19 ms·

Google rewrites many page titles

547 points by cyrusshepard 5y ago

tiborsaas 5y ago
Google has a guide on this :) https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...
- justin_oaks 5y ago
  While the Zyppy article is interesting in that it has statistics about the title rewriting, the Google guide on writing proper titles is more relevant to all of us who maintain websites affected by this. Thanks for linking it. The ideal article would be something like "Google rewrites your titles in search results because your titles suck." The Google guide does well to explain why some titles are rewritten, such as having duplicate titles across multiple pages, making it impossible to differentiate between pages that show up in the same set of search results.
- bo1024 5y ago
  In other words, Google's policy is that the search result isn't showing the page title, it's showing Google's short description of the page. If Google thinks your page title is an adequate description it might use that, otherwise it will write its own. (edit: and Google has enough self-importance to advise you to write your title as if it were a short description, to make their job easier)
- seren1 5y ago
  TIL that indexing and crawling are different, and robots.txt prevents Google from crawling but not indexing.
endisneigh 5y ago
tldr: Google sometimes uses headings instead of titles. Match them to prevent title rewrite; stop using long, verbose titles
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  As a search engine developer I totally get why. HTML in the wild is not well behaved in the slightest. People use title and heading tags in all manner of weird ways. I've seen <title>-tags in the <body>-tag used as headings. I've seen documents where every line was a <h1>-tag. You kinda need to make the most of what you're given.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    HTML5 has been around for long enough that we should be able to punish sites that use completely bonkers markup at this point right? Since Google effectively has historical archives of the internet they could pretty trivially grandfather in legitimately old content (things they tracked before some date) and just start down-ranking sites that continue to misbehave with markdown but skate by with browsers running in compatibility mode. Something like abusing <h1> tags is legal, if obnoxious, HTML and so it shouldn't really fall under this... but it's been long enough that we can start punishing completely incorrect syntax right?
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      That would be a massive loss, though. A lot of content isn't in HTML5, and a lot of that pre-HTML5 content is precious and valuable. Google has sadly already tossed a lot of that by the wayside, since it often isn't served with HTTPS. I think something like 80% of the sites my crawler is aware of serve pages over plain HTTP. In general, attempts at shaping the web through search engine indexing requirements seems to mostly serve to filter out content made by humans and select for search engine marketing.
      - ncphil 5y ago
        Not so sure older content (like the stuff I wrote in the late 90s to mid 00s) would be negatively impacted, so long as search providers pay careful attention to the <!DOCTYPE> tag (or lack thereof). I wouldn't characterize holding people to at least a bare minimum of standards (e.g., title in the head and nowhere else, which has been the rule since at least HTML 2.0 in 1994) as "punishment", any more than dinging them for unclosed parens and other typos. Language is how we communicate understanding, and markup is how we frame presentations on the web (mostly). People need to be prepared for the consequences of making it up as they go along rather than educating themselves on the standard (whether spelling, grammar or markup language).
pxeger1 5y ago
This article has been really badly proofread (or probably not at all) - "HTLM" - "includ" (unmatched parentheses
- Aardwolf 5y ago
  )
  - teddyh 5y ago
    (⁽₍⟮⦅⸨﴾﹙（｟
    - pphysch 5y ago
      POV: your about to learn the most esoteric LISP yet
      - saalweachter 5y ago
        A LISP-like language that only used various left-brackets sounds even worse than the whitespace-based programming language.
      - stevelosh 5y ago
        Common Lisp isn't that esoteric! (defun fun-reader (stream arg) (declare (ignore arg)) (read-delimited-list #\⸨ stream t)) (set-macro-character #\⸨ (get-macro-character #\) nil)) (set-macro-character #\( #'fun-reader) (defun square (x⸨ (* x x⸨⸨ (square 10⸨ ; => 100
    - martin_a 5y ago
      "Hello World" sample in some esoteric language?! :-)
- omoikane 5y ago
  (An unmatched left parenthesis creates an unresolved tension that will stay with you all day. https://xkcd.com/859/ https://xkcd.com/859/
nerdponx 5y ago
These characteristics all seem like Google attempting to combat SEO-oriented spam titles.
- godshatter 5y ago
  ...by making the titles more enticing for users to click on. Doesn't seem like that great of a solution. I would rather they went the other way by prepending "[possibly spam]" or "[possibly clickbait]" to the title. There's an arrogance to this whole process that amuses me. I can picture the dev team responsible for this code sitting in a meeting with the lead dev saying "it appears that some idiot web authors are using titles that have extra information placed in brackets! Idiots. Well, let's brainstorm possible solutions to this problem so we can protect our idiot users from this obvious menace..." Leaving them alone and giving us back pagination of search results would solve this problem for me. Or they could demote these sites that they think need their titles rewritten in their search algorithm.
