The de Havilland Comet changed aviation for good - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170404-the-british-airliner-that-changed-the-world <comment><USER2> The corner of a square hole in a flat plate has 4x the stress of the surrounding material. It's called a "stress riser". If you look at a concrete slab with such an inside corner, there's usually a crack there.

Boeing solved the problem by using rounded windows, and riveting on a forged doubler around the window frame. The skin was also organized so a crack will not propagate far. The success of the latter has shown itself in various incidents where an airliner has lost a panel in flight, but went on to land safely.

<comment><USER3> > Boeing solved the problem by using rounded windows, and riveting on a forged > doubler around the window frame.

Boeing was by no means the first to use radiused windows in pressurised airliners; the Avro Tudor was doing so in 1946 and there may well have been earlier examples.

Conversely the Boeing Stratoliner was flying with square windows in the early 1940s and didn't suffer fatigue failures, nor did the later DC-6. Corner stresses were understood at the time.

What really undid the Comet was that the fuselage skin gauge was insufficient to accommodate the increased _rate of change of pressure differential_ that was introduced with jet flight. Whereas the preceding piston-engined airliners were lucky to hit 1000 feet per minute climbing to 20,000 ft, the Comet climbed at three times that rate to 35,000 ft +.

The Comet had skin reinforced to 20 swg along the window belt, whereas the succeeding Comet IV had 18 swg with 16 swg framing.

<comment><USER2> Fatigue failure was poorly understood at the time. It still is incompletely understood, but much better models have been constructed to predict it. Fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the load, and the Comet was pressurized at 35,000 feet rather than 20,000 for the Stratoliner, meaning much more load.

<comment><USER4> I assume I am wrong on this, but surely if it pressurized to 35000 feet, then that would be _less_ load? As they pressurized it to that it would be closer to the air at its altitude?

<comment><USER2> The cabin pressure inside is 10,000 feet, the air pressure outside is 35,000 feet, making for more of a pressure differential than at 20,000 feet altitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The other problem the Comet had was economic. It could only carry 36 passengers. The 707 could carry 140.

The larger number of passengers meant the 707 per-passenger cost made it cheaper to operate. The 707 could do 5 times the work of a piston powered DC-6 at only double the cost. It was a huge money-maker for airlines.

[http://generalatomic.com/jetmakers/chapter7.html](http://generalatomic.com/jetmakers/chapter7.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> When I read the headline, I was really hoping this article was about the de Havilland DH.88 Comet.[1] That really was a beautiful aeroplane.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_DH.88](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_DH.88)

<comment><USER6> Not sure why the downvotes. I thought this as well. The DH.88 absolutely changed aviation in it's own way. The first fully monocoque, aluminum skinned, twin engine, variable pitch prop aircraft ever produced. We are still making aircraft with this same basic design to this day.

<comment><USER5> Many of the design elements from the DH.88 can also be found in the DH.98 Mosquito,[1] probably the most successful multi-role aeroplane of WWII.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Such a wasted opportunity. Around the same time, the UK was throwing away its leadership in computing too. Weirdly, both ended up in Seattle.

<comment><USER8> Classic case of first mover disadvantage. Their failures helped Boeing learn some tough lessons about metal stress, and Boeing got many aspects of the fuselage of their first jet liner so right they're _still_ used on the latest generation of the 737 which will finish in the top two biggest selling aircraft this year. Of course, us Brits learned tough lessons of a different kind with the Concorde: no matter how brilliant the engineering is, you need a mass market to break even on an aerospace programme.

It's not as if the UK's contribution to Airbus or other parts of the aviation supply chain today is insubstantial though.

<comment><USER9> Airbus is one of the companies that will be hit hard by brexit. Arguably the single market is what made Airbus possible to begin with.

<comment><USER10> Airbus is based largely in France and Germany. BAE will likely suffer more as a contractor.

<comment><USER9> [http://www.airbus.com/company/worldwide-presence/airbus- in-u...](http://www.airbus.com/company/worldwide-presence/airbus-in-uk/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Peter Duffey first flew during WW2 [https://www.buckinghamcovers.com/celebrities/view/127-captai...](https://www.buckinghamcovers.com/celebrities/view/127-captain- peter-duffey.php)

he also wrote a book about his flying experiences [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Comets-Concordes-Peter- Duffey/dp/18...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Comets-Concordes-Peter- Duffey/dp/1888962100)

</comment><comment><USER12> My biggest "surprise" always is how little we have progressed if you just look at how the planes look and how fast they fly (6h11m NY->London in 1958, that's pretty much what they do today, not?). It seems like the airline industry got a lot of stuff just right the first time and since then just has been doing performance tweaks (where I take "performance" to be very broad to include things like safety, economy, ...).

<comment><USER13> In 1958, the cost of a ticket was about 4x what it is today (adjusted for inflation but not earnings growth), flying was at least 20x less safe in terms of fatal crashes per departure, and consumed at least 4x more fuel per passenger-mile. Those are some impressive performance tweaks.

<comment><USER14> Those of us with legs suffer at least 4x more - The price has been at least partly compensated for by cramming more people in.

<comment><USER15> A first class ticket is about double the cost and has the traditional leg room. If you can live with only half the cost of the 1950s then its an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's indeed a beautiful aeroplane.

But what's striking, and indeed rather UFO-like, are the small engine intakes. Anyone know what's up with that?

<comment><USER17> They're turbojet engines, not the turbofans that you see today.

Turbojets have a smaller intake and the entire thing produces thrust. Unlike today's much more efficient turbofans, where a small turbojet turns the larger fans to produce most of the thrust.

<comment><USER18> The Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft was a modified Comet airframe:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_Nimrod](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_Nimrod)

In the early 2000s, BAe Systems had a project in train to upgrade them to the MRA4 spec, essentially remanufacturing the existing MRA2/MRA3 Nimrods around a new wing structure that could accommodate RR BR700 turbofans, doubling the aircraft's range:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Nimrod_MRA4)

(Go look at the photos on the respective wikipedia pages and examine the engine inlets at the wing roots: the MRA4's air intakes are much larger.)

The MRA4 upgrade was at least as radical as the proposal to re-engine USAF B-52 bombers with four GE high-bypass turbofans (as seen in the photograph on the web page below, showing a B-52 flying with the new engine in the inboard starboard pod):

[http://aviationweek.com/defense/ge-rolls-pratt- vie-b-52-engi...](http://aviationweek.com/defense/ge-rolls-pratt- vie-b-52-engine-upgrade)

... Which also got cancelled; in the case of the B-52 the USAF had so many old engines in mothballs that re-engining the B-52 would cost more than just swapping out old units, and in the case of the Nimrod MRA4 the program ran into nightmarish cost-overruns when it became apparent that the aircraft they were trying to remanufacture _were all different_ — the RAF's Nimrod fleet had been hand-built then patched for half a century and simply couldn't be consistently upgrades.

(Moral of story: upgrading a 50+ year old design is harder than it looks.)

<comment><USER7> _Following the cancellation, the Defence Secretary Liam Fox used the Nimrod MRA4 procurement as an example of the worst of MOD procurement performance_

Ah those innocent days, before the QE carriers and the F35 made that look like mere pocket change.

<comment><USER19> I thought the consensus was that the construction of the carriers had gone really well.

<comment><USER7> They were supposed to have finished their sea trials by now.

Also they were supposed to be convertible to cats & traps at the drop of a hat, which would have allowed the UK to procure a non-BAe fighter to fly off them, couldn't have that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a "square windows" Comet 1A in the [http://www.dehavillandmuseum.co.uk/](http://www.dehavillandmuseum.co.uk/) , next to the northern stretch of the M25. Well worth a day out to this quiet little museum (home of the former De Havilland factory) if you live in or around London.

<comment><USER21> It's surprising the designers made that mistake. Square inside corners were a known problem in shipbuilding.[1] Welding Journal, 1945: "Another contributing failure to welded ship failures is faulty design and in this category the inclusion of square corners is by far the most common and most detrimental. Occasionally some form of square corner will slip by the designer and and draftsman ... Supervisors should call it to the attention to the drawing room and request it be changed. ... would go a long way to solving our welded ship problems."

Early models of US Liberty ships had that problem, big-time.[2] One broke in half before it got out of the shipyard. About 20% of the fleet experienced a square-corner fracture. Those were rush-job ships, built quickly with square corners to save construction time. It was well known in naval architecture to avoid that. Portholes are usually round.

