[HN Gopher] More content by people, for people in Search
___________________________________________________________________
More content by people, for people in Search
Author : gingerlime
Score : 246 points
Date : 2022-08-19 08:03 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| otobrglez wrote:
| What could possibly go wrong?
|
| O, wait. That's how the SEO hacking industry was born.
| SCLeo wrote:
| I write novels as a hobby and I publish them on my website. I
| recently noticed that there are websites that blatantly copy and
| sell my novels without my permission and are ranked higher than
| mine. I think it is because Google identifies their pages as the
| source. If anyone knows how to deal with issues like this, please
| let me know.
| fooey wrote:
| Send DMCA complaints to google
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Unfortunately it sounds to like a lawsuit may be your best bet.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Unless they are hosted by people in countries unfriendly with
| the US, in which case good luck.
| codazoda wrote:
| I would write up a simple cease and desist letter and send it
| to the registrar, web host, page owner, Google, and anyone else
| you can identify. You might even be able to write a script that
| does some lookups for you. May not work for foreign domains,
| hosts, etc. But, maybe. YMMV
| Aulig wrote:
| > script that does some lookups for you
|
| Might want to check out https://plagiashield.com/
|
| I use it occasionally but don't have an active subscription.
| But it's decent at finding stolen content (except for false
| positives on privacy policy & TOS)
| injidup wrote:
| With what license do you publish them?
| mdmglr wrote:
| > Last year, we kicked off a series of updates to show more
| helpful, in-depth reviews based on first-hand expertise in search
| results.
|
| I find myself searching <product name> + "review reddit" to find
| real honest reviews. My anecdotal experience is that everything
| else is written by content creators who are given the product for
| free to use for a few days/weeks/months w/o going in depth.
| marttt wrote:
| Same here. For more niche stuff, <product name> +
| "site:news.ycombinator.com" is standard practice. Or Algolia's
| HN search.
|
| Another one is <product name> + "forum" or <product name> +
| <some trusted forum>.
|
| I train myself to use DDG, but, to my own dissapointment, I end
| up with "!g <query> site:something-trustworthy.com" way too
| often.
|
| For regular Google searches, I've had the feeling of being
| "scammed" for years, though. The "fishing devil" on the no-
| results page also feels like buttering up the user. I always
| subconsciously interpret this as a lightly humiliating, but
| cowardly way to say "we decide what you see, bro". But, YMMV.
|
| Never wanted to bash anybody, but this has got to be the most
| negative post I've ever written on HN. Please, please, please,
| Google, give me the search results of around 2008-2010. Pages,
| pages, pages of results for almost any query. I worked as a
| journalist then, and googling was actually useful, even
| educational, in real life.
| visarga wrote:
| I use the "Search the current site" Chrome extension. You can
| just hop to a YC or Reddit page and click the search icon,
| but it works with all websites.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-the-
| current...
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I can assure you that 90% of these product review sites have
| never even used the product, and the content is almost always
| written by a $25/article writer from Upwork.
| ThalesX wrote:
| Awhile ago the company I used to work for used a local
| service that does 2 pieces of content per week for you for
| lime 50EUR / month. Quality was shit but it did get us views
| and paying customers.
| throw10920 wrote:
| At this point, I'm not sure how many of the Reddit reviews are
| valid, either.
|
| Marketers may be dumb, but they're not stupid - all it takes is
| a few people to notice Google starting to add "reddit" to their
| autocomplete, start looking around, figure out what's going on,
| and then suddenly the whole "SEO"/marketing spam sphere is
| aware of it and will start making sockpuppet accounts.
| permarad wrote:
| Yeh I find myself adding 'reddit' a lot to my search queries.
| I'm looking for someone asking the same question, and someone
| answering it.
| dgudkov wrote:
| I don't think Google will ever be able to distinguish texts that
| are written for people from texts that are written for Google.
| It's effectively the Turing test, and Google won't pass it.
| corille wrote:
| The way I read it, this is aimed at derivative texts that were
| scraped from other sites. If Google indexes those sites, they
| can recognize when the content of a newly indexed site is
| copied from elsewhere.
| rchaud wrote:
| Most of the blogspam on the Internet today are website filled
| with product 'reviews' and affiliate links. These aren't
| derivative of anything, so they won't be downgraded. Neither
| will the hordes of blogs breathlessly reporting celebrity and
| business gossip. A search engine won't be able to
| differentiate between the quality of a TMZ vs say Variety.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| It's worse than a Turing test: it's trying to distinguish
| between a honest human (writing content they are knowledgeable
| about or that is original) vs a dishonest human (who writes
| filler content just to get a higher ranking). It would almost
| need to be able to read the author's mind to figure out their
| intention. Or, given a text, figure out if what it is saying is
| original and/or true.
| visarga wrote:
| No, they are trying to distinguish between content that is
| going to make $ for them vs content that is not going to make
| $. They don't care about truth or utility.
| gambler wrote:
| This is just 2nd order gaslighting. For many, many years Google
| was denying obvious problems with how their search system worked.
| Denial and gaslighting was clearly their marketing strategy. It
| kind of worked too, at least in terms of public opinion in tech
| space. Now something has changed and they're suddenly pretending
| to care. Problem is, this effectively gaslights people about
| their prior gaslighting.
|
| Why was the company blatantly denying obvious issues for so many
| years? What has changed? Why should I trust their judgment all of
| a sudden?
|
| It's kind of like someone who is a pathologic liar having been
| caught in various lies for many years, swearing to tell you the
| truth, but not admitting to the past lies.
| jsnell wrote:
| Can you give a few concrete examples of these "blatant
| denials"?
| TedShiller wrote:
| lol
| wilde wrote:
| It's great to hear them admit that there is a problem. For years
| we'd get "our internal quality measures say we're doing great.
| You're imagining things. Fuck off to Bing and see how you like
| it."
|
| I suspect they have an inventory problem, not a ranking problem.
| Why would any real humans publish publicly on the internet at
| this point?
|
| If you're posting for fun you have to deal with moderation and
| stolen content.
|
| If you're posting for pay Google just takes your content and
| shoves it onto the SERP, skipping your ads.
|
| Bill Gates had it right. If you want a sustainable ecosystem, you
| need to make sure the other players are making more money than
| you in aggregate. As far as I can tell, that's only true on the
| internet for eCommerce and so that's all that's left.
| dzonga wrote:
| google search getting worse day by day.
|
| and they're increasing surface area for the results to become
| more garbage.
|
| what are trusted experts ? does google wanna be a publisher now ?
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| What reading the post suggests to me is that they are identifying
| high quality chunks of content as unique, and then ranking pages
| up or down in part according to what was seen to have published a
| given chunk first.
| dmix wrote:
| > Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending
| and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your
| existing audience?
|
| This is something youtube should be updating their algorithm for
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I am so sick and tired of sites that have a bunch of filler
| content in them just to appear higher in search results. You
| search for something, say "How to change a light bulb" and you
| get all this front loading with sections on "what is a light
| bulb?" "Why do light bulbs need changing?" "Picking a light bulb"
| and then finally the answer.
|
| Maybe a search engine that could prioritize getting to the point
| would be good.
| byteduck wrote:
| I've found that DDG (and by some extension, Bing) seems to do a
| little bit better at this. But, the only search engine I've
| found that actually does a _good_ job at this is Kagi. It 's
| really good at filtering out those SEO spam articles, and even
| separates out stuff like listicles when it's not what you're
| looking for.
| [deleted]
| skilled wrote:
| I mean, I have seen some really funky articles relating to what
| you said - articles that are ranking on page one.
|
| I was looking up some niche stuff in JavaScript space, and the
| article started out with a sentence:
|
| _" An increasing number of developers are looking to get
| started with web development. And because of this, they are
| searching to get started with <a fairly complex topic to grasp
| for a beginner>."_
|
| Sooo.... developers are looking to get started with
| development...
|
| And like you say, the same goes for all the "What is a <topic>"
| - feels like a fundamental error on Google's part for parsing
| language intent.
| rchaud wrote:
| Basic queries like "how to change a light bulb" are better
| answered on Youtube; it's not 1995 anymore, a web page
| explaining that with text and pictures is slower than creating
| a video. The only ones still writing web pages for things like
| that are trying to sell you something. If they weren't, they'd
| also just make a video.
| albrewer wrote:
| > Basic queries like "how to change a light bulb" are better
| answered on Youtube
|
| Hard disagree. If the best content for the problem is a
| video, then sure, bubble that up to the top of the search
| results. But to limit yourself to only one medium is
| ridiculous.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| it may be faster to create a video but it is faster for me to
| skim through and read and determine if it is relevant than it
| is to sit through a preroll ad, skim through the video, wait
| for the video to load, find the part that is relevant but I
| skipped ahead into the middle, so I have to skip back and
| wait for that to load again, then a midroll ad shows up. ugh.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| "better for you" != "better for everyone"
|
| People have very different preferences in the format of
| content they consume.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Completely disagree. Videos take forever. Often times I have
| a specific query and text is easier to search than
| information within videos.
