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from the we-prefer-the-term-autonomous-agents dept.
A large portion of web traffic is due to bots, and has been for years.
How much of the [I]nternet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was "bots masquerading as people," a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube's systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event "the Inversion."
[...] Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the [I]nternet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world's greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its "Instant Articles," the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook's mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.
Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what's the point? [...]
Some metrics already measure the legitimate traffic as smaller than the bot traffic.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @06:52PM (2 children)
I also meet them very frequently, in a few last years more frequently than sites with useful information. The thing is IMHO that the large amount of keywords in these pages allows to make bots index it under more words which may be used with the most important keyword by user. This "blurs" results a bit and makes user more prone to click wrong page. Such things are today everywhere, from news portals to e-shops. Even some WP sites, probably using a plug-in, have it. They are linked using invisible hyperlinks or scripts detecting UA of crawler.
Similar things go with images - there are sites which notoriously make such "gibberish" with images found on other sites. Crawling through this makes lots of traffic and makes search quality worse. Won't it go against some law article? Like "obstructing access to IT system" (literal translation of some country's computer security law)?.
So if some website wants to charge money for hosting a simple text or a picture, just check how much it's really worth by looking at terabytes of junk they host without problems, as sometimes is just better to go with own hosting and with knowledge that some time ago it was a default part of Internet access account to make communication possibilities more equal than producers farting propaganda into consumers' ears.
This knowledge also cures all "Internet freedom" fights - all this recent "Article 13" mess is just a squeak of one pig being pushed away from food by a larger pig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @09:57PM
I wonder how our resident Bot feels about these pages, does "it" find them confusing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @06:12AM
Change your useragent to Googlebot and you will see some weird shit on the web.