Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意

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Hi, i know im late for this discussion, but its EXACTLY what ive been looking for, is this topic still valid?. I just discovered this site by chance. But spent a lot of thinking on this one. (have autism, so i might come off as more than just a little weird)
This topic is as valid as you make it bb :JunkoLewd:
 
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InsufferableCynic

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I don't see a conspiracy here.

My guess is a lot of the old sites that used to exist have basically shut down due to lack of traffic, since nobody bothers to really use the web anymore outside of a handful of sites. This further drives people to these sites so it's a vicious cycle.

Google may at one point have had several billion results, but I would wager most of them have gone down.

Webhosting is expensive.
 

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Google may at one point have had several billion results, but I would wager most of them have gone down.

Youd think at some point Go*gle would stop advertising them though, and even if you re right I find it worrying that after such a short time period only 400 links out of 92 million are still left around. The internet is supposed to be some massive culmination of knowledge but what does that say if 99.999% of it just disappears overnight and no one noticed.
 
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why link to some valid place in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere website on page 14 when 99% of googlers will never see it. Cheaper just to have first two be valid, and 3+ be junk.
 
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Iommi Fan 420

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I don't see a conspiracy here.

My guess is a lot of the old sites that used to exist have basically shut down due to lack of traffic, since nobody bothers to really use the web anymore outside of a handful of sites. This further drives people to these sites so it's a vicious cycle.

Google may at one point have had several billion results, but I would wager most of them have gone down.

Webhosting is expensive.
I wish there was a reaction for posts that glow.
 

disco

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I'm really beginning to seriously think that maybe the internet isn't as big as they make it look, we're limited to the same websites of always. We should be trying to get out of the normieweb and get into the deepweb and what google won't show because true freedom is there. Stuff like this is what I'm talking about: wiby.me
The "surprise me" function is gold!!!!! Really cool! (I'm checking out Pinball Expo 1994!.. Wow)
 
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Vrashzt

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One of the things that have bothered me for a while now, are artificial forums.
I can't find an example to save my life now, but I bet some of you already came in contact of what I am talking about: it's basically a forum, like Agora, but where ALL the threads and posts are fake, in the sense that they are always copied from somewhere else, like a 4shits thread.
The architecture of the site differs from a imageboard, because they have users and post counters, threads, forums and subforums, but the content is 100% artificial.

I don't know why someone would make something like that, and what they stand to gain from it, but there are hundreds of sites like that and it unnerves me.
 

UCD

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Only 619. Hmm
Screenshot 2022-05-30 141527.png

I have to say, I never use the second page of any search engine. When I am searching for an obscure site or something, I use other methods to find the link to the website I am looking for. We all know that search engines hide relevant info if it does not meet a quota of popularity. In other words, you could search the exact thing you want, but if it is not popular, it will not show up at the first page for sure, and sometimes not even the other pages. The fact that search engines are not the source of limitless results is pretty eye opening though.

I tried the internet archive instead. It is mostly in english, so many important sources are likely not present, but it produced 30 thousand results! I also sorted by articles and texts only, to make it practical. Since internet archive is painfully slow, I didn't go very deep, but there were way more results. Some things were blocked by account walls, but even then, there were way more unlocked than show up in all of google. Crazy

Zlibrary ends mysteriously at exactly 500 results, even though it says 500 plus. Making it obvious that they are hiding results for some reason. Interestingly, you can select a single year of publication, and you still get only 500 results, so there is obviously a large pool they are accessing, but they don't let you look at it all at once for some reason.
Screenshot 2022-05-30 173314.png

Libgen has better access to zlibrary's library ironically, and is shows 2090 results, all of which are accessible easily through zlibrary.
Screenshot 2022-05-30 173719.png

If you want scientific sources or books, using a combination of the previous things, researchgate, google scholar/sci hub (with extension) can get you basically any worthwhile research. (Of course I'm excluding schizo science self publishing). Sci hub claims 88,485,382 articles, while research gate claims 135 million. for google scholar, there are general topics you can choose from, and climate change shows 900 390 results. The page menu breaks after page 30, so I don't know how many results you can actually access. Its a fuck ton though, and there is no way you can read them all. However, The general searches for these sites is restricted like google and you have to know what the study is called exactly to find it. The search option for researchgate for climate change stops at only 10 pages! On google scholar(sci hubs search engine), past page 98, even though there are 100 pages, you get a "server error" and while I don't know how much there are, in 98 pages, there is no way in hell it is 4410000 results as google claims. I think this is because actual academics have inside info, and they know what the study is called, so the general search is useless for them. This makes information only accessable to the academics.

The key here is that although there are archive sites that have info, they hide search results, so you have to know exactly what it is called to find it, but if it is hidden across al search resources, you cannot know what it is called and you can never access it unless you have inside info. Maybe because of site loading times, or something? anyway super fucked.
 

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Andy Kaufman

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One of the things that have bothered me for a while now, are artificial forums.
I can't find an example to save my life now, but I bet some of you already came in contact of what I am talking about: it's basically a forum, like Agora, but where ALL the threads and posts are fake, in the sense that they are always copied from somewhere else, like a 4shits thread.
The architecture of the site differs from a imageboard, because they have users and post counters, threads, forums and subforums, but the content is 100% artificial.

I don't know why someone would make something like that, and what they stand to gain from it, but there are hundreds of sites like that and it unnerves me.
Literally just ad revenue by hoping to fish for clicks this way and it obviously wirks because we all came across one of those at least once.