Natfan 5y ago
Site refuses to load for me, hug of death?
draw_down 5y ago
phreeza 5y ago
It's quite funny to me that people are running these kind of almost scientific experiments on a fully human-generated and in principle knowable system. The reason are understandable of course but it does seem like a waste of human energy.
- deleted 5y ago
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- tonmoy 5y ago
  Haven’t we been doing similar thing with for example stock market analysis when we analyze a company’s earnings/management etc?
- capableweb 5y ago
  Agree. Then you imagine that the entire SEO industry is basically based around the idea that a company has a algorithm only they know, and the industry is trying to reverse-engineer that algorithm. If they released a whitepaper describing exactly how it works, the entire industry would have to change their ways to consulting already public information instead of experiments like this.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Veen 5y ago
    If they released a white paper explaining how it works, the search results would have even more spam than they already do.
- valyagolev 5y ago
  it's like calling adversarial ML a waste of energy. we use this approach for the problems where we want to preserve a lot of variety in solutions
- chillingeffect 5y ago
  Great systems view, that's the general basis of cooperation vs competition. we keep some things secret, stimulating other people to expand energy and think creatively instead of doing it for them. It becomes wasteful when the energy required to produce new information and techniques is impossible to obtain. e.g. in massive inequality: a homeless person just can't gain the skills to obtain a job, or an oppressed population can't overcome the excitation energy needed to free themselves. It's also the reason we outlawed monopoly in the U.S., only to reach the local minimum of duopoly.
echelon 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220126145329/https://zyppy.com/blog/google-title-rewrite-study/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220126145329/https://zyppy.com... Since people are reporting failure to load.
dahart 5y ago
> Takeaway: to dramatically decrease the chance of Google rewriting your title, matching the H1 to the title tag seems to be an effective strategy. Of course it should be mentioned this wont last if it becomes popular. Historically every time an SEO trick gets popular, the rules are adjusted. Even having this article on the front page of HN might be enough to see Google react by rethinking how (or whether) tags in titles affect the title rewrites.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I wonder if Google is going to try out "AI"-generated titles that are directly summarized from the page content by machine, treating the page title and headings as inputs to the model.
  - soco 5y ago
    Next step, an AI to regenerate the contents according to what the AI thinks I should have said. </s>
    - mhitza 5y ago
      Problem solved WRT copyright issues relating to news articles. If the AI derived content (a la GitHub copilot) is deemed as original "unlicensed" content, no reason to force users to visit the website. (it's been a while since the news media and Google had their legal battles, and I'm unsure what the end resolution was then)
      - propogandist 5y ago
        artificial intelligence (or at least their corporate puppet masters) are fighting for copyright law protection on insights the AI derives from reading copyrighted pages and content on the internet. a robots.txt can keep you safe
  - phreack 5y ago
    I would be surprised if that's not the case already!
xg15 5y ago
> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.
- unglaublich 5y ago
  For the same reason they extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" the content of the page? And the images, and the citations, and the links, etc. For the sake of quality.
- deleted 5y ago
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- Loughla 5y ago
  >I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? Because I've already spent a lot of time on the content, to then just slap 'Lou's Wednesday Website Update' as a title? Because, historically, a title is an introduction to my writing? Any of those.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Regarding one of these examples: How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen [Tested by Experts] - Phone Fixer -> How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen - Phone Fixer Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated <currentyear>] even if the article content wasn't updated.
    - logifail 5y ago
      > Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically...
hammyhavoc 5y ago
Thinly veiled content marketing for Zyppy, complete with CTA at the bottom, and mentions of themselves throughout, including: "Fortunately, here at Zyppy, we have a large database of titles thanks to our title tag analysis tool. Armed with this data, we set out to determine how often Google rewrites titles and the scenarios which trigger this behavior." Furthermore, "HTLM" instead of "HTML"? Needs proofreading. Lol.
- sockpuppet69 5y ago
- KerryJones 5y ago
  Are you implying that what they're saying isn't important or invalid? Or, what is your point?