| xpe wrote:
| Most people want a search engine designed to understand what they
| want in context.
|
| But until people pay for that search capability directly, the
| economic incentives will not align.
|
| And there is the ever present temptation of accepting money from
| advertisers. This is potentially lucrative. Will consumers ever
| pay enough directly to offset seller interests to sway search
| results? I doubt it under the current regulatory framework.
|
| We need changes.
|
| Some people (policy people and economists mostly) know about
| Ronald Coase. One of his key points is we can rebalance who has
| the upper hand at the beginning of a market (initial conditions)
| and still have economic efficiency.
|
| Coase's classic analysis compares two hypothetical worlds. In one
| world, smoking is legal and non-smokers have to compensate
| smokers in order to have a smoke free experience. In the other
| world the opposite is true. Both worlds can be completely
| economically efficient (defined as the equilibrium where there
| are no additional exchanges that make all parties better off).
| The difference between the worlds is purely distributional -- who
| gets to have more money.
|
| Distributional questions have a considerable ethical component.
| Like most people, I prefer the second over the first.
|
| Regulation could also similarly apply to search engines. We could
| tilt the balance in favor of consumers instead of sellers (in the
| case of public companies, this means investors).
|
| What am I proposing? Simply put: more discussion about such
| options.
|
| I will not try specify the best legislation for all situations in
| this already long comment. This does _not_ mean no significant
| improvements are possible nor feasible. I simply do not want to
| get mired in debate over only one policy option.
|
| ---
|
| About me: I listen to good libertarian style arguments as long as
| they are realistic about the standard economic model's
| limitations and failure modes: externalities, market power,
| imperfect information, nonrational consumers, and so on. / I lean
| liberal, so I care about transition costs too. Rapid change is
| hard because people have limited geographic mobility, especially
| in the short run. I also care about observable, measurable
| opportunities more than only hypothetical talk about options.
| eric4smith wrote:
| More and More above the fold content is coming from google sites.
|
| That's not gonna change.
|
| Especially if you're searching for local services above the fold
| will be ads then maps listings.
|
| I get it. But that blog post is some 1984 shit. Hahaha.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> _We know people don't find content helpful if it seems like it
| was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers. So..._
|
| Back when "SEO" was new, I would read the Matt Cutts blog. He was
| head of "anti-spam." I remember thinking back then that anti-spam
| was an ignorant frame.
|
| Once Google gained importance, websites started trying to improve
| their rankings. That might mean migrating from Flash to HTML. It
| might mean meta-tags, content, keyword stuffing, link
| collecting... paying a consultant.
|
| Google's early view/advice seemed to be: "Just ignore rankings.
| You do your thing, makes your site as useful you can. We'll do
| our thing: judging your site algorithmically and deciding how to
| rank it." Websites intentionally trying to improve rankings was
| ipso facto spam. The very idea of SEO was spam.
|
| Naturally, cracks appeared. Flash and embedded images was an
| early one. Google's initial position was: "HTML is better for
| users." They thought websites should use clean HTML regardless of
| rankings. No contradictions need be confronted
|
| Once a two sided conversation starts, that crack becomes a wedge.
| It becomes clear that website owners don't care about the
| usability of plain html text. Usability doesn't matter until you
| have users... and users come from Google. The "language" of SEO
| continued developing in this disingenuous way. Google pretended
| to be giving tips about accessibility or content, that
| tangentially also improve rankings. Websites pretended that their
| keyword stuffing was about usability or whatnot.
|
| Google have been carrying this culture of euphemisation for
| almost 20 years now. Elephants stampede all over the meeting
| room. Everyone tries hard to pretend they don't hear the
| deafening trumpeting.
|
| Youtube is an even more extreme example. Google's algorithms,
| policies and processes throw an entire media industry around,
| while Google pretend these are just minor side effects, or that
| it isn't happening. The gaslighting is awful.
| kylecordes wrote:
| I agree with you, but Google also faces a perhaps impossible
| problem of how to detect good content on YouTube.
|
| They can look at how long people watch; but that ends up
| rewarding rambling pointless blather when a concise two minute
| video would be perfect.
|
| They can look at likes or subscribes, but that causes many
| wasted human lifetimes per day, of people saying and listening
| to pleading to click said buttons.
| bsedlm wrote:
| no longer true, a lot of videos have autogenerated captions.
| so that's a start, it's text, use text ranking techniques.
| gsatic wrote:
| They lost control long long ago. It's basically a Jurassic Park
| story at this stage.
| [deleted]
| thallukrish wrote:
| What if unique content is not the one I want?
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Good. I'm getting sick of adding -2022 and -best to my searches.
| The results are a wasteland...
| jfoster wrote:
| That's a super interesting approach to culling the spam, since
| web spammers often are trying to make old content look new.
| Does it work well?
| pcdoodle wrote:
| YMMV. It seems like google only lists "authoritative" domains
| on the first few pages. Tried to fight the brightest TV by
| nits / mcd/m3 and that trick didn't work for me :(
|
| Sometimes adding "reddit" helps.
| entwife wrote:
| Google's advantages are PageRank, a head start (time), and its
| sheer size.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's good that they recognize Search has become a cesspool, but
| their incentives fundamentally don't align with users. One of the
| things that makes content farms suck is advert-delimited
| paragraphs, and I don't see Google downranking those sites while
| they are taking a cut from the delimiters.
| kylecordes wrote:
| AI content writing tools are now staggeringly good at producing a
| huge volume of pointless text, for incrementally $0.00 per word -
| previously the nonzero cost per word of hiring the lowest-cost
| writer available, was at least a little bit of drag on the whole
| Internet filling with pointless content.
|
| Google has a giant hard problem to solve here. I hope they are
| successful.
|
| If they aren't successful, it could be a door opening for someone
| else to take a stab at search.
| politelemon wrote:
| > tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for
| ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform
| people
|
| By my understanding, this should _hopefully_ cause Pinterest
| pages to disappear from image searches too, but by my experience,
| they 're a big site so Google will have made an exception for
| them.
|
| And it should likely deal with those StackOverflow 'clone' sites
| which sometimes rank better than StackOverflow itself.
| freediver wrote:
| The more accurate title would be "Less content by robots".
|
| Unfortunately, what is not mentioned in the article is that sole
| existence of these content-farms is enabled by Adsense. So
| basically they are in the chicken and egg problem, and the only
| way to really solve it is to acknowledge that ad-based business
| models lead to detoriation of content on the web, get rid of
| Adsense (probably miniscule revenue contribution compared to
| Adwords) and then figure out how they resolve their own business
| model incentives and outcomes for users. Tough one.
| dmix wrote:
| These Google search blogs NEVER honestly talk about the
| problems or their (alleged) solutions.
|
| You basically have to act as a mind-reading translator to
| understand what they actually did.
| nyxtom wrote:
| Flash back to 1998 when Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page when they
| said an ad-supported model will never be able to rank quality
| content. Seems like they almost realize it
|
| > "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial
| search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising
| business model do not always correspond to providing quality
| search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one
| of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular
| Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great
| detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a
| cell phone while driving. This search result came up first
| because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank
| algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web
| [Page, 98].
|
| > It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for
| showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the
| page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
| type of reason and historical experience with other media
| [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines
| will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from
| the needs of the consumers."
| [deleted]
| whage wrote:
| Reading through the comments here (and very much feeling the pain
| they describe), this idea came: Shouldn't we have a search engine
| that heavily favours the types of websites that we typically look
| for? You know, the classic 90s style tech blogs, the plain HTML
| documentation pages. Ignoring websites with ads, sites with lots
| of baggage (fonts, scripts, whatnot), sites with lots of images.
| Maybe increase the ranking of pages that don't change much in
| their look and content as time goes by. I don't know. Would it be
| useful? How would it pay for itself?
| powerhour wrote:
| Remember Hotbot? They had a way to limit searches to those that
| used JavaScript. ha!
|
| https://wikieducator.org/File:Hotbot.gif
| superkuh wrote:
| millionshort.com used to be good but it recently joined the
| mega-corp search pack and hid it's search engine behind
| required code exectution that blocks non-megacorp browsers.
|
| https://searchmysite.net/ is a curated search for exactly what
| you describe though. It's been on HN a couple times.
| rchaud wrote:
| What you're describing is an internet that hasn't existed since
| 2006, or whenever Jquery and Ajax started becoming mainstream.
|
| Sites containing "fonts and scripts" are not baggage. They have
| just been updated for modern times. Sites have to measure
| traffic somehow, and it's not going to be via a "Guest Counter"
| widget like they had back in the Geocities days.
|
| You might be looking for an alt-web like that hosted on the
| Gemini network. It's all text and HTML-only as I understand.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I infer that there is a point after all to having my extensive
| personal library.
| s1k3s wrote:
| > More helpful product reviews written by experts
|
| This translates to "more YT videos made by our content-creators",
| right? Searching for "macbook pro m2 reviews" gives me 5 YT
| videos at the top, all repeating the same stuff over and over
| again and (no offense) made by people who aren't really experts.
