
Google Removes More Than 11 Million .co.cc Domains From Search Results - dkd903
http://digitizor.com/2011/07/06/google-removes-cc-domains/
======
yaakov34
The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with
commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate
purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN
provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in
pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the
wazoo (pardon my French). They've learned to imitate user participation,
reviews, blogs, anything that you care to name that you used to look for to
ferret out the really good pages.

I'll be more specific: about a century ago, in internet years that is, it was
a good idea to add "review" to the search terms to see what actual users were
saying about a product. This has become an extremely _bad_ idea now, since SEO
specialists (I am using neutral language here) noticed this, and have
registered 1.5 quintillion domains along the line of best-barbecue-reviews.com
and reliable-handbag-reviews.com and what have you; and these domains are the
last places to contain actual reliable reviews of anything, being paid
advertising in disguise, instead. And Google _loves_ to find search terms in
domain names.

And that's just a tiny, tiny part of it.

P.S. Please don't turn this into a thread of recommendations for VPN providers
- it will probably get flagged as off-topic.

~~~
nodata
Google's search results are extremely... crap. There I said it.

It used to be that I could search for something, say this:

word1 word2

and Google would give me the results for pages which contain both those words.

Then Google decided I didn't mean what I searched for, so I had to prefix my
searches with plus signs, like this:

+word1 +word2

And now this week I find out that even that doesn't work any more.

It's crap. Maybe duckduckgo does it right. I'll give it a go.

~~~
lsb
Duckduckgo's innovations are pretty cool, especially bang-commands (to search
on google maps, add "!m" to your query).

But the underlying search is Bing.

Perhaps Google is personalized and Bing doesn't, or perhaps DDG doesn't pass a
uid token to Bing, but it's just not as good actual results, which matter to
me about 10% of the time. (Luckily, the query parameters to google.com/search
are the same as to duckduckgo.com/ so a simple massage of the URL works well.)

~~~
joshuacc
"a simple massage of the URL works well"

As does prefixing your search with "!g".

~~~
lsb
Well, I'll be jiggered.

------
jawns
Dang ... there goes traffic to the First State Tourism Board's
<http://www.visit-delaware.co.cc>

~~~
AlecSchueler
Wouldn't it make sense for them to be using .us anyway?

~~~
city41
The page says Delaware's new slogan is "Delaware: boring on purpose" which
seems to suggest it is a parody site.

------
ice5nake
Seems like a cop out to me. It kind of says, our technology can't weed these
results out so we are just going to not deal with it. I am sure it is
difficult problem; don't get me wrong. However, I'd rather see Google say that
some fancy algorithm determined co.cc domains are junk and has relegated them
appropriately.

~~~
Tiomaidh
I'd rather they fixed the results now and worried about the algorithm later
(and you know they're working on the algorithm) than make us suffer
unnecessarily until the algorithm was suitably improved.

------
Klinky
One thing that irks me is Google News. It's hard to get your site listed on
Google News but when you see some of the sites that are listed, you have to
wonder why Google makes it so difficult. Some search terms bring up "news
sites" that are essentially devoted to spamming health remedies and playing
them off as though they were real news articles.

~~~
yaakov34
I don't know, Google News actually doesn't seem very spammy to me. I just
searched for "diabetes" - this is usually a good one to check if an index is
spammed - and while it brings up some sensationalist garbage (that's life for
you), it doesn't seem to find anything which wants my credit card number right
now. Even a spam-king search like "weight loss", while it finds nothing
interesting, doesn't seem like pure spam.

~~~
Klinky
Do a search for RezVera. I research digestive health news & this has been
coming up a lot over the last few weeks. Either copycat sites or PR sites that
link back to another site with an iframe containing a short form promo
offering the supplement for $60 bucks. Blah.

~~~
yaakov34
I checked it out. RezVera is obviously a commercial name, not a generic name,
and its entire internet presence consists of a few PR sites. Google News finds
them all, and puts them on one page. It's not like they are crowding out
better RezVera news. There is maybe something to be done here about delisting
these sites altogether, but I don't see a huge problem for this particular
search. Or is there some legitimate review of it, which gets crowded out?

~~~
Klinky
I am not searching for RezVera. I am searching "gastritis" "irritable bowel
syndrome", etc... RezVera is just a quick way to see the sites that get listed
on Google, I assure you those sites come up for legit searches too.

If you do a search for "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" & then sort by date 3 of the
top 4 choices are: "Manuka Honey Capsules Announced", "New Supplement
[RezVera] Shows Great Promise for Gastritis", "CSIRO cereal a real superfood".
Spammy McSpam Spam.

Sometimes press releases blur the lines between advertising & news, I get
that, but these sites aren't really that useful & look almost like they're
gaming Google News to advertise. Rarely do they actually have any
authoritative links backing up their claims, which is something Google
supposedly wants from sites joining Google News.

~~~
yaakov34
This is the problem with the customization of Google - for me, these are not
in the top 4 results even sorted by date, although 2 of your titles show up
further down. But yes, I see your point now, someone spammed Google News as
well. Scum. I think it's still less spammy than the Web search, since some
kind of human attention is required to get in there.

