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Elevating original reporting in Search
- SalmndraCrypto 7y agoGoogle made some pretty serious moves in the last year. Their recent algorithm update is forcing news sites to improve their overall content quality and by now highlighting original reports it will force news sites to write original content and not just rewrite each other articles. It's cool to see how Google is changing online journalism
- jacquesm 7y ago> It's cool to see how Google is changing online journalism It really isn't. That sort of 'cool' is what got us AMP, Chrome and search results mixed with advertising as well as Google products that are promoted at an unfair advantage compared to established products by competitors. Monopolies have their occasional upsides but they also have structural downsides which is why they should be avoided.
- toasterlovin 7y agoI'm generally pretty right wing and I generally think that the tech companies have a heavy left-wing bias. That said, Google already has a massive influence on journalism. From where we are, today, in the real world, this feels like a good change. In my opinion. For what it's worth.
- sverige 7y agoAm I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?
- danso 7y agoIsn't the original PageRank, and every iteration since, defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? They have a 160+ page guide that tells their ratings team how to identify high-quality content: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
- dmg826 7y ago"Quality" is a really hard thing to define algorithmically. Even if you had great journalists on staff, I don't know if their heuristic expertise could translate to an algorithm. Most signals of trust/quality come via backlink profiles, which may be a poor proxy but are still the best that Google has been able to come up with.
- dexen 7y ago>Isn't the original PageRank (...) defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? No, quite the opposite. The original PageRank was defined by what other internet publishers considered to be a relevant and informative webpage. Specifically, the original PageRank was weighting content by the links (and content around the links) it was getting. The trust was placed on the internet publishers linking to it. The trust was distributed and also transitive to a degree. Which, if you think about it, is pretty close to what journalists do - they prop up the good ones in various ways. And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences - equal peers judging relevant materials and marking / linking the ones they approve. All in all, the original algorithm was effectively a "wall" between Google engineering and the actual content, as ranked & searched. It was clear delineation that "we don't editorialize search results". Granted, the later incarnations of Google Search take into account much more than just the original PageRank, and thus stray away from the idealized original formulation - and also get much closer to editorial decisions.
- michaelmior 7y ago> And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences I don't see the connection between the peer review process and PageRank. Peer review consists of educated experts explicitly making a value determination on the quality of the work before it is published and publicly available. Citations can be useful for judging impact, but this happens after the peer review process has been completed.
- danso 7y agoRight, I understand your point, and maybe I'm being too reductive here, but the idea heuristic that what people link to is authoritative is an opinionated decision that ended up being satisfactorily accurate (and efficient to implement). And evaluating the heuristic's accuracy ultimately boils down to human judgment; from their early Google proposal (though not the original Pagerank paper): http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html > The biggest problem facing users of web search engines today is the quality of the results they get back. While the results are often amusing and expand users' horizons, they are often frustrating and consume precious time. For example, the top result for a search for "Bill Clinton" on one of the most popular commercial search engines was the Bill Clinton Joke of the Day: April 14, 1997. Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily. (Yes, the opinion that a "bill clinton" query should probably return official/biographical pages before "Joke of the Day" is a pretty obvious and uncontroversial one)
- aviraldg 7y agoWhat would be the alternative? For lawyers to specify search algorithms?
- SquareWheel 7y agoMaybe a giant list of websites in alphabetical order? (joking - we don't need another DMOZ)
- journalctl 7y agoThat would at least make SEO easy: “How do we appear at the top of the results?” “We’ll call our website ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA - Wikipedia’”
- SquareWheel 7y agoThat's how it worked in the Yellow Pages. "AAA Plumbing" and such.
- teddyh 7y agoOff-topic, but: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!
- saalweachter 7y agoI haven't actually read any internal resumes, but why do you think no one working on Google News has any journalism education or experience?
- lolinder 7y agoTo a large extent they already do, albeit unintentionally. We can discuss whether that should be the case in the first place, but Google has been shaping the news industry ever since "Google" became a verb. With that shaping now irreversible, and with shutting down being the only way to stop it from continuing, it certainly seems like the right thing for Google to think seriously about the rewards their engine offers. While Google is definitely prone to abusing their influence, this move seems very reasonable.
- AFascistWorld 7y agoTech companies are being pushed to become judges on everything or face backlash.
- binarybits 7y agoAbsolutely, but they have that influence and so far they've mostly been using it in ways that make journalism worse (creating powerful incentives for shallow articles with clickbait headlines). This seems like a step in the right direction.
- concordDance 7y agoAgreed, I would want some additional criteria for consideration for a number of these, for example when it comes to news I would want interview transcripts or links to such things to affect ranking, similarly links to scientific papers. Avoiding certain a number of common reasoning errors (such as equivocation) or stats errors (such as not considering biased sampling or even not considering sampling size at all when making points) should also be required for top quality.
