Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jotm 1482 days ago
Doubt it. Even today, obvious spammy content aggregators show up for many keywords with stuff taken directly from Reddit/Stackoverflow/Superuser/etc.

All of Google's fancy ML could've been replaced with a simple report button - enough people report a site and either trigger a manual review (best option) or just ban them (could be used against competitors... but negative SEO was already a thing and is still widely used).