| Or are they?
| lloyddobbler wrote:
| It's the internet. Everyone is an expert!
|
| (/s, if it wasn't blatantly obvious.)
| s1k3s wrote:
| What's funny in this specific search for macbook reviews is
| that the well known websites which really have interesting
| information AND dig deep in the product specs AND have been
| there for more than 2 decades are not even on the front page.
| It's literally just the ones repeating the stuff I can find
| in Apple's landing page, but rephrased by some copywriter.
| rchaud wrote:
| Tech reviews online are largely useless. Just like the "shocked
| face" thumbnail, reviewers have realized that their viewers
| want entertainment more than they want a review. So the video
| largely ends up being an infomercial with a lot of product
| shots, rehashing of specs and largely generic opinions.
| okumurahata wrote:
| On YouTube, there is an option called "Don't recommend channel".
| I wonder why Google doesn't have a similar option. Or even
| better, a "Recommend me this website as the first option" button.
| It would useful to avoid spammy sites and to benefit the good
| ones. To avoid gaming the algorithm, Google can't take this data
| into account to benefit/punish websites on search results. The
| button has the only purpose to customise the user experience one
| by one. Over time though, and organically, spammy sites would get
| less traffic. Eventually, they would be forced to shut down (lack
| of ad revenue).
| Youden wrote:
| Kagi has this feature. You can mark websites to prioritise for
| your results and websites to demote or completely exclude.
| visarga wrote:
| That's great, until they decide to nix it or you want to
| migrate your list to another search engine. I wish we could
| decouple these choices from the website providers. A web
| browser that puts the user back in control.
| xzjis wrote:
| There is no reason to think that a paid search engine like
| Kagi will get rid of one of it's signature functionality,
| but if you're interested in an extension for browser:
| https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| The "Don't recommend channel" feature on YouTube is not
| permanent, but the blocked channel will reappear after a while.
| shortformblog wrote:
| Anecdotally, my level of daily traffic from organic search
| (driven by evergreen history articles on esoteric topics) has
| roughly doubled from where it was a month ago and is at a
| significantly higher level than it's been over the past year.
| Looking further back in history it seems there was a dip after
| the spring of 2020 that largely has defined my search-based
| traffic levels since then, and the traffic from search has
| largely bounced back in the past two weeks.
|
| While it's still early, I will say that I'm seeing better results
| from a variety of search results, whereas I had 2-3 consistent
| search performers that drove most of the traffic prior to the
| recent change.
|
| Just the perspective from someone who runs a long-running tech-
| meets-history newsletter.
| nicbou wrote:
| Mine dipped slightly, to the level of a year ago. It looks like
| it might have been bumped again this week. It's undeniably
| genuine, original, quality content. However I don't know how _a
| machine_ reads and scores my content. Given the stuff YouTube
| thinks I like, I 'm scared.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Hopefully this helps when looking for genuine product reviews /
| suggestions.
|
| The only way to get half-decent reviews at the moment is to
| append "reddit" to your search query, otherwise you get pages
| full of comparatives that haven't tested any of the items they
| recommend.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before Reddit stops
| caring and allows more and more bots, content farms, or paid
| posts on their platform.
| peyton wrote:
| Got bad news for you... it's a huge outlet for content
| writers.
| yunohn wrote:
| I don't know what "Reddit stops caring" means. Currently most
| moderation is done by an insular unpaid group of redditors.
| There is already lots of stealth promotion/ad posts,
| astroturfing, and trust issues. There is not inherent way to
| fix the inevitable breakdown, it's a societal problem of
| greed and dishonesty, and you can't easily just "ban bots".
| paulgb wrote:
| I'm mostly worried that they'll disable the "old.reddit.com"
| trick to get the old layout. Finding information in reddit
| threads is a complete chore with the new design, which only a
| few comments displayed at a time.
| skilled wrote:
| Well, I am excited to see the impact of this.
|
| These days there is no shortage of tools that monitor SERP
| fluctuation, and if this update brings about _significant_ impact
| it will be talked about everywhere.
|
| And I fully expect spammers to go ballistic once their content
| gets obliterated.
| rchaud wrote:
| If anything, spammers are years ahead of Google.
|
| Did they go ballistic when Google introduced the Panda update
| in 2010, killing many of the the web-scraped, machine-generated
| blogspam that was poisoning search results? No, they moved on
| to fresh territory like Youtube, gaming the recommendation
| engines. And they eventually came back to the web to poison
| results with hordes of awful 'best bicycle for fitness in 2022'
| type afilliate marketing sites.
| mclightning wrote:
| Adding "site:reddit.com" improves search results by 10 folds in
| many topics.
| nfhshy68 wrote:
| > More helpful product reviews written by experts
|
| You mean content farms? Oh yea, more of that please.
| bradhilton wrote:
| For medical advice I would see more serious articles/blog posts
| in search results and fewer listicles.
|
| For meal recipes I would _just_ like to see the recipe and not a
| blog post with dozens of ads.
|
| For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just
| scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run
| by software developers they have to know about this problem lol.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's funny, I've had almost embarrassing success building a
| trivial recipe filter for my search engine. The code itself is
| comically simple[1], I just count how many recipe-words I find
| (from a manual dictionary), and then add a small penalty for
| excessively lengthy texts. Very much a soviet space pencil
| approach. It's hard to assess recall, but the precision seems
| to be in the 80%+ range.
|
| Check it:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scallops&profile=f...
|
| [1]
| https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/branc...
| bradhilton wrote:
| NICE! I like it, thanks for sharing!
| rchaud wrote:
| > For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not
| a blog post with dozens of ads.
|
| Why not just buy a cookbook? It doesn't seem like the
| convenience of accessing recipes at the touch of a button is
| worth the tradeoff of ads.
| powerhour wrote:
| > For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that
| just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a
| company run by software developers they have to know about this
| problem lol.
|
| This fact alone tells me they're not willing to take search
| result quality seriously. I'm sure medical professionals feel
| the same way about relevant content that is scraped and
| republished.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > Next week, we'll launch the "helpful content update" to tackle
| content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking
| well in search engines rather than to help or inform people. This
| ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality
| content doesn't rank highly in Search, and our testing has found
| it will especially improve results related to online education,
| as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related
| content.
|
| I know Google isn't going to reveal the exact secrets behind what
| changes they're making to do this to avoid black hat SEO, but
| haven't they been trying to do the above all along? What stops
| the SEO community from observing how rankings change, guessing
| what the new metrics are, and then optimising for these metrics
| as usual until the search spam is back where it started?
|
| What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment
| on if a page was helpful? A big reason imo that Googling for
| "reddit <search term>" works is that spammy stuff on social sites
| (including Hacker News) gets punished quickly by spam filters,
| down-votes and negative comments - regular Google search lacks
| that because people can't down-vote or comment on a page. It
| feels inevitable to me they'll have to start doing something like
| this.
| dazc wrote:
| There is no incentive to arranging a downvoting scheme targeted
| against a random poster on HN or Reddit, there is, however, a
| great incentive to do the same against a commercial competitor
| in Google search results.
|
| Negative seo is a thing and any commercial site that is
| remotely successful is targeted with it daily.
| layer8 wrote:
| > What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a
| comment on if a page was helpful?
|
| Difficult for such a system not to be gamed, e.g. via botnets.
| seanwilson wrote:
| What stops Reddit from being gamed like this? How does the
| "reddit <search term>" trick on Google return good results in
| a way that isn't being gamed?
|
| I'm not saying it's as simple as adding an up/down vote
| widget next to each Google search result, but what can Google
| do to compete with social sites here where social sites have
| a lot of rich signals about what users prefer? There's no way
| to weigh or moderate each up/down vote based on how reliable
| the source is? What stops Hacker News, Reddit and Slashdot
| being overrun with spam from bot votes?
| Spivak wrote:
| And difficult for the system to not be gamed by brigadiers.
|
| Also voting is an extremely skewed signal, what people say
| they like and what they actually like are very different and
| with search you can actually measure that by seeing which
| results users actually go to and don't bounce from.
| layer8 wrote:
| I wonder about the bouncing, because I often either (1)
| check out a couple more results, only to find that they
| aren't better than the first acceptable one, or (2) open
| the first ten or so promising search result in new tabs in
| one go before looking at the actual pages. Google can only
| make limited inferences about result quality from that,
| meaning that its ratings become skewed toward less
| sophisticated users.
| kristaps wrote:
| Could it be that the results have gotten so bad that less people
| even bother with search, hurting ad revenue?
| sebow wrote:
| How does "more original content" doesn't sound like potential
| shitty results for a given query? We've already seen tailoring
| doesn't work universally and people often times want concrete
| results.
| coding123 wrote:
| https://devrant.com/rants/4578894/holy-shit-google-nobody-li...
| alecco wrote:
| Remember the original gmail horrible emojis? They were also
| sort of blobs with wide bottoms. But they eventually changed to
| something closer to normal.
| https://search.brave.com/images?q=gmail++emojis
| smolder wrote:
| I believe you mean "wonderful emojis". I'd rather use the
| blobs.
