Twitter spamming in SERPS amazingly bad

[internetheaven]

Several searches today have resulted in a Twitter box appearing ... each packed with spammers!

Every few seconds a twitterer twittering and including several top search terms in their twitterpost so that they get free front page exposure ... even for just a few seconds before the next spammer butts in. Examplified:

"get major keyword now by logging on to spammy pharma retailer dot com"

"be in with a chance to win a free major keyword when you sign up to our twitter stream"

The list just keep churning them out, several copied and pasted under different twitter profile names. It's a little funny actually.

[edited by: tedster at 7:48 pm (utc) on Mar 12, 2010]

[dertyfern]

Funny but sad. You could kind of see this coming at the time of announcement.

[doughayman]

Well, of course. No rocket science here to figure this out. Once again, Google in a state of denial.

[kidder]

Yeah I heard several of the high profile social media marketing guys crowing about this when twitter results went live, even the best of Twitter is borderline if you ask me. "Just sat down to take a dump" and "Now I'm feeding my pet goldfish" - Who cares about that sort of garbage under any circumstances? They should change the name of twitter to "dribble".

[CainIV]

Another example of humans thinking they, and what they do, matters most.

Glad to see it tanking, poor idea at best in the beginning.

[tangor]

Sadly, it won't take. Goggle rarely goes back, even when they appear to do so. Bad steps get inserted time and again, under a different name or in a different place... but they've invested all these "x" dollars to develop new toys and will not scrap bad ideas... or very very rarely!

[internetheaven]

Glad to see it tanking, poor idea at best in the beginning.

That's it! Why didn't I see it sooner!

Google are not stupid, they did see this coming. Spam was limited on Twitter as you had to get people to sign up to your feed. NOW - it's riddled with spammers as they are all trying to get their twits shown on Google.

By making Twitter part of Google they've infected Twitter with spam. No wonder they've stuffed it down the bottom of the SERPS, Google don't think Twitter is relevant at all, they are trying to destroy them!

[mack]

By making Twitter part of Google they've infected Twitter with spam. No wonder they've stuffed it down the bottom of the SERPS, Google don't think Twitter is relevant at all, they are trying to destroy them!

Never thought of it that way before, Well done :)

It gives incentive to spam Twitter, therefore undermining twitter itself, Not sure if that was the initial plan, but it does look to be working.

Mack.

[tedster]

Early adopter spam artists started in immediately after the "real time" scroll box first appeared on the Google SERPs. Then the techniques for finding the best keywords for spamming Twitter started to get shared on forums and blogs. I wonder if there will be an effective counter to all this. Or if social search even has enough value to justify the resources needed.

[outland88]

Maybe somebody will come up with a block Twitter script or even a block Universal Search script. Advertise it as get the real results without Google skewing them.

[brinked]

if i want to search for something in general, I'll go to google. If I want to search for a video to watch, I'll go to youtube, if I want to search for a tweet, I will use twitter.

Google is starting to get a little ridiculous on the things it tries to get into, they are trying to cover everything in their search results when some things just shouldn't be in the serps...such as tweets. Heck, I barely ever find the videos in the serps to be useful

[kidder]

Yeah I agree unless my search term has the word "video" or "tweets" in it then I want clean results thanks. Why don't Google go down the path of giving us a set of check boxes below the main search? Too easy perhaps? In Australia we have AU local and global options, so why not throw in a few more like social media / video / personal / local and so on? Give the users the choice and see how they behave. That would make for some interesting data.

[mack]

I think video is fairly useful, especially if your carrying out a "how to" search. A video can often provide a better explanation than a web page.

Mack.

[dstiles]

Not useful for me. I never view online videos unless I know exactly who put 'em there, and even then only under extreme protest. There are a lot of trojanned vidoes on the web at the moment. No thank you.

I suppose there are a few good videos but to me text can explain most things so much better than peering myopically at a small moving image.

[Reno]

It's gotten to a point where they practically need to divide the SERPs page into 4 scrollable parts, then we could focus/select what we want:

~ Top left: "From Websites" (the old traditional web - a gazillion sites)
~ Top right: "From Online Media" (YouTube et al)
~ Bottom left: "From Blogosphere/Forums"
~ Bottom right: "From the Babblesphere" (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, et al)

Monitors are big enough to handle this division, and surely time would be saved as users sought an answer to queries. The web has changed dramatically since Google left the incubator, and yet they still try to be all things to all people. Perhaps it's time for a facelift?

