16 ms·

I recently created a web page that provides - in my biased opinion - unique, relevant information on a niche topic that I'm interested in. It's been impossible

I recently created a web page that provides - in my biased opinion - unique, relevant information on a niche topic that I'm interested in. It's been impossible for me to crack the top search results on this topic. Instead, the top 20+ results are all news articles repeating the same thing. I never had reason to complain about Google's algorithm until I became a content creator. Now, I wonder what other great web pages I'm missing out on.

jasonkostempski 10y ago
I'm not sure Google knows a ton about the quality and uniqueness of the actual content, you'll need other sites to start referring to yours.
- aluminussoma 10y ago
  It's a niche topic, so there aren't any other sites that discuss my topic (except news articles). If there are other sites, I can't find them! :)
- romaniv 10y ago
  It's a chicken and egg problem. To get a lot of incoming links you need to be popular. To become popular (via search engines, at least) you need a lot of incoming links. This heavily penalizes smaller websites and rewards incumbent players on the web who have dedicated marketing teams that can afford to spend several hours a day on social network promotions and viral campaigns.
mysterydip 10y ago
It would be an interesting experiment if there was a search engine that ran on a heuristic of novelty rather than conformity. If you want to search for the history of pineapples, you don't need 100 sites with the same info. The more varied info you get, the broader a picture you can paint. The downside is in the assumption that every difference is correct, but it's as dangerous as the assumption that only what is repeated is correct. Would be an interesting alternative at least.
- dasil003 10y ago
  The blackhat SEO would at least be interesting if not terrifying.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Even better, add settings the user can tweak for which heuristic setup you want. Put it behind enough layers of dashboards that it doesn't terrify the average user.
- apetresc 10y ago
  Certainly it's not _as_ dangerous.
- jtraffic 10y ago
  You could also use current search algorithms but add a penalty for redundancy. Or perhaps group similar results. I've always like the idea of column-based web results. I suppose some of what Google does has this flavor.
- jclos 10y ago
  It's even more odd considering diversity in page ranking and novelty in recommendation are well studied (although not solved) problems in information retrieval, so it's not like there isn't a solution. And it's not like Google doesn't have the human or computer resources to tackle it.
- Xeoncross 10y ago
  I would assume that to counter the junk/spam/wrong information that would develop (even unintentionally) about a topic you would have to combine this with a "trust" ranking like PageRank. Basically, only more mainstream sites have the right to present different views which leads you back to square one: Repeating information.
- manarth 10y ago
  If you want to search for the history of pineapples, you don't need 100 sites with the same info. "Pineapples grow from a plant in the tropics." "Pineapples are grown in equatorial countries." --- "Pineapples, when ripe, have a very sweet taste." "Ripe pineapples have a high concentration of sugar." --- "The etymology of the word for pineapple is 'excellent fruit' in the language of Tupi, although the english English translation is an aberration, with a stem of 'pine' due to it's resemblance to a pine cone." "Most European languages name the fruit using the root word 'nanas', from the original native language where it was grown. Many languages have adapted the root word, although a few have a large degree of uncertainty, such as the origin of the reference to 'apple' in the English word." --- It would need a fairly decent AI to recognise the commonality of information in these examples.
Namrog84 10y ago
For those that might not know. You can remove keywords and sites from a search. Most search engines can do this but the syntax might be slightly different. For Google it's a minus sign. (sometimes it's the word NOT) E.g. "onions -news" (without the quotes) will search for the word onion and not return any sites that have the word news in them. This can have false positives so youd need to play around with the words. False positives because non news sites may have the word news and news sites might not have that word.