[1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=P1IfAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA473&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=P1IfAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA473&ots=SumDmFcwfB&pg=PA473#v=onepage) [2] [https://metallurgyandmaterials.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/libe...](https://metallurgyandmaterials.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/liberty- ship-failures/)

<comment><USER8> As I understand it, the problematic corners of the Liberty ship doors were _literally_ square, actual right angles often close to a metal seam. The Comet's were rounded off, just not enough to cope with the stress of the speed and pressure differentials it was subjected to. I'm under the impression (but not certain) the rationale behind portholes being circular is/was more to do with concerns about the fragility of the glass than the surrounding metal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like the De Havilland story in how it made the managers look like fools: 2 crashes in bad weather, +1 in good weather, a worldwide suspension of operations, resumed a fortnight later with reassuring words from the management, +1 another crash, then a more serious stress test (which should have been done since the beginning), with negative results, then a bankruptcy... Fortunately, that's what happens to the wrong companies.

Another aircraft story I love is the Tu-144, the copy of the Concorde: "Critical alarms were so routine that pilots had to borrow pillows from passengers to stuff the cockpit siren". The full Wikipedia article is worth reading (or the Mayday episode worth watching), it's a good laugh.

Each time I fly, I internally laugh at how crazy humans are, throwing a can of the most inflammable liquid we can find, at 900km/h. "Play with fire, mum says, ..." and play with fire we do.

<comment><USER23> Could be worse, at least jet fuel isn't hydrazine.

It is possible to extinguish a small fire with jet fuel. Don't try this at home.

<comment><USER9> F16's carry hydrazine as emergency fuel to maintain control in case of loss of power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The British Nimrod, a submarine hunter, as well as other roles, was based on the Comet and was in service until 2012.

Modified Comets apparently flew until 1997.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does the BBC not even get the history of Britain correct? The aircraft never exploded. It just broke up in mid flight.</comment>


Ask YC: Pros and Cons of building with Groovy  - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have experience with building a site in Groovy (Java based)? Would you recommend / not recommend it? Thanks. <comment><USER2> I launched a personal project built with Grails a couple months ago. You might want to check it out at <http://feedlr.com> (which is a mashup inspired by twitterfeed)

IMHO Grails/Groovy is really good stuff that's worth checking out. Groovy as a dynamic language on JVM is by all means fun to work with compared to Java itself. Also being a Python guy, I don't feel like Groovy is any less fun than Python, the former with more syntactic sugars. Once trying Groovy you won't want to go back to Java any more. And Grails as a Rails-like framework for the JVM stack is like nothing else in the world of Java frameworks. It's a breeze to live with. And a perfect match for Groovy.

Having said all that, I think the biggest low point for Grails/Groovy now is its community. It's far less mature than the comparable others like Python or Ruby. The G's are like the minorities.

Edit: The framework/language themselves are also still their immature state. It's not uncommon that I find weird bugs caused by bugs of the framework itself.

And if you build your personal project using Grails, hosting is another problem to worry about. There are simply far less choices than Python, PHP, or even Ruby. You have to deploy to the Java stack and there are barely any cheap and usable Java hosting services out there. So I finally landed my project on a VPS at linode.

But the landscape seems to be slowing changing in favor of Grails though. Now mor.ph is providing easy hosting for Grails alongside with Rails. There's also a blog post on LinkedIn posted yesterday which shares their experience with Grails. It's definitely worth checking out: [http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/linkedinblog/~3/31010...](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/linkedinblog/~3/310107636/grails- at-linke.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Having used RoR and Spring fairly extensively, I was convinced that Groovy, and more specifically Grails, would be great to work with. Fun? Check. New? Check. Bleeding edge unstable? Check. Extremely difficult to figure out how to do things you already knew how to do with Spring or RoR? Check.

I just wasn't able to ever get efficient with the platform and ended up having to figure out how to expose Spring internals to do the stuff I wanted to do.

I would recommend building something with Grails if it's a personal project but not for anything commercial or production.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get a great feeling from Groovy. It seems to inhabit something of a no-man's land between Java versions of popular languages like Python and Ruby, Scala and other more experimental languages, and plain old Java. That's just a vague sensation though, based on reading things over the years.

</comment><comment><USER5> A friend of mine tried Groovy for real work a while back and he didn't seem very impressed with it from a robustness/polish and performance point of view. It has to be said that he's a heavily IDE-pampered Java head, so he might have higher standards of polish than you (or I) do.

German c't magazine recently did a feature on it and they seemed to like it.

Personally, it's a bit too close to Java for my tastes; there are plenty of decent JVM languages out there if that's a strong criterion for you. Clojure's my favourite, but it's absolutely not the way to go if you're not into functional programming.

</comment><comment><USER6> I started a (commercial) project with Rails, and eventually, when we needed some 3rd party libraries that Java provides moved to running it on top of JRuby.

Since then we've been getting the best of both worlds IMO - our code is more mixed now, where most is still Ruby based so it's fun, easy, simple and fast (to develop), but some things are done with Java - when it needs to run fast, or we can't find a comparable ruby library to do something.

In short, instead of Groovy, and in view of the rest of the comments here regarding its maturity, why not consider JRuby?

</comment><comment><USER7> There are a lot of complaints about Groovy's performance in the past year. Check out some bench marks before you decide to use it for anything other than simple scripting jobs.</comment>


The "high-level CPU" challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/?p=20

<comment><USER2> I think he's got a point that Von Neumann machines get trashed a lot by people who have no better alternative. After designing a processor in a senior level computer architecture class, I think the Von Neumann machine really is the best organization given your building blocks are binary logic gates. Also, a lot of work has been done on instruction level parallelism, caches, and branch prediction that keep the whole processor humming. Hardware is very expensive to design and build, so it's economical to build to a general purpose and widely used instruction set architecture and then optimize that as much as possible. The next best thing is probably massively parallel architectures, but the compilers and programming languages to support those are just not there yet and there is so much code written sequentially. Perhaps when we have some crazy new medium to build processors on (think analog neural nets or quantum computers), a better architecture for those mediums will supplant Von Neumann's.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a bit shocked. Here's an industry-insider article upset about "trashing Von Neumann machines when there's no alternative".

But pensioners who read the New York Times (<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/technology/17chip.html>) know the problem is that Von Neumann architecture is already dead. The CBE (the PS3 chip) has 8 cores, Tilera has 64, Intel is working on a 128 core chip, etc.

The question isn't, "Will vector processors prevail?", but, "What are we going to do in the software industry to handle the fact that this is the future."

<comment><USER4> Start making use of parallel programming libraries? More stuff like this I suspect - <http://www.parallelpython.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> he could search the literature for existing material on the topic. you can, for instance, read quite a bit about the architecture of the lisp machines. searching google scholar for "tag coprocessor" comes immediately to mind as producing some literature on the topic. i think work has also been done on hardware support for generational garbage collection.

so, random challenge, promising big prizes, from someone who hasn't searched the literature... crank.</comment>


Ask HN: Interested in a Collaborative filtering API? - <AUTHOR> Is anyone interest in a Collaborative filtering API? My friend and I have been thinking about wrapping up what we have in an API. We have basically the Netflix algorithm for anything people rate.
The two possible's we've tossed around are:
- an api that you have to submit all rates in your database to.
- an api that connect to your database.
Both have big trades offs that we haven't been able to work around. <comment><USER2> Something like Directed Edge?

<http://developer.directededge.com/article/REST_API>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah excellent. If this was stack overflow I would mark that as the answer</comment></comment>


Minerals in Afghanistan not news: NYTimes gets played by military - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/the-mineral-miracle-or-a-massive-information-operation/58104/

<comment><USER2> It was still news to me.</comment>


Ask HN: is "Matrix" style human aptitude possible? - <AUTHOR>

Is it possible to disrupt how human beings learn? Have there been any demonstrations of a novel method of learning? <comment><USER2> Takes a bit of practice, but you can teach yourself to develop a photographic memory which might help you learn. The military's done it for years. How do I know this? If I told you I'd have to kill you.

[http://www.mikemichalowicz.com/how-to-get-photographic- memor...](http://www.mikemichalowicz.com/how-to-get-photographic-memory- instantly/)

<comment><USER3> Eidetic memory is vastly different from a memory aid/trick (and click bait). People with eidetic memory are quite literally biologically superior to the rest of us. While the TV series "Suits" is a fiction it isn't far from reality: my late grandmother had an eidetic memory and while she did not have the full range of abilities as the protagonist, she was able to recall any page of a book after rifling through it.

