I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic.
I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them.
Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their proxy traffic towards many sites I managed. I could easily document their behaviour.
In the same time, I wrote a crawler that visited their sites over a long, long time. I learned that they kept injecting hidden links to other sites in their network, so I did let my bot look at those also.
By this time, I also got a journalist with me that started to look at the money flow to try and find the organisation behind it.
My bot found in excess of 100K domains being used for this operation, targeting all of westeren Europe. All the 100K sites contained proxied content and was hidden behind Cloudflare, but thanks to the position I had, I managed to find their backend anyways.
We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down.
Oh, and the journalist? He did find a Dutch company that was not happy to see neither him or the photographer :)
> We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down.
As someone that tried reporting spam sites because they were using content scrapped from my website, I'm not surprised.
Cloudflare has a policy that they will not stop providing their IP hiding/reverse proxy services to anyone, regardless of complaints. The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it.
They say "we're not a hosting provider" as if that's an excuse that they can't refuse to offer their service. I'm sure many spam websites would go away if they couldn't hide behind Cloudflare.
> The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it.
Or worse. Since I have no way to know beforehand who I would be dealing with, this is actively dangerous - what if the mobster running this site is having a bad day and choses to retaliate ?
Also what a stupid fucking policy that is. Even if you are not legally compelled to block content, what is the point of actively helping distibute harmful content?
What they are doing is worse than just saying "We are not a hosting provider" - because while what is true, they are actively distributing content that is hosted elsewhere while hiding who is hosting it.
One can easily write an email to abuse@hoster.example.com and usually these people do not want garbage on their networks. CF is making it impossible to do notify them, and they refuse to implement an alternative procedure.
I still do not understand the moral position of profiting off of enabling criminal scum, when it would be so easy not to...
I do not think that it is up to Google or CloudFlare to police the internet. If a site is doing something illegal then report it to appropriate gov agency. If gov agency does not anything then get involved into political process to fix that.
If Google, or CF, or whoever are fronting illegal activity with their services, they are absolutely responsible for damages the party they are proxying.
Platforms must be responsible for the content they are hosting, broadcasting, and publishing.
One to one communications between two people exchanging ideas and having a private discussion is different from mass broadcasting.
> Platforms must be responsible for the content they are hosting, broadcasting, and publishing.
> One to one communications between two people exchanging ideas and having a private discussion is different from mass broadcasting.
The highway is used both by those visiting their friends and those doing mass deliveries. Is it the job of the highway maintenance crew to control for what purpose their network is used?
The "owner" of the highway is the government, who regulates commercial traffic differently to personal traffic. The government places strict rules on who is allowed to use the highway, and how it is used.
The highway maintenance crew is akin to the person installing racks for CloudFlare.
Highway are a poor analogy for information broadcast systems in general. Highways are closer to a one to one transmission system rathe than a broadcast system of one to many.
They're already removing things they don't like. I see no reason why they shouldn't remove things that are objectively 100% harmful.
Like seriously, is there a single person on the planet that's going to defend online scams? It's immoral, it's illegal, it benefits no one and harms thousands. And it's not like it's very hard to detect and block either.
If someone were to tell AT&T that this call center customer of theirs is in the business of extorting people for money, they'd at least look at it and help law enforcement accordingly. Cloudflare has a talk-to-the-hand attitude until actively forced by law enforcement. That's an important difference right there.
At this point I'm convinced that at least 10% of all legitimate economic activity is actually money laundering for crime organizations, in various forms. I imagine that percentage goes even higher in the financial capitals of the world.
> what if the mobster running this site is having a bad day and choses to retaliate ?
I wonder if someone with malicious intent could set up a site designed to generate complaints (how exactly would be an exercise for the reader), put it behind Cloudflare, and purposely use the information in the forwarded complaints to harass, abuse, dox, or otherwise harm people.
>One can easily write an email to abuse@hoster.example.com and usually these people do not want garbage on their networks. CF is making it impossible to do notify them, and they refuse to implement an alternative procedure.
But that's exactly what CF does. They forward your abuse complaints to the abuse contact of the IP address hosting the content.
The retaliation is quite real—CF keeps your entire e-mail address and name in there, so you are essentially doxxing yourself. Pretty sure 8chan posted a lot of the reports they got back in the day.
They might take that stance, to avoid liability and complication.
At the moment, they have a very clear rule. If they stop providing services to obvious spammers, they will create lots of grey areas, and they will also implicitly make a judgement that the client they still serve are _good_ in some way, and an enterprising lawyer or muckraker might exploit that.
This may have had something to do with the fact that the daily stormer was claiming prior to that that their lack of suspension was an implicit endorsement by CloudFlare of their site and content.
Misuse of trademarks is a thing.
I agree, however, that CF's policies are applied arbitrarily.
Better known for being linked to the Christchurch and El Paso shootings, being the origin of the QAnon movement and having a history of hosting child pornography.
Facebook, reddit, MySpace and Twitter have all been linked to mass shootings and child pornography. None of these sites condone, enable or remotely desire such content.
> None of these sites condone, enable or remotely desire such content.
Yeah, and that's the difference, isn't it? 8kun might not condone any of these things, officially, but it very much enables and desires them.
This kind of discourse is seen as the "price of freedom", its presence a demonstration of absolute tolerance and blind faith in freedom of speech. Facebook, reddit, MySpace and Twitter are more strictly moderated and impose actual terms of service on their users' freedom of expression.
But of course this also means the people most motivated to join networks that offer guarantees of free speech absolutism are those whose discourse is not tolerated by these mainstream alternatives. And their presence will almost guarantee an absence of "normies" who don't run into the limits of their freedom of speech on the moderated networks much and feel uncomfortable around the former group.
Heck, the only reason 8chan ever became large enough to be widely known was because 4chan evicted Gamergate. And 4chan isn't exactly known for its strict moderation and suppression of political views.
Moot was trying to be friends with the people in that circle. A girl he was trying to date didn't like it. He was taking awkward babysteps towards his lackluster job at Google where he would never be promoted or accomplish anything meaningful again.
How is that different from a hosting provider that has to address legal complaints regarding spam, copyright infringement, etc. on their servers? Just like a hosting provider, they specifically have a relationship with the website owner to provide the reverse proxy service. It's not like they can say "we don't know who or how our service is being used".
It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they have to deal with these liabilities and complications, not hide behind some vague "our hands are tied" language.
Presumably if illegal content is not taken down by the customer then the host cancels the service, right? Otherwise the host risks liability. That's different from revealing the IP of a customer which requires a court order.
If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching").