- bartread 10y ago
  That's very true, and useful information, but it's the kind of thing only a sophisticated searcher does. Very occasionally I still use extended search syntax. On the other hand, back in the 90s it was a practical necessity to use extended search syntax with services like AltaVista to find anything because search engines were basically terrible. Google on the other hand has and continues to expend considerable effort to ensure such syntax is unnecessary 99.9%+ of the time. Consequently very few people know it any more. Combine this with the fact that in order to use the extended search syntax effectively you often need at least some understanding of what you're searching for (e.g., at least the ability to discern bad vs. good information), and you can quickly see why the average Joe is going to end up seeing and quite possibly believing the false information. (I, for example, not being any kind of foodie, only know that it takes much longer than 10 minutes to caramelise onions specifically because I saw a friend who is a foodie do it a few years ago. He specifically made the point that it takes ages, otherwise you lose the sweet flavour. If that hadn't happened I'd believe it takes 10 minutes because Google said so.)
- aspenmayer 10y ago
  I was wondering how long it would take for someone to bring up the search modifiers. Here's the best/most complete list of them I've found, with examples of how to use them. https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehensive-list-google-search-operators/ https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehen...
  - losteverything 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
romaniv 10y ago
Related anecdote. I used to write for an amateur online magazine with product reviews and analysis of a certain industry. It wasn't big, but the content was good - not just in my opinion, I was told that many times by various readers. In ~2005 we routinely were #1 to #5 in searches related to the products we're covered. Today I often can't find new articles from that website even when I use the exact title as the query. The website is minimalist, fast and has no ads. The articles are extensive and well-conceived. And yet they are buried several pages deep under piles of single-paragraph stub "reviews" on more popular resources. I assume the same thing happened/happens to a lot, maybe most small-scale content creators these days. Clickbait rules and content doesn't matter nearly as much as the number of incoming links. You can no longer rely on search engines to get you traffic and need to constantly self-promote on other websites (e.g. social networks).
- ComputerGuru 10y ago
  Yes, it used to be content truly was king. That mantra is long dead now, though.
  - dmoy 10y ago
    In fact it can be argued that content was never king: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742 http://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742 (from 2001)
- dhimes 10y ago
  Do you think they are favoring pages that have adsense on them?
  - Filligree 10y ago
    I'm almost sure they're not. In all my years working for the ads section of Google I've never once heard the tiniest hint of anything like that, but I have repeatedly slammed my head into the firewall separating Search from everything else. Google seems quite determined not to risk being seen as biased in that way.
M_Grey 10y ago
The trick then is just find the key word or phrase they all share, - it out, and you're back in business. Searching has always taken some work on the searcher's part, and Google is selling a product, not offering a charitable service. It might be time to consider the need for a way to search all of this content that isn't bound to people trying to monetize the experience. DDG seems like an option in that regard.
james_niro 10y ago
You should put trump and it will go on top
sametmax 10y ago
While writing a french blog about Python, it took us 3 years and 500 articles to start showing up on the top results. And we cover metaclasses, packaging, generators, etc. All the stuff you can't find elsewhere. Being new in town is suspicious to google. Raising honestly to the top takes a lot of time and effort, unless you have incredible promotion habilities and/or deep SEO knowledge.
