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- Like SEO, the rules for ranking are obfuscated to prevent gaming (to a degree). - Unlike SEO, the 'news' association for publishers comes with a standard of

- Like SEO, the rules for ranking are obfuscated to prevent gaming (to a degree). - Unlike SEO, the 'news' association for publishers comes with a standard of authority. Imagine if it took ten minutes for OP to get their site listed and showing articles on the headline carousel. Now imagine how easy that same process would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation. It's far from perfect but the process is not that quick and not that easy for newcomers for a reason.

owenwil 8y ago
For many blogs (after talking to others) all it takes to get listed is hiring someone who knows someone, and the majority of sites in Google News are never reviewed again once they're reviewed. I can understand why it should be limited _but_ I also don't think the current approach is a good one.
larkeith 8y ago
I don't buy this: It's easy to verify a news site as legitimate by checking the content history - posting complex articles regularly for multiple years is a massive barrier against gaming the system, and requiring a certain update frequency on every category biases towards spam/misinformation sites, not against them.
- aiiane 8y ago
  Define "easy" - if you start out just eyeballing it, then spam blogs will steal historical content from reputable news sites to try to slip through the process. So then you have to start checking for plagiarism/copied content, and from there it becomes an arms race. Not so easy after all.
  - larkeith 8y ago
    Okay, 'easy' was definitely an exaggeration, however it should probably be doable, given that Google already takes website age into account while ranking search results. I presume they have anti-plagiarism measures in place already, as otherwise obscuration of ranking rules would be trivially avoided by content theft.
apatters 8y ago
The organic search results have also been tweaked over the years to put a greater emphasis on domain "authority." Google SERPs are a very different animal than they were 5 or 10 years ago -- back then there was a greater emphasis on keyword relevancy. Nowadays, you get stuff that doesn't match your search very well, but it comes from a domain that is popular, old, has lots of links, and maybe has a little bit of secret Google blessing because it's a big brand... People commonly lament that the Web has changed, it's dominated by big brands, it's not weird anymore, etc. I think this is a big part. Google has made these changes in an effort to address some legitimate problems around spam, black/gray hat SEO etc. But they likely have some less user-centric incentives as well ($$$) and either way, Google SERPs have become more boring and less relevant. There might be an opportunity for disruption emerging because of this. Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the Web. But frankly as this article demonstrates, what Google wants to recommend comes from a smaller sandbox and often is not the most interesting stuff out there. If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game. I wish there was a way to detect people attempting to game the algorithm, and just ban them indiscriminately. That's the only way. It probably requires AGI, though. Just like the old saw, "you're not stuck in traffic, you're the traffic", if you're doing SEO beyond making your page lightweight and useful to people, you are a part of the problem. It won't solve fake news issue; people could still make nice and fast sites full of lies. But at least low-effort "content marketing" spam would hopefully disappear, not to mention comment spam and all the other content that exists solely to push useless sites higher in SERPs.
jondubois 8y ago
I think that the whole "fake news" fiasco is corporate propaganda designed by big corporations precisely to discredit small independent news sources. Fake news is not that bad. It's a small price to pay for increased decentralization of power. Did Trump destroy America; no. Trump made people question things so that's a good thing. So-called "fake news" is good in small quantities. A world with only one kind of news source curated by the elites is a horrible, dystopian place. I'd rather read fake news from time to time; at least it would keep me doubtful and suspicious. People should never stop questioning things. Just because something is popular doesn't make it true; it may be slightly more likely to be true but it's also a lot more dangerous if it's not.
- CM30 8y ago
  100% agreed. Indeed, as someone who runs a smaller news outlet/site myself, I constantly worry that sites like my own will get caught up in the crossfire. And that's especially true because sometimes, the mainstream narratives are not right. The obvious old example is the Iraq war one with 'weapons of mass destruction'; this was all incorrect, but I can see any alternative news site saying so getting banned for 'fake news' because of it. Does that mean all narratives are true? Of course not, you've got nutcases and conspiracy theorists as well, and fake news will exist too. But sometimes the mainstream/elite held view is wrong (or a lie/propoganda), and other outlets should be able to call them out on it.
- qotgalaxy 8y ago
  Every single sentence in this post is either massively ignorant or actively deceitful.
gambler 8y ago
My god, how far the web has fallen. Search engines were originally intended as tools. It was their job to index and deliver all content relevant to user's query. You could publish an article and if your website was indexed and users searched for something related to your article, it would appear in relevant search results. You could actually get traffic that way and bootstrap your audience without being one of the select few established websites with millions of visitors. Page rank slowly eroded that into the broken model we have right now. >Now imagine how easy that same process would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation. Imagine you could publish good content on your website and actually get visitors without becoming a vassal to Twitter, medium.com or whatever is popular at the moment. O horror! No, we can't have this stand. We need to centralize and control everything because someone might, gasp, get incorrect information from the internet. Also, what about non-news subjects? This shit is affecting everything on the web, including product reviews, analytical essays and even educational content.