| ikeserbestian wrote:
| Nice, I just realize I am not alone. Plus, their "material
| design" is another graphical catastrophe. I can't look any
| Google product because of this, notably Android.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Corporate Memphis is so awful.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Can't decide what I hate more: the pandering or the
| infantalization or the forced cheerfulness of it all.
| alecco wrote:
| Smile or Die https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
| emptyparadise wrote:
| No wonder people are getting jokerfied.
| throwaway1851 wrote:
| For me, it's the nightmarish distortion of everyone's form.
| Big sites have become a bad acid trip you can't wake up
| from.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Fitting. Corporations don't see us as real people anyway
| now. Just an amorphous collection of wallets and
| monetizable data.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I'm cynical Google will be able to truly fix this or even want
| to.
|
| I think Google is part of a cartel; their search funnels people
| to sites that run ads that often are part of the Google network.
| Yes, they make a ton from search advertising but also a ton from
| the greater network.
|
| This is really the Mob boss cracking down on underlings who have
| gone over the line and are collecting too much protection money
| or are cutting the "goods".
| pushkine wrote:
| Many creators have noticed that YouTube's recommendation
| algorithm is heavily skewed to favor videos with monetization
| enabled. I wouldn't be surprised if Google Search's algorithm
| was hard coded to favor websites using AdSense.
| seydor wrote:
| The fact that this is news, is news.
| [deleted]
| throwaway290 wrote:
| The fact that the fact that this is news is news, is news.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I was sure they announced Big Plans years ago to combat content
| farms, to the point of e.g. browser add-ons so you could report
| these things. Either they just didn't work and the content
| farms outsmarted them, or they stopped caring. But it does feel
| to me like Google was a lot stricter 5-10 years ago than they
| are now.
|
| In the interim they tried to push AMP, but had to admit finally
| that it's more to keep people inside their ecosystem than make
| the web faster/better.
| dazc wrote:
| In a year's time you'll still be reading the same complaints
| about search quality though for the simple inescapable fact
| that there is little incentive for anyone to write impartial
| and authoritative reviews for anything that is isn't just a
| random hobby.
|
| What you may witness is less amazon affiliate posts and more
| made for AdSense posts - such as those recipes that begin with
| a random love story, for example.
| plonk wrote:
| I like to write impartial and authoritative reviews for
| things that aren't just a random hobby of mine. Especially on
| anonymous forums. This could be good, or it could make
| advertisers start spamming forums with more fake accounts.
| stabbles wrote:
| Sure enough original, quality content will be generated by AI
| paganel wrote:
| A little OT, but is there a name for that design style that
| Google is using here? I'm talking about the bearded dude at the
| top of the article, with glasses and a phone in his hand.
|
| I've seen it more and more during the last few years, from ads
| around the city I live in to hipsterish magazines. There's
| something about it that has started bugging me the wrong way, I
| find it kind of infantilising but at the same time trying to
| "sell" me something as an adult (an insurance product, a "life is
| good" vibe because goofy drawings, that sort of thing). Or maybe
| I'm seeing too much into it.
|
| Later edit: I'm talking about visuals like this one [1], which,
| looking at it again, I find quite similar in style to the one
| Google is using (hence my question, there must be a trend or
| something).
|
| [1] https://www.reginamaria.ro/sites/default/files/inline-
| images...
| dilap wrote:
| It's reminiscent of socialist realism -- with a modern, tech
| twist. The favored art-style of woke companies. It's their
| vision of utopia: a rainbow of skin tones, but everyone
| belonging to the same global monoculture.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Well at least we made it past the white woman eating salad
| stock-photo phase
| cma wrote:
| Reminds me of the hyper capitalist predecessor to corporate
| memphis:
|
| http://clipart-library.com/data_images/177477.png
|
| Guys in baggy suits and ties running through fields. You
| probably remember it from things like manual covers of
| scanners and stuff.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| There's something very ominous about this kind of art.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I'd rather look at socialist realism. Soviet propaganda feels
| a lot more genuine than these weird corporate caricatures.
| asddubs wrote:
| I've known it as alegria, see also this subreddit collecting
| examples:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckalegriaart/
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Corporate Memphis
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
| gempir wrote:
| Corporate Art Style, also referred to as Big Tech Art Style,
| Globohomo Art Style and Corporate Memphis.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Globohomo Art Style lol. That's what I'll call it from now
| on.
| civilized wrote:
| The name seems a gift to right-wing critics.
| rchaud wrote:
| generic stock art and iconography has right-wing critics?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Globohomo means global homogeneity, even if some right
| wingers seem to think it means...something else lol
| [deleted]
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Thanks Google. Now can we fix the recipes pages please.
|
| No one wants the back story for the "the best brownies", I want
| to know the ingredients, cooking temps (Celsius and Fahrenheit)
| and time.
| planb wrote:
| I feel like these "back stories" will get even more important
| for a high ranking if Google prioritizes "content by people,
| for people"
| yunohn wrote:
| Google doesn't write recipes, dedicated and passionate cooks
| write blogs with recipes in them.
|
| I guarantee you that none of them are aiming to provide just a
| grocery list or instructions, they definitely enjoy writing
| their story as well. They're building their own cookbook
| essentially, not a bunch of lists.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Or, more likely, they are just SEO optimising by providing a
| lot of prose (which Google has historically prioritised in
| search rankings) - the same way as all those AI-generated
| article summaries on the astroturfing sites
| yunohn wrote:
| How do you propose anyone (Google or humans) differentiate
| between 500 mostly-similar recipes for brownies? I think
| HNers look at food blogs with a very depressing robotic
| expectation.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| How is picking the one with the longest word count the
| best ??
| Andys wrote:
| I am sorry, but I believe you are mistaken. Recipe sharing
| worked one way for all of history until it became profitable
| to game the search engines by adding story-like content.
| yunohn wrote:
| Could you source anything that proves this? I've always
| seen personalised stories with recipes, save for barebones
| websites that are aggregators and not personal blogs. Maybe
| consider food writing the same as technical writing? Nobody
| wants to read a dev blog with just snippets of code, they
| want the story too!
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| imagine stackoverflow came with a backstory when you
| googled "javascript http post" ! Same with "best brownies
| recipe"
| yunohn wrote:
| There are lots of recipe aggregators that are similar to
| your stackoverflow needs. You should compare a dev blog
| post to a food blog.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| @yunohn ? You think ppl searching for 'food blog stories
| outweighs' the people searching for food recipes?
|
| Im honesty asking since. In my mind (i could very well be
| wrong). I. would think there are more ppl interested in
| 'how to make Great brownies' , then there are ppl
| searching for 'the backstory of the great brownie recipe'
| ?
|
| Yet the results i get from my searches are more inline
| with if i searched for backstory of recipes.
|
| Hell maybe im just searching with the wrong keywords ??
| yunohn wrote:
| No, I'm saying Google doesn't make the internet. Content
| creators want to add their own story and vibe to a simple
| recipe. You are free to use recipe aggregators that
| don't, or make your own content?
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| This !
| equalsione wrote:
| I _think_ OP is referring to the fact that most sites are
| forced into writing really long form posts because the format
| is "encouraged" by Google.
|
| I don't know the ins and outs but my understanding is that if
| you don't follow the Google format then you recipe drops way
| down in Google search results.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| No, they're forced into long form posts because recipes
| _cannot be copyrighted_. By adding a story you get
| something with copy rights.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| IANAL but wouldn't you just get a copyright on the story
| and somebody could still extract all the necessary
| information for preparing the meal and publish it as a
| simple recipe?
| mikro2nd wrote:
| IANAL either, but I believe that, yes, you could do just
| that. Of course you'd not have any copyright... :)
|
| TBH I'm not entirely clear why the issue is so important
| to the people who publish these things, but clearly _it
| is_!
| rchaud wrote:
| Why would they care about copyright? The sites these
| recipes sit on are ad-funded. Copyright would matter if
| they were selling these as books, not for free online
| where anybody can copy it, save it as a PDF etc.
| bspammer wrote:
| Google created the incentives that led to the current state
| of recipe pages.
| [deleted]
| Shorel wrote:
| And with the possibility of having the measures in metric.
|
| Otherwise, it is almost useless for most of the world.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Exactly ! I feel double mad when reading metrics/measurements
| in non metric format
|
| 1) Im mad cause now i need to google a convert query and
| author assumes the world is only full of U.S.A ppl
|
| 2) Mad cause I should know approximate conversion value,
| since I *think/claim" to be not a stupid person.
|
| Both of the are usually false, in my case at least
| addandsubtract wrote:
| I like how you said "possibility", as if 3/8th of a cup
| wasn't a good enough measurement.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Lol cant tell if you serious or trying to get my temper up
| to 75 Farhenheit :p
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| We don't need an update. We need a rollback.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| We need to roll back a lot more than just Google.
| [deleted]
| emptyparadise wrote:
| It got so bad that I'm actually taking my own notes on topics
| again and trying to build up a personal knowledge database. Maybe
| it's not such a bad thing...
| powerhour wrote:
| A tool that records the sites you visit and makes their content
| searchable locally would be pretty nifty. It'd be a MITM, which
| isn't awesome, but if it's not a managed service that might not
| be so bad.
| plonk wrote:
| You'd need something like RSS to only download the useful
| contents. You could probably same a few forums' contents on a
| 500GB SSD if you stuck to text and used an efficient format.
| devX3 wrote:
| I'm unsure if I could keep up with something like this with my
| daily workload/workflow where I already have to document so
| much.
| jonasdegendt wrote:
| Make sure to go full circle by publishing your notes on a blog
| and start ranking!
