

Search Engines are Parasites - mroman
http://www.searchengineblog.com/interviews/interview_ralph_tegtmeier.htm

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krakensden
This guy is selling software that generates "topical fillertext related to
your targeted keywords and search phrases, implementing predefined keyword
densities, randomized page descriptions"...

In other words, he's the parasite here. Instead of saying "make things people
want" he's saying "don't do any work, just be really loud and leech content".

~~~
mroman
"In other words, he's the parasite here. Instead of saying 'make things people
want' he's saying 'don't do any work, just be really loud and leech content."

That's interesting. Where did you get that from? If you had read the entire
article, you would not have reached that erroneous conclusion.

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fantomsurfer
The search engines are the parasites. They are making billions of $$$ using
other people content.

~~~
agazso
Without search engines how would you find that content?

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fantomsurfer
I don't say that they are useless. Point is that they are crawling the
content, wasting bandwidth without paying for it.

The engines make the big money, not the webmasters.

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dminor
Yeah, you _probably_ won't get banned from Google, but who really wants to
take that risk?

~~~
CodeMage
When people start being afraid of one company, that's the best indicator that
the said company really needs some serious competition in the market.

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barrkel
Sounds like a lot of dodgy rationalization for some pretty shady practice.

~~~
mroman
"shady" refers to a moral or legal issue . . . these are technological issues,
and need to be thought of as such.

~~~
prodigal_erik
He's talking about lying to search engine operators to trick users into seeing
different content than they actually wanted. That's not capital-E Evil, but
certainly unethical, wasting those users' time and making everyone's search
results less useful.

~~~
mroman
No, he's not talking about that. Please quote him on it if he is.

~~~
prodigal_erik
> a technology that serves different content to search engine spiders and to
> human visitors, based on visitors' (human or otherwise) IP address. This
> requires special software (such as the stuff we have developed, hint, hint!)

> You can now optimize those phantom pages for better search engine rankings
> at your own discretion, and noone will be the wiser.

Deceiving the search engine to tamper with its decisions is an explicit goal,
as is not getting caught.

> users can always, and actually will, vote with their mice on whether your
> site's high ranking was justified and relevant to their search

They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant
results for users.

> Ethical behavior only makes sense amongst equals.

And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in
another tragedy of the commons.

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mroman
Ah, I finally got a reply link to your post.

"Deceiving the search engine to affect its decisions is an explicit goal, as
is not getting caught."

Indeed. Yet that obviously does not automatically imply deceiving the users,
as you erroneously stated earlier. Doing so would be stupid, as in serving up
porn for bridge search results, for example.

"They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant
results for users."

Incorrect. You misunderstood what he stated. By saying "vote with their mice"
he is referring to whether or not users purchase products or otherwise
"convert". Granted, this interview does not cover his stance on DECEIVING the
users. The following one does:

<http://www.searchethos.com/fantomaster-response.html>

"Deceptive cloaking (again: solely viewed from the surfer's perspective) is
self-defeating"

"And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in
the tragedy of the commons."

Interesting that you would drag morality into an exclusively technological
issue. I won't address this, as it has no place in this discussion.

~~~
prodigal_erik
They are deliberately making search results less useful. If this became
widespread we would have to abandon search engines entirely. That's the same
as the ethical argument against spam.