- 0x4a42 10y ago
  Off topic... but thank you for your great blog. :)
  - sametmax 10y ago
    :) It's always nice to support, even after all these years. It's a hard job, and we don't get paid to do it so we need to hear comments like that.
- luck_fenovo 10y ago
  I took a look at your blog from another post of yours (fascinating stuff, based on what I can tell from Google Translate, at least). Any chance you were secretly penalized because of some of the more risqué content on your site?
  - sametmax 10y ago
    I can be wrong but it seems the contrary. 80% of our traffic is generated by the alternative content. Maybe it lowers the ranking of the Python content. Hard to say. But now we are actually quite famous in the french Python community. For a blog on such a niche topic in a small country we get around 6000 v/d. The hard part was starting really: we (my co-author and I) have no promotion skill whatsoever. We actually starting to gain traction after 3 major french bloggers linked to us completely out of the blue (sebsauvage, korben and lehollandaisvolant). It seems linking from trusted source is still the most important part of the game for google. Eventually I want to create a new site, in english this time, to translate all the stuff and make it SFW so it can benefit more people. Unfortunately this won't be enough to test your theory since as soon as you create content in english, you multiply you traffic by 10000. Anyway first I'll need to save for 5/6 months of budget before doing so cause as a freelancer I can't really take holidays. Maybe I should do a crowd founding.
stinos 10y ago
Instead, the top 20+ results are all news articles repeating the same thing. I encounter this several times a week it seems (google, ddg, doesn't seem to matter). Usually when trying to find the actual source of something, like a scientific study, the top hits are all news sites, often whith articles which look like copies of each other. I'm assuming they're ranked by number of visits and popularity in general of the site, but it makes it really hard to drill down to the source of something. To the point I usually give up. I am going to try the '-news' thing mentioned by another commenter though, hope that helps. Or are there any other tips?
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  For scientific studies try Google Scholar scholar.google.com
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  Perfect example of this is trying to google for mailing list posts. All sorts of maximum ad-cram crappy sites (including ones that try to pretend to be a forum, with mailing list posts as "users") that maximize SEO gaming techniques dominate the results for 20+ pages. http://marc.info http://marc.info, which is the best archive avalible atm, plain, simple no bullshit layout and is linked everywhere anytime somebody wants to reference a mailing list archive, nowhere to be found.
  - RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 10y ago
    IMO it's because Gmane used to be highly ranked, but then it was shut down, so all those links are now gone, and the "void" has been filled with "crappy sites" like you said. Speaking of which, does anyone know what's going on with Gmane? There hasn't been any updates since the ownership change.
  - mej10 10y ago
    I am sure they all have Google's ads on them, too. Only slightly suspicious.
    - 10y ago
pessimizer 10y ago
Google thinks it's a great idea to direct people to go to the sites that other people have gone to, and not recursive at all.
jklinger410 10y ago
"Just write great content! Don't worry about the algorithm. Gaming it is bad, being destroyed by it means you're bad, the results on the top are good! Please buy ads." - Google
garraeth 10y ago
This might help: https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ It's helped me find unique and interesting sites in the past.
BeetleB 10y ago
