tristanperry

UK citizen here.

Yeah, I'm pretty outraged by it. I mean, we don't have true freedom of expression/speech/reporting over here (hence super injunctions), but it's still crazy how various rich people - mainly overpaid footballers - are having affairs and then bullying their way through the courts to protect their 'privacy'/overexcited lebido..

Plus we've now got the ridiculous situation whereby the person who cheated (in this case, Ryan Giggs..) is protected, whilst the person they cheated with (in this case, Imogen Thomas) is seeing their name dragged through the dirt. It's bizzare to say the least.

Thankfully this hopefully won't be as much of an issue in the future however, since a report was released today (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13465286) and the general consensus is that injuctions have been awarded too often and in the future they shouldn't be used (as much) for these purposes.

Still, it's pretty annoying that rich adulterers are being legally protected..

Thanks for this; I've installed it. I don't really think that disabling the public points has lead to better discussions.

I was going to type a fairly lengthy comment, but I think I'll just do a one sentence sum-up (and hope I don't get downvoted for it!): This is yet another strong piece of evidence that we're in a bubble.

I get ipadinsight.com in 7th position, behind 5 scrapers too (searching from the UK).

Just like the anti-content farm blog posts previously, I'm half hoping that the internet community turns its attention to the problem of content scrapers (in the hope that Google take more action against the problem). I am a fan of Google - and the biggest source of traffic to my websites is Google search traffic - although the issue of scrapers does seem to be growing (even despite the attempted anti-scraper Google algorithm update earlier in the year).

A couple of days ago I did some searching online and found that a fair number of websites had copied some of my articles in their entirety. And sadly, a lot of these 'websites' were actually Google Blogger (Blogspot) blogs. And whilst some of these copied articles weren't appearing in Google search (I guess since the entire site contained copied/scraped content, thus giving them a Google SERP penalty?), some of the copied articles were appearing in the SERPs. And a couple of these websites even had Google AdSense on them.

So there was the crazy situation whereby my content had been stolen/scraped illegally, and put on a Google Blogger blog with Google Ads on it, and (in some cases) that blog then received traffic from Google Search. Hrmph.

In the interest of balance, I will point out that I filed Google DMCA requests after finding these scraped articles, and Google did promptly reply (a non-automated reply around 30 hours later, which is quick considering how many DMCAs Google must get).

They only removed the individual blog post (and not the blogs overall, even though they were clearly spam blogs), but nonetheless I am happy with Google's quick response.

I just wish that content scraping isn't (in some cases) a profitable endeavor..

I'm European too (UK). Disagree with you on this one. Firstly, HN isn't "full" of people who are chasing wealth. There seems to be a broad mix of employees and employers/entrepreneurs here.

Secondly, your assumption that wealth creation and becoming 'rich' are antonymous to morality is (IMO) invalid. Sure, there are examples of 'big bad evil' capitalism being at odds with morality, but overall I would argue that wealth creation and becoming 'rich' tends to involve producing quality (software, goods, services - whatever).

And producing quality is often a win-win situation (a win for consumers as they get quality, and a win for the producers/business owners as it helps them financially). And I do honestly believe that aiming for quality isn't just a means to an end - in other words, I think that aiming for quality will benefit everyone in the company (including the employees) - not just the end users.

So fundamentally I'd disagree with your assessment on wealth generation = lack of morality.

Yeah I'd agree. There's a big difference between leasing/renting, and leasing-to-own and I'd be very surprised if Adobe offered a prorated discount system as a result.

http://bbcworldnews-japan.com/ works (I assume that's colocated in Japan though)

Been down for a while now; no official Tweets from any of the official BBC Twitter accounts it seems.

Edit: It's backup now. Was done for about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

10 requests per second doesn't sound majorly high. That's 36,000 pages per hour which whilst big, doesn't sound too high, especially for a site as popular as SO (Alexa puts it at 137rd most popular site; granted, Alexa isn't the most accurate).

