The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Can anyone stop the keyword spammers on google?

Can anyone stop the keyword spammers on google?

You've seen them. They show up on your top 5000 hits the more each day. What little time I have to read the articles found are now spent filtering them out.

Ever search for "toronto" and end up doing this for the next 5 minutes?

toronto great restaurants -paris (400,000 hits omitted.. whew)

toronto great restaurants -paris -"new york" (another 200K, whew)

toronto great restaurants -paris -"new york" -shopping (another 50k)

It's not just Toronto, it's everything you do every day, it's incredible, the keyword spammer's has it ALL covered.

Is there no way to avoid bs?

Li-fan Chen
Monday, March 8, 2004

For the uninitiated, what exactly are you wibbling about?

Monday, March 8, 2004

The subhumans whose job it is to turn Google from being a useful resource for everyone into an advertising site for their clients are unfortunately getting better at that job, with the result that some sorts of useful information are getting harder to find using Google. For instance, if you're looking for specs or reviews or prices for some bit of computer hardware, you might naively hope that giving Google its model number and maybe a little more information would turn up tons of useful material. Instead, it turns up enormous numbers of pointers into the same "comparison shopping" site, usually to pages containing no information whatever about the product you're interested in.

I think Google should offer per-user blacklists, so that all your queries can implicitly have "-kelkoo" etc tacked onto them without the necessity of typing it by hand. Store the information along with your other preferences. Or they could just have a policy: Get caught trying to fool Google and get completely erased from all Google searches for a month. (But that might be too easy to abuse.)

Gareth McCaughan
Monday, March 8, 2004

The 10-keyword limit is hurting.

You could, in theory, think up precise queries, but you keep running up against the limit.

Alex.ro
Monday, March 8, 2004

Do you guys remember when Altavista was good? This just seems like deja-vu.

Dan Brown
Monday, March 8, 2004

The tragedy of the commons.

Philo
Monday, March 8, 2004

Actually nobody's ever made a penny from spamming, it's all been from selling $249 "Get Rich Quick Spamming The Internet" kits.

SUCKAHZ!!!

Cubist
Monday, March 8, 2004

Uh, what exactly is your problem? I just headed over to google and actually *did* a quick search for Toronto. Here are the top 4:

#1: Toronto - The official City of Toronto Web site
#2: City guide to entertainment, events, movies, restaurants, hotels ...
#3: TheStar.com - News/News
#4: University of Toronto -- Home Page

So you covered the city itself, entertainment, news, and education - with the top 4 hits. What exactly were you looking for?

Robert 'Groby' Blum
Monday, March 8, 2004

What? This is the worst whine ever.

Who cares about the number of hits? The whole idea behind Google is that the most relevant links are listed first.

Clutch Cargo
Monday, March 8, 2004

1) Use the Google Web APIs and write a client to do your searches for you.

2) Add SpamAssassin style rules to your client to judge the results.

3) Delete the spam.

4) Train the client to improve its accuracy.

5) Sign up for a Google account and License Key.

6) Enjoy 1000 spam-free queries a day.

Simple. :)

Thom Lawrence
Monday, March 8, 2004