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Comment by kwertyoowiyop | Hacker News Reader

Those are infuriating. I hate to see ACTUAL content creators having their livelihoods stolen this way. Why wouldn't Google filter out the worst offenders? It takes literally one minute to get a nice list of a dozen imitation sites that nobody would miss. Maybe Google feels a little inhibited from 'choosing the winners' for all but the largest cases?

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One FTE at Google could probably filter out like 99% of the SEO spam sites in technical english querries.

It would be a winning battle, since it is less work to blacklist than to make a high scoring site.

I guess Google Search internally is a mess. Maybe they have no clue what they are doing or have some really bad directors and lower managers messing stuff up.

Maybe there are so much blackbox ML called from 1000s of Perl files that the engineers don't understand what is happening.

I often wonder how much modern IT infrastructure is simply this mess of 'we have no idea how it really works' blackboxes strung together with API calls.

I suspect you're right about how much of a true understanding they (at google) still have of the behaviour of their search engine.

>Why wouldn't Google filter out the worst offenders?

There are no Google adverts on GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc but there are on many of the copycat sites.

I'm not sure about these days, but historically the engineers on Google search wanted to fix these problems algorithmically, rather than delisting specific sites by hand

And, again historically, Amith Singhal and team preferred ranking algorithms to powerful-but-opaque L2R (learning to rank) approaches.

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