In other words, a common carrier.
Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content, not the user.
But in a way, they actively host the content. The fact that their server periodically retrieves new content from a different backend makes no difference. The page sits on their hard drives and is server by their servers when I visit that domain. It's always been a very, very thin argument and it has gotten even thinner with the likes of Cloudflare Pages and Workers.
Cloudflare is just a huge company actively ignoring abuse complaints and somehow they are getting away with it. It even helps their PR to a certain market segment.
They even still host kiwifarms, a board that is primarily known for its vicous harassment of people and is known to have driven multiple innocent people to suicide.
I consider CloudFlare a bad actor at this point and I wish the other big names around them would too. They are subsidizing crime with VC money.
I've been reporting hundreds of spam sites to Cloudflare, but always get the same lame excuse. Godaddy the same. Meanwhile good content drops in Google rankings and spam moves to the top.
You are missing the point of the complaint, which is that it's a private decision to hold that policy. Maybe it was a bad idea to use the word "line", but the intent still stands unadressed.
Yes. Also to the incident where they stopped hosting 8chan after they vowed to never take sides again.
You can agree with Cloudlare not providing services to those sites as much as you want, but you cannot pretend that Cloudflare hosts everyone equally. They cannot use that as an excuse to not deal with spammers.
> All I'm saying is that we won't know until they come under pressure again
That's also true of people who haven't murdered anyone yet, though.
Whom do you trust more? The person who did something and vowed to never do it again, or the person who didn't vow anything? I tend to prefer the former.
When it comes to murdering someone, I'm going to prefer the person who has never murdered anyone yet.
When it comes to service providers, I would tend towards your direction. They did a thing that had conflicting ethics on each side, weighed the outcome and their ethics, and then made a hard decision for the future. What they did could be reversed, too, and didn't cause much permanent damage.
Murdering someone is very permanent and should take a lot more initial consideration.
This is very rational of them. They position themselves as a pipe for "bytes", not "content".
By ignoring the content they serve, they rid themselves of the necessity to analyze and judge what they serve. Not only would this require a brain the size of a planet and the expense of running it, but also would inevitably conflict with someone else's judgments, and bring various PR woes.
They don't analyze the internals of their traffic the way internet backbone providers don't analyze the internals of the traffic they pass around.
I frankly find this position superior: imho it does more good by preventing censorship than harm by serving good-intentioned and bad-intentioned customers alike.
In fact I completely agree with that stance. It's not cloudfares job to police the content. They provide a simple service. If something is unlawful law enforcement should go after the owners.
That sounds like a hell of an investigation, and now my curiosity is running. 100k domains sounds like an huge amount of logistics on their side to keep it all running. It would be interesting to read about how a spam company manages that kind of infrastructure compared to a "legit" company.
Legit company will always have internal struggles between dev/sales/marketing, so things just take longer and are much more draining to accomplish. I'd imaginge spam org just needs to have bare minimum stuff up to satisfy whatever need it is they have knowing that humans won't necessarily be perusing those domains, yet it's 100K domains. I could almost see something like this running more smoothly. I can also see it being run by small number of people that let things lapse and it's just barely hanging together. So many questions...
It is not very difficult to manage: a company of mine was bought by a squatter (I found out after dealing with a broker for the sale; I had to integrate it with their 'tech team' and walked away after) and for many years already, this all has been fairly easy to automate. The registars have apis, cloud flare has apis. There was 1 tech guy keeping it all up and running and he didn't have to do anything. It would register and provision with content automatically. There is really almost no work involved besides keeping money in the registrar account and the costs are only the domains probably, maybe they have a little hetzner load balanced setup with 2 machines but that's likely it.
The reason you found so many domains is that they intentionally take down thier spam sites and reload them under a new domain every few hours. They do this so they can't be taken down by people reporting them as spam. They literally setup the next domain while the current one starts being used so they can do a live swap to the next one without interruptions to thier spam operations. This is typically done in an effort to spread Trojan malware to anybody running computers with out of date operating systems and browsers. Windows getting people off of Internet Explorer has been a huge hit for them as it reduces the number of possible vulnerabilities someone might have when they get sent to one of these Trojan spam sites.
did the article resonate with norwegians? I assume the report probably answered so many questions of the populace on google's malfunction, even if nothing came out of it
There is / are organisations that a) scrape legitimate sites for content, b) host that content on their own 100K domains, c) sit behind cloudflare, d) do some seo??? e) when someone finds their site they then inject an ad or similar rubbish f) do this enough that they make money off the ad / competition / porn ?
That seems like a problem that the ”original-source” metatag was supposed to stop?
Canonical urls help with noting your own purposeful duplicated content. But that meta tag goes on the duplicated content. So it doesn't help with scrapers, who strip that out.
But I thought that it was useful for google - who could find two caches with same content, one of which was 2018 one of which 2020 and both say "this is canonical". At that point the 2018 version is real and the other rejected.
Then again, you could just do it with publication dates ...
Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault.
I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated software and keygens, detailed instructions for a variety of useful things. That was the golden age of the web.
These days, all the "interesting" data on the Internet is all inside closed Telegram chats, facebook groups, Discords or the rare public website here and there that Google
doesn't want to index (like sci-hub, or other piracy sites).
The data that remains on SERPs is now also heavily censored for arbitrary reasons. "For your health", "For your protection". Google search is done.
It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.
Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either.
What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap.
Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site beforehand, which is another problem.
I also feel like some product manager decided that having a blank results page is horrible. So even if I put terms in quotes, and there are no results with those quoted terms, Google decides to show me results that have virtually nothing to do with what I want to see.
Except a blank page is exactly what I want to see if there are no results or if I mistyped my query. These shoehorned-in results throw me off every time because it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret them as "oh, google has no results for what I typed in past this point, so they're showing me random crap". I miss the old days when search was as precise as a scalpel.
Maybe I'm naive about the complexity of the problem (every article I read about the difficulty of what Google's doing certainly suggests so), but I honestly believe that we've reached the point where a talented and well-founded startup could outplay Google at their own game.
I literally couldn't agree more. I can't stand how bad searching has become.
While we're at it, you know what else I really hate? How google switches the order of the buttons for Images, News, Shopping, Video, etc. on EACH QUERY. Who in the world ever thought this was a good idea?
I've always assumed that this is a bug in their A/B tests, because I cannot even imagine how utterly degenerate their product design process must have become to come up with this on purpose.