Increasingly, folks are gaming Google's search. Take this book: https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended-ebook/dp/B014DUR7L2 https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De... If I search for '"Never Split The Difference" review', I want to find, well, people's reviews. Note that the book has several ratings on Amazon - it is a popular book. Yet I found only perhaps 1 "honest" review in the first 2 pages of Google's results. Everything else I find reads like a promotion for the book. Looking at Fakespot, there is some evidence of light tampering with Amazon's reviews on the book. The reason I Googled it? I've read a few chapters and am appalled at the book. It essentially is trying to boost its popularity by trashing what is taught in well respected negotiation programs at top universities. But while repeatedly trashing that education throughout the book, he continually advocates strategies that are also taught by the same programs he is trashing. Given that he continually bashes the most famous book on the topic (Getting To Yes), I wanted to see if anyone has done an honest comparison between the two - pointing out the author's somewhat dishonest stance. And I can't find it in the early Google hits. I see it only in the 1 or 2 star reviews on Amazon.
- rfrey 10y ago
  It doesn't get better. It is a truly awful book, I think I only finished it because I was in a train-wreck fascination mode with the author's insecurity.
  - BeetleB 10y ago
    Glad I'm not the only one thinking so. To be honest, that's similar to my motivation for finishing it. I think this is the first book I decided not to stop reading just for the sole purpose of writing a lengthy rebuttal review. I actually will not say that his techniques are bad/wrong/poor. But it's really shitty to keep trashing Ivy league MBA programs and then advocating the techniques taught by those programs. To date I've read 3 books from The Harvard Negotiation Project and another from, I think, Duke. For each chapter in this book, I want to highlight his techniques and then specify exactly where the same advice appears in the books he criticizes. I think it actually would have been a great book if he wrote with more integrity. His book is easy to read and practice. If his techniques work, then he has a legitimate advantage over the other books, which are much more complex. It's a pity he made a potentially great book into a lousy one.
codingdave 10y ago
I had the opposite experience. I wrote up a page for me and my kids to use, and then ignored it. A year later, I checked my stats, saw it was getting traffic, because somehow it was the #1 google result for a few phrases. So I improved it, monetized it a bit (not much), and as I have mentioned a few times before, we get a few dinners each month paid for by it. Of course, I've never been mentioned in the news. Maybe the trick to being in a niche is keeping the niche quiet.
jerryr 10y ago
I had the opposite experience. I created a ridiculous cooking blog to entertain family and friends. It became the #1 result for the phrase, "how to sort lentils." And it was brought to my attention yesterday in another HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13875755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13875755), that Google is now presenting it as the One True Answer for sorting lentils. My site is absurd, so hopefully would-be lentil sorters get a good chuckle and move on. But this Google feature seems broken if it's promoting bad information.
- emmelaich 10y ago
  I had a read. Porkulent is fantastic. I'll have to send links to my Facebook foodie friends and see how long they take to get it.
  - jerryr 10y ago
    Thanks! One of these days, I'll hopefully get around to posting more.
graeme 10y ago
What's the site? I'd be interested to take a look to see how the SEO is.
3131s 10y ago
I run a niche web app that has about 3000 unique visitors a week. People generally agree it's the best resource for its purpose and there was an article in one of the bigger local newspaper about it too. There are no ads or other shadiness on the site. It used to rank between 3 to 5 for the couple of obvious search terms, but since a site overhaul the ranking has tanked. I contacted Google via GWT but no response (though in the past they've been helpful a few times).
hyperpallium 10y ago
Which search engines (if any) do give your site a reasonable rank? I miss the old unhomogenized web.
hkmurakami 10y ago
Highly frustrating that sites like Wikihow which are scant on useful info rank so high.
rorykoehler 10y ago
This is why they will eventually be disrupted unless they change their search algorithm drastically.
sly010 10y ago
I did an experiment once. Searched for some random stuff on Google and Duck Duck Go. Of the 10 topics 7 of them showed relevant topic on Duck Duck Go while only news articles on Google.