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I bet I could make it to the front page of HN if I blogged
| about my notes on taking notes. Everyone loves that sort of
| thing.
| TOMDM wrote:
| HN is more of a notes of writing software for taking notes,
| but hey I'm sure people here would be happy to branch out.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I don't know, articles about zettelkasten get a lot of
| love: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zettelkasten
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I have to append site:reddit.com before most queries now.
|
| Health and medical queries are the worst. The top results
| literally have the same generic content.
| plonk wrote:
| You don't want medical advice from reddit though. At least
| the university websites are trustworthy enough to decide if
| you need to see a doctor.
|
| Maybe a no-filler health info website could be viable if it
| spread by word of mouth and not via Google. After a while it
| should become well-ranked on Google anyway, like Wikipedia or
| StackOverflow. Getting it to that point is a chicken-and-egg
| problem though.
| mib32 wrote:
| I think it's quite clear: when I search for something, what I
| want to see, it's people arguing with each other on my topic of
| search, and I want to read their various arguments, and make my
| decision.
|
| This is why I like HN and artisan forums so much, or even Reddit.
|
| Google could do just one thing - prioritize giving out the
| discussions of real people. But they just don't wanna do it
| apparently
| potamic wrote:
| The last couple of years have seen renewed interest in the search
| space and a lot of new comers in the market targeting the content
| search vacuum left behind by Google. Looks like they are finally
| waking up to the threat and ramping up their public relations.
| Too late Google, too late. Your veiled, corporate attempt at
| building a narrative around your product is not going to work. I
| have burnt many a neuron over the years using your product over
| and acquired an unrelenting PTSD from you. Thankfully I have
| found a cure and can breakup with you finally. You have a good
| one.
| aembleton wrote:
| You've acquired PTSD from using Google search? Did you ever use
| Yahoo search?
| iamjbn wrote:
| Just wait until cheap to write GPT3 articles learn SEO techniques
| inherently and bombard the internet suppressing human writers in
| the spam ocean. At https://aquila.network we're always thinking
| of this scenario.
| rchaud wrote:
| Quora annswers basically read like GPT-3 if it were trained
| exclusively on recipe websites.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Reminds me of
|
| https://xkcd.com/810/
| paxys wrote:
| I expect these changes will lead to a brief period where the
| quality of search results will get better, but then will be
| quickly reversed engineered and gamed by "SEO experts" bringing
| us right back to where we are. This is a fight Google simply
| cannot win.
| superkuh wrote:
| Google Search only ever returns <400 results. Never any more.
| Apparently Google considers this fine. So, RIP Google Search
| 1998-2019, apparently.
|
| If google search really wants to improve results all they
| actually have to do is let people _see_ the results instead of
| hiding them. 400 results is _not_ enough.
| nixcraft wrote:
| >Better ranking of original, quality content
|
| Hah. Just another day, someone sent me this link[1] which took
| images and text from my page[2] for the Google query "linux check
| disk space". Here is the thing my page doesn't even appear on
| Google. The ripped page points to the source[2] and has a link
| back to the original images. These scammers know how to game
| Google with their AI-driven sites, and they adopt it faster than
| Google rolling out new changes. I hope Google fix this issue.
|
| [1] Spam/scam page - http://blog.imm.cnr.it/content/linux-check-
| disk-space-comman...
|
| [2] Original my page published on 2016-01-23 -
| https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-check-disk-space-command...
|
| [3] Google search query -
| https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+check+disk+space
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| DMCA notices are unpopular with the crowd here, but when your
| content is plagiarized and other people are profiting off of
| your work, I'd recommend the following workflow:
|
| * Use Copyscape and perform automated plagiarized content
| detection.
|
| * Automate the sending of DMCA notices to Google and the
| website host (using captcha solving services, if necessary).
| account42 wrote:
| Yeah no, automated DMCA notices should never be a thing. The
| shoot first ask questions later mechanic of DMCA notices is
| bad enough but at least have the decency to verify the claims
| you are making.
| mianos wrote:
| As lame as it is, it's not really plagiarism when there is
| attribution, even if it is non obviously that URL at the top
| of the page.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| Attribution does not exempt an author from the need to get
| permission. Baring a few edge cases, such as fair use, a
| copying without permission is still a copyright violation,
| attribution or not.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement.
|
| "Plagiarism" is not a legal thing: it's not a crime
| codified in law and doesn't appear in laws [1]. Instead,
| usually it's a violation of some internal code, e.g. a
| school's or newspaper's policy of integrity. As you say
| indeed, usually these policies only consider something
| plagiarism if there is a lack of (clear) attribution.
|
| However copyright is encoded in law and copyright
| infringement is a crime. The linked page clearly violates
| the copyright of OP.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects
| yrro wrote:
| My Google experience would be improved immeasurably if there
| was a way for me to block domains after I decide I never want
| to see them in my search results again.
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
| yrro wrote:
| That looks great, thanks. Installing it now!
|
| I've been burned in the past by relying on extensions like
| these, which only work until Google change their HTML and
| then the extension author is (understandably) burned out
| and doesn't update the extension, and eventually I just
| give up and uninstall it... I'd be a lot happier if this
| was a core Google Search feature. But I understand that
| Google don't make money by blocking their (paying)
| customers (spammers who run ads) from their search results.
| blackshaw wrote:
| Google used to have this feature. Why did they remove it?
| dazc wrote:
| Because it was gamed.
| planb wrote:
| Then they should have simply ignored the signal, not
| canned the feature
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| You mean allow people to block Google properties in search?
| No way I guess.
| ctrlmeta wrote:
| Searching for Python API docs and getting w3schools and
| geeksforgeeks results is frustrating. Is there a solution to
| this problem? Maybe even a browser extension?
| yrro wrote:
| That one's easy if you use duckduckgo.
|
| !py urlunsplit
|
| redirects you to:
|
| https://docs.python.org/3/search.html?q=urlunsplit
| sitkack wrote:
| If you are searching for docs, then https://devdocs.io/
| might be better than a regular search engine.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Letting you blacklist a site is one thing. They could improve
| upon it by letting people downvote/upvote pages and then
| using their extensive information vault to decide who is
| somewhat reputable or just similar to you.
|
| I mean, I am 40 years old programmer/entrepreneur interested
| in sports and traditional board and card games. I like nice
| restaurants and hotels and even sometimes write Google
| reviews on them. I have my Gmail account since the beginning
| and I am paying YouTube and Google services customer. I am
| using Google phones since the Nexus. Google knows who I am,
| what I like, where I visit. It's pretty good at estimating
| revenue of my company. What about using the info for
| something useful for once and just show me pages people like
| me liked and don't show me pages people like me think are
| spam/scam? Please?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| That may sound promising on paper, but I give it at most 6
| months before an up/downvote manipulation SEO industry
| emerges and starts destroying any burgeoning improvements
| in the quality of search results.
| headsoup wrote:
| Not to mention anything even slightly political or
| divisive in nature will quickly become chaos.
| null_object wrote:
| Another poster has already suggested `uBlacklist` so I won't
| waste bandwidth by repeating the link, but I want to
| underline the utility of this extension, because it's
| _transformed_ my experience of using Google search for code
| problems.
|
| Before using this, I was finding the first page of my search
| results were overwhelmed with StackOverflow-scrapers, which
| returned SO answers reformatted into some sort of garbage and
| unreadable 'blog-post'.
|
| Nowadays, after blocking twenty/thirty/fifty(?) of these
| sites, I get to where I want as fast as I did 10 years ago.
| nicbou wrote:
| You can also use it to block paywalled and clickbait
| content. For example, you can safely ignore anything from
| cnet.com or digitaltrends.com. There's a few niche-specific
| sites in my blocklist.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Could you share the url list?
| NoMAD76 wrote:
| Also you can use this for uBlock https://letsblock.it
| nextaccountic wrote:
| What's the difference from letblockit to ublacklist? Is
| letblockit affiliated to ublock origin in some way?
| NoMAD76 wrote:
| Don't think they are affiliated, it's just something that
| I mainly use as a companion for uBlock to help me quickly
| generate filters etc.
| hurflmurfl wrote:
| There's a public ruleset for this:
| https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackoverflow-
| translatio...