It depends when the Daz trademark was registered.

The domain was regged in 1998, and if the TM was registered after this date then it should be okay.

There are pushes by some US law makers (e.g. the silly Senator Olivia Snow) to change this so that TM holders have much more rights over domains, even if the domain existed before the TM, but for now it should be fine.

Would be worth consulting a domain lawyer if an offer is made for it though.

Speaking as someone with a fair bit of domaining experience, unfortunately a lot of the domains listed are worthless, with the exception of daz.com which is a 5 figure domain, ww.com which is a 5 (possibly 6?) figure domain, secondhandcar.com which IMO is a 4 figure domain, webcamsoftware.com which is 4 figures, and a few others which hold a <$100 value. So there are some valuable domains, but the majority are worth $0 in my opinion. (Note: I don't mean to sound insulting when I say they're worthless - indeed, I literally mean it that their valuation is $0).

It's also worth noting that the domain industry got hit a fair bit by the recession, and it's possible that some of the above domains would sell for slightly higher than the rough range I've given (espeically the two 4 figure domains I quote, which could go for low 5 figures in the right circumstances).

It's quite common to see people (as the blog post says) regging domains on a whim since they look good, but usually such domains regged on a whim are worthless. And unfortunately it does seem to be the case here.

Anywhoo, I'll send my semi-informed appraisals along to the blog author now. I've been a domainer since I was 16/17 (am 20; 21 next month), so whilst I'm not an expert or anything, I have a fair bit of domaining experience and hope my appraisals are somewhat useful.

And I'd possibly advise that he looks at DNForum.com and NamePros.com (the two big domaining forums; the former is paid-only though) a little bit to get a general feel of domain prices.

I'm impressed with it.

Its UI is clear and responsive, and overall is seems quicker. Plus it uses up around 40% less RAM (in my experiences).

A pretty useful collection. I've seen all these sorting algorithms depicted diagramatically previously, but having these all as a collection where you can change the data set and speed of rendering is pretty nice.

Would be a useful teaching aid IMO, as it quite poignantly demonstrates just how slow some of the 'intuitive' (for new programmers) sorting algorithms can be.

Indeed, I see Besthesda as a not-so-shining example of the case that squidsoup is making. Morrowind was brilliant - it had great freatures, great gameplay, a great storyline etc.

Then Oblivion came along and they switched their development focus (or at least a fair amount of it) onto the graphics. And the result? Poor gameplay with a cop-out 'auto levelling' system, a 'fast travel' system which was 'click this button to travel anywhere in the game World', etc.

Sure it might have looked pretty and thus sold well, but it was a step backwards in terms of gameplay.

Crysis 1 is another example of this. Amazing graphics, amazing physics. But the storyline was non-existant and at times the gameplay was poor.

I'm currently doing a computer science (& maths) degree and within the CS department there's two main degree schemes: information systems, and computer science.

The latter is programming, i.e. the more technical side of things. The former is more about the IT/business consultancy side of things.

The former group hate programming, but there's a large emphasis on UML and other such 'design' 'tools' within their course.

We (the computer scientists) never tend to use UML or CASE tools though.

So yeah, I have no real World development experience yet (other than helping out in a couple of relatively big online projects), but it does seem to me that programmers ('real developers', as the title puts it) don't use UML and other such 'tools', whereas the IT consultancy side of things tend to use them.

Firefox has been getting progressively more memory hungry, indeed. At the moment my Firefox is at 314 MB with very few addons and 4 tabs open (none of the tabs have flash or dynamic stuff going on). I've seen it reach half a gig of memory easily, too.

I've heard that Firefox 4.0 is better though; will half to give it a shot soon.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4261944.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4273051.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4274857.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4272916.htm

/\ For non-URLed discussion of dozens or possibly hundreds of legit sites which were hit.

Today's Wired article gives some more specific examples:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/google-spam-side-effe...

Borderline stuff might be useful to some extent, to a minority of people. Blatant crap is - well - blatant crap with no use to anyone.