Exactly, it's very easy to see how Google doesn't leave the user unspammed. YouTube's search works the same way, and even if there are useful results on top, they quickly trail off into clickbait garbage. Plus the unrelated lists of ‘people also watch’, injected every few items. The search filters are barely enough to dial in when you want to skip obvious trash, but give up on anything slightly complicated. On Play Store, it's worse: you just get troves of what Google thinks you should be getting, with no control on your side—because if people could skip apps with payment inside, they would, and who in Google wants that.
I feel like YouTube's goal is to always get you to watch something else. Scroll down in search results? See unrelated videos. As soon as the video starts? See a 'Recommended' badge. Pause the video? See an overlay with other videos. Leave the video running? Autoplay fixates on something else.
I think there is a market here. "Dumb" search engines, that search exactly the words you type, maybe with advanced features like regex, metadata search, etc... It won't replace Google's guesswork, but sometimes, I just want to grep the internet.
All non-Google engines are all about privacy, which is nice, and almost a requirement if you want to compete with Google, but I'd like to see features that actually improve search too. DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.
I'd like to go a step further and hope for "dumb" search engines that are tailored towards indexing specific subsets of the internet as a whole. As an example, imagine a search engine that is specifically tailored towards programming questions. Or one that specifically omits some of the more annoying SEO optimized results, like Livestrong and USA Today.
My current product started off as precisely that kind of search engine.
User adoption is a huge problem - almost no users made it their default search engine because even programmers need to do non-programming searches and it's too easy to go into your browser, hit ALT+d, bang out your search query, and hit enter.
And because google and ddg do a good job on most programming related searches, they get to be the default search engines.
I think so too. It'd really be nice to get a search capability that doesn't take my past searching into account. I want an unbiased search, and give me good tools to filter.
Yeah, I also try DDG first then and only if not okay I go !g. Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing? They could have shown advertisements also in their "classic" search (let's call it like that) so I'm really at loss - what was in it for them to change??? Germans have a word for that "verschlimmbessern" (or even two words - kaputtreparieren) which means breaking something by trying to make it better.
> Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing?
As far as I understand it, they want to catch synonyms and different tenses for the words.
But they do a remarkably shit job. nginx and apache2 aren't synonyms, but completely different tools for the same job. Yet apache2 instructions appeared as a match when I've used "nginx" in my query (the word apache2 was in bold in result snippet).
I guess it has something to do with Google Internal dynamics. But I'm not the one being paid big bucks to think about such stuff. Maybe they've done their due diligence and made their tradeoffs, but I'm clearly not the target of the search engine anymore.
I'm only a dumb nobody, so if this is a problem for me, I wonder how it is for all the smart people that hangs out here at HN.
It just feels very uphill to use Google right now. No matter how many flags or tricks.
The median Google search user probably never learned to use any of these "advanced" features in the first place. For them, having Google ignore the precise wording of their query and show results for more common related terms is almost certainly an improvement.
> It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users.
I think this is an overly harsh take. I strongly suspect that any algorithm for ranking search results is open to gaming and manipulation by malicious users.
Google changed SEO from a seedy practice to something they actively encourage, promote and support.
Google stopped shitcanning sites that that present different things to Googlebot and regular users, including sites that require a login for normal users but show content to Googlebot.
Google imposed arbitrary ranking criteria that favor long-wided blogspam over concise articles that immediately tell you what you want to know.
Nowadays you need to VPN to the target country. For a reason to complicated to explain here I searched local businesses in the city of Melun, France. There were no reasonable hits. Well, my IP was Finnish (to my best knowledge they have no other means of localizing me) and "melu" means noise in Finnish with "melun" being a common form. No addition of French shopping terms could convince Google that I am not interested in noise abatement. Accepted language header did not help. After switching to a French IP it worked like a charm. And one would guess searching for shopping and businesses would be Google's strength.
I'm sure public human SEO manipulation is at least partly to blame. The only thing that is surprising is that it isn't worse than it is. At least the first half page is usually close to what you want.
One of the last use case for Google is being a proper search engine for Reddit. But I think they are aware of their downfall, that's why the top of the page is increasingly taken by their widgets to provide directly the information.
On the other hand, Youtube is the second most popular search engine and I don't see it slowing down. What an insight they had when they bought it.
Edit : I entirely agree to the fact that valuable information is found more in communities nowadays. I also predict that the web in 5 years will be mostly explored through communities
When I’m looking for reviews of a product I usually type XXX review Reddit to avoid the XXX top 10 list blog spam that google returns. I don’t want a review from someone who just jumbled together a top 10 list without ever looking at the product in person.
I've noticed this a lot lately. There are words on the page that look like a description of the product and a review, but once you really read them you see that they could be generated by a bot and they don't actually review the product, just describe the basic properties of it. Then they provide that button.
True, although Google has been knowing about this issue and has released guidelines alongside a "Product Review" algorithm update three or four months ago.
I think it depends on what you’re searching for, for dev related stuff no other search engine I’ve tried comes close. But there are whole industries now that are so heavily SEO’d that finding useful information without knowing the exact keyword to search for is incredibly frustrating
I agree, and I‘ve read the opinion too that it‘s a problem people have with DDG. Yet google doesn’t feel excellent at that. Could it be worth competing with google there? I‘m not gonna say it‘s "easy", but maybe worthwhile and possible?
I don‘t think I have used more than 1000 different sites in all development searches ever. It‘s the stack exchange network, github, official documentation, non-github official issue tracking/communities and some high quality blogs. That seems very manageable. You could probably index that into one elasticsearch and one sourcegraph instance. Add a little more specific faceted search, add back powerful and precise query syntax and still maintain "just past in whatever and hit the first result" functionality. I‘m likely underestimating the breadth of other developer needs than my own. I don‘t know.
I think a tool like that could be very valuable, as you said in most cases you end up in the same few common locations. Most of the time the reason I fall back on google is because I'm not sure whether what I'm looking for is going to be in a github issue, in a bug tracker, in a forum, in a stackoverflow answer, in a mailing list, etc.
There was a docs aggregation site I tried at one point that was quite useful, but without search across issues/forums etc. I didn't end up sticking with it
Google seems to also place less emphasis on search phrases. When searching for exact article names I easily find them on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google. Two recent search-term examples:
In general, google no longer primarily searches what you asked them but for what they think you want. This might be better for the average user but can be extremely frustrating when you are trying to find something more niche.
I think it is also the result of the whole "Ok, google" voice assistant push. It seems like Google switched to natural language processing and the old-school system of keyword searching is no longer effective.