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Nice!
|
| If anyone want to share other such lists, however
| subjective, I would be grateful
|
| edit: found another one,
| https://github.com/arosh/ublacklist-github-translation
| ape4 wrote:
| Of course, not the same but the Google News thing on Android
| lets you say you're not interested in this suggestion or
| don't show me this news source again.
| xthestreams wrote:
| cnr.it is a domain which belongs to the Italian Research
| Council, and that subdomain seems to be a blog by the Institute
| of Microelectronics and Microsystems.
|
| These are not scammers, it's probably an amateur researcher
| which published that information in a blog which is usually
| read by no-one. Probably it wasn't even meant to be public. But
| because of the prestige of the domain, it becomes first in
| relevant searches.
|
| If you track down the author and send him a quick mail, I'm
| 100% sure they'll help.
|
| I've worked at CNR.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Correct, it looks more like a page containing useful info for
| their users/students etc
|
| There are plenty of scam pages, but specifically this one
| doesn't look like it
| sph wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Research_Council_(Ita.
| ..
| pyb wrote:
| Still, it appears someone at CNR copy-pasted someone else's
| blog and published it as their own.
| oefrha wrote:
| No, the very first thing in the blog post is a link to the
| original, so it's highly unlikely they wanted to pretend to
| be the author.
|
| More like someone who didn't care much about copyright or
| license decided to back up information they found useful in
| their personal blog.
| jraph wrote:
| Honestly, a researcher should know better to not
| plagiarize or to give attribution better than that. This
| is core in their job. If they do exactly this in their
| papers, it's going to be bad for them and they know it.
|
| It's good they linked to the original post and that the
| link is the first thing we see, but nothing says that
| it's the source, and no paragraph explains that the
| content comes from elsewhere.
|
| I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted
| instead of just a link.
|
| I see no malicious intents, it's probably done in good
| faith, but meh.
|
| To the author: did you try to reach out? I'm sure
| something can be done about it if it bothers you. I
| expect the author of this copy to be receptive.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted
| instead of just a link.
|
| Quite possibly an easy way to preserve the content in
| case the original goes offline and to share it with
| colleagues. Perhaps they wanted to link to it from some
| long-lived or even printed material. Not saying it's the
| best way to do so, but it's plausible and not malicious.
| jraph wrote:
| It's plausible and not malicious, understandable too, but
| it's not hard to say it in a sentence at the beginning of
| the post.
|
| This is a public blog, not some internal website.
|
| Anyway, my previous comment probably sounds harsh because
| it is the way I wrote it (because I previously worked in
| a research lab, so I kinda feel disappointed), but I
| still consider this a minor fuck up and it happens to
| everyone, for sure.
| pyb wrote:
| That's utterly illegal though
| rchaud wrote:
| > it's probably an amateur researcher which published that
| information in a blog which is usually read by no-one.
|
| Ah, but this is the new method of SEO trickery and credential
| scamming. Publishing a 'guest post' on a high-ranking blog
| subdomain of a trusted instititution. There was a story of
| someone doing this on Harvard University's blogs, which I
| can't find right now.
|
| But I found something even better. An actual UpWork posting
| promising to publish your crap on Chapman.edu's university
| blog:
|
| https://www.upwork.com/services/product/5-high-da-
| dofollow-g...
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| FWIF, I get the original page as the first search result (and
| [0] as a "featured snippet" above it), and the crn.it page only
| as the third.
|
| [0] https://opensource.com/article/18/7/how-check-free-disk-
| spac...
| progre wrote:
| The traditional response when someone hotlinks your images is
| to goatse them.
| jraph wrote:
| This would be lame, here I'm sure the person who reposted
| this content is not malicious. A quick mail is nicer and less
| work.
|
| Sure, goatse people if they refuse to observe your requests
| if you feel like it.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Maybe the bootleg page could be a source of inspiration?
|
| It has a garbage/content ratio of 32 (the browser downloads 32
| bytes for every byte of content) while the original page has a
| 400 ratio (the browser downloads 400 bytes for every byte of
| content). It's borderline denial of service attack against the
| visitor.
|
| The original also has a slow aggressive cookie box that is
| unnecessary as visitors can be spied on using server logs, no
| need to have cookies for the spy infrastructure. The bootleg
| has no cookie box (though does set a couple of gratuitous
| cookies, and does load one gratuitous googleanalytics.js, so
| maybe it does the right thing in a non-compliant way).
|
| Maybe all these factor make the original page look "less good"
| to google quality ranking? (which would be ironic given
| Google's general leadership of the Orgy of Waste school of web
| design.) Also if google starts ranking such pages up they may
| expose themselves to class action lawsuits as users could ask
| for a refund for the power, hardware and telecom bills incurred
| in being lead to load them?
| gregw134 wrote:
| Plus, the original has an excessive amount of ads. I'm not
| surprised Google is ranking the other page higher.
| feanaro wrote:
| > Also if google starts ranking such pages up they may expose
| themselves to class action lawsuits as users could ask for a
| refund for the power, hardware and telecom bills incurred in
| being lead to load them?
|
| Sorry, but this is completely insane. Search engines should
| most certainly and definitely not ever be liable for linking
| to original sources for such a stupid reason. This American
| pro-litigious attitude has to stop.
| foota wrote:
| Americans aren't the ones forcing crazy things on internet
| companies these days.
| piva00 wrote:
| No, they are the ones allowing companies become such
| behemoths that other sovereign governments have to step
| in and rule over to keep some kind of data privacy for
| their citizens.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| To be fair, even though littered with ads the bootleg is
| indeed more pleasant. Bootleg the bootlegger.
| dash2 wrote:
| I count one advert on the original, and the page loaded
| instantly for me on my 10 year old laptop. What am I
| missing?
| naijaboiler wrote:
| I agree. The bootlegged version is more inviting to read.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| > Orgy of Waste school of web design
|
| What is this referring to?
| cerved wrote:
| Crappy angular apps
| beastman82 wrote:
| You had a great argument until the last sentence
| SNlMyhFioa wrote:
| I'm seeing your page above the "spam/scam" page.
| #2 cyberciti.biz #3 cnr.it
| [deleted]
| antirez wrote:
| Great content is often found in pages without their ADs. I don't
| buy it: they will hardly leave so many dollars on the table.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > With this update, you'll see more results with unique,
| authentic information, so you're more likely to read something
| you haven't seen before.
|
| This phrasing sets off a little alarm in the back of my brain.
| Overall, I agree with the intent of the update and I think Google
| is maybe internally realizing that their questionable search
| quality combined with legitimate and privacy-focused competitors
| (DDG, Neeva [1]) could turn into a serious and existential threat
| to them.
|
| That said, this is not quite the issue a lot of people have with
| Google search results. For me, when I search a movie for reviews,
| it's not that I want _new_ reviews to show up from smaller sites.
| It's that I don't want the whole screen filled with Google's own
| little special sideshow for movie reviews. I can easily see this
| becoming even more frustrating actually if I search for "x
| reviews" and rather than get the usual Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB,
| newspaper reviews, I get RandomGuy.com. If I want RandomGuy.com,
| that is actually what a social media-esque site like Rotten
| Tomatoes or Letterboxd is for, not a search engine.
|
| Hopefully this will be what we want it to be and not, for
| example, the TikTok-ization of Google search results, constantly
| and algorithmically showing you something "new."
|
| [1]: <rant> That said, the game is still very much for the taking
| and no one is still able to easily answer one of my most common
| queries for work: "python regex." Seriously, it feels like a
| battle to get a simple example showing how to use groups/named
| groups to extract specific information. I don't want a reference
| guide to common RegEx wildcards, I already know about \d and +! I
| don't want a toy example showing how to use RegEx for seeing if
| "rain" is in "The cat is in the rain" (that's using a hammer to
| kill a fly - you would just use "if rain in string" for example).
| I want a helpful and succinct guide on the specifics of Python's
| RegEx so I can stop fiddling with it ASAP! </rant>
| weystrom wrote:
| I wish they'd just un-screw the page ranking algorithm. The
| quality of search has been steadily going down for quite a while
| now due to spam getting better and better at SEO.
|
| I'm hopeful for this feature, but I'm not sure how scalable it
| can prove to be, to help manually rank pages for myriad of
| topics.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| It's baffling to me that if you search for "Best xxx", you get
| hundreds of pages only filled with paid ads as top products. How
| is any normal person able to make informed decisions like this.
| [deleted]
| alecco wrote:
| I don't buy it. Google search of basic programming concepts give
| almost always as top results sites like geeksforgeeks and other
| Indian proto-spam sites with very obnoxious sign-up floats
| covering up everything, while the content is almost copy pasted
| from docs or other sites. Google rarely gives you the official
| documentation or tutorials at the top. You have to restrict with
| site: (to the point I have "search engines" doing just that
| "site:").
|
| It seems there's a new one I haven't seen before called
| appdividend blog, from India too. And another one "DelftStack",
| allegedly from Netherlands (tweets from 2019 and weird lack of
| info). programiz, from Nepal (you have to dig to find it).
|
| What should these search pages give, in order: Official
| documentation, then Stack Exchange and similar, then real
| people's blogs, and at the very bottom on page 25 these spammy
| copy-n-paste sites/blogs.
