Fires of Heaven

I am wondering how different everyone's results must be. [Also, I don't know how to format a list on HN…]

I got something similar.

There is (browser?) malware out there that hijacks the google search results to show junk instead of what you are actually looking for. At one point I got bitten by this, it only sometimes replaced the results so it was a bit subtle and took me a while to pin down.

I wonder how many people on HN are infected by such malware and don't realize it? A lot of the complaints about search results are clearly not this, but when someone complains of outright spam for reasonable queries, I do wonder...

Weird, last week when I googled it, all I got was liscicles about "the best order to read WoT" and other blogspam. Just googled it now and it seems fine.

Google put one of my accounts into a spam blackhole in Jan 2022 for about a month (almost all results were obvious low quality spam).

Result quality can be significantly different

I took a series of screenshots but they all seem fine to me?

Wikipedia, Goodreads, Fandom.com and MacMillan Publishing; these all seem to be reasonable results. I could share the whole page if I could find a place to upload my screenshots (RIP imgur)

Google has been borderline useless for productive work. I always attach Wikipedia or Reddit to my search to get anything useful

I just did and got The Fires of Heaven along with an Overview, Summary and Reviews. Are you sure you’re not using Bing?

Try reverse image search for a cartoon from DeviantArt, 99% links in the results redirect you to unrelated pr0n sitez. We're talking that kind of spam

> Try googling "What is the fifth book in the wheel of time series" and see what you get? All spam.

Google gave the correct answer. Didn't see any spam.

> Google's been 98% spam for well over a year now.

I find this hard to believe. How do you even measure for this?

I'd love to see a few more examples of searches you are making that show spam, because the example you gave provided me with the appropriate results. I almost suspect you are either being disingenuous or just have some malware on your computer.

"This search engine I've gone out of my way to not track my search, viewing or other habits and usage is showing me irrelevant ads! Fucking trash!"

They'll complain at the thought of paying for YT premium ("the internet should be free bro! Except my new SaaS calendar app, of course"), pirate Factorio, pay for kagi. A real eclectic bunch.

I see this all the time these days and always wonder how many people making these comments have their own monetized apps, or have done any work on monetization, etc.

I tried that and it all seems pretty relevant to the Fires of Heaven in particular. (name/description, wikis, book stores, discussions etc)

Google "wheels of time", skip the results about the TV series (ca. 3), open the wikipedia page and go to the " novels" section.

So... just go to wikipedia.

I got decent results back. What do you get?

It's probably good to check with a guest browser session before making this kind of strong claims.

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