owenwil 8y ago

For many blogs (after talking to others) all it takes to get listed is hiring someone who knows someone, and the majority of sites in Google News are never reviewed again once they're reviewed. I can understand why it should be limited _but_ I also don't think the current approach is a good one.

larkeith 8y ago

I don't buy this: It's easy to verify a news site as legitimate by checking the content history - posting complex articles regularly for multiple years is a massive barrier against gaming the system, and requiring a certain update frequency on every category biases towards spam/misinformation sites, not against them.

aiiane 8y ago
Define "easy" - if you start out just eyeballing it, then spam blogs will steal historical content from reputable news sites to try to slip through the process. So then you have to start checking for plagiarism/copied content, and from there it becomes an arms race. Not so easy after all.
- larkeith 8y ago
  Okay, 'easy' was definitely an exaggeration, however it should probably be doable, given that Google already takes website age into account while ranking search results. I presume they have anti-plagiarism measures in place already, as otherwise obscuration of ranking rules would be trivially avoided by content theft.

apatters 8y ago

The organic search results have also been tweaked over the years to put a greater emphasis on domain "authority." Google SERPs are a very different animal than they were 5 or 10 years ago -- back then there was a greater emphasis on keyword relevancy. Nowadays, you get stuff that doesn't match your search very well, but it comes from a domain that is popular, old, has lots of links, and maybe has a little bit of secret Google blessing because it's a big brand... People commonly lament that the Web has changed, it's dominated by big brands, it's not weird anymore, etc. I think this is a big part. Google has made these changes in an effort to address some legitimate problems around spam, black/gray hat SEO etc. But they likely have some less user-centric incentives as well ($$$) and either way, Google SERPs have become more boring and less relevant. There might be an opportunity for disruption emerging because of this. Google knows its search engine isn't very good anymore! That is why they're increasingly trying to pitch their service as a recommendation engine with special AI sauce, not an index of the Web. But frankly as this article demonstrates, what Google wants to recommend comes from a smaller sandbox and often is not the most interesting stuff out there. If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> If someone can come up with a distribution mechanism which solves the problem of helping the user discover All The Content minus the spammers, scammers and fake news, they will be able to deliver more relevant information than search or social media can today. Google being large actually gives them an in-built disadvantage here because no matter what algorithm they develop, it's going to be everyone's first priority to reverse engineer and game. I wish there was a way to detect people attempting to game the algorithm, and just ban them indiscriminately. That's the only way. It probably requires AGI, though. Just like the old saw, "you're not stuck in traffic, you're the traffic", if you're doing SEO beyond making your page lightweight and useful to people, you are a part of the problem. It won't solve fake news issue; people could still make nice and fast sites full of lies. But at least low-effort "content marketing" spam would hopefully disappear, not to mention comment spam and all the other content that exists solely to push useless sites higher in SERPs.

jondubois 8y ago

I think that the whole "fake news" fiasco is corporate propaganda designed by big corporations precisely to discredit small independent news sources. Fake news is not that bad. It's a small price to pay for increased decentralization of power. Did Trump destroy America; no. Trump made people question things so that's a good thing. So-called "fake news" is good in small quantities. A world with only one kind of news source curated by the elites is a horrible, dystopian place. I'd rather read fake news from time to time; at least it would keep me doubtful and suspicious. People should never stop questioning things. Just because something is popular doesn't make it true; it may be slightly more likely to be true but it's also a lot more dangerous if it's not.

CM30 8y ago
100% agreed. Indeed, as someone who runs a smaller news outlet/site myself, I constantly worry that sites like my own will get caught up in the crossfire. And that's especially true because sometimes, the mainstream narratives are not right. The obvious old example is the Iraq war one with 'weapons of mass destruction'; this was all incorrect, but I can see any alternative news site saying so getting banned for 'fake news' because of it. Does that mean all narratives are true? Of course not, you've got nutcases and conspiracy theorists as well, and fake news will exist too. But sometimes the mainstream/elite held view is wrong (or a lie/propoganda), and other outlets should be able to call them out on it.
qotgalaxy 8y ago
Every single sentence in this post is either massively ignorant or actively deceitful.

gambler 8y ago

My god, how far the web has fallen. Search engines were originally intended as tools. It was their job to index and deliver all content relevant to user's query. You could publish an article and if your website was indexed and users searched for something related to your article, it would appear in relevant search results. You could actually get traffic that way and bootstrap your audience without being one of the select few established websites with millions of visitors. Page rank slowly eroded that into the broken model we have right now. >Now imagine how easy that same process would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation. Imagine you could publish good content on your website and actually get visitors without becoming a vassal to Twitter, medium.com or whatever is popular at the moment. O horror! No, we can't have this stand. We need to centralize and control everything because someone might, gasp, get incorrect information from the internet. Also, what about non-news subjects? This shit is affecting everything on the web, including product reviews, analytical essays and even educational content.