  - hammyhavoc 5y ago
    I'm saying that we should expect better from HN, and the people who frequent it. Otherwise, it's just a poor alternative to Reddit. If I wanted content marketing that nobody could even be arsed to have proofread then I'd go elsewhere. The ever-decreasing standard continues.
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      > Otherwise, it's just a poor alternative to Reddit. There are plenty of great subreddits. Every time I hear reddit used as a put-down it feels very snobbish.
      - hammyhavoc 5y ago
        Sure. Likewise there's far more terribly moderated ones than good ones. OK, "the average badly moderated sub-Reddit". My opinion remains.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      Quoting the last paragraph of the guidelines, which has a bunch of supporting hyperlinks: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. I dislike that they’re an SEO company, but I don’t object to self-serving posts, as long as they’re also curious and interesting to me. Seeing a comprehensive list of how Google rewrites page titles is interesting to me, because I’m fascinated with headline writing. I’m sorry that you find self-serving content and calls-to-action to be problematic, but I would warn you to expect more of them on HN over time (as neither are violations of the site guidelines). There’s no need to claim it’s going to turn us into Worse Than Reddit. It’s been this way for HN’s entire life, or at least the chunk I’ve been present for. HN’s just the same as it always was. I respect your outrage but you chose an invalid expression of it.
Giorgi 5y ago
Ok... owning couple of dozen sites all submitted and fully indexed, I have never seen even single URL re-written. Does this really happen?
- treycopeland 5y ago
  Yes, happens 61% of the time.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  Google claimed that the original <title> is used "more than 80% of the time" when announcing the change[0]. Combining this rate with the rate seen by the article (rewritten 61% of the time, on the subset of 81,000 URLs they were interested in), I'd guess that some websites see a lot of rewrites and many other websites see none at all. [0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-generating-page-titles https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-...
  - cyrusshepard 5y ago
    So an interesting distinction here is required! When Google says they use the title 80% of the time, they mean they use the title 80% of the time to create their search result title, which they may or may not modify. The other 20% of the time they use an H1 or other elements on the page.
the-dude 5y ago
HN rewrites page titles too.
rsimmonds 5y ago
Fascinating. Such a great study!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
butler14 5y ago
Zyppy's content marketing efforts aside, this wouldn't be so much of an issue if Google was any good at it But as with its meta description rewrites, they're often worse than what was there to start with, and in some cases completely change the meaning, to the detriment of searcher experience
tapland 5y ago
Every day my desire to be able to rate sites relevance after a search increases. And I'd love to be able to choose if the original or Google generated title was the most relevant. (Cmon there is some machine learning training potential in that). Rather that than ditching google search completely which is getting closer every day.
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
Speaking of rewriting titles... I noticed that HN reworte a self post title a few days ago. [0] Why is HN editing self post titles? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053890
- slater 5y ago
  Mods frequently rewrite submitted titles, either cos it's not the same title used in the article, or because there's a better wording for the HN crowd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Check dang's (HN mod) comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
  - johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
    This title edit was not for an article, which is what confused me. A user submit a self post, a rant basically which got popular, and the title was edited hours later.
    - zerocrates 5y ago
      It's totally ordinary for a post to go front-page and attract hundreds of comments on the basis of a title that's later deemed too interesting/editorialized/whatever, and you later see some dry uninformative title like "Google account security" or whatever it was occupying a top slot. I can't say I've noticed it often before for text posts, but I do generally think this pattern of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is pretty silly in general.
      - johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
        It's just wrong to change the title of a self post imho. Without making it publicly known at least... you're changing what the poster intended to say. Editing sensationalised headlines back to sanity makes perfect sense though.
avivo 5y ago