Whether or not it's Google's fault depends on how much you attribute the development of the advertising-driving distraction factory internet to Google's business. We can debate whether or not Google was ever really in the search engine business – certainly at one point the search was a useful tool. Today, Google search is a sort of glorified Yellow Pages*. Their main product is selling ads in this Nouveau YP. The results their search engine returns are now heavily skewed towards revenue-generating sites. Such sites may incidentally be informative, but they are generally selling something.
This is not to say that all search results are bought, although of course those are present now, too. But overall Google presumes that whatever the user is searching for, the best result is one where the answer is "buy this thing".
For those search results that don't lead directly to commercial products, the revenue generation is indirect: through the collection of user preferences and activity, Google can refine its search results towards maximizing revenue. At the very least, the result is likely to be a site that has ads, some of which generate revenue directly for Google.
*In the old-fashioned Yellow Pages book, you couldn’t really “search,” but there was an index by category. It had many of the issues inherent in categories, but it didn’t take an expert to find things. Google search eliminates the needs for anyone to understand a taxonomy of businesses.
Google only recently started to totally butcher the Swiss search results. For some reason I could still find direct download links to movies and music a few years ago (kinda legal here).
Now such search results often don't even get a second page...
I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality.
It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it.
If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions.
Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are expired domains that have been bought.
I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently.
On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago.
It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher.
Typically Google has a warming/trial period for new large content sites, after their search bot is introduced to the content and has spidered its way through the site.
For example there used to be a very common content farm system, that was structured like like this:
So when people searched for sites by domain name, the zillions of low traffic long-tail results of this farm system would be all over Google's results.
What it would present on the page is a mess of data about nytimes.com, such as traffic, or keywords pulled from the site header, maybe a manufactured description (or pulled right from the site head), sometimes images / screenshots of the site. Anything that could be stuffed in there to fill up enough content to get Google to not do an automatic shallow content kill penalty on the content farm. This worked for several years very successfully until Google's big algorithm updates, 9-10 years ago or whatever now (Penguin et al.). You could just build a large index of the top million domains (eg Alexa and Quantcast used to provide that index in a zip file), spider & scrape info from the domains, and build a content farm index out of it and have a million pages of content to then hand off to Googlebot.
So initially such a farm will boom into the search rankings, Google would give them a trial period and let out the flood gates of traffic to the site. Then Google would promptly kill off the content farm after the free run period expired and they had figured out it was a garbage site.
I still occasionally see this model of content farm burst up into traffic rankings, and it's usually very short lived. It makes me wonder if that's not more or less what's going on with the Mermaid farm.
This definitely looks like an expired domain that was bought. Havfruen seems to be a restaurant in the city of Korsør - which conveniently have the postal code of 4220.
.it pages are used in Norway too, but I'm not sure it's something GPT-ish that's being used. Whole sentences are copied word for word from other articles.(might be a small dataset it's trained on?)
It could of course be that its something similar to GPT that is trained on all the content it could find and then writes articles, cause it's clearly messing up sometimes, form the small piece of content available at the search results page.
I'm not sure if this is an ML race and the reason we're not seeing the same thing in English is because Google might understands English better than spammers. While in Norwegian and German it's the other way around?
Clearly freshness is a large part of it. Google seems to have indexed millions upon millions of pages tied to this in the last 24 hours.
Seems like not a new thing. Here is a warning tweet from beginning July from Danish Cybersec guy @peterkruse who saw his name coming up for a different domain owned by the same registrant as havfruen4220.dk
Interesting, I've been seeing the same spam for Norwegian searches, but with the domain nem-multiservice dot dk, or nem-varmepumper dot dk - presumably another legitimate business' domain that expired and was grabbed by the scammers. Visiting those domains show the same graphic as shown in the article.
Almost any search in Norwegian will have obvious scam sites like these in the top 10 results.
Other domains part of the same scam that show up in my results today: mariesofie dot dk, bvosvejsogmontage dot dk
Yup. Those domains are the same thing, and redirects to the same thing. There are even more domains.
Never seen anything on this scale before. I can search for basically anything(tax rules, baking, stocks, property, hygiene...) and Google will most likely show those domains somewhere.
The content seems taken from other websites and mixed in a nonsensical way. It comes up frequently in my search results.
www.xspdf.com has completely unrelated content and seems a separate business.
Would be interesting to see the actual content. Based on the small snippets in the search results, it takes content from other sites, like large Norwegian news sites, and somehow outranks them hard.
I wonder what the Google Search Console looks like for that domain, considering that it's probably getting millions worth of free traffic.
EDIT:
After looking more at it, it's insane how much it ranks for and how well. Straight up brand names seems to be the hardest to compere with, at least larger ones. Those seems to be around page 4-5 for me.
Some brands I was unable to find at all, but ironically another .dk domain showed up in it's place that did the same thing. There is also some .it domains using the same content.
I've found that it takes contents from multiple sources and glues it together in sometimes great ways. Like one sentence from this page, another thing from that page.
Maybe this is some ML that collects content and pieces a lot of it together sentences or half sentences to one large article? It's clearly from completely different sources, but about the same thing.
Example:
"wash car"
Result in google:
"A dark winter with snow and salt is hard on the car, and it's extra important to wash the car" - Collected from one article.
<some other text>
"Keep the pressure washer at 30-50 cm from the car..." - From another article.
Ironically, there is like 11 results all tied to this thing outranking the original articles(those are last), even if it's medium to large sized well known companies selling for billion(s) of dollars each year in Norway.
Sometimes it goes from one thing and switches to something completely unrelated, so I guess the spammers still have something to improve.
Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for:
Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k
SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k
These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale.
For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" which has 207k searches per month in Norway and is rated as 0 (out of 100) for being easy to rank for. Usually when a keyword has that amount of searches it would be incredibly hard to rank for, I've never seen anything like this. So what is happening here looks like they are just taking advantage of a market with really low competition keywords.
Interia is a large polish web portal, from what I could find. Norwegian people doesn't know it, but polish people might. There is probably around ~2 % polish people in Norway. It also ranks as #1 for me. It's in polish too, so basically only ~2 % of Norway would understand it.
However, the weird thing it that it steals content from articles, and then outranks them. Most pages seems to be boosted, maybe as a result of it being new. (Most content is just hours old)
Could you check these too? (exactly the same thing, but newer, it seems)
www.mariesofie.dk
nem-varmepumper.dk
The keyword data was based on searches in Norway alone, it is an order of magnitude higher in Poland. In Norway almost anybody could rank for that keyword if they tried due to the difficulty being different based on location and language.
Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool.
But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad wasteful.
You need a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush for competitor analysis and keyword research. One trick with Ahrefs if you want to be frugal is to pay for the $7 trial and use it as much as possible during the trial to do your keyword research and cancel. Technically if you are efficient enough that trial could get you months worth of content at least.
