[HN Gopher] Google search overwhelmed by spam attack
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Google search overwhelmed by spam attack
Author : bhartzer
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-12-22 21:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.searchenginejournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.searchenginejournal.com)
| cmcconomy wrote:
| Recently almost every YouTube ad I get is a poorly made deepfake
| of elon musk telling me about an amazing secret investment
| opportunity. Google is losing the plot
| sadhorse wrote:
| Most ads I see on YouTube are very dubious and poorly made. A
| reasonable ammount are plain fraud. It is very frustrating
| going to "ad center" and reading about how the advertiser did
| not verify his identity.
| dylan604 wrote:
| s/is losing/has lost/
| otikik wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of "annoyance"
| metric for the ad selection algorithm. The idea being: show a
| certain demographic the same annoying ad again and again, and
| they might end up paying just to get rid of ads. I'm pretty
| sure Spotify does this.
| malfist wrote:
| 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.
| thedaly wrote:
| > 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.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| I tried that and it all seems pretty relevant to the _Fires of
| Heaven_ in particular. (name /description, wikis, book stores,
| discussions etc)
| kernal wrote:
| I just did and got The Fires of Heaven along with an Overview,
| Summary and Reviews. Are you sure you're not using Bing?
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Google "wheels of time", skip the results about the TV series
| (ca. 3), open the wikipedia page and go to the " novels"
| section.
| jbm wrote:
| 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)
| summerlight wrote:
| It's probably good to check with a guest browser session before
| making this kind of strong claims.
| amitp wrote:
| 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...]
| Moru wrote:
| I got something similar.
| creato wrote:
| 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...
| jostmey wrote:
| +1
|
| Google has been borderline useless for productive work. I
| always attach Wikipedia or Reddit to my search to get anything
| useful
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I got decent results back. What do you get?
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| > 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.
| seydor wrote:
| youtube search is problematic. i very often get videos on top
| that are auto-generate spam with AI narration and random clips
| (often completely irrelevant to the subject). there are videos i
| know that aren't shown even when i search with title and channel
| name.
|
| Google wants to be too relevant , to the point it s unusable
| sadhorse wrote:
| Also recommend. Others liked. Recommend for you. Shorts
| section.
|
| Search is unusable.
| twisteriffic wrote:
| Recently getting pimple poppers and onlyfans when searching
| for small engine repair.
|
| It's better than the Rogan and IDW spam I was getting a few
| weeks ago.
| kredd wrote:
| I mean, when we get public posts like this one where someone
| boasts how they're spamming to get hits through SEO --
| https://x.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509, I can only
| imagine it's happening in larger quantities behind the scenes.
| bhartzer wrote:
| Google actually shut that down pretty quick. That 'loophole'
| doesn't exist anymore.
|
| Pro Tip: if you're going to boast on how you're spamming
| Google, then expect it to be shut down, especially if it's a
| hole in their algorithm.
| kredd wrote:
| I'm actually curious, how did Google do that? The guy who did
| it did it in a very obvious way, but I'm assuming you can
| just schedule a lot of posts that would drop once a day, make
| the AI to use different language structures and change the
| underlying AI model in general (e.g. switch between OpenAI,
| Mistral and whatever) and slow drip submit the posts. How
| would Google know they're "mass generated"?
| yetanother12345 wrote:
| I would have thought it well known by Search Engine Journal that
| at intervals Google implements changes that in one way or the
| other influences what kind of sites are rated in which way... And
| that, at times of change this may lead to very substantial
| changes in ranking, sometimes letting a lot of
| "irrelevant"/"lower quality" (...all this is subjective to some
| extent) results flow to the top for certain queries, even for a
| prolonged period of time... Back in the day these algo updates
| were quite the thing to monitor and discuss on certain SEO-
| related sites...
|
| That said I only comment out of casual interest as I stopped
| using Google more than a decade ago.
| nvr219 wrote:
| What do you use now for all the various things? I cut google
| out for most things but still use their search from time to
| time (and of course have to use google docs but that's because
| the people I'm collaborating with are on google)
| martinibuster wrote:
| This has nothing to do with changes in the algorithm. I've been
| in search for 20+ years, so I'm quite familiar with how Google
| works. ;) My article explains why it's likely happening.
|
| TL/DR is that spammers are likely exploiting two loopholes. 1.
| Longtail keywords are low competition and may trigger different
| algorithms. 2. Some/many of the search queries the spam ranks
| for trigger the more permissive Local Search algorithm
| amluto wrote:
| > The spam site was checking for Googlebot IP addresses. If the
| visitor's IP address matched as belonging to Google then the spam
| page displayed content to Googlebot. > > All other visitors got a
| redirect to other domains that displayed sketchy content.
|
| Years ago, Google had an explicit policy that sites that showed
| different content to Googlebot than they showed to regular
| unauthenticated users were not allowed, and they got heavily
| penalized. This policy is long gone, but it would help here
| (assuming the automated tooling to enforce it was any good, and I
| assume to was).
|
| More recently, Google seems totally okay with sites that show
| content to Googlebot but go out of their way not to show that
| content to regular users.
| altdataseller wrote:
| I think they did this because lots of publishers show paywalls
| to people but still want their content indexed by Google. In
| other words, they want their cake and eat it too!