I had this problem recently, was hoping there was a reasonable fix but it appears not... (the H1 already contains the title) I don't think about SEO, and just focus on useful writing / societal impact. However, I recently discovered by accident that I ended up with a top 2 search result for "platform democracy": https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy . But the title is missing the first 3 words—including the key words "Platform Democracy" — so that if I was a random person aiming to learn about the concept, I would likely skip over the result! (I almost did even though I wrote the piece!) This seems not ideal for either users or Google, and also an interesting exploration of AI/NLP impacts, so I tried to dig a bit deeper. I had a brief exchange with Danny Sullivan, Google's public @searchliaison on it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1484636387366289413 https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1484636387366289413) which linked to two guides from Google on this. Sadly neither were particularly helpful, but will share them here in case they are helpful to others: - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc... - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/09/more-info-about-titles https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/09/more-info-... (Also plausibly relevant: I have http://platformdemocracy.com/ http://platformdemocracy.com/ redirect to the piece. I imagine this might impact search ranking, but I would be surprised if it impacts the title rewriting.)
- ttty 5y ago
  Your Google result is actually "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure"
- cyrusshepard 5y ago
  Author here. Frustrating situation. As the title is long at 84 characters, we know that Google is definitely going to rewrite it. The simplest way is to break it into parts and get rid of the shortest part that still makes sense. So maybe take 'Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure' And 1) condense it and 2) lose the colon 'Platform Democracy is Policymaking Beyond CEOs & Partisanship' (60 characters) If that is too condensed, you could try a a short title in the <title> and a longer title in the copy.
travisgriggs 5y ago
I totally get this. Back in the day when I was a kid, we went to the local library and read about the world. When the librarians weren’t serving me by “checking out books” to me, they were busily putting new and improved titles on the books in receiving. /s Seriously. Google is starting to feel less like the librarian of the net (we index the world) and more like the Truman show: we craft your reality.
- deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- stickfigure 5y ago
  Given how site owners habitually attempt to distort reality with tag stuffing and other bullshit metadata, what do you expect? Reality is not what is printed on the tin.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    I'd expect Google to downrank sites that are trying to manipulate the system. Not rewrite them.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      How could that work out? Low quality sites usually have more juicy ad spots? More seriously: incentives are stacked against search quality these days. Poor results means more trips into ad laden wastelands, and more returns to the ad laden search results page. Giving people the result up front and center would directly affect quarterly profit I am afraid. At least this is the model that makes most sense to me. The next most probably is machine learning is already out of control and the people who created it left. Edit: wild speculation of course.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
Surely the misconception is the belief that what google displays is the page title. Google displays a link to a page, with a short description of what you will find there. Likewise, when I link to a page from my page, I don't use the title of the page: I use some text that I chose. This a non-story, as far as "rewriting titles" goes. What is interesting is that Google has an automated way to briefly summarize a page.
travisgriggs 5y ago
I’m no search engine expert. Is this standard practice at some level across other search engines? Is “retitler” just part of every search engine stack (e.g. DDG, Bing, BraveSearch, etc)? Or is this unique to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” folks? Honestly curios.
bobbyi 5y ago
This data is based on what's seen in the wild, right? So if they see text in brackets removed more often than text in parentheses, that could reflect what sort of text people tend to put in brackets vs parentheses rather than (or in addition to) how google treats those characters.
shockeychap 5y ago
One think I don't see getting discussed in the pros and cons is the simple fact that you can't even tell what titles have been rewritten. Google gives no information in the search results to tell you what is original and what they've rewritten. This matches other trends like how it's become ever harder to discern sponsored ads from organic search results. I used to love Google for how it presented relevant results and made it easy to discern sponsored ads. Today, I avoid Google products like the plague. (I can't escape all of them, but I'm about 90% off.)
igouy 5y ago
The issue isn't that Google search results exclude stuff that was in the page title. The issue is that Google search results insert stuff into the page title that wasn't there. So the issue isn't that the overly long + pipe <title>Which programming language is fastest? | Computer Language Benchmarks Game</title> is abbreviated. The issue is that the domain of the hosting service is inserted, which gives the misleading impression that this is a project in-some-way approved and promoted by the Debian organisation: "Which programming language is fastest? - Debian" :when it would be better just to snip: "Which programming language is fastest?"
friendlydog 5y ago