jasonkostempski 10y ago

I'm not sure Google knows a ton about the quality and uniqueness of the actual content, you'll need other sites to start referring to yours.

aluminussoma 10y ago
It's a niche topic, so there aren't any other sites that discuss my topic (except news articles). If there are other sites, I can't find them! :)
romaniv 10y ago
It's a chicken and egg problem. To get a lot of incoming links you need to be popular. To become popular (via search engines, at least) you need a lot of incoming links. This heavily penalizes smaller websites and rewards incumbent players on the web who have dedicated marketing teams that can afford to spend several hours a day on social network promotions and viral campaigns.

mysterydip 10y ago

It would be an interesting experiment if there was a search engine that ran on a heuristic of novelty rather than conformity. If you want to search for the history of pineapples, you don't need 100 sites with the same info. The more varied info you get, the broader a picture you can paint. The downside is in the assumption that every difference is correct, but it's as dangerous as the assumption that only what is repeated is correct. Would be an interesting alternative at least.

dasil003 10y ago
The blackhat SEO would at least be interesting if not terrifying.
M_Grey 10y ago
Even better, add settings the user can tweak for which heuristic setup you want. Put it behind enough layers of dashboards that it doesn't terrify the average user.
apetresc 10y ago
Certainly it's not _as_ dangerous.
jtraffic 10y ago
You could also use current search algorithms but add a penalty for redundancy. Or perhaps group similar results. I've always like the idea of column-based web results. I suppose some of what Google does has this flavor.
jclos 10y ago
It's even more odd considering diversity in page ranking and novelty in recommendation are well studied (although not solved) problems in information retrieval, so it's not like there isn't a solution. And it's not like Google doesn't have the human or computer resources to tackle it.
Xeoncross 10y ago
I would assume that to counter the junk/spam/wrong information that would develop (even unintentionally) about a topic you would have to combine this with a "trust" ranking like PageRank. Basically, only more mainstream sites have the right to present different views which leads you back to square one: Repeating information.
manarth 10y ago
If you want to search for the history of pineapples, you don't need 100 sites with the same info. "Pineapples grow from a plant in the tropics." "Pineapples are grown in equatorial countries." --- "Pineapples, when ripe, have a very sweet taste." "Ripe pineapples have a high concentration of sugar." --- "The etymology of the word for pineapple is 'excellent fruit' in the language of Tupi, although the english English translation is an aberration, with a stem of 'pine' due to it's resemblance to a pine cone." "Most European languages name the fruit using the root word 'nanas', from the original native language where it was grown. Many languages have adapted the root word, although a few have a large degree of uncertainty, such as the origin of the reference to 'apple' in the English word." --- It would need a fairly decent AI to recognise the commonality of information in these examples.

Namrog84 10y ago

For those that might not know. You can remove keywords and sites from a search. Most search engines can do this but the syntax might be slightly different. For Google it's a minus sign. (sometimes it's the word NOT) E.g. "onions -news" (without the quotes) will search for the word onion and not return any sites that have the word news in them. This can have false positives so youd need to play around with the words. False positives because non news sites may have the word news and news sites might not have that word.

bartread 10y ago
That's very true, and useful information, but it's the kind of thing only a sophisticated searcher does. Very occasionally I still use extended search syntax. On the other hand, back in the 90s it was a practical necessity to use extended search syntax with services like AltaVista to find anything because search engines were basically terrible. Google on the other hand has and continues to expend considerable effort to ensure such syntax is unnecessary 99.9%+ of the time. Consequently very few people know it any more. Combine this with the fact that in order to use the extended search syntax effectively you often need at least some understanding of what you're searching for (e.g., at least the ability to discern bad vs. good information), and you can quickly see why the average Joe is going to end up seeing and quite possibly believing the false information. (I, for example, not being any kind of foodie, only know that it takes much longer than 10 minutes to caramelise onions specifically because I saw a friend who is a foodie do it a few years ago. He specifically made the point that it takes ages, otherwise you lose the sweet flavour. If that hadn't happened I'd believe it takes 10 minutes because Google said so.)
aspenmayer 10y ago
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to bring up the search modifiers. Here's the best/most complete list of them I've found, with examples of how to use them. https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehensive-list-google-search-operators/ https://bynd.com/news-ideas/google-advanced-search-comprehen...
- losteverything 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

romaniv 10y ago

Related anecdote. I used to write for an amateur online magazine with product reviews and analysis of a certain industry. It wasn't big, but the content was good - not just in my opinion, I was told that many times by various readers. In ~2005 we routinely were #1 to #5 in searches related to the products we're covered. Today I often can't find new articles from that website even when I use the exact title as the query. The website is minimalist, fast and has no ads. The articles are extensive and well-conceived. And yet they are buried several pages deep under piles of single-paragraph stub "reviews" on more popular resources. I assume the same thing happened/happens to a lot, maybe most small-scale content creators these days. Clickbait rules and content doesn't matter nearly as much as the number of incoming links. You can no longer rely on search engines to get you traffic and need to constantly self-promote on other websites (e.g. social networks).

ComputerGuru 10y ago
Yes, it used to be content truly was king. That mantra is long dead now, though.
- dmoy 10y ago
  In fact it can be argued that content was never king: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742 http://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742 (from 2001)
dhimes 10y ago
Do you think they are favoring pages that have adsense on them?
- Filligree 10y ago
  I'm almost sure they're not. In all my years working for the ads section of Google I've never once heard the tiniest hint of anything like that, but I have repeatedly slammed my head into the firewall separating Search from everything else. Google seems quite determined not to risk being seen as biased in that way.

