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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if Skrenta's approach is perfect (can spammers make slashtags? I'll bet they can!) but Google's is clearly failing.

Giant swathes of Google searches are now overrun with datafog spammers. Ehow, squidoo, hubpages, wikihow, buzzle, how-wiki, ezinearticles, bukisa, wisegeek, articlesnatch, healthblurbs, associatedcontent - all thee and thousands more domains filled with spam semi-automatically generated by legions of Indians for a few cents per page.

There's not one word of useful information on any of those domains. But apparently they serve a lot of ads for Google, so they don't get delisted.

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I invoke SandGorgon’s law of outsourcing analogies

As an online discussion about PROGRAMMING grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving outsourcing or Indians approaches 1, if Godwin’s law has not already been satisfied

I really don't see that many comments about Indians and outsourcing in programming discussions here. Or maybe I am not noticing them?

Also, the law is pretty much a tautology since it doesn't define a time scale... eventually, pretty much everything gets said.

"As an online discussion about PROGRAMMING grows longer, the probability of a discussion of traditional medicine and spiritual beliefs surrounding childbirth in ancient sub Saharan African tribes approaches 1."

AS Godwin's law itself clarifies:

Godwin put forth the sarcastic observation that, given enough time, all discussions—regardless of topic or scope—inevitably end up being about Hitler and the Nazis.

There's one feature I wish Google would add - the ability to manually blacklist sites from the search results.

Why can't Google hire a crap load of people to manually sift through the most common queries and identify the spam and penalize those sites?

Google is worth billions. They could easily afford to hire 10,000 people to do this full time and it would completely transform their results.

Even if Google is imperfect, a curated list of links doesn't need to be any better. Duck Duck Go is basically Google (well, Bing) plus a blacklist. SEO takes time, so this should be pretty effective.

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