|
| Google is full of developers, so they have to know about this but
| for some reason the company does nothing about it. Almost like
| the company is fully driven by ad revenue and doesn't want users
| to find actual content.
| infinityio wrote:
| It is a paid service, so probably not for everyone, but have
| you tried Kagi? It lets you 'pin' specific sites to the top,
| rank sites higher, rank sites lower, or block them entirely
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Cool, so will the relevant wiki page, which is almost certainly
| both the most linked to and most desired page for almost all
| "thing" searches, go back to being result #1 instead of buried
| under content farms, copyspam, and Medium trash?
| dannyw wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't run AdSense.
|
| Content farms run AdSense.
|
| Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core metrics.
| pas wrote:
| > Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core
| metrics.
|
| While this is almost trivially true based on what we know of
| (the world, big tech companies, Google in particular, etc),
| do we have direct supporting evidence for this?
| gregw134 wrote:
| This is just completely untrue.
| [deleted]
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Maybe we'll finally get recipe pages where the recipe isn't
| buried under 2000 words of drivel just to bump the SEO score
| gempir wrote:
| Bread recipe
|
| Well you see already in ancient rome they made bread this
| way...............
|
| [2 pages of story time]
|
| AD
|
| AD
|
| AD
|
| Ingredients separated by more Ads
| [deleted]
| tasuki wrote:
| Why not search Wikipedia directly?
| pushkine wrote:
| Remember when Facebook was at its peak around 2014 (innovation,
| popularity) then announced radical changes on its feed algorithm
| in like 2016 to prioritize content made by friends? ...
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Google used to have the ability to search for "discussions", no
| idea why they removed that.
|
| Nowadays I just append "site:reddit" to most of my queries
| (although I'm sure there's more and more paid/fake posts there as
| well)
| visarga wrote:
| I'd like more search filters like that, they should be
| composable with logic expressions. For example, "forums" or
| "eu" (all EU national domains, so you can find a product that
| is easy to ship), but you could extend it with page categories
| like "reviews", "recipes", "python", "js", "in/out_top_1m",
| "blogs", not to mention verticals like "shopping", "hotels",
| "tickets".
|
| Especially for the shopping category Google dropped the ball.
| When I am, wallet in hand, ready to buy a widget, why doesn't
| it do the best to help me find it? Isn't that the essence of
| search? Or just to search again and show more ads?
|
| Such a failure of experience to try to use Google. Behaves like
| the doctor who secretly wants people to be sick so he can have
| more business.
|
| But the writing is on the wall. Dialogue based search agents
| are coming, snippet based search is on the way out. The
| language models become better and better, they can even do sub-
| searches. The trend towards natural language based search is
| being accelerated by the mobile phones who lack proper
| keyboards and large screens.
| [deleted]
| account42 wrote:
| Using Corporate Memphis-style hero image for an article about
| "content by people, for people" has got to be someone at google
| trolling us. There is no way they can be this tone deaf.
| TOMDM wrote:
| This was my first thought too.
|
| C'mon Google put Imagen to work, I'm so over this art style.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Same, and with just about every tech corp using it, it gets
| old rather quick.
| nyxtom wrote:
| The entire revenue model for Google is not incentivized to rank
| quality content and what you are looking for. Low quality content
| is filled with ads. As an alternative to this, I've been using
| Kagi (https://kagi.com/) for a while and I love it
| firasd wrote:
| I'm not sure this whole drive towards 'original content' makes
| sense. It encourages people to make long rambling pages that
| don't get to the point
|
| In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was
| almost always the first result on various topics
|
| What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of
| oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly
| just filling up paragraphs for google like "so you want to learn
| about oranges? an orange is a great type of fruit. here's a bunch
| of text about oranges being described in historic literature"
| MicolashKyoka wrote:
| An AI trained on the body of verified human knowledge that
| understands natural language could replace a good deal of the
| googling done by people.
|
| In an ideal world, such an endeavor would be supported by
| governments all around the world (or a single "Earth
| government"), with yearly updates to keep up with the state of
| the art.
| darkwater wrote:
| You have just described the typical content-farm page created
| to game Google. I hope this update is going to lower the
| ranking of those pages (pages that usually have an ad every
| paragraph or more).
| hattmall wrote:
| Every site needs a commercialization score and a way to
| filter them down. Number of ads should be a dead give away,
| but that's antithetical to Google's business.
| darkwater wrote:
| Yeah, I was going to suggest the same: farm-factory sites
| are easily identifiable by the number of Ads, especially on
| the doubleclick.net domain. But maybe for Google in the
| long-run would be a net positive to ban those sites anyway,
| due to better "organic" results and how people will see
| Google results.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| yes, yes, and yes!
|
| I've started just closing the tab. I don't give a shit that a
| certain country planted oranges and it gave them naval
| superiority, I want to know what types of oranges there are!
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I hadn't thought that the reason they do this is to appear to
| have original content. It seems like distinguishing between the
| original source of information and a site that has a bunch of
| filler "original content" but just exists to
| republish/plagiarize some other site's content must be a
| difficult problem to solve.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| My impression is that this update is specifically about
| deranking those types of pages
| medion wrote:
| Encourages people to make long rambling pages which don't get
| to the point? Ever seen YouTube, it's exactly the same. 10-11+
| min videos saying almost nothing because it's the most
| lucrative length. The internet of today is just everyone gaming
| everything for a dollar.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| At least Youtube has a timeline (with sometimes even
| chapters) that let you jump ahead. The thumbnails are also a
| good indication on what type of content you can expect from a
| video.
| ciupicri wrote:
| Most YouTube junk does not even have a proper meaningful
| description, just some buzzwords for SEO.
| nichos wrote:
| Web pages have a timeline in the form of a scroll bar on
| the right
| dash2 wrote:
| Actually that's a cool idea, put a graph on the scroll
| bar which shows where most people spent their time, same
| as the Youtube widget.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Medium kinda does something like this by highlighting the
| most shared part. Alternatively, you can also use AI to
| summarize the text on web pages.
| rchaud wrote:
| In the case of Youtube, the video thumbnail itself is usually
| a strong enough signal as to whether it's worth watching.
|
| Enormous swathes of the platform are filled with gossip
| channels (politics, crypto, stonks, celebrities, music)
| hosted by clout chasers desperate to be seen as authorities
| on that topic.
|
| Of course there can be good content inside of these
| categories, but you can generally tell which channels are
| "optimized for engagement", i.e. run like a business, and
| those are more amateurish and perhaps more authentic.
| dalbasal wrote:
| The dissonance is between Google's native perception and
| external reality:
|
| _reality 1_ : The www exists. Google indexes it, analyzes it
| and delivers it to users. Users like certain things, like
| original content.
|
| _reality 2_ : Google's ranking policies/algorithms influence
| the web. The "original content" that exists in a world without
| Google is different to the content that exists in a world where
| Google ranks such web pages more highly.
|
| Google refuse to see or present themselves in the role that
| they actually occupy. They avoid thinking of the search
| algorithm as encouraging or discouraging anything. It's just
| analyzing.
|
| On youtube, This mindset is even more loopy, because on youtube
| they actually _own_ the platform. The recommendation engine or
| whatnot implements what is clearly a new policy, Youtube
| pretends that there was no policy to change in the first place.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Goodharts law
| jwie wrote:
| I think it's more that nobody knows the policy. It's all ML
| changes few people understand or can even communicate. I
| don't expect google would explain if they knew how it worked,
| but they also cannot explain how their technology works.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Google refuse to see or present themselves in the role
| that they actually occupy. They avoid thinking of the search
| algorithm as encouraging or discouraging anything. It's just
| analyzing._
|
| Can you clarify what you mean by this?
|
| As an outside observer, it seems that Google recognizes that
| their search engine does have a "Heisenberg" effect akin to
| _" measurements of certain systems cannot be made without
| affecting the system"_
|
| E.g. the Google search ranking causes the rise of content
| farms. Google then fights back with a new revision to the
| algorithm to downrank them. That constant arms race between
| various blackhat SEO and Google's new algorithms was
| commented on many times by Matt Cutts (Google former head of
| search quality): https://hn.algolia.com/?q=matt+cutts
|
| Another example is the RapGenius punishment by Google to
| discourage content that tries to game the algorithm: https://
| www.google.com/search?q=rapgenius+penalty+google+ran...
|
| Google often makes manual human intervention e.g. M Cutts
| team telling HN they're looking into RapGenius SEO hack:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6956658
|
| Are those are not examples of Google understanding its effect
| on internet content that tries to game their algorithm?
|
| I think the issue is that Google's algorithm isn't perfect --
| and therefore it appears like they don't discourage bad
| content.
| dalbasal wrote:
| OK..
|
| In a sense, I am overstating. Having an anti-spam team is
| obviously a recognition that SEO/Spam exists and that
| Google is trying to discourage or mitigate.
