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You’ve totally glossed over the fact that there was an additional slide in the rankings after the site owner went public with this story. And what about the app

by cik2e 6y ago

You’ve totally glossed over the fact that there was an additional slide in the rankings after the site owner went public with this story. And what about the app being banned from the App Store? Why would someone go through the trouble of compiling extensive research for free? Ads pay for things that people want but are unwilling to actually spend dollars on. That’s the state of things, whether we like it or not. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

hluska 6y ago
I think that again, we need to put our pitchforks down and think through this critically. Maybe someone from Google did decide that CNW is about to blow the lid on their scam and decide to shit all over its business model. But let’s step back for an instant and think over some other possibilities. Google released some pretty major core updates in 2018 and 2019. A lot of these updates seemed to focus on what the SEO community has taken to refer to as EAT (expertise, authority and trust). Google’s own guidance on some of these indicate a similar theme - they’re interested in sources, quality of analysis and other trust metrics. Some major sites saw some really massive drops over these years. When I checked out CNW earlier on today, I read a couple of articles. There were no sources at all. The net worth calculation seems to be the individual’s reported earnings less state and federal taxes. And the content looks like it was lifted from Wikipedia - in some cases, entire sentences were reprinted word for word. To get that, my browser had to make 426 requests, download 9mb of mostly adware and display ads almost everywhere. Maybe this is all a big Google ploy but I think it’s more likely that their algorithm has changed to favour high quality sites as opposed to sites that used to get search performance because of valuable keywords in their domain. As for their Android app, I’ve never owned a phone that runs Android so I can’t find and download an Android version but I decided to go down the rabbit hole and install CNW in my iPhone. They’ve apparently been ad free for two years, which is nicer than their web experience. But the content is the same kind of stuff as their website - entire sentences seem lifted directly from Wikipedia, their news section is similar, it’s just slightly repackaged stories from other sources. Thanks to today, I now know that Takeshi 6ix9ine made $5m for a livestream which pushed his net worth to a reported $8 million. I’ve never felt so old or out of touch in my life...:)
- flokie 6y ago
  Just curious - how do you know it's lifted from Wikipedia vs. the other way around? It's quite hard to trace the sources. E.g. did a quick search for Jerry Seinfeld, CNW is a lot more robust than Wikipedia (or the inc. magazine article it cites)
- arh68 6y ago
  > I now know.. You prove it is an acceptable user experience. Of course it's easy to scroll past ads. When I read Encyclopedia Brittanica, there are no sources. Yes, it's a pain in the butt to grab the book off of the shelf, but it'd still be wrong for Google to copy it. If the data is no better than Wikipedia, why didn't Google copy Wikipedia? With all their PhDs and $100M bonuses, they could not do better. They copied CNW because the CNW dataset was better. The fakes prove it. To deny the CNW's data's worth is illogical, pitchforks or no pitchforks.

by cik2e 6y ago

hluska 6y ago

I think that again, we need to put our pitchforks down and think through this critically. Maybe someone from Google did decide that CNW is about to blow the lid on their scam and decide to shit all over its business model. But let’s step back for an instant and think over some other possibilities. Google released some pretty major core updates in 2018 and 2019. A lot of these updates seemed to focus on what the SEO community has taken to refer to as EAT (expertise, authority and trust). Google’s own guidance on some of these indicate a similar theme - they’re interested in sources, quality of analysis and other trust metrics. Some major sites saw some really massive drops over these years. When I checked out CNW earlier on today, I read a couple of articles. There were no sources at all. The net worth calculation seems to be the individual’s reported earnings less state and federal taxes. And the content looks like it was lifted from Wikipedia - in some cases, entire sentences were reprinted word for word. To get that, my browser had to make 426 requests, download 9mb of mostly adware and display ads almost everywhere. Maybe this is all a big Google ploy but I think it’s more likely that their algorithm has changed to favour high quality sites as opposed to sites that used to get search performance because of valuable keywords in their domain. As for their Android app, I’ve never owned a phone that runs Android so I can’t find and download an Android version but I decided to go down the rabbit hole and install CNW in my iPhone. They’ve apparently been ad free for two years, which is nicer than their web experience. But the content is the same kind of stuff as their website - entire sentences seem lifted directly from Wikipedia, their news section is similar, it’s just slightly repackaged stories from other sources. Thanks to today, I now know that Takeshi 6ix9ine made $5m for a livestream which pushed his net worth to a reported $8 million. I’ve never felt so old or out of touch in my life...:)

flokie 6y ago
Just curious - how do you know it's lifted from Wikipedia vs. the other way around? It's quite hard to trace the sources. E.g. did a quick search for Jerry Seinfeld, CNW is a lot more robust than Wikipedia (or the inc. magazine article it cites)
arh68 6y ago
> I now know.. You prove it is an acceptable user experience. Of course it's easy to scroll past ads. When I read Encyclopedia Brittanica, there are no sources. Yes, it's a pain in the butt to grab the book off of the shelf, but it'd still be wrong for Google to copy it. If the data is no better than Wikipedia, why didn't Google copy Wikipedia? With all their PhDs and $100M bonuses, they could not do better. They copied CNW because the CNW dataset was better. The fakes prove it. To deny the CNW's data's worth is illogical, pitchforks or no pitchforks.