Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016)

Re:Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016) by tyingq on Thursday November 30, 2017 @07:02AM (#15815080)

"Having worked at Google’s Search Quality Evaluation team, I can confirm that Google would only manually remove sites from its search results if they violate its webmaster guidelines"

Or, Google can get around that by repeatedly tweaking the algorithm on purpose to demote specific types of sites. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/. (long read, but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines)

There's also the issue of false positives. Machine learning algorithms that demote sites (panda/penguin/vince) certainly have some amount of unintended victims.

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Re:Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016) by merb on Thursday November 30, 2017 @02:13PM (#15818595)

> but comparison shopping sites didn't violate any guidelines

most comparsion shopping sites were anoying and did get ranked for everything I wanted to buy. I.e. "buy television" gave you 1. amazon, 2-6. comparsion sites.

If I wanted to compare televisions I would've entered "compare televisions pricing", etc.

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Re:Why Did ProtonMail Vanish from Google Search Results? (2016) by tyingq on Thursday November 30, 2017 @03:55PM (#15819441)

If you follow the FTC link above, though, the human testers Google used liked them.

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