The Net is Dead

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

Google doesn't give a shit

'Lowlands, some photographs''Trackback spam eliminated'

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Tuesday Aug 23 2005

It's been quite a while since I wrote an open letter to Google. It's unfortunate but I never received a response from anyone at google while I know they actually responded to feedback I sent earlier. This is a bloody shame if you ask me. Lately, referrer spam and comment spam has gone to new heights. Yesterday for example my webserver reached a load of (I kid you not) 8.0 because of a spam attack. I've literally been blocking machines manually through my .htacccess file based on what I saw in my apache access log to keep the server sane. It's getting worse and worse and worse. I've received mails from people asking me how they can stop the spammers from stealing gigabytes of bandwidth. And what's yet even worse, Google doesn't give a rats ass about all of this it seems. No sites seem to be ever banned from the index, pagerank is still in effect and the've even started to allow evil search queries from hell such as this one again. At the time I wrote the open letter Google was actually blocking such queries which spammers use to find weblogs of a specific type in order to fire off their spam scripts. Right now it seems they feel it's fine again for spammers to use Google to find their targets...

I'm starting to seriously dislike Google...

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Commentary

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At 24 August '05 - 08:56 localhost wrote:
Hope my just installed blacklist will not generate too much serverload. Don’t think my host will like it so much. Fortunatelly, my blog doesn’t generate some much traffic as yours.
At 24 August '05 - 09:28 Marco wrote:
@localhost> This blog actually generates very little traffic. Especially if you consider the fact that quite a lot of sites link to it because of my templates. My Dutch blog kontverhaal.com actually gets more traffic than this site which has the whole world as a potential audience.

The blacklist itself doesn’t generate traffic, the spammers who fire off attacks with sometimes 10 requests per second do, unless you seriously use your .htaccess to block them.
At 25 August '05 - 10:54 weefselkweekje wrote:
Actually, I think google’s been quite active in fighting anything that abuses their system. They’ve PR0-ed a couple of big sites recently, invented the nofollow attribute, which could be a long-term solution.

Blocking queries is something they don’t do. And and basically they’re right. Considering how they basically control site popularity right now, blocking anything can have “butterfly effects”, and borders in censorship.
At 25 August '05 - 13:43 Marco wrote:
Well they did block them in the past. A query to find patterns such as ‘pivot/entry.php?id=’ only serves one purpose: harvesting spam url’s. In the past Google showed only the first page and disallowed subsequent result pages for specific spam related queries. NOT all in-url queries!
At 25 August '05 - 15:35 weefselkweekje wrote:
I wouldn’t say all queries like that one are bad all the time. I guess especially with in-url queries it’s quite hard to figure out what the user wants. They’re frequently used by programmers I guess, and usually contain cryptic url bits….
At 17 November '05 - 21:10 Angsuman Chakraborty wrote:
Blocking machines doesn’t work because they use zombies. It is much simpler blocking referrers.
I have a small referrer list, infrequently updated which very successfully controls the referrer spamming.
At 29 July '06 - 21:47 Smokedog wrote:
Google has become a waste of my time, and there is no way to let them know my dissatistfaction. Almost all searches result in crap.
At 07 September '06 - 02:32 Butterfly wrote:
I’m not much for spam although we just got at admit that the internet will always be plagued by this problem.

I read an interesting paper the other day about the use of Latent Sematic Indexing (LSI) technology to actually determing if a comment is relevant to the blog topic, if it reaches a certain percentage then it is passed into the server to be used as a comment.

2 benefits: The more you right, the more the program has to go on to determine if your comment is legitimate and it also keeps the comment area filled with relevant information only. Basically whosever want a link has to work for it and add something useful to the blog before he is granted a link. Again very useful for information exchange.

This would be great if someone could come up with this, it might actually save the whole blog industry before the spam attack kills it
At 26 December '07 - 00:14 High Treason wrote:
Yo, I liked that bit were you woz complaining about google, and your site knew I searched for “Google is s***” on google only I didn;t use the stars in the search ( I like the idea of such code that can do that, i’ll look it up on mamma.com instead of google )

You think google not block things? Well I searched for “3G 3 USB Modem unstable and unreliable” on google and itr said I woz a robot or virus and I had 2 do one of thos silly things werte a random picture with letters comes up and type them in so it knew I was real person not a program – I’m dislexic google i can’t read too well at da best of times but the random shapes – arrrrrgh!

Theoretically searching for – well – children in very bad situations involving sick minded adults (pervs) if you know what I am on about (it’s bad, I can’t even say it) (you understand i never have and never will try of course! because it is just sick! any person who does is sick and deserves to be shot!) you will get many results, well it’s context sensitive search, if it can tell when I type something like “Irritan chemical” it is spelt wrong, it can reckognise that, it should notify authorities coz it logs your IP the instant you use their site I reckon.

You can’t contact google on the UK site at all, if you can it’s impossible to find, and Youtube I woz racially abused on there and there’s no way to report it because it wasn’t on MY video, so I had to let the man threaten me and my family and there was nothing I could do – Google runs Youtube dunnit?

Google are Perverts
Google are Terrible!

_HT!
At 31 July '08 - 08:39 Tom Chandler wrote:
google is appaling and i have now recieved hundreds of viruses and i cant ever find the page i want because they are full of shit pages
At 10 January '09 - 04:55 DR wrote:
google seriously suck and its going to take another 10 years for you sheeple to figure it out
At 20 March '09 - 03:51 phill wrote:
indeed google is verry unsecure and about that you being abused on youtube thats just wrong you can report it cant u i tried once about a verrrry bad threats and stuff but they never helped me thats why i use a alt email for eveything now so i dont get spam it works a bit but still i agree with google seaching is shit i mean u cant find anything what you want i wanna fucken kill the person who set up google he deserves to die he wasted 3 years of my life and in that time i could of been doing somthing better such as my hobbies or studying google is gay google doenst amit that cause eveyone already knows its gay dont complain use stragagies i
At 22 August '09 - 11:08 goooooogle hater wrote:
google is shit, thank you.

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