I accept your point about it being harder to classify, but I don't see how the SE's job being harder can equate to slightly useful content being worse than outright spam.

Yep, this is an oft-used argument for why Google might not aim to penalise sites for having spammy backlinks pointing to it.

I think that the recent high profile cases have been a tad more obvious since a bit of research can find that it was indeed that company (or their SEO company..) who built the links.

I'd imagine that in general, Google would aim to simply discount spammy backlinks for the reasons you mention.

Especially since tools like xRumer can build 100,000s of backlinks per day, and various other ones (ScrapeBox etc) can build 10,000s per day...

A good list :)

A couple more:

http://www.google.com/search?q=wisegeek.com

http://www.google.com/search?q=bizrate.com

----

My reasons for suggesting that these are blocked:

"What are Some Animals Commonly Mistaken for Dinosaurs?" (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-some-animals-commonly-mista...)

"How Do I Care for a Rose Breasted Cockatoo?" (http://www.wisegeek.com/how-do-i-care-for-a-rose-breasted-co...)

"Why Does Alaska Have Really Long Days During Some Times of the Year and Really Short Days During Other Times?" (http://www.wisegeek.com/why-does-alaska-have-really-long-day...)

- should be fairly self explanatory. Plus it only took be ~45 seconds to find these examples of journalistic <sarcasm>brilliance</sarcasm> (there's MANY more such examples). Plus they are - IMO - breaking AdSense guidelines since the Google link unit ads are EXACTLY the same (in color/style and :hover behaviour) as the in-content navigation links, which is a direct breach of AdSense policy. You'd think the AdSense team would be aware of such a big violation..

--

And as for BizRate, it's a 99% autogenerated site with little (if any) unique content. Plus most pages have at least one keyword stuffing area (such as http://www.bizrate.com/mens-shoes/dress-shoes/ - see the 'related searches' bit on the left, for a quick example).

It'll be interesting to see whether this is widely adopted. As others have said, I've been reading this sort of article for at least 4 years now and there doesn't seem to be much progress.

Perhaps the metacrap rant (http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm) was right?

Seems that way at the moment.

This is why I think it'd be great to see Google release all the 40,000+ test queries which Google/Matt Cutts took back in 2000. It would help to put to rest some of the "Google is regressing and getting worse" debate one way or the other (and I suspect by showing that such talk is more sensationalist than accurate; I think Google search has improved a fair amount).

The article does make some interesting points, and I am a bit confused at the supposed sequence of events with the JC Penny/NY Times story. Plus it does raise the question of why a company who previously has had some SEO issues was - apparently - able to game Google's rankings in such a major way (using such spammy methods) without Google picking up on it for months.

That's a conclusion point from the article which I think is a well founded one.

As for the other points in the article's conclusion though:

>> "But all the evidence suggests otherwise. Demand Media is worth $1.6 billion, and their entire business is based on pushing cheap, useless content into Google to get a few stray links. If Google was good at search, Demand Media wouldn't exist."

"wouldn't exist" is subjective. If Demand Media weren't pumping out content, what would rank in its place? Part of Demand Media's success is that they are 'filling in the gaps' and covering content surrounding keywords which don't really warrant much competition. Sure this isn't always the case - and Demand Media's sites do sometimes rank highly for some rubbish content with other alternatives available - but in many cases it does seem to be at least part of the reason for DM's success.

Do I like some of Demand Media's content? No.

Do I like that Demand Media seem happy to have some pages with more adverts than content? No.

Do I think that Google et al should not even index some of their pages (some of which can at current rank fairly well)? Yes.

Do I think that there's many good alternatives to some of DM's content? NO. Unfortunately.

>> "And Bing wouldn't be making solid gains in search market share."

I might have different ideas about what "solid gains" means, although to me a percentage point here or there doesn't amount to much.

If - say - a Presidential candidate seen his/her opinion polls increase by 1 or 2%, you wouldn't see a bunch of stories saying how the candidate is making "solid gains".

