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Comment by w00pla | Hacker News Reader

The question is: why doesn't google do anything about this? There are countless such pages. Why not just blacklist domains? Or artificially give them lower pagerank?

Or is it okay as long as they get ad-sense money?

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I work for Google, and while I don't know anything about this particular situation, one invariant that I've been consistently impressed with is that the ads side of the company doesn't influence the search side of the company _at all_. I've seen well meaning ads support folks emailing people in search quality about an innocent problem with one of their customer's sites, and getting sternly told that they should never again send an email to those mailing lists.

Offtopic but I for one would like to see Google do this for personal information or at least provide the option to do so i.e. info from one G product does not leak to another without explicit opt-in.

Isn't there a search engine out there that takes into account the advertisements vs. content ratio? It would be trivial to get rid of Made for Adsense sites by scanning for the Adsense code used and seeing how often it's used on a page and the percentage of the page it takes up.

Duck Duck Go tries to do this.

There are a lot of good results that have a similar ratio of ads to "content" unless your definition of content is very sophisticated.

Google allows you to have three ads though. If you had a page with three ads and the best written 500 word article on it's topic, your definition of MFA sites would have it banned even though it is obviously a ton better than most sites around.

For smaller publishers, it's usually three blocks of ads plus two blocks of link units. For those not familiar with AdSense, link units are the horizontal or vertical lists which take the visitor to a search results page rather than straight to an advertiser's page.

I think a strict definition of MFA is always going to be a little grey, but there's clearly something wrong with pages that are nothing other than widgets, scraped content and the like.

they do it all the time, as long as it's a small site, Mahalo's existence basically flies in the face of all of Google's rules and regulations

An old boss told me, "When you're the man, the rules don't apply to you."

Not to say that Calacanis is the man, but to illustrate that rules are there to suit the rule makers and in this case, it suits the rule makers to ignore their own rules.

So why didn't Google nip Maholo in the bud when it was starting out? Insider connections?

because when they launched they were being touted as a search engine, not a content farm

They went through a bunch of different iterations and stuff before they established as the site they are now. And look at the funding of Mahalo and Google. Same early people.

they do block domains, at least from their organic search engine results.

i accidentally got one of mine blocked when playing around with some random software that produced a site that was somehow against their TOS. i didn't have it live long, but long enough for the spiders to grab and flag. still waiting on a reconsideration request.

why not mahalo? who knows. if i had to venture a guess, i'd say that the larger the site and the more revenue google sees from that site due to adwords and the like, the higher up the chain the decision to block it has to come from.

I think Google prefers to programmatically detect and blacklist behaviours, without too many innocent casualties - even if working out how to do that takes longer. They aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole.

They do often play whack-a-mole at the lower level too...but they also take human reviewers into account so it is not so expensive on engineering time.

And at the higher level they absolutely do penalize people individually to send a message. Watch the opening of this video if you think otherwise http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-08-n14.html

Can they then at least pick one scraping site from all the others (to prevent duplicate information)?

Although this is perfectly legal, there is quite a few big sites that scrapes Wikipedia and adds ad-sense. If you are searching for a narrow topic, page 1-2 is WP and WP copies.

As a sidenote - I see that Google Search has upvotes, comments and deletes in the search - yet it does not seem as if anyone uses it. Why? Why can't the user at least blacklist sites?

That's only if you are logged in, and it only affects that user.You cannot up/down vote the Google results for everyone.

>If you are searching for a narrow topic, page 1-2 is WP and WP copies.

It would be good to have a "remove all pages with Wikipedia content" button on searches. Sometimes it seems half the results are simply Wikipedia copies.

They've played whack a mole plenty of times. They do it daily. This isn't some random guess or 'I think' like you're saying. This is fact.

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