Blippex

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This looks interesting: http://qz.com/129879/this-is-the-first-interesting-search-engine-since-google/

[Don Coyote]

very interesting.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

PROFESSIONAL OPINION HAT: SEO is a thing that I help do. It's both the best and the worst thing about search engines, because on the one hand it helps small businesses compete with national companies, but on the other hand it's used to get junk sites high in the rankings for ad revenue. On the one hand, this seems like it would be really easy to game: just visit your website a bunch of times and stay there forever. That works in the early phases, but once you get a lot of people using it your attempts to game will get lost in the noise. Hiring other people to sit on your site for a while is a viable tactic... kinda. The reason you can outsource captchas and terrible writing is because those things don't take up a lot of time, so somebody sitting in a room in Malaysia or wherever can do a ton of them during the day. To pull off a successful game on blippex, you'd be paying per visitor, and they'd be staying on your site for several minutes at a time at minimum, and then they'd need to visit other websites to make the data less obviously faked. It would get expensive, fast. Even if you're just paying one person to manage a lot of computers*, that hardware doesn't buy itself.

Additionally, you won't see ANYONE on a professional level attempting to game blippex until it gains a lot more market share. Just like no one wrote any viruses for Macs in the 90s, no one is going to waste time building out a large scale campaign to skew search results on an engine that a tiny fraction of users have ever heard of. Hell, the only reason anybody does SEO for Bing is because the same tricks work as with Google, and in fact they're a little more effective on Bing.

So, this is really interesting and totally worth watching and contributing to. The results are likely going to be legitimate for at least a year or two, and that's like forever in internet years.


* or tablets, or smartphones...

[Lord Cataplanga]

PROFESSIONAL OPINION HAT: SEO is a thing that I help do. It's both the best and the worst thing about search engines, because on the one hand it helps small businesses compete with national companies, but on the other hand it's used to get junk sites high in the rankings for ad revenue. On the one hand, this seems like it would be really easy to game: just visit your website a bunch of times and stay there forever. That works in the early phases, but once you get a lot of people using it your attempts to game will get lost in the noise. Hiring other people to sit on your site for a while is a viable tactic... kinda. The reason you can outsource captchas and terrible writing is because those things don't take up a lot of time, so somebody sitting in a room in Malaysia or wherever can do a ton of them during the day. To pull off a successful game on blippex, you'd be paying per visitor, and they'd be staying on your site for several minutes at a time at minimum, and then they'd need to visit other websites to make the data less obviously faked. It would get expensive, fast. Even if you're just paying one person to manage a lot of computers*, that hardware doesn't buy itself.

Additionally, you won't see ANYONE on a professional level attempting to game blippex until it gains a lot more market share. Just like no one wrote any viruses for Macs in the 90s, no one is going to waste time building out a large scale campaign to skew search results on an engine that a tiny fraction of users have ever heard of. Hell, the only reason anybody does SEO for Bing is because the same tricks work as with Google, and in fact they're a little more effective on Bing.

So, this is really interesting and totally worth watching and contributing to. The results are likely going to be legitimate for at least a year or two, and that's like forever in internet years.


* or tablets, or smartphones...

Maybe you could convince legitimate users to stay longer on your website somehow.
So instead of "like this silly thing on Facebook for a chance to win a prize", you could say "play this stupid game that takes five minutes to beat and you might get a prize".

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

You can try to game it like that, but it won't be highly effective. The best way to get people to stay on your website is -- wait for it -- actual, good content. So if people are gaming their websites for longer visits, everyone wins.

For reference, here's a short list of tricks people use for Google that will not work (or will not work as well) against Blippex:
     * Comment spam
     * Forum spam
     * Hacking hidden links into websites
     * Wikipedia reference abuse
     * Superfluous press releases
     * Junk articles
     * Tricksy page content

A world without these things would be a better place.

[von]

From the way the article makes it seem, Blippix appears to use a browser plugin to send user statistics back to Blippix itself.
This is kinda creepy IMO, but aside from that, couldn't a clever little cookie simply sniff what that plugin is sending out, figure out how to modify values, and then do something like flood the Blippix mothership with forged statistics from "unique" visitors who've all been "viewing" a particular page for 100000+ years?

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

From the way the article makes it seem, Blippix appears to use a browser plugin to send user statistics back to Blippix itself.
This is kinda creepy IMO, but aside from that, couldn't a clever little cookie simply sniff what that plugin is sending out, figure out how to modify values, and then do something like flood the Blippix mothership with forged statistics from "unique" visitors who've all been "viewing" a particular page for 100000+ years?

Yes, because that wouldn't get caught at all 

Seriously, though, I don't know how it's implemented exactly but I'm sure there are ways it could be hacked. The thing that interests me is that it can't be gamed in the same ways that Google and Bing can, since it's not relying on backlinks.

[von]

From the way the article makes it seem, Blippix appears to use a browser plugin to send user statistics back to Blippix itself.
This is kinda creepy IMO, but aside from that, couldn't a clever little cookie simply sniff what that plugin is sending out, figure out how to modify values, and then do something like flood the Blippix mothership with forged statistics from "unique" visitors who've all been "viewing" a particular page for 100000+ years?

Yes, because that wouldn't get caught at all 

Seriously, though, I don't know how it's implemented exactly but I'm sure there are ways it could be hacked. The thing that interests me is that it can't be gamed in the same ways that Google and Bing can, since it's not relying on backlinks.

It is pretty cool that it doesn't suffer from the issues google has, but still. Open Source client + results that rely on reports generated from that client. I dunno, it just smells like someone with a botnet is going to find a fun way to take advantage of this to a pretty steep degree...

Naturally, I'm just speculating too, though, so meh...

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I think you're right that the blackhats would have a field day with it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Well, I downloaded the thingy, so theoretically I'm helping.