Puckdropper
That's a good question, and I wonder if that's how it works
Tue May 24, 2022 4:21am

Maybe the ads and clicks are so cheap they can't make any money with just one thing, so it takes a whole host of them to make things work. It's kinda like phone and e-mail scams, the message is so cheap they don't lose any money but if they just get one sucker it pays for annoying hundreds of thousands of people.

There's really only two search engines out there any more, Google and Bing. Duckduckgo uses Bing as their backend while startpage.com uses Google. I've wondered sometimes if webpages are starting to tailor results more like you suggest, which can be a GOOD use of the technology. I would use a "downvote" or "useless" button on the search engines. (How do you prevent people from abusing it? Argh... Why can't we have nice things?) Sometimes I wonder if more niche-specific search engines will be the up and coming thing, like a programming search engine that actually searches for the funny characters languages use (>>, ::, etc). Google wasn't making that easy a few years ago, always dropping the punctuation...

    • I wonder how much money these sites actually rack up? - Erik_, Wed May 18 2022 5:46pm
      Or is it one of those things where they just host SO many pages that even if each site only gets them a small amount of ad money, the number of sites makes up for it. Also, I wonder if you get paid for a click done by a web crawler? I get those on this site clicking buttons and links all the time. M... more
      • That's a good question, and I wonder if that's how it works- Puckdropper, Tue May 24 2022 4:21am
        • The downvote / "useless" tagging could still work on... - Erik_, Tue May 31 2022 1:20am
          search engines that use logged in accounts to help mold searches for you. They could then take the total data of all the user's input to give a general trend to everyone. It would need some sort of down vote spamming/brigading correction/prevention which I'm sure would be possible given that Reddit ... more
          • I like it, I might actually sign in to a search engine - Puckdropper, Sun Jun 05 2022 3:26am
            if I knew that the hideous results could be downvoted into extinction. I can't find any information because of all the sites that have SEO'd themselves into the top position.
            • I wonder if some sort of wrapper around an existing search.. - Erik_, Mon Jun 13 2022 12:42pm
              engine would work. Like how DuckDuckGo uses Bing and others user Google. Same idea, but just implement the upvote/downvote/block system on the results. Doing it that way might actually be simple enough to throw together a proof of concept depending on home easy it is to "borrow" the actual search re... more
              • It would take quite a bit of tuning - Puckdropper, Mon Jun 20 2022 1:08am
                as there's a lot of sites vying for that top spot. I've seen entire pages of search results that are rip offs of each other. Might still be worth it, though. Especially for things where you need to go more in depth on.
                • Those fake sites are the worst. - Erik_, Thu Jun 23 2022 12:56am
                  They clog up the first page with snippets of text they randomly copied off other sites just to get the top spot.
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    "Forces act when not restrained" - Puckdropper