What is still up to debate is whether memories/knowledge can be electronically injected into our minds. I would say it is highly plausible at some distant point in the future, we are already coming to terms with electronically reading our minds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://fourhourchef.com/](http://fourhourchef.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone interested in justsaywebsite.com as an opensource? - <AUTHOR> I'm a server-side guy. I wanted a website. I saw that Jekyll is a good opportunity.  So I figured out this (that's the vision, the above is a weekend POC for a server-side guy that never did any UI).
1. A website which generates Jekyll (or other static websites configuration) configuration in your GitHub account.
2. You own your website in your github repository.
3. You add components you wish (shopping cart etc).
4. It's free to use.
5. Changing a theme with a button click.
6. The configuration is like the website data, so you can change the theme and all text would change. - standard configuration.
You are in control of your website, it's a Jekyll website in your GitHub account.
I thought of continuing to work on it as an opensource, but wanted to know beforehand if anyone is interested.
I know there are many websites which help you create a website, but the difference here would be that you are in control of the website if the generator disappears for whatever reason you are still left with a standard Jekyll website, the justsaywebsite.com is just a generator and a configuration nice helper UI that helps you manage your website.  See this as an external website builder that just assist you in your way in static websites, it would encompass all the best practices and new tools.
Last note, I was just playing with it this is by no means a product or even any alpha. <comment><USER2> I tried it out, very interesting. I've seen a lot of services like that, it would seem weird if none of them is self-hosted like yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting just came across this: [https://github.com/planetjekyll/awesome- jekyll-editors](https://github.com/planetjekyll/awesome-jekyll-editors)</comment></comment>


Airbnb Spawned an Ecosystem of Startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/airbnb-spawned-an-ecosystem-of-startups-that-sweat-the-details-so-owners-don-t-have-to <comment><USER2> A privacy focused "smoke detector" for noise. That's an awesome idea. Never heard of that before but that definitely fills a gap in the vacation rental sector.

Although I prefer the other way around. Measuring the actual noise level in case of tenant complaints, which this seems to be able to do as well

</comment><comment><USER3> It's amazing to see that companies who solve big problems at scale also create a platform for others to solve smaller problems on the same scale.

Like Uber/Lyft which spawned solutions for rider-focussed tax and insurance solutions.

The same thing is happening in the EdTech sector, with MOOCs and teaching platforms creating the space for teacher tooling, student management, and workflow optimizations. It just takes those companies a while to realize the value of (and engage in) those ecosystems.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting. It's a great approach that creative companies with enough funds can think of.

Hubspot is also doing it with Hubspot for Startups

<comment><USER5> Seems like Hubspot's program gives tools to support startups but there is no ecosystem of startups that center around using Hubspot more effectively.. seems very different to me.

<comment><USER4> I didn't get into the article. I checked it after your comment and you're right.

Hubspot for startups is very different than Airbnb startups ecosystem/</comment></comment></comment>


The firewall transformation for black holes and some of its implications - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.08640 <comment><AUTHOR> "It boils down to a single "new physics" ingredient in black hole physics as soon as quantum effects are being considered: from now on, when quantised particles and fields are considered, only those general coordinate transformations are permitted that map space and time continuously, and they must be one-to-one,"

ISTM the argument hinges on the idea that conventional co-ordinates for a black hole are one-to-two (i.e. two "normal space" regions in a Penrose diagram) and this is the source of the quantum state paradox/firewall issue.

</comment><comment><USER2> "the black hole has no interior"</comment>


Google search and search engine spam - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html <comment><USER2> "we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content."

"As "pure webspam" has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to "content farms," which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. "

Looks like 2011 is the year that Google kills the scrapers. Look for an uptick in the sensitivity of the duplicate content penalty.

<comment><USER3> I don't think they're talking about duplicate content so much as stuff like Demand Media (ehow), Associated Content, Hubspot, ezinearticles, etc, etc.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with eHow?

<comment><USER5> This is HN, so I'll give an example related to my startup. We make a wireless (802.11g) flash drive called the AirStash, which works like an ordinary USB SD card reader on a PC and uses HTML5 for the interface on wireless devices. Here's an example of spam content from eHow that talks about our product:

[http://www.ehow.com/how_6861903_install-wireless-flash- drive...](http://www.ehow.com/how_6861903_install-wireless-flash-drive.html)

"Wireless flash drives communicate with wireless devices using wireless protocols."

You don't say?

"Advanced wireless flash drives stream data to more than one device at a time."

Well, we're the only one out there, so I guess they're all advanced!

"Insert the USB portion of your wireless flash drive into an available USB port on your computer. Your computer should automatically recognize the device. If not, click the "Start" button and then click "My Computer." Double click the flash drive in the removable media section. This opens the drive and displays the files. Double click the executable file (start.exe, for example) to start the installation process."

Uh, no. No software installation is ever required, a point we make abundantly clear on our web site.

Basically, it's all wrong.

<comment><USER6> I just googled the AirStash and it looks awesome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."

<comment><USER8> I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. It's gotten much, much better, and one additional algorithmic change coming soon should help even more.

I'm not saying that a clone will never be listed above SO, but it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks ago.

<comment><USER9> My experience is the exact opposite: I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search results in the last few months. It feels like it increases when I accidentally click a clone site.

This happens for more than StackOverflow clones. Mailing lists, Linux man- pages, FAQs, published Linux articles, etc. all have clone pages that are obvious link farms (sometimes they even include ads that attempt to harm my computer) that rank higher than the "official" (or at least less-noisey) pages.

Ideally, I'd like to completely remove domains from result as has been discussed elsewhere on HN. Hopefully this upcoming push for social networking that Google has will reintroduce a better-implemented "SearchWiki" feature...

<comment><USER10> Try DuckDuckGo. Gabriel has been doing an aggressive job about removing unsavory domains and I've been fairly impressed. I think that Google probably can't be nearly as aggressive for political reasons.

<comment><USER11> The reason Google isn't doing the same thing as DuckDuckGo is most likely because manually banning a domain instead of improving their algorithms to avoid unwanted behaviors will only temporarily work, and only in select cases. There will always be new spam and content farm sites.

<comment><USER12> There seem to be a small number of large content farms (perhaps suggesting economies of scale are pretty important). In this case, manually killing them will work well for Herr. Weinberg.

<comment><USER13> Over at blekko, we leave in a few large but marginal sites like eHow, and let users kill them with their personal spam slashtags. For smaller spam websites, we can frequently use Adsense IDs to kill them in groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google have two strong incentives to weed out AdSense drivel sites in the search results.

1\. They diminish the value of Google Search as an advertising platform. And Google Search is likely the most valuable virtual estate on the net. I more often click on ads in Google Search than I click on ads on all other sites combined. This is because when I'm on Google Search I'm actually searching for something, so I might click on a relevant ad.

2\. They diminish the value of AdWords content network ads. People pay Google to display their ads because they believe they get better return for their money there than on the alternatives (Yahoo and Microsoft). Ads on low quality sites are unlikely to be competitive, so these sites decrease the relative value of AdWords.

That is, high-ranked low quality sites with AdSense are a double threat to the main source of income for Google, and I expect Google to make it their main priority.

Why, then, aren't they more successful? My guess: Because the problem is a lot hard than any armchair designer would believe. Problems tend to be a lot simpler when you are not the one who must solve them.

<comment><USER15> I agree with you on point 1; if Google's search quality is not the best than people will (eventually) go elsewhere.

I disagree on point 2. Users on low quality AdSense sites almost certainly arrived there from a search engine so if I can display my adverts on a users landing page it will be almost as good as if they arrived on my site straight from Google.

<comment><USER16> In fact, AdSense ads on sites with shitty content are even more likely to be effective, because users won't find what they're looking for in the page content.

<comment><USER17> Bingo. When our indie music site's stream server would go down, our adsense ctrs would skyrocket. The people who come from google go apeshit and start clicking anything--especially adsense units--when the content they were expecting isn't found or isn't functional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And yet Mahalo is still tolerated, somehow.

E.g., this query -- "travel agent vermont" (which I got from this post complaining about Mahalo spamming the web and Google not enforcing its own qc standards [http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo- com-m...](http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-meet-the- new-spam-worse-than-the-old-spam/)) _still_ returns a Mahalo result in the top 10.

