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0 pointsrhizome7y ago0 comments

If Google was so evil, why would we purposefully send traffic to sites where we only get a percentage cut of the revenue?

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?

0 comments

citrablue7y ago

It's because Google's constraint is number of engineer-attention-hours. This kind of thing probably just isn't a priority, when they have a billion other things they could work on.

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.

idlewords7y ago

Google has vast resources and could easily get this stuff right, but chooses not to. Their protests about not having the capacity can get pretty comical. Note also that the claim about "working on the things that have the most impact" is tautological.

ma2rten7y ago

There may be cases where we drop low traffic sites from our index, which is separate from the search index. I don't how much of that is public information, so can't go into detail.

rhizomeOP7y ago

Well but my point is why can't Google recognize these phone-number-lookup sites as the chaff that they are? Nothing should rank lower than them in any search that would return their pages. Said another way: it should be harder for them to clog the top of the SERPs (of course "them" could imply any number of topics).

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