|
| But Google is well beyond just attracting spam. Success in
| Google search rankings is, for many sites, the better part
| of online success. If Google ranks needlessly wordy recipes
| more highly than concise & useful recipes... then wordy
| recipes get _written_. It 's not about ranking recipes
| anymore... it's about the effects google has on recipes.
| The recipes get _written_ in a wordy fashion, because of
| the ranking system... not just ranked because of the
| writing style. Google is _dictating_ the nature of online
| recipes with their rankings.
|
| A few years back, Google made changes to youtube's
| recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages"
| frequent, regular videos. Viral hits became much less
| common. The result has been to send many professional
| youtubers into a frantic grind. There's no point in taking
| time with a video, or trying weird ideas. It won't go viral
| anyway. A week off or a couple of flops is harshly
| punished. There are tens of thousands of these youtubers,
| basically small businesses.
|
| There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects. It's
| always communicated as it is here. I believe this is how
| Google execs actually think about the issues. As a quasi-
| spam problem to be mitigated with the next "helpful content
| update."
| jasode wrote:
| _> There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects. _
|
| Can you articulate what _concrete actions_ Google could
| take that would address these 2nd order effects?
|
| _> , Google made changes to youtube's recommendation
| engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent,
| regular videos. [...] A week off or a couple of flops is
| harshly punished._
|
| I've seen this repeated many times (especially from
| Youtubers making videos about "burnout") but the analysis
| about cause & effect seems incomplete. As one
| counterpoint, Ben Krasnow "Applied Science" channel
| _slowed down_ from weekly uploads to a video every few
| months and yet his views and subscribers went _up_ not
| down: https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos
|
| Another yt channel that had a year between uploads and
| the views _went up_ : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX
| 7katl3DVmch4D7LSvqbVQ/vid...
|
| My pet theory on the contradictory anecdotes: the
| Youtubers making videos on a topic with _lots of
| competition from other Youtubers uploading every week_ --
| such as fast fashion clothes shopping -- are the ones
| that seem to suffer if they slow down. E.g.:
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul
|
| However, if you're making videos in niche topics with
| originality (maybe "weird ideas" as you put it), you
| won't be penalized by infrequent uploads. Many examples
| including Technology Connections, Applied Science, etc
|
| So a different conclusion can be reached... if one makes
| a _high quality_ videos, one can even upload just once a
| year and the Youtube algorithm won 't penalize you.
| michaelt wrote:
| I suspect some of the contradiction comes from whether
| you're measuring _views per video_ or _ad revenue per
| month_.
|
| If one youtuber produced a 32-minute video per month and
| got 500,000 views while another produced eight 4-minute
| videos per month and averaged 200,000 views per video,
| who do you suppose gets the most ad money? I'd wager the
| latter.
| antidnan wrote:
| This is especially annoying with recipes. There's usually a
| massive backstory that takes up 90% of the page. Some recipe
| websites even post a button to jump directly to the recipe, at
| least they're self-aware.
| fatherzine wrote:
| I used to search for recipes on the Internet. The spam became
| unbearable. Then I spent $30 on a cookbook, one recipe per
| page. Very happy with the outcome. Simple, fast, effective:
| it just works.
|
| Happiness meta-rule: Throw electronics away, use analog
| equivalents instead.
| amarant wrote:
| I think there's a different driving factor that. I've heard of
| a metric that is how long you spend on a given URL. Not sure
| how they gather that data, probably only gathered from Chrome
| users.
|
| Anyway, from what I've heard, that's the reason recipe sites
| have started posting 4 pages of drivel about the dish before
| getting to the actual recipe.
|
| Or so I've heard, I don't really have any good sources for
| this, could just be hearsay
| smoe wrote:
| A couple of months ago I read on various SEO blogs (they all
| seem to mostly copy and paste each other with little original
| research) that these days it is less about keywords and
| technical things like semantic html, but if and how long
| people engage with the search result.
|
| E.g. if a link to your page is shown to the user in search
| and they don't click or they return to search page too
| quickly, Google sees this as a signal that the result was not
| helpful.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| I guess that means we can use adds and tracking against
| itself. Any time you go to a webpage that is ad heavy
| quickly leave. Over time they get ranked down until they
| shape up or die.
| naravara wrote:
| If it's based on length of engagement this does explain the
| trend towards verbosity I've noticed. I assumed the long
| leading paragraphs and introduction and background sections
| were just excuses to keep dropping the keywords in, but I
| guess it's to make me have to spend a lot of time reading
| and scrolling to get to the meat of the answer.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > probably only gathered from Chrome users.
|
| Or, Google Analytics. Or Google ads. Or, if you return to
| Google and try other links for the same query. Or if you
| return to Google and refine the query (e.g., a new search
| where the term is within a predefined threshold of word
| vector similarity)
|
| There are plenty of ways to approximate time spend on link.
| vandreas2 wrote:
| Feels like the early days of the internet when the computer
| savvy knew how to find what they were looking for (possibly
| even using early google) and everyone else was condemned to
| sifting through trash to get something useful. These days I
| find myself reaching more often for specialised search like
| going straight to wikipedia or amazon if I want to get a direct
| answer.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I almost spit coffee all over my keyboard. "straight to ...
| amazon if I want to get a direct answer.". Hilarious.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The first headline is "Better ranking of original, quality
| content"
|
| The update literally says they are working to get rid of the
| type of useless content you are talking about.
| badwolf wrote:
| literally every dang recipe website in the universe... Ugh.
| cma wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't bring in adsense dollars, I'm surprised it is
| usually still on the first page (frequently it isn't for
| disease searches, which have some of the highest ad spends).
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| But it's very easy to exclude most popular words and use TF-IDF
| and Google probably uses that to devalue rambling.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Those types of rambling posts are clearly one of the targets of
| this update. From the Search Central guidance, here's a
| question for site operators to ask themselves to "Avoid
| creating content for search engines first":
|
| > Are you writing to a particular word count because you've
| heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we
| don't).
|
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co...
| dmix wrote:
| It's funny because one of the points is
|
| a) dont summarize other sites
|
| b) dont write overly long articles just to make google happy
|
| It's a shame a) is never helping with b)
| stevenally wrote:
| Yeah. The more words, the more space to insert ads. Then people
| tap on those ads by mistake when scrolling.
| [deleted]
| whage wrote:
| This resonates with me so freaking much. I am disgusted by how
| every bit of information on webpages seem to be buried between
| paragraphs of empty EMPTY talk and even when they seem to get
| to the point, most of the time there is no real information
| there. Sorry, this had to come out. We really need better
| search engines.
| civilized wrote:
| I think it's going to require a social rating system. Which
| is why people append "reddit" to searches these days.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's safe to assume that a social ranking system covering
| the whole web will be gamed.
| jfoster wrote:
| There is an extent they can go to with account
| verification where gaming is not very feasible.
|
| Can you create a fake account with a verified credit card
| number, verified phone number, passport, drivers license,
| account history consistent with human usage, Google One
| subscription, etc.? You probably can, but doing it at-
| scale is going to be quite costly.
| feanaro wrote:
| I don't think we need this that bad so as to jeopardize
| our privacy and freedom over it. So I'll pass on this
| idea.
| hattmall wrote:
| Yes, but if it's truly social it won't be easy. There
| need to be ways to see who did what and filter them out
| and various groups / spheres of influence. Just like in
| real life.
|
| If it is a hidden algorithmically social function then of
| course it will be gamed.
|
| But IRL there are certain people whose advice and
| recommendations you value and those whose you ignore. And
| in other cases you can easily ask the source of other
| information to find out if it is high value or not. MLM
| is the gamification of the IRL social structure and it's
| fairly easy to opt-out.
|
| That's what search needs, a way to see the path
| information took to be presented to you and a way to
| filter it.
|
| Unfortunately right now, so much of the best information
| is in Facebook groups, post and comments. The interface
| there is absolutely horrible though and not designed to
| provide you information, but to maximize the amount of
| ads that come across your screen.
|
| The same is true for video information. It's not easily
| searchable or digestible. The web peaked when information
| was predominantly text form and not fragmented into
| walled gardens.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Yes, but if it's truly social it won't be easy. There
| need to be ways to see who did what and filter them out
| and various groups / spheres of influence. Just like in
| real life.
|
| Appending site:news.ycombinator.com instead of Reddit?
| rchaud wrote:
| This is true of most non-fiction literature as well (self-
| help and business books especially), so I'm not sure if
| Google can necessarily discourage people from adding
| unnecessary padding.
|
| Google is already scraping bits of website content and
| showing it to the user as a "featured snippet". Nobody is
| going to write short pages if Google can already rob you of a
| click so easily.
| danyork wrote:
| My understanding from reading a number of articles about this
| "helpful content" update from Google is that they want to get
| rid of pages like what you describe and instead prioritize
| pages that get right to the point. So perhaps you'll get what
| you are asking for.
| lopis wrote:
| Clearly the end game for Google is to, also, become TikTok.
| 100% algorithmically sorted original content.
| pas wrote:
| I have no problem with that if it can also read my mind and
| serve up what I need. Until then, I want the option to
| correct their generous recommendations.
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