<comment><USER8> Google has taken action on Mahalo before and has removed plenty of pages from Mahalo that violated our guidelines in the past. Just because we tend not to discuss specific companies doesn't mean that we've given them any sort of free pass.

<comment><USER19> On a similar note, how is the expert sex change site still in your index? They very clearly are serving different content to the crawler (as evidenced by the "cached" link) than they are to people who click through on the SERPs. I though this was a big no-no?

For an example (which was submitted as search feedback a month ago), try searching for "XMPP load balancing" and look at the third organic link.

(Edit: actually, in that case it appears they're using JavaScript to hide the indexed content. Same effect, however: the cache link shows the "solution" but clicking the search result displays an ad.)

<comment><USER20> While I'm not a fan of that site either, it's not true -- scroll to the bottom of the page. Sneaky? Absolutely, but the content and solution is there.

<comment><USER21> It's _no longer_ true.

Short version is: they used to, and got busted for, serving answers to the spiders and ads and pitches to the surfers. So _now_ they show the answer at the bottom of a pile of ads and pitches.

But they still suck. Horribly. And are the number one example I hear when people say "I wish Google would let me blacklist domains".

<comment><USER22> I don't believe no one has created a FF plugin for expert sex change (yet)!!

Edit: Even a GM script to remove all the leading spammy divs would do...

<comment><USER23> FYI:

On Chrome you have Search Engine Blacklist [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbck...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbckmoknagndlhjbeohb)

On Firefox you can use the filter option of Optimize Google [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/optimizegoogl...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/optimizegoogle/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _One misconception that we've seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn't take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads._

That's not quite what I've been reading. I believe the more common claim is that Google has a disincentive to algorithmically weed out the kind of drivel that exists for no other reason than to make its publisher money via AdSense. It's about aggregate effects, not failure to clamp down on individual sites. Or, put another way, it's not _if_ certain sites are serving Google ads, it's _because_ that kind of content is usually associated with AdSense.

AdSense is definitely a problem for search quality. It creates the same imperative for the content farm as Google Search has: get the user to click off the page as soon as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to create high-ranking but unsatisfying content with lots of ad links mixed in.

<comment><USER25> I agree. Also interesting to see that Google defines webspam as "pages that cheat" or "violate search engine quality guidelines." By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all. Nor are the spammy sites in my field which super-optimize for keywords in ways that make it difficult for legitimate content to rise to visibility.

If Google did not operate AdSense, it seems hard to believe the company would not have penalized this sort of behavior ages ago. A love for AdSense is probably the single largest thing spam sites have in common worldwide.

<comment><USER8> "By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all."

Disagree. Our quality guidelines at [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769) say "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content." Duplicate content can be content copied within the site itself or copied from other sites.

Stack Overflow is a bit of a weird case, by the way, because their content license allowed anyone to copy their content. If they didn't have that license, we could consider the clones of SO to be scraper sites that clearly violate our guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You know, sometimes it really makes me mad that it's difficult to get into contact with a person at Google for support of their products. But, I've got to hand it to them. They could have issued a non-personal public statement like most companies and signed it with "Google Search Team" But instead there is a personal touch. It's public statements like these that add just a bit of personal touch that makes people love them. My 2 cents. Entrepreneurs take note.

<comment><USER27> The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.

<comment><USER8> No, the reason why it's difficult to contact people at Google is that 1 billion+ users visit us each week, and we only have ~20,000 Google employees. Even if every single employee did nothing but user support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 50,000 users apiece.

Likewise, there are 200,000,000+ domain names. Even if every single employee did nothing but webmaster support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 10,000 domains apiece. The same argument goes for supporting hundreds of thousands of advertisers.

The problem of user, customer, and advertiser support at web-wide levels is very hard. That's why we've looked for scalable solutions like blogging and videos. I've made 300+ videos that have gotten 3.5M views: <http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp> for example. There's no way I could talk to that many webmasters personally.

So we haven't found a way to do 1:1 conversation for everyone that has a question about Google. That's not even raising the back-and-forth that some people want to have with Google. See [http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5d498a633ec07950&hl=en) and [http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=21e50ed1333526fc00049a55576e8089&hl=en) to get a glimpse at the sort of prolonged conversations that people want to have with Google. In short: it's a hard problem.

<comment><USER28> Of course not everybody should be able to contact Google 1:1, but at least all the people that were subject to an action that required human intervention from Google.

Example: I get my adsense account or site banner in a non automatic way since there is some problem with the content: so not into an automated way, but because somebody looked at my site.

I should, in that case, have a chance to communicate with Google. This is inherently scalable as everything started with a 1:1 action.

<comment><USER29> You do, though. I recently had my AdWords account suspended and got to talk to a human at Google to handle the issue (through normal channels). For Chrome OS, we have an actual call center with real people sitting in it.

<comment><USER28> That's very good, this way it is balanced as actually nobody with a minimal business idea can expect google to reply 1:1 to normal users that happen to don't find what they want in the search engine or like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google has taken a lot of criticism on HN and elsewhere for an apparent perverse incentive, to direct searchers to content farms with adwords, instead of the original source (like StackOverflow or Amazon reviews).

I'm skeptical, because spammy-ad clickthrough rates are already low and trending lower, and I speculate google has great incentive to send people where they want to go lest their competitors get stronger.

<comment><USER8> Google also has a decade+ of track record of choosing the right long-term thing for users instead of short-term revenue: 1) not running annoying punch- the-monkey banner ads in the early days when everyone else was doing it. 2) not running pop-up ads when everyone else was doing it. 3) little-known fact: if the Google ads aren't ready by the time your search results are ready, you just don't see ads for that query. We don't delay your search results in order to show you ads.

It just wouldn't make sense for Google to suddenly abandon that (very successful) strategy and say "let's keep spammy/low-quality sites around and send users there because we make money off the ads." We make more money long- term when our users get great results. That makes them more happy and thus more loyal.

<comment><USER3> Regarding #3, why are these two things coupled in terms of page load? With all the js stuff you guys are doing now with instant, it seems like you could load up the ads on the right a split second after the search results and no one would notice or care...but I'm guessing you've tried this and it didn't test as well :)

<comment><USER8> Great question. The "don't wait for ads" policy has been around since ~2001, way before AJAX became common. In theory you could make it so that the ads loaded when they were ready, but that could also generate a visual "pop" that I imagine would annoy many users.

My preference is just to enforce a hard time deadline. If the ads team starts to miss that deadline and revenue decreases, then they're highly motivated to speed their system up. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the evaluation metrics that we've refined over more than a decade, Google's search quality is better than it has ever been...". On the other hand, you can't open an RSS reader today without tripping over someone griping about content farms polluting the search results. There are intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. Why such disparate viewpoints?

As Matt's post suggests, it could simply be that people's expectations are rising -- search results are getting so good in general (which they are) that we notice the problems more. Or it could be that Google is focused on a narrow definition of "spam" that doesn't cover content farms. It could even be that both sides are "right" -- that overall search quality is rising even as the content farm problem worsens, if Google has been successfully reducing other causes of low search quality.

I'd love to see some hard analysis of this. For instance, pick some a reasonably large set of sample queries, and show what the results looked like five years ago, and what they look like today. Of course, you'd first have to find a set of sample queries and results from five years ago.

<comment><USER8> We do have some data on this. I'll ask about whether do some comparisons of "Google today" vs. "Google three years ago."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beyond the flood of SEO spam and Demand Media-style content mills, there's another search quality problem I have with Google: torrent sites. I will frequently search on the exact name of a song or album on Google in order to find out more information about that song or album, but lately most of the results have been links to torrents, including results on the first page. This applies even if I add "review" to the search query. I will even see links to torrents ranking above links to iTunes.

These songs and albums are not available legitimately through torrents. What value is there in providing links to pirated content? I understand that Google is not under any legal obligation to remove these results, but as a non-pirate these results are significantly lowering my perception of the quality of Google's search results.

<comment><USER32> Google tries to make no judgments about the sites that go the top of their algorithms.

<comment><USER5> Isn't this the whole problem? 90% of the web is crap. If Google can't deliver the non-crap, I'll be looking elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd be interested in a further explanation of "Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines [...]".

Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught? Does this entail decreasing the rank of the entire domain, the IP? Does blacklisting ever happen?

I ask since Google have previously[1] said they don't wish to manually interfere with search results.

[1] "The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm" - [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to- googl...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-google- ranking.html)

<comment><USER8> "Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught?"

Although our first instinct is to look for an algorithmic solution, yes, we can. In the blog post you mentioned, it says

"I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc)."