Unless the website is public domain or license to freely remix, isn't Google violating copywrite law by creating a derivative work?
xnx 5y ago
Good. Google's interests more closely align with my own than page authors. I'm glad to have Google as an agent working for me to make more useful page titles.
xnx 5y ago
20+ years ago also used the meta description tag from a page instead of page text snippets. We're many decades past blindly accepting page author provided content as being the most useful thing to display. People keep thinking of Google as a search engine greps pages to find matching text. That is old/obsolete thinking, any Google-like services has evolved how directly it can return the information/answer you seek instead of returning a page that may contain the information/answer you seek.
wodenokoto 5y ago
On modern browser, the page title is almost completely obscured. It’s not a thing users generally see, and the few views where users have access to the page titles that are not some sort of developer tool, the title is more often than not cut short. I don’t see why google has to use the page title as a headline for a link result.
pictur 5y ago
Google literally turns the internet into a garbage dump. There are so many spam news sites that can come to the fore thanks to their seo nonsense that the sites that provide real news are not even seen lol
jpswade 5y ago
Google has done this for practically as long as I can remember. If you remember when dmoz was still a thing, Google would favour the title from that, rather than the site's actual title because it perceived it as more useful to the user as it was moderated. By now I would expect that Google has used this and real moderators to train their machine learning model to rewrite titles, perhaps as a way to, you know, hopefully make the product more useful.
jedwhite 5y ago
Advertising corrupts. Ad-tech corrupts absolutely. The reason is the cumulative impact of two things: 1. Algorithmic optimization of results for ad click-through rates, and 2. The scarcity of space for organic results on results pages for queries with commercial intent (because of the large amount of space given to ads). The high value of the clicks on those pages (sometimes $100+) drives marketers to focus disproportionate resources on SEO tricks and gaming to show in one of the few spaces left on the front page. A search engine with ads and ad-tech tracking cannot work well for consumers in the long term. Google is now an ad-tech company, not a search company. It employs 3x as many people on advertising as search. [Edit for clarity] It makes sense in this context to programmatically re-write titles to optimize conversion, rather than consumer experience.
- deleted 5y ago
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uptownfunk 5y ago
Oh I missed the memo where we added Google to the list of things Hacker News loves to hate on.
junon 5y ago
Why was the title edited here on HN? The original title is much better, and had more information. A bit ironic given the subject matter. Dang, was this your doing? If so, can we please have an open discussion on this? It's happened a few times and it's annoying and seemingly randomly enforced. The guidelines state not to editorialize headers but this rule gets ignored a lot. What was deficient about the original title?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cyrusshepard 5y ago
  My guess is because it was self-submitted, it was held to a higher standard. Fair enough. And in some universes the title could be considered click bait, although it is accurate in this case. Moderation is a tough job. You never win. That said, the revised HN title seems like it was written by bad AI. The point seemed to be to drive it off the homepage. In that, the HN title succeeded. Regardless, I'm happy the article generated a lot of interesting discussion before manually being deemed unfit. It is curious how at the same time the title changed, all the top comments (which were generally supportive) got pushed to the bottom. And now, including yours. Assuming this article touched a nerve at the same time someone was having a bad day.
t0mislav 5y ago
Oh, now I understand.
Zachsa999 5y ago
I hate those dropdown things that say "How to change gamma values in gimp" and they lead to a YouTube tutorial. Please stop serving me YouTube tutorials; they all suck.
animal_spirits 5y ago
Hackernews rewrites many post titles
- randrews 5y ago
  Including this one, ironically.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
What I find fascinating is I’ve seen a small, but increasing, subset of results where: - the result title is clearly not original, usually derived from content on the page - the original title is known to be generated - the original generated title is as close to harmless as any web content could be - the result title is actively harmful and misleading - the original title is demonstrably better - this idiosyncrasy is applied to very high trust hosts (eg GitHub) - it’s not applied to the same content from obvious scraped content/spam/scam sites with obvious tells
jpswade 5y ago
Has anyone else started seeing results with titles as “Untitled”?
5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 5y ago
Something has to be fishy with this because I get tons of "Untitled" results now which directly lead to spam. This sucks big time because I usually got really good results since I search a lot coding related things and now I cannot use this account anymore for searching