M_Grey 10y ago

The trick then is just find the key word or phrase they all share, - it out, and you're back in business. Searching has always taken some work on the searcher's part, and Google is selling a product, not offering a charitable service. It might be time to consider the need for a way to search all of this content that isn't bound to people trying to monetize the experience. DDG seems like an option in that regard.

james_niro 10y ago

You should put trump and it will go on top

sametmax 10y ago

While writing a french blog about Python, it took us 3 years and 500 articles to start showing up on the top results. And we cover metaclasses, packaging, generators, etc. All the stuff you can't find elsewhere. Being new in town is suspicious to google. Raising honestly to the top takes a lot of time and effort, unless you have incredible promotion habilities and/or deep SEO knowledge.

0x4a42 10y ago
Off topic... but thank you for your great blog. :)
- sametmax 10y ago
  :) It's always nice to support, even after all these years. It's a hard job, and we don't get paid to do it so we need to hear comments like that.
luck_fenovo 10y ago
I took a look at your blog from another post of yours (fascinating stuff, based on what I can tell from Google Translate, at least). Any chance you were secretly penalized because of some of the more risqué content on your site?
- sametmax 10y ago
  I can be wrong but it seems the contrary. 80% of our traffic is generated by the alternative content. Maybe it lowers the ranking of the Python content. Hard to say. But now we are actually quite famous in the french Python community. For a blog on such a niche topic in a small country we get around 6000 v/d. The hard part was starting really: we (my co-author and I) have no promotion skill whatsoever. We actually starting to gain traction after 3 major french bloggers linked to us completely out of the blue (sebsauvage, korben and lehollandaisvolant). It seems linking from trusted source is still the most important part of the game for google. Eventually I want to create a new site, in english this time, to translate all the stuff and make it SFW so it can benefit more people. Unfortunately this won't be enough to test your theory since as soon as you create content in english, you multiply you traffic by 10000. Anyway first I'll need to save for 5/6 months of budget before doing so cause as a freelancer I can't really take holidays. Maybe I should do a crowd founding.

stinos 10y ago

Instead, the top 20+ results are all news articles repeating the same thing. I encounter this several times a week it seems (google, ddg, doesn't seem to matter). Usually when trying to find the actual source of something, like a scientific study, the top hits are all news sites, often whith articles which look like copies of each other. I'm assuming they're ranked by number of visits and popularity in general of the site, but it makes it really hard to drill down to the source of something. To the point I usually give up. I am going to try the '-news' thing mentioned by another commenter though, hope that helps. Or are there any other tips?

nommm-nommm 10y ago
For scientific studies try Google Scholar scholar.google.com
throwaway2048 10y ago
Perfect example of this is trying to google for mailing list posts. All sorts of maximum ad-cram crappy sites (including ones that try to pretend to be a forum, with mailing list posts as "users") that maximize SEO gaming techniques dominate the results for 20+ pages. http://marc.info http://marc.info, which is the best archive avalible atm, plain, simple no bullshit layout and is linked everywhere anytime somebody wants to reference a mailing list archive, nowhere to be found.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 10y ago
  IMO it's because Gmane used to be highly ranked, but then it was shut down, so all those links are now gone, and the "void" has been filled with "crappy sites" like you said. Speaking of which, does anyone know what's going on with Gmane? There hasn't been any updates since the ownership change.
- mej10 10y ago
  I am sure they all have Google's ads on them, too. Only slightly suspicious.
  - 10y ago

pessimizer 10y ago

Google thinks it's a great idea to direct people to go to the sites that other people have gone to, and not recursive at all.

jklinger410 10y ago

"Just write great content! Don't worry about the algorithm. Gaming it is bad, being destroyed by it means you're bad, the results on the top are good! Please buy ads." - Google

garraeth 10y ago

This might help: https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ It's helped me find unique and interesting sites in the past.

