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A comment on A British couple who took on Google and cost it £2.1B. Parent comment

Re:A British couple who took on Google and cost it £2.1B by amelius on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @08:00AM (#16375407)
> Google's ranking algorithms are notoriously secretive due to attempts to resist SEO spamming

Why can't they approach it like software security? E.g. Linux's source code is open, and this is considered a good thing regarding security.

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Re:A British couple who took on Google and cost it £2.1B by Zak on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @09:07AM (#16375746)
The kind of security Linux does is binary and has correct answers: should this user be logged in? Can this user write this file? Should this [more complicated access using SELinux] be allowed?

Search rankings are relative to each other and do not have objectively correct answers. Furthermore, I think the methods people have discovered so far to produce search results users are happy with are all gameable to some degree, so the only option available at this point is a degree of security through obscurity and an ever-evolving arms race between Google and spammers.

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