Now that ad revenue is really dropping in payout this businesses model became unpopular.





On topic: I talked to a good friend who's also a software developer at work who used to work in SEO about this theory because I tested it myself and found it very intriguing.
According to him you can still acess all the other search results through the API but not the website. When doing SEO-work for some local midrange company, you can see many thousand pages beyond those you can see nornally on your browser.

The reason google omits these to normal viewing can only be speculated about but it's most likely just a matter of interest since normally no one wants to see the 4.527.284th result out of 10 million. That's something for big data analytics nowadays.

So my personal take is that the potemkin village is in itself an illusion which is a sad byproduct of how the algorithm pleased 99.9% of users enough that they hardly even check past page 1. Google tries to estimate what you want to see when you enter something like "network connection" and a random forum post from 2009 where someone happens to use those words it is deemed incredibly irrelevant but it will show up in the search hit count of x-million at the top and should theoretically accessible through the API for SEO purposes.
So the way google (and bing for that matter) work is that they make the internet APPEAR smaller than it is and also make large parts of it inaccessible (or rather harder to reach) just because you can't go arbitrarily deep down the result pages anymore with your browser.
The only things lost for good (on google at least) are these copyright omissions because those should also be inaccessible through the API. Those shoulf only make up a miniscule amount though among the final number of search results.
 
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UCD

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One of the things that have bothered me for a while now, are artificial forums.
I can't find an example to save my life now, but I bet some of you already came in contact of what I am talking about: it's basically a forum, like Agora, but where ALL the threads and posts are fake, in the sense that they are always copied from somewhere else, like a 4shits thread.
The architecture of the site differs from a imageboard, because they have users and post counters, threads, forums and subforums, but the content is 100% artificial.

I don't know why someone would make something like that, and what they stand to gain from it, but there are hundreds of sites like that and it unnerves me
Sounds weird, I have never come across something like that before.
 
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Andy Kaufman

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Sounds weird, I have never come across something like that before.
Like he said, the hosts of these fake forums use crawlers to go over actual forums and imageboards and blindly copy the conent en masse under fake usernames and these wierd github style randomly generated avatars. some are even advanced enough to port 4chan style quotes into forum quotes.

when you go to a 4chan archive of some normal SFW board and randomly google (with "quotation marks") a post you might stumble across these. Sometimes they're very quick though, I remember googling my own 4chan post for some reason and it wasn't even an hour old and had I found it in one of those fake forums.
They also kind of serve as an involuntary archive for fleeting content like that of imageboards.
 
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Like he said, the hosts of these fake forums use crawlers to go over actual forums and imageboards and blindly copy the conent en masse under fake usernames and these wierd github style randomly generated avatars. some are even advanced enough to port 4chan style quotes into forum quotes.

when you go to a 4chan archive of some normal SFW board and randomly google (with "quotation marks") a post you might stumble across these. Sometimes they're very quick though, I remember googling my own 4chan post for some reason and it wasn't even an hour old and had I found it in one of those fake forums.
They also kind of serve as an involuntary archive for fleeting content like that of imageboards.
Would you (or anyone else) mind linking an example in this thread? I've never seen something like this, and am curious to see one.
 
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Andy Kaufman

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Would you (or anyone else) mind linking an example in this thread? I've never seen something like this, and am curious to see one.
I spent 20 minutes searching and found nothing. I asked /g/ and see if they find something... If @Vrashzt wouldn't have confirmed to have seen them too I'd doubt my sanity now ^^'
It may just be - since that's the big topic here - the ominous algorithms detect these kind of fake/copy paste forums and just filter them out but that's just a guess. Or they've all gone offline because it just wasn't worth it anymore. But I solemny swear that I have seen them and I'll dig for proof.
 
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Andy Kaufman

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I spent 20 minutes searching and found nothing. I asked /g/ and see if they find something... If @Vrashzt wouldn't have confirmed to have seen them too I'd doubt my sanity now ^^'
It may just be - since that's the big topic here - the ominous algorithms detect these kind of fake/copy paste forums and just filter them out but that's just a guess. Or they've all gone offline because it just wasn't worth it anymore. But I solemny swear that I have seen them and I'll dig for proof.
FOUND IT!
Or rather the kind stranger :SoyU1: on /g/ found it:

Even with ublock and adblock+ this site manages to spam me with ads so be careful when you navigate it!



image.png


Here you can see that they clearly just clone 4chan threads and posts.
 
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InsufferableCynic

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FOUND IT!
Or rather the kind stranger :SoyU1: on /g/ found it:

Even with ublock and adblock+ this site manages to spam me with ads so be careful when you navigate it!



image.png


Here you can see that they clearly just clone 4chan threads and posts.
I notice bots always tend to use proper names for some reason.

They are always called eg "John Smith" rather than "xxxPussySlayer69xxx".

Do they really think using a human sounding name will be more convincing? Especially since this is supposed to be a GAMING forum?
 

Andy Kaufman

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I notice bots always tend to use proper names for some reason.

They are always called eg "John Smith" rather than "xxxPussySlayer69xxx".

Do they really think using a human sounding name will be more convincing? Especially since this is supposed to be a GAMING forum?
That doesn't matter. The trick is that when you google for something specific, this forum used to turn up on page 1 and as soon as you click they won already. They don't expect you to spend much time there.
 
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ZinRicky

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Do they really think using a human sounding name will be more convincing? Especially since this is supposed to be a GAMING forum?
I think they do that because it's way easier to pull from a list of realistic-sounding English names rather than from a list of gamertags
 
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