Pet theory (disclaimer that I know very little about SEO) would be that the website with the cloned content loads fast and does not load 4 MiB of javascript, thus beating the original content in ranking mostly because of the speed, which is I believe a important factor in Google rankings (and getting more important).
And add to that the some link spam and preventing the visitors to return not get any bounce back...
Either way, I can't help to be a bit impressed by the SEO spammers outsmarting the people at Google. (Edit: and I don't mean to say they are smarter or anything, just that they only need to find one weakness in the algorithm while the people working to improve it needs to make it works for everything.)
Once the hard requirement on speed impacts the quality of results it no longer helps me as a user. I'd rather have the sites invest their time in good content and wait a few seconds rather than get fast but low quality SEO-ed results. Same with AMP, the quest for speed doesn't make my experience faster if I still load the original page (which is often still necessary).
Not sure how relevant this is, but the animal characters in the top image are from a Russian children hit cartoon "The Smesharicks" (literally "The Laughballs").
I hate dealing with this and now refuse to use Google now when I saw patterns in search results while I was researching common things (like housing) in Norwegian, here in Norway. I rarely use Google these days, but I thought for a second that Google might be better with search results than DDG in Norwegian, but this stuff is aggravating. This is one of those where they screw around with history that you just have to start fresh again on whatever you were doing instead of going back.
edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian.
> edit: one other thing I have seen, but it doesn't mean it is always spam. All The Words In A Title Are Capitalized - it's something to pay attention to whether it is spam or not. Conventionally, titles are usually not like that in Norwegian.
Another big one is that Norwegians like Germans write words together, just one example from one of the stupid ads: "Spesial Reportasje" is a dead giveaway not only because of the capitalization.)
(Oh well, sadly because of pressure from Words incompetent spell checker over years and lenient teachers this is getting worse. I fear we are seing compound damage here as kids that got away with this are now becoming teachers...)
For someone learning German as a foreign language separating the words would really help.
Even if it leads to things like "Trink Wasser fur Hunde" (as mentioned in the Wikipedia article).
Hyphens or spaces are still better than those long words...
> What languages did you speak before learning Finnish
In order of skill, or chronological? C: German, Swedish, English, and French. S: Swedish, English, German, and French.
> and what level are you currently at?
"Level"... Lived and worked here 26 years (longer than in any other country), usually speak only Finnish with colleagues. (Exception: my previous job, 2014-18, at an unusually international company; quite a lot of English there.) What number is that, on whatever scale you were thinking of?
[EDIT:] IOW, it's gotten to the point where I fear my actual native language is only my fourth-best any more, Finnish having pushed it off the podium. [/EDIT]
Anyway, my point was: I may have improved a bit since, but was probably quite close to my current "level" after two or three years. It really isn't all that humongously difficult as it's made out to be.
The logic of a multi-inflected agglutinative language may feel unusual at first, but once one gets used to it, it's just that: logical. The orthography and especially the pronunciation of Finnish is the most straightforward of all the languages I've dabbled in (smatterings of perhaps half a dozen more besides the ones I speak). And I think, above all, it has the fewest cases of "this is the rule, but the exceptions are this, that, and the other", where you just have to learn by rote that "this word works that way, but that word works this way", of any language I've come across. Learn the rules and you know it; no exceptions to learn.
Just want to add to my comment also that it is not limited to havfruen4220.dk, but clarifies a general pattern. I tried a couple of search terms like 'mattilbud rema 1000' and found more .dk domains on the second page (nem-varmepumper.dk, humanrebels.dk) - two things that have nothing to do with food.
For all that Google search has been utterly crap for going on a decade now, I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this. I like DuckDuckGo for now, but I imagine as they get bigger they're going to be a target for these kinds of spam just the same.
> they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this.
Why, though? There is an arbitrary ranking system that seems increasingly independent of what I actually searched for. Google had created a game where the winner isn't necessarily relevant or at all useful. It's inevitable that spammers will play that game.
> I have to admit part of the reason is that they get targetted relentlessly by SEO spam operations like this.
A bit of it is probably that.
Outright ignoring my queries: +, doublequotes, "verbatim" and all takes more than SEO tactics, it takes someone inside Google, either malicious or more probably incompetent on the inside.
Or more probably: someone was so busy trying to use AI in searches that no they haven't had time the last ten years to consider if it was smart.
Is there really any difference between DDG and Google when it comes to SEO spam? If there is, I sure haven't noticed in spite of using both, often for the same search terms.
It seems to me that the techniques used to spam Google's index work just as well on Bing's index.
That's an advantage. Since google tuned up their engine to treat authoritative results as better their searches became absolute dogshit.
You search for a very specific thing and all the results are big sites that have said something that contains two of the 6 words you search for in a completely generic article that helps you none.
My favorite is when your query contains a word that is the very essence of what you search for and google chooses to display results without it so you have to do extra click "yes I actually want to search for what I said I want to search for".
The ones thing I want more than anything from google or DuckDuckGo or anyone really is the ability to give a list of domains and never have their results show up in my searches. I know I can do this on a per search basis but I want it to be a configurable setting.
I installed it and it's—ok? For search results where the spam overwhelms the signal (it used to be able to do a decent reverse phone lookup by putting a phone number into Google), you end up with empty pages or mostly empty pages in the search results. Better than nothing, but it really should be a feature from the search engine, not a browser plugin.
I figured sooner or later Google would pick up the signal but I think instead they just started ignoring my "- requests" as I stopped using them. edit: or maybe they fix the problem. Spam sites used to be a problem during the early decline of Google. I think what happened was that problem actually almost disappeared for me and was replaced by irrelevant results from non-spam-sites
Yeah, I've seen this domain a lot lately. But I've complained about the Norwegian results for years [0]. For most searches there will be a result that's just keyword spam ranking high. Retried my "pes anserinus bursitt" search now 2 years later, and two results are spam from havfruen, and there are some other results from https://no.amenajari .org which is also just translated and scraped content for all languages google seems to love, as I've seen it for years. A third domain I often see as well is "nem-varmepumper". Apparently a site about heat pumps has content on everything.
With DDG, I found this thread. Google set to Norway as region/language found nothing from havfruen4220.dk, unless I specifically added site:havfruen4220.dk in the search.
Almost all my searches from the last days still show havfruen as a result somewhere. My pes anserinus above. Or "obos fellesgjeld" from a ~week ago which was when I noticed the pattern first. "monstera jord" gives lots of translated blogspam, and then a row of havfruen results.
