Has the time come for wiki directory of non-commercial (possibly: advertising-free, cookie-free) sites with robust, actually valuable information, and other sites that are doorways to them (think: topical forums, even revived webrings, etc)? Could this feasibly get enough action to be useful?
Some of them are curated and awesome. Some, less so. Likely some of them are even spammy.
The need is realized, but execution is hard.
You comment now comes up first, but the rest of the results all try to contact googlesyndication.com, so ads? Google will not exclude sites that literally give them money.
If Google was so evil, why would we purposefully send traffic to sites where we only get a percentage cut of the revenue?
EDIT: I realize I needed to explain this statement a little bit more. If we show ads on google.com we get 100% of the revenue. If show ads on reversephonelookup.it they get majority of the revenue. There is a limited amount of advertiser demand. Instead of manipulating the organic search results, it would be more profitable for google to just show more ads on the search page or inflate the ad price or something.
I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to open this can of worms, did it have something else printed on its label?
Phone number lookup sites are almost certainly a) easily detectable; and b) low traffic. If Google only gets a percentage cut of this, why index them for fractions of pennies per year?
Keep in mind that Google is not a product company, they are a data company. They work on the biggest most impactful items, and don't have a lot of time for one-offs.
Finally, it might not be clear at all that these sites should be removed from the index.
Those results are organic, at least they were not marked as ads. That's even worse, it means the regular crawler is preferring generated phone number sites over blogs. That's the real money waster right there.
> We need to crawl all the pages that serve our ads so that we can show ads that are relevant.
Why? I though Google's business model was tracking users to show relevant ads to them. You say it's more like DuckDuckGo, or the old magazine ads: film magazines get blockbuster trailers, gardening magazines get compost ads.
Either the ads are personalized, so the surrounding content doesn't matter, or the ads are "static", so why track everyone all the time, then?
> If we show ads on google.com we get 100% of the revenue. If show ads on reversephonelookup.it they get majority of the revenue. There is a limited amount of advertiser demand. Instead of manipulating the organic search results, it would be more profitable for google to just show more ads on the search page or inflate the ad price or something.
As your sibling comments imply, this works like a protection racket. The profit is closing the market to webmasters that don't allow ads at all, or that use non-Google networks.
Would you risk loosing 10, to get 1 ?
Also, the search index would gain all the sites that are in the AdSense index so search results would potentially improve. However, it would give an unfair advantage to google publishers.
Can you explain this? Not sure if it's your phrasing or what, but I'm not getting what you mean.
Google is converting the world into a content production factory FOR Google and they pay literally pennies for the work.
If even pennies. Consider how much content Google search now includes from Web pages where you don't even need to click into the page. Weather. Answers to questions. Some links I click keep google.Com in the url and Google processes the page and shows me what Google wants.
I don't even know anymore how much of what I see is what the creator wanted me too see our what Google wants me to see our not see.
Imagine they remove competitors ads with that. Who knows what they do in the name of making the Web better.
You can't go public, answer to no one accountable, who only thinks of MONEY and do no evil.
If Google wants to do no MORE evil. Take yourself private and live up to your credo.
It's upsetting to me that doing better than Google in search seems to be very close to an impossible feat of magic at this point.
I know that will change some day, but I can't see how.
Even if somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on infrastructure and employees, it would still be an insane risk.
Writing that out, it almost sounds like internet search engines should be as big and as important of an operation like the TLD registrars. Funded by big governments in collaboration with each other.
Google can’t do this. Original sources very likely don’t have ads, scrapes will have tons. But good results are good results. Big g has done an admirable job. They can’t exploit the best metric for quality.
[1] Content scraped from github, tech discusion forums, personal blogs, unix man pages etc.
It has far fewer languages, but the translations of those it has, are far better in my opinion. Allthough I am also no linguist, just an average non-English speaker.
Setting that aside, google has done good things. Today, not so much. It’s never too late to turn the ship around. Google can still be awesome. Our opinions aren’t that different.
I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.
Google can't still be awesome, as they're no longer seeking to disrupt an existing market and burning through venture capital while doing everything and anything (including providing superior search results, and making ethical business practices part of their brand) to attract users.
Rooting for a profit motivated transnational entity in the manner one would for a sports team exposes the insidious nature of brand narratives and the exploitable irrationality of our own interactions with them.
I believe they can, but I don't know if they care to - they're highly profitable after all. What I really dislike about search is that, by treating links as currency, they have broken links. Lots of people won't put plain old links on their site because they fear it would hurt their rankings.
Their overreliance on links as the sole quality indicator has, at least in my country, lead to the large media companies just renting out folders or subdomains - and whatever low quality content is published there ranks at the top.
They still build good stuff, and I'm sure their engineers could "solve" search again, but it appears that their management doesn't want to.
I've been getting those too, lately. I thought maybe that my touchpad finger is developing tremor ;)
You get a full page of non-sense results and ads/spams when the phone number you searched for is not known from any website (I guess)
It's a similar mechanism that some forums use to highlight the terms that were part of the google query which lead to this site.
FFS, 411 was amazing before the web.
Also, in about 1989 my friend and i used to have a contest between us; to call 411 and see who could keep the 411 operator on the phone the longest.
This was a fun social engineering exercise for 14 year old nerds who like the idea of being phreaks.
Our record was 45 minutes and got to know a lot about the 411 system, where call centers were located and how the 411 system worked.
This was right near the time that we ran the long distance bill up to $926 for one month of calling into a BBS in san jose and PCLink to chat....
Got grounded for a month for that one...
I wondered the same thing and just to speculate, here's my list of reasons on why phone number search is so awful:
- As far as I know, not a single cell phone carrier publishes a telephone directory (whether opt-in or opt-out). So there's no (public) data to index.
- Some landline carriers still publish telephone directories, but of course landlines are dying out. And I remember reading that 30-50% of landline subscribers choose to be unpublished or unlisted anyway. So that source of phone number data is drying up.
- Because international phone calls have become so cheap and caller ID is now easily spoofable, spam and scam calls have become huge. So no one wants their phone number to publicly accessible these days.
- In the early web years, there were legitimate phone directory websites who appeared to have collected their data from landline telephone directories and "city directories" (if anyone still remembers those things). But I guess they didn't find a good way to monetize the service, so the honest phone lookup sites died off.
When I search for a name, usually their blog is listed below 10 creepy lookup sites that list their name, physical address history, phone numbers, relatives, etc.
Google should push that garbage to the bottom of the stack.
But either way, it looks like a Google employee have seen your comment and fixed this particular search query.
It's odd that so many of those sites exist, that Google indexes them so deeply, and that they show up in searches so prominently. It's obvious that they are spam, scams, or worthless, but those same sites have been appearing prominently for years.
I agree with the author. My experience has also been that Google heavily prioritizes very large and frequently-updated sites over small static information-rich personal sites. I think it's a big flaw that needs to be fixed or for someone else to do better.