547 points by cyrusshepard 5y ago

Google has a guide on this :) https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...

justin_oaks 5y ago
While the Zyppy article is interesting in that it has statistics about the title rewriting, the Google guide on writing proper titles is more relevant to all of us who maintain websites affected by this. Thanks for linking it. The ideal article would be something like "Google rewrites your titles in search results because your titles suck." The Google guide does well to explain why some titles are rewritten, such as having duplicate titles across multiple pages, making it impossible to differentiate between pages that show up in the same set of search results.
bo1024 5y ago
In other words, Google's policy is that the search result isn't showing the page title, it's showing Google's short description of the page. If Google thinks your page title is an adequate description it might use that, otherwise it will write its own. (edit: and Google has enough self-importance to advise you to write your title as if it were a short description, to make their job easier)
seren1 5y ago
TIL that indexing and crawling are different, and robots.txt prevents Google from crawling but not indexing.

endisneigh 5y ago

tldr: Google sometimes uses headings instead of titles. Match them to prevent title rewrite; stop using long, verbose titles

marginalia_nu 5y ago
As a search engine developer I totally get why. HTML in the wild is not well behaved in the slightest. People use title and heading tags in all manner of weird ways. I've seen <title>-tags in the <body>-tag used as headings. I've seen documents where every line was a <h1>-tag. You kinda need to make the most of what you're given.
- munk-a 5y ago
  HTML5 has been around for long enough that we should be able to punish sites that use completely bonkers markup at this point right? Since Google effectively has historical archives of the internet they could pretty trivially grandfather in legitimately old content (things they tracked before some date) and just start down-ranking sites that continue to misbehave with markdown but skate by with browsers running in compatibility mode. Something like abusing <h1> tags is legal, if obnoxious, HTML and so it shouldn't really fall under this... but it's been long enough that we can start punishing completely incorrect syntax right?
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    That would be a massive loss, though. A lot of content isn't in HTML5, and a lot of that pre-HTML5 content is precious and valuable. Google has sadly already tossed a lot of that by the wayside, since it often isn't served with HTTPS. I think something like 80% of the sites my crawler is aware of serve pages over plain HTTP. In general, attempts at shaping the web through search engine indexing requirements seems to mostly serve to filter out content made by humans and select for search engine marketing.
    - ncphil 5y ago
      Not so sure older content (like the stuff I wrote in the late 90s to mid 00s) would be negatively impacted, so long as search providers pay careful attention to the <!DOCTYPE> tag (or lack thereof). I wouldn't characterize holding people to at least a bare minimum of standards (e.g., title in the head and nowhere else, which has been the rule since at least HTML 2.0 in 1994) as "punishment", any more than dinging them for unclosed parens and other typos. Language is how we communicate understanding, and markup is how we frame presentations on the web (mostly). People need to be prepared for the consequences of making it up as they go along rather than educating themselves on the standard (whether spelling, grammar or markup language).