As the quote mentions, we do reserve the right to take action on sites that violate our quality guidelines. The guidelines are here, by the way: [http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!"

Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.

<comment><USER8> Our policy in search-quality is not to pre-announce things, but we did give some pretty strong hints about planned improvements to search quality in that post (e.g. talking about scraper sites). I'll be happy to talk more about them soon when they launch.

<comment><USER35> Hey Matt, is there anything y'all can do about the content farm sites where someone buys an old high pr domain and sells 100's of links on it and drops them in between tons of content? Here's a prefect example of that: <http://www.dcphpconference.com/>.

<comment><USER8> That is clearly webspam. We only indexed five pages from that site, but there's no reason for that site to show up at all. Thanks for mentioning it. It won't be in our index for much longer.

<comment><USER35> Hey Matt, thanks for the response. I actually have a huge list of these type of sites that I've submitted through the spam report and 90% of them are still indexed and have pagerank. Is there another way I can send them in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> While I applaud the direct personal response, I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem." If users see a problem and you don't, smaller competitors can eat your lunch. I'm kind of hoping for some competition in the field.

In terms of adsense, if you really think about it, adsense content on a page should probably be a slightly negative ranking signal (not just not a positive signal). The very best quality pages have no ads. Think of government pages, nonprofits, .edu, quality personal blogs, etc. If no one is making money off a page (no ads) then whatever purpose it has, it is likely to be non-spammy.

<comment><USER37> _I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem."_

We see a virtually unbounded number of problems with our search results, and we're working constantly to fix them. Most of the people I talk to who work on search have the attitude that Google is horribly broken all the time, it's just also measurably the best thing available.

Google as a company, and search quality in particular, does not rest on its laurels. The people who hate Google's search results the most all work at Google. If you think you hate Google's search results as much as we do, you should come work for us. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I believe it is very hard to implement algorithms that can make a difference between stackoverflow.com and a rip-off, or a legitimate Apache mailing list archive and a rip-off.

Why not allow the community to sort this out. "Google Custom Search" already exist. Google could extend that to the direction where people could customize the Google search to exclude certain sites from the results (right now it is only possible to specify a list of sites to include in the search).

Blacklists for at least specific "fields of searching" would emerge very quickly. People could select what blacklists to use, if any.

</comment><comment><USER2> As a pointer: Matt_Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google. He's been very active on this thread. Please search below for his posts.

</comment><comment><USER39> There are a few signals that should be possible to pick up. Examples:

\- When power searchers start adding -somedomain.xyz to their searches

\- Increase spam reporting by adding some kind of feedback to the spam reporting feature. I think I'd love to get an automated mail saying something like: "The site somespamdommain.xyz that you and others reported x days ago is now handled by our improved algorithms". Submitting spam reports really doesn't feel useful when it seems like nothing ever happens.

\- Adding weight to spam reports. You know a lot about us, and I guess you can filter out who are power searchers. This could help stop people from gaming the system into blocking competitors.

</comment><comment><USER40> Google AdSense for Domains ( <http://www.google.com/domainpark/>) really makes a lie of not wanting useless content. The designed a revenue source for parkers/squatters.

<comment><USER41> How often have you searched Google and been sent to one of those pages?

They don't want useless content in their serps. If someone goes directly to the domain, that's in no way related to search quality.

<comment><USER40> It is very related. Google made span sites and splogs profitable (through their various add networks). Therefore they are the major funder of spam sites- even if they themselves do not promote them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The timing of this is interesting... About a week before Demand Media's IPO. Must be a bad day for the investment bankers.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think there might be something else at work here: our rising expectations of how search engines should work.

In years past, Google's results were measurably less relevant than they are today. In the time between "then" and "now", we're grown more accustomed to high quality, fast, relevant results. I think this makes it seem like small problems in search are bigger than they are.

It would be great if there was a "Google of 2004" to test this side by side, but I don't think that is possible. :)

</comment><comment><USER44> @Matt I like that you pinpointed some specific here, but is the algorithm going to be strong enough to easily pick up things like this: <http://posterous.com/people/YrCushFlSet> This single account is feeding 100 different websites alone that all feed hundreds of others. This is helping fuel numerous sites in the plastic surgery niche and it's quite disturbing.

<comment><USER8> mwilton13, I passed this on to my team when you mentioned it to me on Twitter recently. Have you mentioned the site to Posterous too?

<comment><USER44> Thank you Matt. I am following up with Posterous and the other sites involved on Monday. We reported one of the content farms on blogger last year too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Please, exile half or more of Demand Media's pages from the index _before_ their imminent IPO!

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm just impressed with how this was handled. Consider how much more technocratic this is than a news release from ten years ago.

Google issues an announcement via blog post. TC and others start to pick it up. And the original author of the blog post takes questions and provides technical answers, where allowed, in HN.

</comment><comment><USER47> Google cannot escape their fundamental conflict of interest: they make money by selling web traffic to advertisers, then buying that traffic back at discounted rates and re-selling it again, over and over. None of their revenue comes directly from search, though search is their primary source of raw traffic. Their search results don't have to be good, they just have to be good enough to sustain traffic. And right now there are so many people who reflexively use Google out of habit that their results could deteriorate substantially (and many would argue already have) before it impacts their shell-game revenue stream.

</comment><comment><USER48> Curious though what the metrics they use to evaluate effectiveness against spam are. It could have just as much (or as little) spam indexed as it had 5 years ago, and in some comparisons that would be valid, but what if much of the spam had moved from being evenly distributed throughout results to being distributed in the top positions? Then, one could say spam was even lower than ever in total quantity, but it would be even worse in terms of user experience.

That said, I agree with Google, users' expectations have skyrocketed, and it is tough to keep pace with them.

<comment><USER8> I actually feel quite comfortable with our metrics. Back in 2003 or so, we had pretty primitive measures of webspam levels. But the case that you're wondering about (more spam, but in different positions) wouldn't slip past the current metrics.

<comment><USER49> How do you interpret the backlash from the users recently ? In your eyes, have we become more used to "perfect" results, or are the fewer bad results left more insidious and thus more harmful (despite the overall level of quality being higher) ?

Personally I tend to find what I'm looking for by adding a few more words, but in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work and I often have to rewrite my query one or more times to get something valuable.

<comment><USER50> _in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work_

This is one of my pet peeves. If I search for "product X review", most of the result I get back are of the form "be the first to review product X", which is absolutely not what I want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Spam is not only in the organic search but also in the image-search. I observed a site that steals 140.000 (!) images by hotlinking (also some of my pictures). First the pages itself seems to be "clean". They only set hotlinks to blended search images, and they got a lot of traffic, that sure. Then they switched the site: on the top there are two porn-ads (it was xslt*us) I wrote a spam report and posted it an webmasterforum. But it took about 10 days until the site was removed. Hope this gets better... And: hotlinking is a great problem.

</comment><comment><USER52> First, I haven't noticed any significant increase in the frequency of spam sites appearing the Google search results. The biggest problem that I did notice is social bookmarking sites, like reddit and digg, outranking original content. They often have nothing more than a copied-and-pasted paragraph, sometimes supplemented by low quality comments (as is common with these types of sites). Since this site is very similar, not many people will be concerned about this issue.

Second biggest issue is poor Wikipedia articles appearing in the top results for almost any reference type query. Many less frequently updated Wikipedia articles are nothing but regurgitated content lifted from other quality sources. What makes it worse is that Wikipedia is using no-follow for their links, so even if these sites are linked in the reference section, they won't get any credit. It's interesting to see so many people complain about low quality content on commercial sites, but they never mention Wikipedia, which is a much bigger offender (I guess this might be because Wikipedia gets its content for free and doesn't have ads and other sites pay for the content and do have ads).

Third, I hope Google doesn't make any changes without checking very carefully that good sites will not be negatively affected. For example, newspapers will often have the exact same articles from the AP, but also original content based on their own reporting. Punishing them for having duplicate content would not work well. There are many similar possible pitfalls.

</comment><comment><USER53> "The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we've refined over more than a decade, Google's search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness."

The long answer is that without Wikipedia results, Google's search quality would be at an all-time low in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

</comment><comment><USER54> When a company needs to write a blog post in this tone, they are definitely losing ground.

