

DuckDuckGo ups content farm banning by promoting wikiHow in 0-click - epi0Bauqu
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2011/02/04/duckduckgo-follows-content-farm-banning-with-promoting-wikihow-content

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jdp23
DuckDuckGo continues to impress. And sometimes editorial decisions are better
than algorithms: since most users view most Demand Media articles as spam, DDG
and Blekko get good results without investing a lot of engineering investment
simply by banning them. Meanwhile Google had to work out algorithmic changes
and test them at scale -- with the risk that they unintentionally get rid of
stuff from other sites that most people actually _do_ want to see. So it's a
tough situation for Google, especially when you factor into account potential
impact on all the advertising revenue they're generating from these spam
sites.

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moultano
I agree that it's harder for Google, because we don't have the luxury of hard
coding rankings, but I take big issue with this:

> _So it's a tough situation for Google, especially when you factor into
> account potential impact on all the advertising revenue they're generating
> from these spam sites._

Adsense revenue does not enter in to ranking decisions. Our evaluation process
is far from perfect, but revenue is _not_ part of it. We're not blind to the
fact that a lot of scummy sites run adsense, but the even scummier ones have
already been kicked out of adsense and now use other ad networks or affiliate
programs. "Denying spammers revenue" has been at times the explicit goal of
projects that launched.

~~~
jdp23
The tough situation I was talking about is that the net result of investing
all this engineering effort to keep up with Duck Duck Go and Blekko still is
likely to wind up as a revenue loss for Google.

In terms of AdSense revenue influencing search results, it would be great if
Google published their ranking algorithms and implementations so that people
could verify it for themselves. [Ditto for Microsoft of course.] But okay,
I'll take your word for it that it's not factored explicitly into the ranking
calculations and that you've done the analysis to make sure that it doesn't
indirectly influence calculations. Even so, it may have affected resource
decisions. At the organizational level, did the specter of losing tens of
millions in ad revenue had something to do with why Google waited so long to
start to address the problem?

~~~
moultano
> _Even so, it may have affected resource decisions. At the organizational
> level, did the specter of losing tens of millions in ad revenue had
> something to do with why Google waited so long to start to address the
> problem?_

At the organizational level, Google is essentially chaos. In search quality in
particular, once you've demonstrated that you can do useful stuff on your own,
you're pretty much free to work on whatever you think is important. I don't
think there's even a _mechanism_ for shifting priorities like that.

We've been working on this issue for a long time, and made some progress.
These efforts started _long_ before the recent spat of news articles. I've
personally been working on it for over a year. The central issue is that it's
very difficult to make changes that sacrifice "on-topic-ness" for "good-ness"
that don't make the results in general worse. You can expect some big changes
here very shortly though.

