iGrep and the duplication of Internet Content
Note: Since the time this blog entry was written many great changes have been made to the iGrep search engine. The amount of ads have been greatly reduced, the archives are no longer searching and I believe iGrep is a useful too for searching the content on the devshed network. Read the following comment and the discussion that follows with that in mind.
Devshed is reproducing hundreds of thousands of mailing list and usenet posts which are marked as their “archives” but exist for the sole purpose of generating ad revenue when people stumble onto them. This is their business plan, and the purpose of iGrep. This is internet and search engine spam, and I pity anyone who lands on their pages or thinks that using their search will help answer any questions that they have. iGrep offers NOTHING that is not already in google but by duplicating content (violating googles guidlines) they are making content even more difficult to find. I can’t even open one of their archived pages without my browser grinding to a halt while trying to display all of their silly flash ads.
Google adsense policies clearly states that:
No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.
Please convince me that this page has another purpose.
Nobody wins with this type of spam, the advertisers don’t win, Internet users don’t win, and unless the promoters get hard cold cash they don’t gain anything either. The only people hoping to gain anything are the spammers themselves.
Why respectable companies, and decent people associate and represent a company that does this, I don’t know.
April 15th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
Nice Aaron !
You are just building links to them !
Pffff……
–
bertrand
April 15th, 2005 at 10:02 pm
toggg: This is one place where I condone the use of rel=”nofollow”
April 15th, 2005 at 11:38 pm
Think devshed gets support from Zend because it used to be a good site. Then it got bought out by http://www.devarticles.com (who you may remember for re-publishing a whole bunch of old phpbuilder articles as their own).
My guess is Zend just needs to clear up it’s list of links.
April 16th, 2005 at 4:24 pm
Install Flashblock for Firefox: http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
April 16th, 2005 at 5:00 pm
DevShed has been off my favorites list for a while now, they’re site takes 4 minutes to load each page because of the 100000 ads they put on each page, even the words are pop up ads now. They’re a waste of bandwidth at this point.
June 13th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Oh how i wish that we could waste as much of DevSheds time as they waste of ours. What a bunch of weasily little shits!
July 26th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
You’re complaining about a free service using ads to support itself? I’m sure you’re willing to pay a monthly fee to suppor their business so you don’t have to view ads? Many others are not, though.
There’s nothing wrong with offereing a usenet archive. Google guidelines don’t say anything about this, either. They tell you not to go register a.com, b.com, c.com, etc. and put the same content on every page. Offering the same service as another site doesn’t violate these guidelines.
You do make a valid point about the AdSense ads on the “no results found” iGrep page, though.
Overall, though, it’s pretty stupid to bitch about a free site doing what they can to support themselves. You put up with it because of the great member base and the quality help and community you actually get out of the site.
My $0.02. (Dev Shed member since 1999)
—John Holmes…
July 26th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
John, I’m complaining about a company regurgitating content that is already available on the internet for the SOLE purpose of generating ad revenue.
Search for anything, “PHP” for example. You get 10 ads per 10 results. At least it seems like all the results are from the DevShed forum, which they are free to index however they like. The thing that pissed me off was how they used data from external sources to power their search engine.
July 26th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
FWIW, the content loads really quickly now due to some infrastructural changes regarding the use of HTML compression techniques
http://forums.devshed.com/t268039/s.html is the link which advertises the hack.
Other reasons for slow loading of pages can be contention at a network level, so it might not all be down to flash
just my €0.02
–Ax
July 26th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
So you’re saying that there should be one and only one usenet archive on the web?
Ad supported or not, it’s a service to those who are searching. Even if there are others, providing your own is not bad.
—John Holmes…
July 26th, 2005 at 10:39 pm
Grow up, tithead
July 26th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
John, I totally agree with what you’re saying… and they must have tweaked the engine to provide better content, so I am not nearly as pissed off at the service as I was when it was launched.
Creating something that is useful is GOOD, searching through devshed articles and forums is good.
In the beginning what was happening was a search was pulling up 90% usenet archives, 30% of which was spam that was sent to the mailing list. The pages were optimised for google search engines in the hopes that they would get picked up by google as well. This type of behaviour is SPAMMING the internet for the sake of Advertising, which was the ONLY reason for the promotion of IGREP as a search engine.
Anyway, I am not changing my mind about dumping useless information onto the internet. Although I have to admit that igrep works quite nicely now to search through devshed articles and forums.
By the way, where are all of you guys suddenly coming from?
July 27th, 2005 at 5:24 am
Devshed: http://forums.devshed.com/showthread.php?p=1198812
August 6th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Hey, I’m a mod at devshed
I hate iGrep, and I wish it a quick and incredibly painful death. I don’t know why a well-respected group would turn to iGrep and ask for help.
Dumbasses :/
January 13th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
No your NOT a mod at devshed, so go back to the hole from where you came. Im the owner of the Developer Shed Network and we DID tweak www.igrep.com search results to EXCLUDE devarchives. Also all of our sites and forums have been tweaked to decrease load times significantly.
J
January 13th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
devshed is my home…. you all should just have a little respect…. you guys dont even know what you are saying… now about iGrep… to be honest with you… i never tried it… so i cant say anything about it really.
January 13th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Why are my comments being deleted?
January 13th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Jon, no comments are deleted… don’t know where your comments went but will look in my spam bin
January 13th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
There you go… it was in my spam bin.
January 13th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Aaron, with all due respect, labeling Dev Shed as “f*cking spammers” makes your complaints seem much less professional and (from my perspective) unsubstantiated.
What you should do in such situations is go onto Developer Shed’s Esupport and politely explain in a ticket what you think is wrong and how the admins can fix it. Flaming gets us nowhere.
=)
January 13th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Peter, with all due respect, this post is sooooo old. The initial iGrep was such crap it was unbelieveable. It’s changed now so obviously someone else shared my sentiments.
January 13th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
We are always looking to improve upon our offerings to the development community. If you have constructive criticism I invite you to PM me on www.devshed.com as I see you have made a account there and Id be happy to discuss your ideas with you. But I would greatly appreciate the slanderious title of this thread be edited.
J
January 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Jon, title changed and some of the rant taken out.
I still think that the “do anything to get people to our pages and then stick ads on it” is a fundimenally flawed business plan. But then again, it’s working out pretty well for google
As explained several times above, I am happy to see that iGrep has matured to become a useful tool for searching the enormous amount of information that is contained within your network, and wish you and your many, many users the best!
January 16th, 2006 at 12:36 am
Sorry about my previous post. iGrep has changed fairly recently and is not as bad as before. But I stand by what I said before - at the time, it was total crap. But now it is much better, and I look forward to using it the next time I need to.
-Xbot
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