------
dave1010uk
Domains ending in .co.cc are subdomains, just like domains ending in
.example.com or .uk.com. When people buy a subdomain then their purchase is
not regulated in the same way as a domain (eg ending in .cc or .com) is.

------
brudgers
5000 phishing sites cause Google to block 11,000,000 domains? That's less than
0.5%.

First, is that really "a significant fraction?"

Second, when did collective punishment become less evil than innocent until
proven guilty?

~~~
yaakov34
You must somehow have avoided running into it, but .co.cc was a fever swamp
and a nightmare. For any popular search terms you can think of, it contained
"popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "my-popular-search-terms.co.cc" and "best-
popular-search-terms.co.cc" and so on ad freaking nauseam. And it got spammed
all over your screen, because Google likes to find search terms in the domain
name.

What do you think was there? Do you think 11 million people woke up one day
and decided ".co.cc would be a great domain for my business"?

They should have nuked it from orbit a long time ago.

EDIT: I just realized .co.cc is not actually down, but it's blocked by my
provider now and no longer indexed by Google, so it's pretty much gone for me.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.

~~~
brudgers
It's an ugly cheap kludge. Furthermore it is a kludge which raises a question
about how good Google's new singing dancing search results filtering algorithm
really is, if it can't separate the wheat from the chaff at /co.cc/.

<Google directed cynicism>The cynic in me sees the timing of this as the first
salvo in an effort toward the monetization of the coming proliferation of new
commoditized top-level domains. When search results are nothing more than an
advertising platform, why should a search engine return your results unless
you are paying for the screen space? Perhaps, /co.cc/ was not encouraging the
use of Google Analytics or promoting Adwords sufficiently.</Google directed
cynicism>

~~~
sorbus
You're confusing cynicism with paranoia. A cynic would think that Google has
lost faith in its algorithm and is taking to manually blocking spammy sites; a
paranoid would think that Google plans to have websites pay to be included in
search, and is retaliating against hosts that don't use Google Analytics or
Adwords.

~~~
brudgers
Not really having a dog in the hunt for Google page ranks, it's not really
paranoia for me. It's not really cynicism either given that it is a natural
extension of Google's basic revenue model, i.e. showing links to pages in
exchange for payment. I just added the tag to keep the post consistent with
implicit HN style guidelines.

There is nothing sacred about the blue text links, and with "personalization"
they don't reflect an objective page ranking, but a subjective ranking based
on speculation about what one is most likely to click.

It is only in the minds of consumers of Google's search services that a wall
between search results and advertising exists. With personalization, the same
algorithms are applied to both.

------
jeggers5
I love how Google have the balls to do things like this, this can only be
considered a good thing.

------
sucuri2
And just as they blocked the .co.cc, the attackers are now using the .co.tv:

[http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/07/google-blocks-co-cc-
attackers...](http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/07/google-blocks-co-cc-attackers-
are-now-using-co-tv.html)

Never ending battle...

------
ryanmarkel
This is a really good thing, even though the people using these domains will
likely just move to another free provider; we've seen large chunks of spam on
WordPress.com from these domains more than once (linkfarming).

Kudos to Google.

------
parfe
Google blocked one domain that was reselling subdomains.

------
feint
i never really saw many co.cc domains in the search results anyway. From what
i've heard, many of the co.cc domains were used for distributing malware.

If you provide a free hosting service, you have to be prepared to constantly
deal with spammers and phishers.

------
mikeklaas
At Zite we have a domain-level spam filter and

    
    
       .co.cc
    

is the the 6th strongest feature for spam indication. The first five are:

    
    
       cheap
       forex
       pills
       viagra
       urnitur

------
bigwally
This is one of the dumbest things Google has done.

If Google really wants to get rid of 90 percent of spammy sites all they need
to do is block any website that is registered with Godaddy.

~~~
dangrossman
That doesn't make much sense. GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world,
with the most extensive general public advertising campaign, and manages over
45 million domains. They're the registrar for your neighbor and your
neighborhood small business more often than not.

------
vaksel
you could probably take it even further just by making it a lot more difficult
to rank the other types of domains:

1\. anything that's not a .com or .org(let's face it...if it's a .net, then
it's most likely bought for seo optimization)

2\. the .co.uk/.de etc, should only get a bonus in their own countries.

3\. anything that's longer than 16 letters. If it is, chances are that its
just a spam domain.

4\. anything with a dash in the domain(the more dashes, the bigger the
penalty).

5\. anything with a # in the domain

this way brands would be fine, but those crappy domains that were purchased
solely for SEO wouldn't be as effective. Sure, .com exact match would be fine,
but that's a lot less to worry about.

~~~
CrazedGeek
Most ISPs I've used use .net for their domains, and there are plenty other
legitimate sites that use .net (Battle.net, anyone?).

~~~
vaksel
brands would still be able to rank.

it's just going to get a lot more harder to rank legitimateISPs.net