Switching language on Google has basically no effect. Sometimes I want to find Swedish results for a thing with the same name, but no matter what I do I get Norwegian results ranked first. So don't think this is easily emulated from abroad.
The last time I accidentally installed malware on my computer was when the top Google result pointed me to a site masquerading as the official site for the software. That thought me a lesson to pay attention to the domain name.
...but, you know. Can you see anything else they're doing that would give them that kind of ranking? These pages are just piles of crap, and google is pretty good at filtering that sort of stuff out.
If it was that easy, google would be filled with spam everywhere.
The chance that someone did something random thats very uncommon (block back) and it happened to be a super effective signal to google seems:
a) like an edge case they didn't think of
b) like it'll get fixed pretty fast
c) not that unlikely.
Compared to, say, the idea that some random spammers have built a network of incredibly sophisticated ML-generated pages that can subvert googles algorithms which seems:
a) not substantiated by any obvious content on the pages
b) requires a very high level of sophistication which seems totally lacking
c) very unlikely
...but I mean, who knows right?
We're all just speculating. I guess it'll get fixed soon, and we'll never know.
I agree. Tons of sites employ the bounce-back avoidance tactics, and these don’t particularly help their ranking (in fact, lots on non-ranking sites do it — presumably just to keep you on the page)
You could do a slightly more difficult, less direct sequence check on the specific user.
If they circle back around to Yandex in N time and go hunting for the same query or similar query, then you can rank the prior attempts as not having been ideally helpful (downrank the result/s they clicked through to when they last searched for that query two minutes ago).
Makes sense, does DDG do the same? If yes isn't that against their "We don't track users" mantra? If no how do they improve their results while missing such a powerful signal?
I would be fairly certain that DDG isn't itself tracking users in a manner that they can use that ranking approach. They don't need to.
If you do a search for the same terms in DDG vs Bing, you'll find that the results are very similar. DDG lets Microsoft do the dirty work of abusively tracking users to max out on ranking factors, and then DDG reaps the benefit. DDG doesn't need to get its hands dirty, because someone else is doing so much of that for them.
By leaning so heavily on Bing, DDG is a blood diamond merchant of privacy. They might not own the mines or directly command the labor, however they're quite happy to buy the blood diamonds to further their own profit afterward. And DDG's users go along with the scheme, because buying into the con helps them sleep better at night. It works like this mentally: those users over there (at Bing) are having their human right to privacy violated, I know it's going on, and I directly benefit from the search data training as I use DDG, but hey at least it's not me being abused, so I can do my virtue signal dance and sleep well at night comfortable in my compartmentalization.
I've also seen this, but from a different side. I have Google Alerts for many open source projects that I run, but in the past few years these alerts have become all but useless. Spammers scrape genuine pages from all over the place (including ones containing references to my projects) and put them into scammy ".it" domains. These appear both in Google Alerts and high up in Google Search. So alerts and search both become useless. The scam appears to be that when you visit these web pages they say you're the billionth (or whatever) visitor to Google and you've won a prize, just type in your bank details.
This has been going on for years now, so I don't have much confidence that Google is able or willing to fix it.
They are using different images. A month or so ago it was some guy tied up on a chair with some russian text on top of the image.
There are a lot of these domains (ptsdforum.dk, verdes.dk, momentsbykruuse.dk from the top of my mind). Always Danish domains and always registered by the same person in Riga.
Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?
I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result.
I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are using the same algorithms that are only useful for mainstream results.
I noticed this in my country when searching for somewhat less common parts (electronics, car parts, tools, etc). The first few results are for online retailers in my country, and then after that it's full of domains with paths such as /sale_12345678. The domain sounds somewhat promising, and the description sounds good - other than it often being a quantity of 10 - but when you click the link it just redirects to AliExpress.
I find that using another search engine in that kind of situation is extremely useful! If I'm searching for more mainstream stuff google usually is great but when I'm going for more specialized topics duck duck go will usually bring up some different links!
Search engines seem to be stuck between serving two roles: 1. An easily accessible directory of mainstream information, and 2. A specialized tool to find the diamond in the rough. It seems like it has to be a tradeoff, it can't serve both roles equally well.
"The alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. Its origin comes from George Orwell's "1984", in which the memory hole was a small incinerator chute used for censoring, (through destroying), things Big Brother deemed necessary to censor."
> I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking
Tools are not to blame here, it's like blaming the compiler for the behaviour of an application. Starting with the training data and ending with how the model is used in deployment it's the blame of people who made it, not of the neural architecture. The architecture itself can learn anything you throw at it, good or bad.
Atleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords).
Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showing me results for diving.
I play a game with google search: I take something very mainstream like a movie title, let's say 'Reservoir Dogs'
And change something in it, to say 'Reservoir Cats' for example.
Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'!
Even putting something opposite or unrelated to the highly mainstream result will have no effect.
Its completely entirely ridiculous and makes the search engine seem like a facade.
Although I'm familiar with your point, I literally just searched for the term you mentioned, navigated all the way to page 6 and every single result was specifically for Reservoir Cats proper, none of them even mentioned Reservoir Dogs in the title, only in the description for some of them.
the same, maybe someone at google read this and fixed it reaaalllly quick.
If I search for Palp fiction it shows me pulp fiction results but asks if I really meant Palp fiction, if I say yeah I really meant that it shows me Palp fiction with a message did you really mean pulp fiction.
on edit: some of the palp fiction is headline palp friction.
We ignored your search query and showed you results our highest paying customers / advertisers paid us to show you instead.
I don't know of a good general internet search engine, so I tend to stick to the sites I know will provide answers that'll work for me, which is a shame for discovering new content.
I searched diving suit thickness and it provides to correct information as the first result...the diving suit thickness for different temperatures. Not sure why you are not getting that information
Odd. When I try that search[1] I'm seeing good results. There's a onebox telling me how thick a suit I need for different temperatures, followed by a bunch of articles on the topic.
This exactly. I’ve been researching specific house repair issues and just get nothing but content spam. Whenever I want specific information I find myself adding “reddit” to the query string, which will usually turn up a thread with links out to the actual answer.
Said it before and I’ll say it again, when Reddit finally becomes inaccesible via searches we will have lost a huge and very useful database of succinct information.
You haven't noticed that reddit has become substantially search inaccessible a number of months back?
Every reddit page while not logged in is full of hidden content from other unrelated pages. When you search, you'll get hits in these unrelated pages-- but when you follow the link it's not there (because it's on the unrelated pages).
