Technology: Search
When Search Engines Prefer Spam
The curious case of Google and Levitrares
A few weeks ago, I published an essay on structural gender bias in Wikipedia, and ever since then, I’ve looked to see whether or not the piece appears in search results. I had no expectation that the piece would appear at the top of the result screen, but I hoped that if I looked for “Erasing Her from HIStory” and limited the time to the last month, I would see a link.
My approach was flawed. When I finally did see the story, it was the top result for the title (in quotes), but only if I removed the date filter to include all dates. And the link Google returned was incorrect:
Correct link to my story:
https://medium.com/@OpenSexism/erasing-her-from-history-a5be2cdbe45c Spam link returned by Google:
https://levitrares.com/host-https-medium.com/@OpenSexism/erasing-her-from-history-a5be2cdbe45c?source=user_profile---------1----------------------------This spam link opens an illegible pop-up riddled version of my story. The way Google is mistakingly indexing my piece — prioritizing a pirated link over the true one — has effectively erased my content, which is, ironically, about erasing women.
I am not the only one affected. Frederick Bott noticed and wrote about this problematic behavior back in May. He notes:
“I don’t know what their aim is, but clicking anywhere on that webpage which looks just like my page in Medium, gets us all kinds of clickbait ads and challenges”
Of the search engines I’ve tried: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Qwant , Google — only Google’s search algorithm is fooled by the pirating site. But this is a problem for writers like me because Google commands a substantial share of search traffic. I publish on Medium because I want my content to be visible and discoverable, and Google’s failure to recognize my content correctly is undermining that.
I took a minute to report the problem to Google using the feedback form found here: Web page spam (mentioned in this thread) and encourage anyone experiencing this problem to do the same.
Google notes that it “does not use these reports to take direct action against violations,” but that “these reports still play a significant role in helping us understand how to improve our spam detection systems that protect our search results.”
I suspect the erasure I’m experiencing is just one symptom of a larger problem that Google must address to ensure that its algorithms are not prioritizing spam. Here’s hoping that happens soon.
