Ross of OttawaDo you make a search engine and want more market share?
Provide a button that says "exclude sites with ads" or "order results with fewer ads first" and enjoy the huge surge in users.
A more nuanced setting would be to exclude hits with obtrusive advertising. We need forces working _against_ pop-ups, banners, redirects, overlays and such BS that gets in the way of reading.
It should be easy to write your crawler to detect such crap and note it in your index, degrading the score for such sites.
Something has to break before the web becomes totally unusable.
Michael T Babcock@ottaross it's harder to detect than you'd think in this era of obfuscated JavaScript.
In all likelihood you'd have to run the page in a vm to see whether it creates a new window and then see if that window is valid (like a login page) or spam. This would be a lot more CPU and RAM than simple indexing.
In all likelihood you'd have to run the page in a vm to see whether it creates a new window and then see if that window is valid (like a login page) or spam. This would be a lot more CPU and RAM than simple indexing.
@mikebabcock yeah does sound resource intensive. Likely slow to get off the ground but valuable as the index builds.
Ideally I'd like to see some sort of inversion of that, where an automated authority certifies sites as being non-enshitified, for a fee. If they stray away from that they lose their certification. Good search engines only serve certified sites.
The non-crap Internet gradually builds in parallel to the crap wild-west web and the latter gradually becomes a ghost town.
John Schrag@ottaross Kagi.com already does this. (Sites full of advertising spam get downgraded). I’ve been using it for a year and I can’t imagine ever going back to Google.
@jvschrag Sounds like a start in the right direction alright. Would like to be able to eliminate them from search results all together.
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua👏 👏 👏 👏 👏
sidb@ottaross Aside from the relief of not being yelled at by brands on less monetized pages, I have more trust in the actual content there, too. It’s less likely to be SEO slop bullshit and more likely to be truthful and succinct because it was written by a human who wanted to communicate something, not a scammer trying to farm eyeballs for pennies.