Worse, the pages with the correct content aren't necessarily in the results at all because it was low enough in the thread that it was collapsed and wasn't visible to the search indexer.
It's not a total loss, but I'd say about 80% of my own comments are now difficult-to-impossible to find via search when they were easy previously.
Searching in Google has become all about shopping. Pure and relevant content is hard to find.
Even today here are bloggers outside who do not have a commercial affiliation with the goods/items/things they are blogging about. Such content is practically impossible to find in comparison to all the Amazon-affiliated pseudo-information conveying spoof-sites.
Same here, I no longer can find anything sensible on Google, regardless how much I try to customize the search expression.
Additionally as polyglot it is very irritanting that Google tries to helpfully translate queries for me, thus I have to go to other search engines to actually find the article on the language I want.
Pinterest is the worst as you cannot see the results without registering… How can it be a relevant search result! Fortunately -site:pinterest.com make it useable.
I couldn't agree more. More and more lately I've felt like the Altavista days. I know the information I'm looking for is out there, it's just not in the Google results page, which is plastered with unreadable stuff (paywalls, content farms), crap "content cards" in the results page, and sneakier and sneakier ads.
I'm not sure what the beginning of the end was for Google Search, but I think the day where they changed the ad background to white is a good candidate.
Google Search used to be like Chrome or Gmail - we know its wrong in the long term, but it's hard to stop using it because it just works so well.
But these days, not anymore. Search is a lot less sticky, and it is their golden goose they are messing with here.
I have been struggling with the same issue recently. Results are much more narrower and they seemed to be leaning towards consumer goods items. Though I don’t remember when I ever bought something coming from Google search.
Catch22 though. If you eliminate bounce back, you have to rank to get the ranking signal into Google. So how did they rank in the first place? I haven’t tried to reverse what they’re doing but I don’t think the author quite figured it out. Interesting phenomenon though.
I had a look at this, and it looks to me like it's a 301 from another domain. Typically when domains get a manual penalty (primarily for spam), they drop in rankings overnight. So to counter this, you register a new domain and redirect it and overnight, your rankings bounce back. This technique is super common for blackhat sites like illegal streaming sites.
If the redirect is done as a meta refresh, then you can block it in your robots.txt from being picked up from SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush etc.
These types of sites are called doorway pages and have been around for ages. They are most popular in Russia and on Yandex, but you do see them on Google for super longtail keywords with 0 competition.
The other important thing to remember is that doing SEO in any language that's not English is a walk in the park. Lots of SEO influencer types have case studies showing how much extra traffic they get by translating their content. [1]
The mermaid mentioned in the article seems to be either a terribly amateurish operation or a very sophisticated sting.
They can be easily traced to a block of flats in Latvia but since their registered phone its a Toy Store in Riga...I am going to go with probably stolen identify operation and a sense of humour on their part instead of the real operation of some 12 year in Riga...
This is only tangentially related but has anyone else started getting more obviously spam emails in their gmail inbox lately? I feel like for a long time I never got spam in my inbox but lately I’ll get ones that seem like they should be easy to detect, talking about gifts and stuff and uSiNg wEirD capitals or s p a c i n g. Is it just me?
Yes, and more non-spam email is getting filtered as spam. Also, a mailing list I was unable to unsubscribe from and marked as spam at least 5 times kept being delivered to my inbox.
I'll chime in as well. I forward everything from gmail to another account I have. I pretty much never got any forwarded email for years because the gmail account is only really used as an identity for google services. A few months ago I suddenly started to get a significant amount of spam forwarded for no known reason.
My guess is they get away with it because it's a non-English query and most of the people working on these problems aren't looking at their localization. A big issue in general for global tech companies is that they don't usually handle things outside the US/English context particularly well. This often crops up in that political space, where for instance, something contentious like gun sales might get pulled from Google globally even though the political concern with them is mostly limited to the US.
An SEO-fighting Googler might at a glance have no reason not to think that could be a really relevant or popular site in your country.
> I think that Google uses stats on whether the user continued checking more results for that specific search query to determine if the visited result answered the user.
God I hope not. If Google does do this, it sounds like a really dumb idea, which will ultimately create widespread usability issues. I can already envision SEO consultants recommending this for their clients if this is believed.
Same here. But sadly the title would have been 'Google purchases "The Mermaid" for $X'... Given their near $2 trillion market cap, I doubt any search engine would be allowed to stay hot for too long.
"We help you to receive high-quality visitors from search engines, generate conversions and build your brand.
To achieve these results, we ensure your website / company is recommended for specific keywords by the search engine's autocomplete function."
I've noticed another trend recently where it seems that some websites write content for google SEO instead of optimized for human readability.
E.g.: I've seen my exact search phrase repeated mutiple times and then a very long article about the topic when what I searched was a simple question with a few words answer.
More reasons why a global search monopoly is suboptimal. Smaller markets like this are just going to get neglected and maintained just enough that a better alternative can't compete. Google search is basically useless for any language other than English.
I've lately noticed that searching Google for topics related to gardening in Finnish often gives me some scraped and machine translated pages from Russia. Really annoying that totally useless content is so high up in the results.
Google search seems to have gotten significantly worse lately (sometimes to the point that it's barely usable). From scams like these (I've seen others) somehow getting a foothold, to a lot of internal "unbiasing" skewing the results towards googles political stance (usually totally irrelevant to my query). It's gotten to the point that I barely google anymore other than for things I already know what the results will be.
I’m in Norway, and I tried the first search “rema 1000” without getting any spam results on the first two pages…
That doesn’t entirely eliminate the other possibilities though, google search isn’t deterministic, and the domain could have been reported since the article went up.
It's not showing for the example search (Rema 1000) for me right now, but I did a search yesterday, about a person/company and the result was news related content, and ended up with a site with the same image. However I can't find havfruen (mermaid) in my browser history so they must use other domains as well.
It is not happening with the example from the article for me, but I have seen this practice ruin my search results in varying degree over the past 6 months. Some times entire keywords will just be broken because there are so many fake sites.
> The simple solution would be to test sites regularly with an unknown IP and common user agent to check that a site isn’t just showing content to Google and gives real users something completely different. That would stop this.
Surely Google does this, right? Given that - in theory - showing different content to Google versus non-Google should result in a penalty, anyway ...
Google is garbage. I once complained a website stealing my contents and other people's contents was ranking very highly in Google. I was told I'd better fixed my website before looking at "competitors". Part of that was true, but at the time the person did not seem to care at all of spammy content delivered by Google.