What you are saying != how you are performing.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is just lip service - Google's quality has dropped off and its really obvious. Recently, I've been regularly comparing the results I get from Google and the ones I get from Bing. Needless to say, Bing's far more relevant. The biggest point people have made are on the money searches like "MP3 Player" but the results I've been comparing have been local searches and programming things like: "show/hide text boxes in Javascript." In Google all I get is links to Amazon and other random results to link farms like javascriptworld.com. In Bing, I get links to forums and tutorials which is what I'm looking for.

Time and time again Google has failed. I've already moved on to Bing and Duckduckgo and I would recommend you do too. Unless you like digging through hordes of useless SERPS.

<comment><USER56> Consider that possibly the problem isn't Google; perhaps it's you.

For instance, <http://www.javascriptworld.com> (which I run) is NOT a link farm. Rather, it's there to support the book "JavaScript & Ajax for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, 7th edition" (by Tom Negrino and myself).

Numerous colleges & universities courses use our book as a required textbook. Consequently, many teachers & professors link to it from course websites to let their students know where to download the book's code examples. Yes, that probably helps the site's Google rank, but that was never one of our goals.

As a result, when you search for certain JavaScript examples, you may run across my site. And in your particular case, my site doesn't help because you don't own our book. But just because it doesn't solve your particular problem doesn't mean that the site isn't useful for other people.

I'm not sure why you thought it was a link farm. Perhaps you should have taken a closer look at the site before using it as a bad example?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> A recent Google search for the Walmart being built 2 miles away from me led me nowhere. Google listed 2 pages of job sites listing open positions at this wal-mart. I almost gave up my search, but decided to search twitter and in doing so I found what I was looking for!

<comment><USER8> I'd be curious to know where the Walmart is and what searches you tried.

<comment><USER57> Jan. 15th I was curious if the walmart was going to be a supercenter so I searched, "fallston md walmart," & "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter." As you can see either result does not show the most relevant and recent info about my query, rather it's littered by prominent job sites. Though on a search for "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter," i see the six result to be [http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out- this-w...](http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out-this-week- for-fallston-walmart-indicate-it-will-be-a-supercenter-with-groceries.html), yet that information to me was weak;. it deduces from all the job listings that yes this will be a Super Walmart. Since I found the results/info lacking I immediately went to Twitter and found an even more detailed article([http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may- open-b...](http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may-open-by-mid- february#photo-4446601)) that had pictures that I think should have appeared in one of my queries. As you see that article was published Jan. 14th and Google did not point me to the most recent/up to date info rather it favored prominent job sites' listings, yet Twitter did.

Pardon, if this seems nitpicky, but just wanted to share one of my recent experiences where Google failed me(i have another example too but search was personal), while Twitter did not.

<comment><USER8> This is interesting. Part of the problem is answering questions when there's not much content on the web. I think a lot of the job sites showed up because Walmart is hiring for that location in preparation for opening.

I'm just now testing this query, but when I did [fallston md walmart], there is a really comprehensive article at [http://www.exploreharford.com/news/3074/work-start- fallston-...](http://www.exploreharford.com/news/3074/work-start-fallston- walmart/) that shows up at #5. That article mentions that "The new road will lead into a 147,465-square-foot Walmart, which has been planned with a possible 57,628-square-foot expansion" Then I did the search [walmart supercenter size square feet]. The #1 and #2 results are both pretty good, e.g. the page at <http://walmartstores.com/aboutus/7606.aspx> says that an average store is 108K square feet, and supercenters average 185K square feet.

As a human, I can deduce that 147K square feet (with 57K square feet of potential expansion) implies that it will probably be a supercenter, but it's practically impossible for a search engine to figure out this sort of multi- step computation right now. My guess is that in a couple months when the store opens up, this information will be more findable on the web--for example, somewhere on Walmart's web site. But for now, this is a really hard search because there's just not much info on the web.

I appreciate you sharing this search. I think it's a pretty fair illustration of how peoples' expectations of Google have grown exponentially over the years. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> For the love of god just give us the tools for effective persona blacklists. With Google's constant changes to the search site and the difficulty in efficiently and effectively monitoring live search results via browser extensions, it's been at best hit or miss. Whether that comes in the form of some API that can be tapped to make a good extension or having it built into the browser, I don't care.

Google of all companies I would have thought would understand and respect the important of giving people the power over their own technology experiences.

</comment><comment><USER59> I can't help but think that this is almost an exact parallel of the iPhone antenna problem. Both companies had minor to medium problems in their flagship products, both problems were vastly overblown by the media, both problems spurred an unbelievable spate of batshit conspiracy theories, and to take the cake both companies responded with the same "This is not a problem, but here's the solution." Good problems to have.

</comment><comment><USER28> What sounds odd of all this is that I think the spam sites and "content farms" are generating a lot of ad clicks for Google. Will they really take appropriate actions against this sites if this will mean a significant cut on the earnings?

I played with adsense a lot in the past, and if you did too you should now how spam sites generate a lot more clicks than sites where the user is actually focused on reading content...

</comment><comment><USER60> Why don't we collaboratively blacklist or push down domains from our Google results? This could be a stopgap measure until Google incorporates such a feature including the collaborative database or magically puts an end to spam.

A proposal: [http://www.saigonist.com/content/google-spam-content-farm- fi...](http://www.saigonist.com/content/google-spam-content-farm-filter)

</comment><comment><USER61> In other industries, the government regulates that there must be a "Chinese Wall" (no communication or shared personel) between segments of a company that have conflicts of interest. In this case, search and advertising qualify. I expect to see proposals for this kind of regulation in the next 10 years as the FCC begins regulating the internet.

<comment><USER62> Good luck, see the Comcast & NBC merger. The FCC is impotent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> This reads just like the nutrition label on Nestle products: the ones that boast that the product has "3 vitamins AND minerals", and, on a distant part of the package, lists two minerals and one vitamin and what the health benefits of them are.

They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph.

<comment><USER8> I've got the results of a test run of search results I did in October 2000 sitting on my computer. The Google search results from today are much better than from October 2000. I do think it's fair to make the point that overall Google is much better--and overall spam is much lower than 5 or 10 years ago-- before we drilled down into responding to the blog posts from the last couple months.

<comment><USER63> Matt,

         I'm sure that Google does better than it did in October 2000.  They'd be something horribly wrong if that wasn't the case.  That's not relevant to the specific concerns people have about what's happening here and now.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, I was responding to the "They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph." by trying to defend that the statements in the first paragraph were true.

Regarding the specific concerns that people have been raising in the last couple months, I think the blog post tried to acknowledge a recent uptick in spam and then describe some ways we plan to tackle the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> What are people's thoughts on companies who do create content farms? From the perspective as being a successful company rather than "I hate the spam and I hope they all DIAF".

Personally I think any type of "scheming" in technology will eventually get caught and then all of a sudden there goes your business model.

<comment><USER65> It depends on the quality of the content, in my opinion. Ultimately magazines are 'content farms'. Various game review sites are 'content farms', since they're both designed to 'churn out' content and articles. (To give a couple of quick - albeit silly - examples). The difference is that the content in these two cases is high quality, usually containing images and possibly videos, and with lots of unique ideas and opinions given.

So I guess it depends. If a 'content farm' produces good, helpful content, then that's great and should be encouraged (even if it is done on a massive scale). But when it comes to a case like WiseGeek where content is spat out en masse, even if the content is crappy and really short, then it becomes a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> @Matt_Cutts starting around page 4 results for the term [loans] what is with all the .edu sites? This seems to be an error on the ranking side of things for all these .edu sites for a financial related term such as [loans]? All the results are .edu after page 4?

<comment><USER8> Typically those .edu sites have been hacked at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> The problem isn't just rank though. After I've seen the original source of duplicated content, I don't just want sites that copy it to rank below it, I want to not see them at all, so that the rest of my results are filled with /different/ things.

</comment><comment><USER68> I also have one spam site example. <http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+phone+service> Look at 3rd result for internetphoneguide.org

</comment><comment><USER69> I was hoping to see something in the latest blog post from Google about spammers using Exact Match Domains to get huge algorithmic boosts. EMD + tools like xrumer usually = first page results :(

</comment><comment><USER70> What about sites like ezinearticles? Where they do not pay for content, isn't that more like organic content from experts? They are not content machines.

</comment><comment><USER71> What is the technical difference between Google being able to accurately measure the volume of spam, and Google removing the spam?

</comment><comment><USER72> tl;dr: Our algorithms already stop resultspam. Y'all are trippin'.

</comment><comment><USER32> I just want to thank Matt Cutts for always being classy. His blog posts/comment are always just set at a high bar.

