3 ms·

>Too bad that I'm forced to play the game of the SE0 L00z3r There's building a link farm, and then there's giving your article a descriptive title.

antirez 16y ago
I agree in general terms, but it's sad that search engines are not advanced enough to do a reasonable job even if your title is not very descriptive. My non descriptive titles are lame, like "Redis weekly update number ...", but there are many artistic, paradoxical, weird-in-an-interesting way titles in the writing tradition that may disappear because search engines are not good enough.
- ergo98 16y ago
  You're defending the ridiculous, and really the first two paragraphs of your entry are just unnecessary defensive noise that encourage readers to hit back. Your title is now vastly better for everyone, from search engines to casual readers.
  - antirez 16y ago
    Anyway what I did was switching to better titles :) I too think it's a good idea in general btw. Don't want to defend my lame titles, but clearly there is a technical limit in our technology. An human will easily recognize that a given article is about something regardless of the title. Just hoping that in the future we'll be ok even with lame titles, but the right thing to do now is indeed switching to saner, descriptive titles.
    - ergo98 16y ago
      To some degree I think that which you seek is already available -- everyone is going to link to your post with link text about autocomplete, and that will add the semantic meaning to it (in the same way that a googlebomb works).
      - antirez 16y ago
        good point, thanks for the hints.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  I understand your concern, but I don't think those things will disappear. Not everyone cares about maximizing page views, and quirky, artistic, esoteric websites with narrow appeal will persist even in the face of SEO.
- danielnicollet 16y ago
  Thanks for your good post. I actually think it's reassuring that there will always be a creative and unexpected title that titillates the brain in a way that search engine automation algorithm will never equate. By the way, that why most of the CMS systems allow for an alias used in SEO-type descriptors like search engine friendly URLs or meta titles. If we leave search engines to choose for us the most creative, interesting, and talented content creators, we are in deep trouble I think. Until then, you can keep surfing randomly once-in-a-while and finding out how far Google is from guessing what's most interesting on any subject. Google and other search engine always tend to return lowest common denominator results on any subject, rather than a new creative and rare perspective on that same subject. It's the nature of automation for the masses. Search automation such as an autocomplete is useful nevertheless. I also agree it can be vastly improved. Autocompletes are there to help you improve the quality of how you formulate your query, help you find content faster, and help you find related, misspelled, or otherwise relevant content. Here is a paper I wrote on advanced autocomplete features of which most have yet to be implemented by Google for instance: http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-incremental-search-interfaces.html http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-incremen...
- smoody 16y ago
  One nice side effect of a descriptive title is that it makes it much easier for those of us who use bookmarking services and things like the Hacker News bookmarlket to tag your article since we don't have to come-up with a descriptive title. People are lazy and lazy people around the world are rejoicing! :-)

antirez 16y ago

I agree in general terms, but it's sad that search engines are not advanced enough to do a reasonable job even if your title is not very descriptive. My non descriptive titles are lame, like "Redis weekly update number ...", but there are many artistic, paradoxical, weird-in-an-interesting way titles in the writing tradition that may disappear because search engines are not good enough.

ergo98 16y ago
You're defending the ridiculous, and really the first two paragraphs of your entry are just unnecessary defensive noise that encourage readers to hit back. Your title is now vastly better for everyone, from search engines to casual readers.
- antirez 16y ago
  Anyway what I did was switching to better titles :) I too think it's a good idea in general btw. Don't want to defend my lame titles, but clearly there is a technical limit in our technology. An human will easily recognize that a given article is about something regardless of the title. Just hoping that in the future we'll be ok even with lame titles, but the right thing to do now is indeed switching to saner, descriptive titles.
  - ergo98 16y ago
    To some degree I think that which you seek is already available -- everyone is going to link to your post with link text about autocomplete, and that will add the semantic meaning to it (in the same way that a googlebomb works).
    - antirez 16y ago
      good point, thanks for the hints.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
I understand your concern, but I don't think those things will disappear. Not everyone cares about maximizing page views, and quirky, artistic, esoteric websites with narrow appeal will persist even in the face of SEO.
danielnicollet 16y ago
Thanks for your good post. I actually think it's reassuring that there will always be a creative and unexpected title that titillates the brain in a way that search engine automation algorithm will never equate. By the way, that why most of the CMS systems allow for an alias used in SEO-type descriptors like search engine friendly URLs or meta titles. If we leave search engines to choose for us the most creative, interesting, and talented content creators, we are in deep trouble I think. Until then, you can keep surfing randomly once-in-a-while and finding out how far Google is from guessing what's most interesting on any subject. Google and other search engine always tend to return lowest common denominator results on any subject, rather than a new creative and rare perspective on that same subject. It's the nature of automation for the masses. Search automation such as an autocomplete is useful nevertheless. I also agree it can be vastly improved. Autocompletes are there to help you improve the quality of how you formulate your query, help you find content faster, and help you find related, misspelled, or otherwise relevant content. Here is a paper I wrote on advanced autocomplete features of which most have yet to be implemented by Google for instance: http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-incremental-search-interfaces.html http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-incremen...
smoody 16y ago
One nice side effect of a descriptive title is that it makes it much easier for those of us who use bookmarking services and things like the Hacker News bookmarlket to tag your article since we don't have to come-up with a descriptive title. People are lazy and lazy people around the world are rejoicing! :-)