I'm surprised to find out people actually return to the search results page using the back button. Whenever I am serious enough (enough to keep looking after the first link I click does not satisfy me) about finding something I always Middle-Click or Ctrl+Click the links to open them in new tabs.
Just tried Google.no from my computer (Norwegian IP (Larvik area)). Nothing similar. I see “normal” search results.
In any way, I stopped using Google stuff 5 years ago. Never looked back since then, so my search history is kind of clean, maybe that changes their algorithm behavior.
I'm kind of curious why he's so concerned about this? They've never managed better than ninth most relevant and in most cases they didn't even make the first page of result. Any advertising person will tell you, if you aren't in the top 3 results (basically the top result now that paid ads automatically get the top 2 spots on nearly all searches) your odds of being seen and clicked on drop to almost nothing.
Are they potentially doin harm? Sure. Have the successfully managed to trick anybody with this? I'd be extremely surprised if they're getting more than a dozen people clicking through from being the ninth result in a day,and when people see they've been redirected to an advertisement the majority of people immediately click away.
This isn't like clicking on a fake prorn site that redirects to cam girls with viruses hidden in all the downloads. It's random unrelated searches redirecting you to blatant ads for cryto currency. The kind of people who are young enough to know what crypto currency is and how to buy it, also know how to spot a redirect to a fake website.
These kinds of scams are a stochastic process. They don't work on your average person, they only work on vulnerable people. Heres the catch though, everyone is vulnerable at some point in their lives. This is where the stochastic process comes in, they don't need to get you when you're strong, they just need to test enough people enough times to catch them in a vulnerable moment.
It is interesting as you cannot see the content which is being indexed. Suspect only bot does. If I understand correctly this is the sequence of events from the bot's perspective:
Each location in a sitemap has a "lastmod" of today/yesterday so bot returns there everyday. In addition each webpage has a "<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">"
But if you visit each of those pages then it shows you a cartoon image. It seems the actual indexed content is visible only to the bot.
## But how is actual content being rendered?
The question is, what conditions (request params/headers) result in the actual content being rendered? The bot needs to evaluate it. Suspect it is some combo of checking if the requester is an actual google bot, maybe by looking up the IP https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
I imagine it's done in a similar way to how reddit circumvents searching for results from certain dates. I don't like anyone messing with google results.
That's because it's real content that they have stolen and just republished. In SEO circles one like to say that original content is king. Well, not so much after all.
I live in Norway and don’t have this problem now. I had a similar problem about a year ago on my MacBook Air because of some software that altered my Google results in all of my browsers. Don’t remember the name of it, but something smelled fishy when the results was different from the ones on my phone.
Pretty sure affects you too as it's the same for me, on multiple networks, multiple user-agents, multiple devices and so on.
Simply just trie one of the examples like "hvordan regne ut prosent"(how to calculate percentages) or, I don't know..."DNB aksje"(DNB stocks, DNB being the biggest bank in Norway). Sure enough, both ranks on the first page or as the one of the top results. (One is now using the www.nem-varmepumper.dk domain, that is the same thing).
EDIT: Now the DNB one moved from 2 and 3 place to page 2. Things are moving around quickly.
It seems google has lost its ability to block spam effectively. Since a few months, I notice an increase amount of outright scam being promoted on YT. I even got a ad for a fake Musk telling people to invest in a shady bitcoin scheme. Knowing that Google is willing to let these slip through just to maximize their ad revenue is really a warning sign that this company, no matter how large it might be by now, should not be trusted anymore.
TFA talks about Google testing with "unknown IP", but doesn't mention any testing done by the author with cookies cleared or in incognito mode. This seems basic.
What do you expect incognito to change? That would presumably show the same content the author is seeing. Only Google sees the content that drives the ranking.
It is Google that needs "incognito" mode, not the author.
I stopped using google for search because I noticed the filter bubble it was building around me. Perhaps that wasn't maintained by cookies, but in that case I wonder what it was...
For all we know (as the OP doesn’t mention trying incognito) the OP could have malicious software on their device that hijacks their browser to manipulate search results
that's easily verifiable doing the searches yourself;
a search for "hvor ofte bør man dusje" in my english google, conencting from brazil shows havfruen4220.dk as 6th and 7th result, which is pretty high for a spam website
"hvordan regne prosent" shows 2 dk websites www.humanrebels.dk, and havfruen4220.dk as 9th and 10th results
could be since the OP clicked on these links to find out google made his personal algorithm show even more of this stuff
thus, I imagine a never ending cycle of even more spam could easily be generated, specially for an innocent user
To expand on this: A very strong ranking signal is how many of the users that click a search result are sufficiently satisfied with the information they have found to end their search.
A good proxy for this is how many people don't click the 'back' button to see other results.
Google is already aware of sites which hijack the back button. Their crawler detects this, and if they find it, they throw out the figures of how many people click the back button.
So if you can find a way to hook the back button so nobody can click back, while stopping google thinking you have hooked the back button, then your page will keep creeping up the rankings.
Google detects back button hijacking with their crawler (by rendering the page in Chromium and seeing the effect when hitting the actual back button), but this is circumvented by presenting the crawler different html. (or making sure the page behaves differently in their crawler, potentially by checking things like the model of the graphics card - googles crawlers don't yet support most of WebGL 2.0, and also simulate playing audio at the wrong rate)
Google also detects how many real users click back. If it's zero, then thats a warning flag. So I'd guess the back-hijacking logic is only activated ~80% of the time.
I doubt it's some crazy sophisticated SEO hijacking operation. Probably a result of a small data set (Norwegian language web pages), specific search terms (Norwegian brands, companies), and lots of keyword stuffing. Most of the examples the author pointed out were from pages 5-10 of Google results, which are probably worthless for ad revenue anyways.
It does rate a pretty good chuckle recalling old Google blog posts about their various uber-sophisticated anti-spam ML algorithms and how black hat SEO just wasn't possible anymore.
This type of scraped-content websites were common for English language searches back in 2010 or so. I believe the 'Panda' algorithm update eliminated them from English searches.
I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them.
Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their proxy traffic towards many sites I managed. I could easily document their behaviour.
In the same time, I wrote a crawler that visited their sites over a long, long time. I learned that they kept injecting hidden links to other sites in their network, so I did let my bot look at those also.
By this time, I also got a journalist with me that started to look at the money flow to try and find the organisation behind it.
My bot found in excess of 100K domains being used for this operation, targeting all of westeren Europe. All the 100K sites contained proxied content and was hidden behind Cloudflare, but thanks to the position I had, I managed to find their backend anyways.
We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down.
Oh, and the journalist? He did find a Dutch company that was not happy to see neither him or the photographer :)