- kuu 7y agoI wonder how they are going to make this... Only based on timestamp? Based in "trusted sources"? Based in a new API?
- danso 7y agoBesides algorithms, they have a team of raters who manually evaluate the results. The rating guidelines are specifically enumerated in this guide: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... For example, check out page 26 for their grid of "Examples of Highest Quality Pages" Algorithmic and signal-wise, there are common conventions in English-language journalism that signal "original reporting", or rather, not original reporting. Such as, "...as reported by" or "...', Rep. Smith told the Washington Post". Of course, not every publication uses those, so I'm guessing the trustiness of a site/source will come into play.
- dmg826 7y agoThe human raters are used to assess the performance of the algorithms (i.e. do human opinions align with algorithmic ones), not to rank content directly. A recurring theme with Google is that they always want to solve problems algorithmically.
- danso 7y agoBut leaning on automated algorithms seems like the only way to realistically scale for day-to-day needs? I was going to posit that Google seems like the company most open to mixing human and automated processes. But that's not necessarily fair to Facebook, for which moderating user content and interactions is a much different problem space than search rankings; and of course, YouTube seems to have the same issues as FB does.
- dunkelheit 7y agoAnd what do they do with these human assessments then? Of course they feed them back to the algorithm so that it can improve. In effect it is still humans influencing the search rankings albeit indirectly. So it is a bit duplicitous to say that "it is the algorithm that decides" when there are humans providing learning data for it.
- Yuval_Halevi 7y agoGoogle recent algorithm update made a massive change in the way news sites write their content. It forced them to be original. I believe elevating original reports is the incentive google gonna bring sites who follow their guidelines
- erikig 7y agoI found the rater guidelines document linked in this blog post quite insightful. Sections like how to assess the "E-A-T" rating (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) will be useful to me when writing content. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoI don't think anybody calling it "content" should ever be considered trustworthy. The word reeks of hastily rephrased Wikipedia solely intended for search engines.
- Silhouette 7y agoIt's a standard term of art, hence terms like "digital content creation" tools, "separating content from presentation", and so on. I think any other connotations you're associating with the word are probably down to you, not the word.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoYes, it's a standard term of art within the hastily-rephrasing-wikipedia-for-SEO community.
- JoBrad 7y agoThe phrase “Table of Contents” refers to the content of a written work. That certainly wasn’t invented for SEO.
- tjwds 7y agoNo, this is patently false. Here are some examples which illustrate Silhouette's point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network https://www.loc.gov/standards/mdc/ https://www.loc.gov/standards/mdc/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Featured_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Featured_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_content
- tobylane 7y agoI wonder how this will deal with content that evolves over time. Some breaking news was published to BBC News with only a sentence and was fleshed out within the hour, so the original publication time and the possible originality of content are disconnected. In theory Wikipedia is meant to be summarising other sites so it couldn’t be first.
- rc_mob 7y agoYeah I hate how the top result for any search is 10 news organizations all with the same low effort headline.
- kleton 7y agoIn December 2018, Sundar Pichai testified under oath to US lawmakers that search results are completely algorithmic with no human reranking of search results. I wonder if they are still going to stick with this story.
- bibinou 7y agoIt's not re-ranking, it's rating of the algorithm. Basically the difference between preparing a exam using annals and buying the exam.
- JoBrad 7y agoWhy wouldn’t they? > their feedback doesn't change the ranking of the specific results they're reviewing; instead it is used to evaluate and improve algorithms in a way that applies to all results
- enlyth 7y agoHas anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I'm actually trying to ask. Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words. My queries end up looking like this after several tries and fails: "something" "another phrase" "also" "this" If I type the whole phrase without quotes I just get a bunch of ads, blog spam, and irrelevant stuff that is pretending to be useful. Hell, most dev-related queries will return shallow medium-style blog articles instead of SO / Github.
- daniel_reetz 7y agoI see the same behavior. I think it's time to assemble a list of examples.
- brlewis 7y agoI bet googlers on HN who work on ranking would appreciate that. Here's a recent one from me: typical tcp packet size
- CDSlice 7y agoWhat exactly do you mean by that? When I search it up I get a SO answer saying what the max packet size is and another (closed) SuperUser answer that says that their is no average tcp packet size because that depends on the specific application. Both of those seem pretty good to me, but I'm not a low level networking guy.
- dunkelheit 7y agoI think the problem is that google confidently and authoritatively displays (in a big and bold font) "65535 bytes" which is an answer to a different question.
- brlewis 7y ago
- CDSlice 7y agoFor everyone who complains about Google having worse results, have you blocked or disabled Google's tracking? I haven't and haven't had any trouble finding things with Google and I wonder if the two are related in some way.
- codezero 7y agoI aggressively block tracking and my google results are fine.