</comment><comment><USER73> It doesn't appear that Cutts & Co. are looking to address any of the more popular blackhat link building methods that all popular SEO bloggers continually say "work but you shouldn't use them yourself because they're bad".

Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"

<comment><USER8> People can make tens of thousands of dollars a month if they rank highly for certain phrases, so tons of SEOs (and spammers) are trying to rank for phrases like that. Other search engines might hard-code the results for [buy viagra], but Google's first instinct is to use algorithms in these cases, and if you pay attention, the results for queries like that can fluctuate a lot.

With a billion searches a day, I won't claim that we'll get every query right. But just because we don't "solve" one query to your satisfaction doesn't mean we're not working really hard on the problem. It's not an easy problem. :)

<comment><USER65> How about the more general case of gray and black hat link building techniques? Especially in internet marketing and certain SEO communities, everything from forum profile backlinking to blog comments and mass article submissions are done daily to rank sites in all niches, not just the really spammy viagra-type sites.

There's a growing concern/consensus that in loads of non-spammy niches, the only way to get decent rankings is to build links.

I know this is naturally something that would be very hard for Google to tackle (since if 'junk' backlinks = domain penalty, black hatters would simply spam their competitors' sites with backlinks and get their competitors deindexed), but are there active efforts being made so that gray and black hat link building campaigns aren't (in some cases) pretty essential to a site getting good rankings?

<comment><USER74> Not to mention link building via satellite site networks. A competitor of ours has hundreds of keyword-niche sites that link back to their URL but also link to several other legitimate domains on each page. How could Google penalize the domain responsible without penalizing sites that have nothing to do with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> According to our metrics we are great; pity-about-you, unless you can "Please tell us how we can do a better job."

I expected more. It reads like content farm.

<comment> brown9-2 Did you read past the first paragraph? They mention some recent changes they've made:

 _To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document- level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. ... We've also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content._

And they are saying pretty clearly they think they can do a better job on content-farms:

Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. ... The fact is that we're not perfect, and combined with users' skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better. _

<comment><USER12> To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly

When is recently?

We've also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites

Since when; all the complaints I have read are from the last few weeks, and when I looked up a medical complaint this week?

And we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower

Oh, are you now? Of course... Translation 'We are looking into it'. D'uh.

that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content

This last part is the only datum I got from the article - they explicitly respond to stack overflow, etc... It is still fluff though.

What I would have preferred: I made a change on 2011-01-15 and you should see it here, here, and here. 'Here' can be broadly defined.</comment></comment></comment>


The Perfect ReactJS UI Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://architectui.com <comment><USER2> Hey man you should keep submitting. It's a great product and you clearly put a lot of effort into it.</comment>


9 Questions Programmers Should Ask in an Interview (as the Interviewee) - <AUTHOR> http://spec.fm/podcasts/developer-tea/18431 <comment><USER2> Where is the transcript?</comment>


Ask HN: How will you comply with GDPR "Right to Erasure"? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In our system, the biggest piece of PII is email addresses. I did not work on our GDPR solution, but my understanding is we have a system where data flows into our log aggregators and email addresses (or any other PII) are scrubbed and replaced with a hash. In our persisted logs (used for analytics and all that), there is only a hash and no email address. In the event that someone needs access to the pre-hashed value, first a request must be approved, and then access granted to a lookup table. If a user has requested we remove their information, the look up hash returns something to that effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> If the data is anonymised when collected you can't follow through with the right to erasure as they're should be nothing uniquely identifiable for that user.

Otherwise you have to do it on request, either by email or form submission or link; automated or manually as you will have 24 hours to follow through with the request. I'd keep track of these requests just in case you need to restore a backup where their data still exists, to notify them and delete their data again from the backup.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm just taking all my contact info out of my site's footer so lawyers can't reach me.

...but really, no idea. Im likely just going to put a contact form in and handle any requests manually.

<comment><USER5> You might try changing the contact details to a location that is hard to reach - say the Central African Republic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm quite curious about this myself...

I would like to extend the question by asking the owners of event-sourced systems how they handle it.

In my case, we will have to do manuell, software-assisted deletions

</comment><comment> video-host Mostly by email. Hopefully it won't have to scale :)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's quite easy for me.

I don't use any piece of shit like Google Analytics, or tracking services, so that's already a plus.

I don't collect anything I don't explictly need on my users, it's easier to manager, more secure and will make it easier to handle those new laws.

<comment><USER8> Right of erasure means you have to delete them on request.

From backups too...

<comment><USER9> I love seeing the same lie repeated over and over: You do _not_ have to delete them from backups. Anyone wasting time on "rewriting backups" should be fired from their job.

You just need a process in place so you don't restore those same users if ever restoring backups.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I've spent a fair bit of my life lately looking at this problem and come to the opinion that anyone trying to systematically prevent deleted users from being restored should be fired.

Different strokes I suppose.

Can we agree at least that you have to _account_ for deletion in your backup strategy?

<comment><USER9> You should account for deletion, but in general this stuff doesn't keep me up at night.

In the rare event you restore deleted users, and even rarer, if they actually notice, just tell them you screwed up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


$126,000 = Your Salary Soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/3/1/harvard-second-in-pay/

<comment><USER2> What I take away from this is that it pays to be director of a nonprofit? (I guess they get there by contacts with their more successful peers they met at Harvard?)</comment>


Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) released - <AUTHOR> http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2015/04/23/ubuntu-15-04-vivid-vervet-released/

<comment><USER2> Yup, I'm going to upgrade. After a little while when most of the glaring bugs will be ironed out of course. I find that's the best approach to living on the bleeding edge.

<comment><USER3> I really haven't found any glaring bugs yet. At least on desktop. On server, you should really just stick to LTS -- rarely is your system's value add how fresh your libc is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How's the systemd move? Is the conversion from upstart reasonably feasible?

I've actually been using upstart a bit as a sysadmin. It is the sort of thing that is clearly The Right Answer compared to init scripts.</comment>


The iPhone 5 concept Apple would love to make - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/the-iphone-5-concept-apple-would-love-to-make-20120621/ <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm having trouble envisioning why a transparent phone would be useful. It would certainly be "cool", but that's really about it.

The keyboard projection part of the video game me an idea though: it would be really awesome if the iPhones could have built-in miniature projectors. That way, whenever you wanted to show something on your phone to a group of people, you could simply project the screen to the nearest wall or floor. It would have a real use case and make content more shareable.</comment>


I've Looked at Airbnb and It's Way Worse Than You Think - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sfhousingrightscommittee/an-open-letter-to-airbnb-emey-about-housing-and-prop-f-8d1bfb84356 <comment><USER2> so, the first article "I've read prop F and its worse than you think" focuses on the insane powers the prop gives to neighbors who want to file complaints or sue other neighbors, and this article's defense is "oh but suing costs money and will rarely happen", yet "citizens need to have power to punish violaters because otherwise the laws won't be enforced".

Which is it?</comment>


MySQL select 10 random rows from 600K rows fast - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4329396/mysql-select-10-random-rows-from-600k-rows-fast

<comment><USER2> SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 10 ?

<comment><USER3> Try running EXPLAIN on that query. It has to create a temporary table, add a random column for every row, and then sort on that column. Not very fast.

<comment><USER2> Ok, how about get the max ID and run a loop of 10 queries matching a random ID between 1 and maxID?

<comment><USER3> That's essentially what the top-voted answer does, except it accounts for gaps in the IDs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why We Need SQL Like Query Language for Realtime Streaming Analytics? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kdnuggets.com/2015/03/sql-query-language-realtime-streaming-analytics.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Big Data Realtime Analytics world mostly doing and discussing counting usecases and implementing them by hand (e.g. using Storm). However, realtime usecases like windows, temporal event patterns etc are too complicated to be rewritten by every programmer. We need higher level abstractions, and learning from Hive and CEP, SQL like languages might fit the bill.</comment>


Warren Buffett is now the richest man in the world (beating Bill Gates after 13 years). - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/10/billionaires08_Warren-Buffett_C0R3.html

<comment><USER2> Since he is already obligated to give the majority of his stock to the B&M Gates Foundation, shouldn't that be subtracted from his net worth as it is an outstanding debt, so to speak?

<comment><USER3> I see it like a will, you don't subtract someone's will out of their net worth. He just set it up even more formally than a will because you need to take billions of dollars very seriously.

<comment><USER4> But you can change a will. Can he back out of this?