pxeger1 5y ago

This article has been really badly proofread (or probably not at all) - "HTLM" - "includ" (unmatched parentheses

Aardwolf 5y ago
)
- teddyh 5y ago
  (⁽₍⟮⦅⸨﴾﹙（｟
  - pphysch 5y ago
    POV: your about to learn the most esoteric LISP yet
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      A LISP-like language that only used various left-brackets sounds even worse than the whitespace-based programming language.
    - stevelosh 5y ago
      Common Lisp isn't that esoteric! (defun fun-reader (stream arg) (declare (ignore arg)) (read-delimited-list #\⸨ stream t)) (set-macro-character #\⸨ (get-macro-character #\) nil)) (set-macro-character #\( #'fun-reader) (defun square (x⸨ (* x x⸨⸨ (square 10⸨ ; => 100
  - martin_a 5y ago
    "Hello World" sample in some esoteric language?! :-)
omoikane 5y ago
(An unmatched left parenthesis creates an unresolved tension that will stay with you all day. https://xkcd.com/859/ https://xkcd.com/859/

nerdponx 5y ago

These characteristics all seem like Google attempting to combat SEO-oriented spam titles.

godshatter 5y ago
...by making the titles more enticing for users to click on. Doesn't seem like that great of a solution. I would rather they went the other way by prepending "[possibly spam]" or "[possibly clickbait]" to the title. There's an arrogance to this whole process that amuses me. I can picture the dev team responsible for this code sitting in a meeting with the lead dev saying "it appears that some idiot web authors are using titles that have extra information placed in brackets! Idiots. Well, let's brainstorm possible solutions to this problem so we can protect our idiot users from this obvious menace..." Leaving them alone and giving us back pagination of search results would solve this problem for me. Or they could demote these sites that they think need their titles rewritten in their search algorithm.

Natfan 5y ago

Site refuses to load for me, hug of death?

draw_down 5y ago

phreeza 5y ago

It's quite funny to me that people are running these kind of almost scientific experiments on a fully human-generated and in principle knowable system. The reason are understandable of course but it does seem like a waste of human energy.

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tonmoy 5y ago
Haven’t we been doing similar thing with for example stock market analysis when we analyze a company’s earnings/management etc?
capableweb 5y ago
Agree. Then you imagine that the entire SEO industry is basically based around the idea that a company has a algorithm only they know, and the industry is trying to reverse-engineer that algorithm. If they released a whitepaper describing exactly how it works, the entire industry would have to change their ways to consulting already public information instead of experiments like this.
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- Veen 5y ago
  If they released a white paper explaining how it works, the search results would have even more spam than they already do.
valyagolev 5y ago
it's like calling adversarial ML a waste of energy. we use this approach for the problems where we want to preserve a lot of variety in solutions
chillingeffect 5y ago
Great systems view, that's the general basis of cooperation vs competition. we keep some things secret, stimulating other people to expand energy and think creatively instead of doing it for them. It becomes wasteful when the energy required to produce new information and techniques is impossible to obtain. e.g. in massive inequality: a homeless person just can't gain the skills to obtain a job, or an oppressed population can't overcome the excitation energy needed to free themselves. It's also the reason we outlawed monopoly in the U.S., only to reach the local minimum of duopoly.

echelon 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220126145329/https://zyppy.com/blog/google-title-rewrite-study/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220126145329/https://zyppy.com... Since people are reporting failure to load.