In-fact, if a mainstream media source run an article on (say) a political party who seen a 2% rise in their opinion polls - and thus concluded that said party is making "solid gains" - I'd feel intellectually insulted and suspect the mainstream media source of bias.

So I definitely feel that this conclusion point is sensationalism (and inaccurate sensationalism, at that) and nothing more.

So all in all, a decent article which makes some decent points (at times). But it does also feel a bit of a shallow 'staying in the bandwagon' type of article, too.

I definitely agree that search results in '11 are better than in '00, although it would be cool if more search results from '00 were given since 1/40000 isn't the most representative of examples.

"Apparently, a disturbed ex-girlfriend"

They got that bit right..

I haven't got much to add since I've expressed my views previously, plus this blog post does a good job of calmly pointing out the issues. It's worth emphasising the penultimate paragraph from the blog post since I feel it's key here though:

"Since people at Microsoft might not like this post, I want to reiterate that I know the people (especially the engineers) at Bing work incredibly hard to compete with Google, and I have huge respect for that. It's because of how hard those engineers work that I think Microsoft should stop using clicks on Google in Bing's rankings. If Bing does better on a search query than Google does, that’s fantastic. But an asterisk that says "we don't know how much of this win came from Google" does a disservice to everyone. I think Bing's engineers deserve to know that when they beat Google on a query, it's due entirely to their hard work. Unless Microsoft changes its practices, there will always be a question mark"

I agree with this entirely. Given Bing's resources, it seems bizarre that they were relying on Google's results even a little bit. And until they sort this issue out, I definitely agree that it's difficult to know when to give credit to Bing.

(Plus it's made all the more difficult considering that Bing keep sort of denying this whole mess, despite the quite conclusive proof. I suspect that if they do stop using Google's results, we won't know about it considering the hole that Bing have dug themselves with their denials. Ah well, que sera sera).

>> "As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index."

Erm, the Google test took pretty non-sensical keywords and put at #1 some completely unrelated website.

And then Bing copied this unrelated website result from Google.

The above quote from Bing (especially the bit in italics) is therefore a little confusing. Since, again, the entire point here is that Bing shown completely unrelated websites taking straight from Google. The results weren't relevant. Thus making the quote fairly contradictory in my opinion.

Yet another 'reply' by Bing, and yet again they seem to be trying to insult their way out of it via ad hominem and strawman arguments.

And yet again, Bing still haven't addressed the key point here: why Google results were taken and used by Bing.

Hmm. It might just be me, but I get the feeling that they aren't exactly fans of Google?!

Good for Google.

Bing have done wrong (granted probably not legally), and their response to a very detailed Search Engine Land article was a quick, nonchalant 'Huh? Oh that. Yeah, we don't copy Google's results. I know that doesn't really answer the claims but we don't really care enough to give a proper response.'

Bing's actions here (and their response) has seemed very poor and I definitely praise Google in going public with this.

I'd certainly like to think that if I was in a position where I caught a competitor piggybacking off my work, I'd go public with the information too (in a non-confrontational manner of course, as Google are doing).

So yeah: good for Google. Bad for Bing.

"We do not copy Google's results."

Which does NOT answer the claims really. No one is saying they COPY them verbatim. They're saying that they SOMETIMES 'look at' the Google results as a ranking signal. And in SOME cases (it seems when it's a fairly obscure search phrase), Bing displays the same result as Google does - as the sting operation shown.

This naturally doesn't mean that Bing copy Google 100%, of course. But that's not what today's news is about.

A very weak 'reply' from Microsoft which again seems to pretty much confirm that they ARE 'looking at' certain Google results.

Perhaps it was meant to say "every single year"? Since I agree that a 2x increase per month would be next to impossible.

Per year would see a 2^5 = 32-fold increase from '99-'04 though, which would seem plausible.

So I'm going for this line being a typo, with year not month being meant.