....................

[tangor]

For google it would be counter productive to split and separate (except for their personalized settings) and the total has greater value than the bits. I don't see g backing off of their stated mission of indexing all the world's information, including tweets...

[Reno]

I don't see them backing off either, nor do I think it is an unworthy goal. I'm just wondering if the noise factor is getting out of hand, and if so, is it worthwhile to consider a new way of presentation?

And yes, giving the user the opportunity to select this "personalized" approach is good, as opposed to everyone getting it by default.

There was a time when the SERPs were entirely made up of the "old web", but now, there's at least 4 sources (and I forgot to mention "News", so that makes 5), and who knows how many more the future may bring. So at what point is it all just simply too much when its all mixed in together? For me at least, it's already there, and if I could select segmentation, I would.

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[edited by: Reno at 11:48 pm (utc) on Mar 13, 2010]

[tedster]

Yeah, I don't see them backing off either. And as much as the average web user may have grown, there are still newbies arriving every day. My 32 year old cousin, for example, who finally bought a computer for himself and is letting his 10-year old show him the ropes.

[tangor]

I see there is some consensus developing. Therefore I ask the question I've held back for a few months... anyone interested in paying google to give them the results they really want? That google becomes their portal/provider serving only x, y, or z for x dollars a month?

_{I see this coming. Anyone else?}

[dstiles]

No. Becaue what I want varies from day to day, hour to hour and often from minute to minute. Which is only ONE of the reasons I've turned off personalization.

[tangor]

I wouldn't pay for it either, until the noise level got so excessive I could no longer view "all the world's info" via google.

Think about it.

[FranticFish]

If they did that that would definitely be their end IMO. Paid services have been on the way out for some time, free services supported by ads have replaced them in niche after niche.

[dickbaker]

If I do a search for "blue widgets," I'm not really interested in a video on how to repair blue widgets. If I were, I'd search for "blue widget repair video."

If I'm searching for "Acme Widget Company," I really don't want a map. If I want a map, I click on "Maps" in the upper left.

Google is muddying the results with things the searcher probably does not want. If they make it worse, Bing will become the more attractive alternative.

[internetheaven]

if i want to search for something in general, I'll go to google. If I want to search for a video to watch, I'll go to youtube, if I want to search for a tweet, I will use twitter.

If I'm searching for "Acme Widget Company," I really don't want a map. If I want a map, I click on "Maps" in the upper left.

Google is muddying the results with things the searcher probably does not want.

You are in a minority, though. In the UK, I think Google has a 98% market share or some ridiculous number like that. People really are slaves to it like it IS the web and the only way to get around.

They yell about Google's results being "broken" the same way they yell about their phone line being down or the local roads being in a bad state.

Unless you're a webmaster, though, it's hard to understand that Google is not like Directory Inquiries. The concept of a "Search Engine" tends to be that you search it, not that it is searching the web trying to guess what you want.

[Brett_Tabke]

related: "Eye Tracking Study Shows Real Time Results Ignored"
[webmasterworld.com...]

Users ignore "real time" results in searches. That's the conclusion of some eye-tracking studies carried out on people doing usability studies with Google results, and it might not be good news for Twitter - which has done deals with Google and Bing to let them index its content and serve it up in the results for searches. Google is reckoned to be paying $15m, and Bing $10m - though the length of the deal isn't known

[Reno]

Users ignore "real time" results in searches.

Which makes my point above about the "noise" factor -- it's like driving down a highway cluttered with billboards -- after awhile, you don't see any of them. Google is getting cluttered, and in so doing, is becoming less valuable, not more.

.................................

[ChanandlerBong]

great revenue model...make your site so bad that people want to pay you to make it better! :o)

seriously though, I think G should consider have little "X" icons that allow you to take out certain sites from SERPS. Then, like spammy youtube comments, you could have the line "4 sites supressed, click to view" or something.

[internetheaven]

Google is reckoned to be paying $15m, and Bing $10m - though the length of the deal isn't known

$25million to paint a spam target right on Twitter's back? That's pretty cheap!

I'm not a Twitter user so don't know if the quality of Twitter and the noise level has risen since Google spammers headed over there. Anyone noticed a sharp rise in nonsense/spam on Twitter since it started appearing in the SERPS?

[internetheaven]

Then, like spammy youtube comments, you could have the line "4 sites supressed, click to view" or something.

As "abusable functions" go, that's a biggy!