Fair play to them though, it enabled them to build a massive business.
I publish exports of the ones Marginalia is aware of[1] if you want to play with integrating them.
[1] https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/ grab 'atags-25-04-20.parquet'
"Affiliation" is a tricky term itself. Content farms were popular in the aughts (though they seem to have largely subsided), firms such as Claria and Gator. There are chumboxes (Outbrain, Taboola), and of course affiliate links (e.g., to Amazon or other shopping sites). SEO manipulation is its own whole universe.
(I'm sure you know far more about this than I do, I'm mostly talking at other readers, and maybe hoping to glean some more wisdom from you ;-)
I've also seen some benefit fingerpinting the network traffic the websites make using a headless browser, to identify which ad networks they load. Very few spam sites have no ads, since there wouldn't be any economy in that.
e.g. https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.salon.com?view=traffi...
The full data set of DOM samples + recorded network traffic are in an enormous sqlite file (400GB+), and I haven't yet worked out any way of distributing the data yet. Though it's in the back of my mind as something I'd like to solve.
It’s also why it is so hard to compete with Google. You guys are talking about techniques for analyzing the corpus of the search index. Google does that and has a direct view into how millions of people interact with it.
The Chrome iOS app still knows every url visited, duration, scroll depth, etc.
There is a native Chrome app on iOS. It gets all the same url visit data as Chrome on other platforms.
Apple blocks 3rd party renderers and JS engines on iOS to protect its App Store from competition that might deliver software and content through other channels that they don't take a cut of.