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| And of course many of these publishers are politically
| powerful, and are the trusted sources that google wants to
| promote over random blogs.
| colordrops wrote:
| "trusted" by the moneyed class to propagate the right
| narrative
| ithkuil wrote:
| Do you think there exists only one class of people with
| money and that they all have a unified narrative to feed
| us with?
| travoc wrote:
| Well, they all show Google ads.
| bhartzer wrote:
| That 'policy' is still actually in effect, I believe, in
| Google's webmaster guidelines. They just don't enforce it.
|
| Years ago (early 2000s) Google used to mostly crawl using
| Google-owned IPs, but they'd occasionally use Comcast or some
| other ISPs (partners) to crawl. If you were IP cloaking, you'd
| have to look out for those pesky non-Google IPs. I know, as I
| used to play that IP cloaking game back in the early 2000s,
| mostly using scripts from a service called "IP Delivery".
| bhartzer wrote:
| You can actually get a manual action (penalty) from Google if
| you do IP cloaking/redirects. It's still mentioned
| prominently in Google's Webmaster Guidelines: https://support
| .google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en#z...
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| They still have that rule. Just not always easy to spot
| spammers getting around it.
| freediver wrote:
| I opened the article from a computer in school library that
| didn't have ad-block. Nearly crashed the system. I seem to
| remember times when SEJ was reputable, can not even describe what
| this is.
| hmottestad wrote:
| I've switched to Kagi a couple of months ago. Every once in a
| while I struggle to get good search results, but then I check
| Google and it's not any better there. It's not always the
| greatest at promoting the sites I like, but I've already started
| boosting and pinning various domains to tailor the results to my
| own preference.
|
| Still using a lot of other google stuff including gmail and maps.
| Just not search anymore.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| +1 for Kagi.
|
| But also, for the past few months, I've completely stopped
| searching the internet. ChatGPT-4 does the job way more
| effectively and I don't see why I would go back to searching
| the internet (assuming the chatgpt experience doesn't get
| nerfed in some way).
| dvaun wrote:
| Agreed. For getting a range of opinions Kagi is best for
| searching through forums, finding technical blogs, etc.
|
| For quick intros to technical issues GPT4 gives a decent
| summary if the topic has been around for a while.
|
| For going in-depth, though, I still rely on technical docs...
| te_chris wrote:
| ChatGPT is like living in an information tunnel. It's amazing
| but it doesn't replace search for me at all. Irony is when it
| does search, because it's obviously just doing a quick crawl
| it actually makes things worse as it treats whatever shit it
| finds as authoritative - which, as anyone working on RAG
| knows, is a whole world of problems on its own.
|
| This is absolutely not to say that Google can be considered
| 'good' these days.
| Mizza wrote:
| I realized the other day that I haven't Googled anything in over
| a month. And I guess even then, and before Google search was
| thoroughly enshittified, it was mostly just a convenient way to
| get to StackOverflow via my search bar, but now it's just ChatGPT
| for most quick queries I have.
| oglop wrote:
| I stopped using google and switched to Bing about a year ago
| after they started doing more with ChatGPT. For the most part I'm
| much happier with how it presents what I'm looking for. It's not
| perfect, but when I compare to google the few times I've been
| frustrated, it's not any better and has to do with the topic, not
| search engine.
| jen729w wrote:
| I've been a DDG user for years now, so I guess a bunch of my
| results come from Bing.
|
| I don't generally compare to Google, so I can't say for sure
| that the results are 'as good', but my experience sure as shit
| is better.
|
| I search for a thing and I get a page with links. Usually the
| thing I want is in the first page.
|
| Sometimes it isn't, or I'm searching for something that I know
| is recent that Google probably has a later version of, so I
| just add the !g to the search and there I am at Google.
|
| It's great. It works. It's not stressful or horrible or
| annoying. I recommend it.
| visarga wrote:
| I've been using phind.com, very good results
|
| install with https://www.phind.com/search?q=%s
| rumblestrut wrote:
| Over the past few years I've felt like Google itself is a spam
| attack.
| xp84 wrote:
| After 20 years of being taken for granted that search engines as
| we know them are equipped to solve the typical problems we throw
| at them, I wonder if the whole concept of an unsupervised web
| crawl as the input to a single purpose search engine will just
| die out.
|
| When I think about my typical web queries across the past year or
| two, it seems more and more likely that I'd be better off
| replacing Google with several purpose-built systems, none of
| which search the "entire web" (whatever that even means anymore).
| Technical queries? Just search StackOverflow and Github directly.
| Searching for a local venue of any kind? Search against a
| dedicated places database where new entries have to pass at least
| a cursory scrutiny. (Arguably Google Maps or Yelp already serve
| this purpose today, but I'm not sure if they have enough vetting
| today). Medical question? Search across a few sites known to be
| trustworthy.
|
| We have become accustomed to go to Google because it's more
| convenient to type in a movie title, "chinese restaurant
| philadelphia", "flights to miami 4/12/24" or "Error code 127
| python" into the same single place, but something tells me we'd
| be better off if that one place made some LLM-assisted guesses of
| what kind of search it is, and then went to a specialized search
| that is curated. If we go back toward the DMOZ/Yahoo model of
| directories that humans curate, I wonder if we could even reverse
| the trend toward spam and clickbait that has been so lamented in
| recent years.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| What's sad is that I didn't even notice.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Google has become unusable in many circumstances, and it rewards
| spam. It claims it doesn't, but it does, a lot of SEO strategies
| now revolve around spamming the search engine with articles,
| pages, etc. Not for useful content, but for linkbacks, internal
| linking, etc. It is especially bad for geo-specific SEO
| strategies, where you're trying to have different page sets for
| different regions. Basically, how it was when Google first
| started and was easily gamed. Now people are spinning up 100s of
| pages and articles using AI and just spamming it. It has gotten
| bad, but the worst part is that you have to do it now in order to
| compete for keywords.
| pandacake wrote:
| For responsible scientists and researchers who've disclosed to
| Google how this is being used to execute large-scale phishing
| attacks, and Google opting to not fix it, this news warms our
| hearts.
|
| Spam on!
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(page generated 2023-12-22 23:00 UTC)