<comment><USER5> He wouldn't want to, and neither would his children or grandchildren, from what I have read.

Even donating 99% of his net worth, his family will still have over half a billion dollars, which is more than enough for down to earth people. And I'm not even sure he is donating that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Truely richer than Putin?

<comment><USER7> That's an interesting question. Buffet is clearly the "world's richest man" measured by the criteria used by the author of this article. I suspect there are many people in the world who are 'richer', but we don't know about them because they operate in the 'black' economy or appear much further down the 'official' list.

<comment><USER8> How many people do you think there are? You'd have to a) control vast resources or businesses, b) make sure no legit journalist in the entire world can tie you to it, and c) not care about achieving higher returns by investing in legitimate options, d) grow to that fortune without using mainstream investment options, and e) restrain your spending enough that you don't arouse suspicion. Not to mention that a huge, illicit fortune would be worth less than face value because it would be less liquid than a legitimate fortune.

Let's look at the top 3:

Buffet: started one of the most successful investment funds ever, which now owns most of Coca Cola and many insurance companies, among other giant, prominent copmanies

Helu: owns most of the telecom in Central and South America

Gates: started and ran the largest software company in the world, running on ~1B computers. Was one of the biggest business and technology success stories of the century.

You have to be prominent to get those big numbers.

<comment><USER7> I dunno, haven't trillions gone missing from the Pentagon budget? Who has all that money? I think it might be easier to hide immense wealth than you suggest. Granted, to do so would require extreme political power or approval, which is why the GP's question about Putin is so insightful.

<comment><USER8> Sure, even if you accept that $Ts have gone missing (not sure if I believe that they're missing, just poorly allocated to overpricing defense contractors), it would have to go to many, many people. I think it would be impossible to hide in America. It is a good point about Putin though. He's probably the only person I can think of in the world who could pull it off. Still, if the main source of wealth is oil, then it would be hard to hide from the world market, and essentially useless without including the world oil market. Same with any other natural resource - how would you hide 600M barrels of oil ($60B worth at current market price)? Or a mine with that many diamonds? Or a company with that much revenue?

It still doesn't answer the other question, why hide all that money? If you've got the billions, why not show them off? Or if you can't enjoy them, why bother embezzling them?

<comment><USER7> Maybe you're right that it would be impossible to hide this in America.

I don't like to get all conspiratorial, but have you read 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man'? If half of what Perkins writes is true, then maybe it wouldn't be so hard. He says that there is a parallel economic system in operation that most of us don't know about. If you were part of that world, you probably could flaunt your wealth... you just have to be sure it's hidden from the population at large.

<comment><USER8> Interesting looking book. Still, it sounds like big banks transferring big tax money to big companies. 3 big means that it can make a lot of people rich and drive a lot of business, but not necessarily create mega-billionaires.

I mean come on, for $65 billion, you could buy Oracle, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, or Apple (in 2006).

[http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/18/06f2000_The- Forbes-2000_...](http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/18/06f2000_The- Forbes-2000_MktVal.html)

Or try spending it on stuff - the most expensive house is ~$120 million (Mittal's house next to Buckingham Palace in London). The biggest yacht is ~$100 million. The entire "World" development in Dubai (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_>(archipelago) ) cost $14B, and it's selling to some of the richest people in the world. You could buy every superlative in the world and still have most of your money leftover. When you get to that much money, the only thing you can't buy is bragging rights over the people above you on the Forbes list.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Dril Turing Test - <AUTHOR> http://dril-turing-test.surge.sh <comment> non-entity I started following the dril gpt2 account on Twitter. Its amazing how realistic many of those tweets sound.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it important to verify email addresses? - <AUTHOR>

How important is it to add an email verification step to the registration process? With this step a user must "activate" their account by clicking a link in an email before they can use site features. On one hand it makes the registration process much more difficult and time consuming, but on the other it is an easy way to verify a user's unique identity. How important is it? Are there alternative methods that are easier on the user? <comment><USER2> Thing is, three or four people around the world (a few in the US and one in Ireland) have given my email address as their own. I have had success in getting the email to go to the right person in some cases, but not others. I claim therefore that confirming email addresses is mandatory.

</comment><comment><USER3> It might seems like a time consuming step right now but will certainly help thwart illegitimate use of your service in the long run. It sort of depends on the service you provide. If it is something like signup and get discount coupons in email then I guess its ok. In most cases, IMHO, it will be better in the long run. Will save you in many ways:

1\. Have verified users therefore less hacking your system through TOS type loopholes.

2\. Your email server will bounce lesser number of emails therefore faster email delivery and reduced costs.

3\. Once your service gathers customers, it will give them a sense of security.

</comment><comment><USER4> I might be wrong, but my current belief is that if a user is interested in your service it will leave real email. If not, there is nothing else you can do with his/her email besides spamming.

Making extra burden for user just to make your life easier ... hmmm, not sure if this is right approach.

<comment><USER5> After running users email verification for only a month with my current start up, I can tell you this: people mistype their emails, you want to verify it actually exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know what your site is (perhaps different than I am imagining), but whenever I'm obliged to do this I nearly always give a Mailinator address.</comment>


Whistleblower Charged Under the Espionage Act Pleads Guilty - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2018/06/26/reality-winner-plea-deal/ <comment><USER2> Reality Winner let the US know our elections are being hacked... yet she is being destroyed.</comment>


In Busy Silicon Valley, Protein Powder Is in Demand - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597409)</comment>


Ask HN: How to virally market an individual website? - <AUTHOR>

My friend is a professional photographer (http://hshahani.com) who feels (and I think, quite rightly so) that a good website and a strong online presence can take his career to the next level.
To this end, he has contracted a designer/developer to create a good looking blog to complement his already impressive online portfolio. Being a photography website it's designed for larger monitors, and in general scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. It's pretty cool as personal websites go - check out his horizontal, all javascript photo blog (http://hshahani.com/php/photoblog.php).
Now that he's done with the website (I'd call its current state beta) and already started pumping content into it  and soon out of it (RSS feed is the next feature ...), he grabbed me the local Web 2.0 guy to advise him on how to market it.
I have no idea. I told him that his blog should be about his photoshoots, that he should work on regularly coming up with some linkbait, and that he should forward his more interesting posts to everyone he knows and several people he wants to know via email/facebook/myspace. But all these suggestions were off the cuff - I have no idea if these are good approaches, nor any idea of what he should expect as a return.
So as usual, I turn to the community. Has anybody on here had similar or has anecdotal advice or recommendations?
My friend and I are both looking for answers to questions such as:
- How many readers/browsers can he hope to have in a month or two? - Are any targeted ads worth paying for? - Should he CC license some of his work (he's a pro - so no chance of him doing all of it) so others can play with it? Will they if he does? - What kind of linkbait is good and what kind is bad? - Where to find traffic?
... and so on. Any specific comments (features you liked, didn't like, would like to see etc) are always welcome as well, tho really it's the marketing part that has us stumped @ the mo ... <comment><USER2> _How to virally market an individual website?_ You don't. Simply saying "viral" doesn't make it so.

 _How many readers/browsers can he hope to have in a month or two?_ Totally depends on how he does as a blogger. Write great content, get readers. Write shoddy content, get naysayers.

 _Should he CC license some of his work (he's a pro - so no chance of him doing all of it) so others can play with it?_ Yes, but not soley so others can 'play' with it. License it to protect his work and his name.

 _What kind of linkbait is good and what kind is bad?_ Personally, I think all linkbait is bad if you're creating it for the sole purpose of labeling it as linkbait. Make quality content, give people something to read, don't just dangle flashy headings in their face and then let them down with bad or even irrelevant content.

All of what you're asking is dependent on your content. Don't fall into the corporate America trap of thinking because you use the latest techniques and resources you've got the right to use buzzwords inappropriately. Viral marketing movements are organic, unpredictable, but most importantly: they aren't made. They _happen_.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm confused - does he want international, nationwide, or local shoots? He has a few celebs on the photo gallery so I can't tell. If local, I would suggest taking each photograph and creating separate pages for each that include the town/city/shoot info as content (all in an attempt to raise the PageRank for searches like "beverly hills photographer").

There's no way to make a photographer's site "viral" though, at least none that I can think of. I do somewhat disagree with "iamdave" - not all viral marketing movements are organic. Many of them are carefully planned 1+ years in advance. Either way, no one's going to be emailing around links/videos of your photog friend.</comment>