BeetleB 10y ago

Increasingly, folks are gaming Google's search. Take this book: https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended-ebook/dp/B014DUR7L2 https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De... If I search for '"Never Split The Difference" review', I want to find, well, people's reviews. Note that the book has several ratings on Amazon - it is a popular book. Yet I found only perhaps 1 "honest" review in the first 2 pages of Google's results. Everything else I find reads like a promotion for the book. Looking at Fakespot, there is some evidence of light tampering with Amazon's reviews on the book. The reason I Googled it? I've read a few chapters and am appalled at the book. It essentially is trying to boost its popularity by trashing what is taught in well respected negotiation programs at top universities. But while repeatedly trashing that education throughout the book, he continually advocates strategies that are also taught by the same programs he is trashing. Given that he continually bashes the most famous book on the topic (Getting To Yes), I wanted to see if anyone has done an honest comparison between the two - pointing out the author's somewhat dishonest stance. And I can't find it in the early Google hits. I see it only in the 1 or 2 star reviews on Amazon.

rfrey 10y ago
It doesn't get better. It is a truly awful book, I think I only finished it because I was in a train-wreck fascination mode with the author's insecurity.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  Glad I'm not the only one thinking so. To be honest, that's similar to my motivation for finishing it. I think this is the first book I decided not to stop reading just for the sole purpose of writing a lengthy rebuttal review. I actually will not say that his techniques are bad/wrong/poor. But it's really shitty to keep trashing Ivy league MBA programs and then advocating the techniques taught by those programs. To date I've read 3 books from The Harvard Negotiation Project and another from, I think, Duke. For each chapter in this book, I want to highlight his techniques and then specify exactly where the same advice appears in the books he criticizes. I think it actually would have been a great book if he wrote with more integrity. His book is easy to read and practice. If his techniques work, then he has a legitimate advantage over the other books, which are much more complex. It's a pity he made a potentially great book into a lousy one.

codingdave 10y ago

I had the opposite experience. I wrote up a page for me and my kids to use, and then ignored it. A year later, I checked my stats, saw it was getting traffic, because somehow it was the #1 google result for a few phrases. So I improved it, monetized it a bit (not much), and as I have mentioned a few times before, we get a few dinners each month paid for by it. Of course, I've never been mentioned in the news. Maybe the trick to being in a niche is keeping the niche quiet.

jerryr 10y ago

I had the opposite experience. I created a ridiculous cooking blog to entertain family and friends. It became the #1 result for the phrase, "how to sort lentils." And it was brought to my attention yesterday in another HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13875755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13875755), that Google is now presenting it as the One True Answer for sorting lentils. My site is absurd, so hopefully would-be lentil sorters get a good chuckle and move on. But this Google feature seems broken if it's promoting bad information.

emmelaich 10y ago
I had a read. Porkulent is fantastic. I'll have to send links to my Facebook foodie friends and see how long they take to get it.
- jerryr 10y ago
  Thanks! One of these days, I'll hopefully get around to posting more.

graeme 10y ago

What's the site? I'd be interested to take a look to see how the SEO is.

3131s 10y ago

I run a niche web app that has about 3000 unique visitors a week. People generally agree it's the best resource for its purpose and there was an article in one of the bigger local newspaper about it too. There are no ads or other shadiness on the site. It used to rank between 3 to 5 for the couple of obvious search terms, but since a site overhaul the ranking has tanked. I contacted Google via GWT but no response (though in the past they've been helpful a few times).

hyperpallium 10y ago

Which search engines (if any) do give your site a reasonable rank? I miss the old unhomogenized web.

hkmurakami 10y ago

Highly frustrating that sites like Wikihow which are scant on useful info rank so high.

rorykoehler 10y ago

This is why they will eventually be disrupted unless they change their search algorithm drastically.

sly010 10y ago

I did an experiment once. Searched for some random stuff on Google and Duck Duck Go. Of the 10 topics 7 of them showed relevant topic on Duck Duck Go while only news articles on Google.