Search Engines are Parasites | Hacker News Reader

Search Engines are Parasites

searchengineblog.com

6 pointsmroman16 comments

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".

"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.

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

Without search engines how would you find that content?

I think the issue is not so much that they exist, the issue is that they profit greatly from content created by others without paying said others a single penny.

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.

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

That is a good point, and needs to be considered. From what I have read about their technology however, there are ways to substantially mitigate that risk.

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.

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

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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