- sseagull 7y agoIn some ways that might be true. But I also wonder if google is using tracking/profiling as kind of a crutch. A while ago, I had google forget about all the things I had searched for. I then wanted to look up some features of C++17, but google kept coming up with info about the C-17 Globemaster instead. Rather than just searching for my terms explicitly, it tried to interpret what I wanted, and failed miserably without knowing I had previously been interested in programming. This doesn't explain Google groups searches, though, where zero results come up even though you copied/pasted the title from an old post.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago> I then wanted to look up some features of C++17, but google kept coming up with info about the C-17 Globemaster instead I did the search just now and every single result on the first page was about C++17. (I am logged-out with Noscript, Ghostery, adblock enabled). They might have fixed it?
- MiroF 7y agohow do you know what the search was?
- sails 7y agoI'm all in on DuckduckGo. No longer doing !g as I don't accept the Google privacy policy (although I have peaked behind the popup using Ublock)
- ilaksh 7y agoOn the surface, focusing on original reporting should be a very good thing. But this goes way beyond that. These raters are going to effectively be the arbiters of truth and reality. This is a very dangerous opaque centralization of information control given the monopoly Google has on search. Maybe take a look at some search alternatives like DuckDuckGo or YaCy.
- fareesh 7y agoOkay let's give this a try news.google.com -> Democratic debate Websites: BBC, Vox, Guardian, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Slate (wow), The New Yorker, USA Today Absent: National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT So basically the news algorithm considers these kinds of stories high quality: 1) Stephen Colbert plays Democrat Drinking Game (NYT) No Greg Gutfeld sketch ? 2) Funniest one-liners at the Democratic Debate (CNN) 3) Where was Mayor Pete Buttgeig at the Debate? (NYT) 4) OPINION: Winners and Losers of the Democratic Debate (NYT) actually has the word opinion in the title 5) Who won the Democratic Debate? Texas. (NYT) I think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations
- dreary_dugong 7y agoInteresting. When I Google just the word "debate" I get an opinion piece from Fox as the second result.
- specialist 7y agoI'd probably pay for a filter that distinquished editorial from reporting.
- ebg13 7y agoYou'd end up with an empty reading list.
- toasterlovin 7y agoNo, you wouldn't. There is actual reporting that takes place in the world. Like all things, what is and isn't reported or investigated is slanted by whoever is doing the reporting. But pure editorial is a very different beast.
- specialist 7y agoYou're thinking of gossip. Anyone quoting sources and showing their work (published data) is reporting. Even if you disagree with the interpretation, conclusions. Especially if you disagree. -- Sadly, I continue to be embarrassed, surprised when geeks proclaim it's all just opinion. This anti-intellectualism is how cults and hoaxes fester and grow. It's not helping. Is it too much to ask that the primary beneficiaries of our modern, technical, scientifically advanced society also defend the foundations of our society? How about just part time? A few hours per week. Take a breather from the cynicism. Just pretend the world is knowable and that we can work to improve stuff. Think of it as a new hobby.
- kkarakk 7y agoThis is cool, i'll have to dig less to see what the original source was for a news report. Also giving more weight to news sources with pulitzers and such is EXACTLY how search SHOULD be rather than ranking up Buzzfeed writers who rewrite news in clickbait worthy fashion
- user_50123890 7y agoGoogle is scared shitless with the DOJ investigation on them.
- DamnInteresting 7y agoIf this change is executed well, it will be a relief for original content creators such as myself. I am involved in researching and writing original content, and in recent years our articles keep getting buried by low-effort regurgitators who slightly rewrite our work, then rank above us because their version is newer. I've even bellyached about this on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19766276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19766276 So, here's hoping Google succeeds in setting thing slightly straighter.
- tosh 7y agoI like the idea of putting a spotlight on original stories, yet this also incentivizes racing to break a story even if it is just a rumor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- rdtwo 7y agoAuthoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Anytime you search for a game guide/faq/hint you get drivel from the big name sites that are super short on content and have bad advice. Almost in all cases the content I’m looking for is in some tiny blog that barely ranks but matches all the search words.
- gambler 7y ago> Authoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Yeah, but what if stupid people search for the wrong thing, find the wrong website and get infected with Wrongthink? Have you thought about that? Crushing amateur content creators and betraying all the ideals of the early Web is small price to pay for preventing that intolerable scenario.
- alkibiades 7y agoi don’t think it’s a coincidence this is all happening before the 2020 election
- thanatropism 7y agoI have this feeling like 30% of the time on HN and never know how to articulate it. I was online in the 90s and never expected to see so much widespread support for curbing free speech. It's like the Russians won.
- wutbrodo 7y agoThere's a dual cause here: illiberalism is increasingly in vogue in our culture and politics, but early internet and tech culture were already heavily skewed towards individualism and independent thought: part of this was inevitable with the mainstreaming of the Internet and the fact that the average person is _far_ less comfortable with non-conformity.
- ldng 7y agoWho or what define "Wrongthink" ?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]