Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money from programmatic ads

Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by bandrami on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:50PM (#36515349)

Don't forget the asinine translation sites with page descriptions like "Have you ever wondered what the Sinhalese word for 'monitor lizard' is[1]? Millions of users have searched for this. In this page you will find..." at which poing the summary cuts off. Somebody generated those in an afternoon with a set of concordances and a Perl script, and they've been sucking traffic ever since.

[1] For the curious, "Thalagoya" for the terrestrial species, "Kabaragoya" for the swimming species

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by xxr on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @11:08PM (#36515876)

“You won’t believe how many words the Sinhalese have for monitor lizards!”

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by bandrami on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @11:57PM (#36516141)

"Slow lorises hate this one simple trick!"

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by kleene_op on Thursday June 29, 2023 @02:20AM (#36517016)

"Find hot lonely monitor lizards in your area today!"

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by JoshTriplett on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @11:41PM (#36516045)

And the sites that list every possible phone number in a given area code, just so that they'll be a search hit for someone searching for a phone number. Zero value provided there.

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by Szpadel on Thursday June 29, 2023 @12:47PM (#36523045)

those are usually for "is this a spam" vote, so I would argue that there is some value there

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by JoshTriplett on Thursday June 29, 2023 @01:49PM (#36524026)

I'm not talking about the ones that provide a user-contributable database of "what business owns this number, is it spam"; those are great.

I'm talking about sites that just list all possible phone numbers in a range, for SEO purposes, with no useful information about each number, and then try to sell you access to their invasive databases of personal information.

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by rycomb on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @11:45PM (#36516073)

Ha! Somewhat unrelated, but that reminded me of a homeless guy in Portland whose intro line was "do you know how you say dragonfly in Spanish?", to which I responded "libélula" (I knew it because Spanish is my mother tongue). Interesting, he seemed kinda pissed off, as I spoiled his soliciting routine. Maybe he's the human version of those sites!

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by vintermann on Thursday June 29, 2023 @04:00AM (#36517677)

And if you click through, you'll find that they don't have the Sinhalese word for monitor lizard, but you can contribute it for them to monetize.

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Re:Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money... by nraynaud on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:57AM (#36518414)

I see automatic translation of normal websites a lot too. I'm French and doing some home renovations, and according to google our houses are built in a way that is vastly different from my experience on the ground, and it's really frustrating, because our regulations and customs are different, and I really need to do things the local way.

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