dahart 5y ago

> Takeaway: to dramatically decrease the chance of Google rewriting your title, matching the H1 to the title tag seems to be an effective strategy. Of course it should be mentioned this wont last if it becomes popular. Historically every time an SEO trick gets popular, the rules are adjusted. Even having this article on the front page of HN might be enough to see Google react by rethinking how (or whether) tags in titles affect the title rewrites.

nerdponx 5y ago
I wonder if Google is going to try out "AI"-generated titles that are directly summarized from the page content by machine, treating the page title and headings as inputs to the model.
- soco 5y ago
  Next step, an AI to regenerate the contents according to what the AI thinks I should have said. </s>
  - mhitza 5y ago
    Problem solved WRT copyright issues relating to news articles. If the AI derived content (a la GitHub copilot) is deemed as original "unlicensed" content, no reason to force users to visit the website. (it's been a while since the news media and Google had their legal battles, and I'm unsure what the end resolution was then)
    - propogandist 5y ago
      artificial intelligence (or at least their corporate puppet masters) are fighting for copyright law protection on insights the AI derives from reading copyrighted pages and content on the internet. a robots.txt can keep you safe
- phreack 5y ago
  I would be surprised if that's not the case already!

xg15 5y ago

> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.

unglaublich 5y ago
For the same reason they extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" the content of the page? And the images, and the citations, and the links, etc. For the sake of quality.
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Loughla 5y ago
>I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? Because I've already spent a lot of time on the content, to then just slap 'Lou's Wednesday Website Update' as a title? Because, historically, a title is an introduction to my writing? Any of those.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Regarding one of these examples: How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen [Tested by Experts] - Phone Fixer -> How to Fix a Broken iPhone Screen - Phone Fixer Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Same for things like [Updated 2022] - there are tons of websites that superimpose [updated <currentyear>] even if the article content wasn't updated.
  - logifail 5y ago
    > Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically...

hammyhavoc 5y ago

Thinly veiled content marketing for Zyppy, complete with CTA at the bottom, and mentions of themselves throughout, including: "Fortunately, here at Zyppy, we have a large database of titles thanks to our title tag analysis tool. Armed with this data, we set out to determine how often Google rewrites titles and the scenarios which trigger this behavior." Furthermore, "HTLM" instead of "HTML"? Needs proofreading. Lol.

sockpuppet69 5y ago
KerryJones 5y ago
Are you implying that what they're saying isn't important or invalid? Or, what is your point?
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  I'm saying that we should expect better from HN, and the people who frequent it. Otherwise, it's just a poor alternative to Reddit. If I wanted content marketing that nobody could even be arsed to have proofread then I'd go elsewhere. The ever-decreasing standard continues.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    > Otherwise, it's just a poor alternative to Reddit. There are plenty of great subreddits. Every time I hear reddit used as a put-down it feels very snobbish.
    - hammyhavoc 5y ago
      Sure. Likewise there's far more terribly moderated ones than good ones. OK, "the average badly moderated sub-Reddit". My opinion remains.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Quoting the last paragraph of the guidelines, which has a bunch of supporting hyperlinks: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. I dislike that they’re an SEO company, but I don’t object to self-serving posts, as long as they’re also curious and interesting to me. Seeing a comprehensive list of how Google rewrites page titles is interesting to me, because I’m fascinated with headline writing. I’m sorry that you find self-serving content and calls-to-action to be problematic, but I would warn you to expect more of them on HN over time (as neither are violations of the site guidelines). There’s no need to claim it’s going to turn us into Worse Than Reddit. It’s been this way for HN’s entire life, or at least the chunk I’ve been present for. HN’s just the same as it always was. I respect your outrage but you chose an invalid expression of it.

Giorgi 5y ago

Ok... owning couple of dozen sites all submitted and fully indexed, I have never seen even single URL re-written. Does this really happen?

treycopeland 5y ago
Yes, happens 61% of the time.
saalweachter 5y ago
Google claimed that the original <title> is used "more than 80% of the time" when announcing the change[0]. Combining this rate with the rate seen by the article (rewritten 61% of the time, on the subset of 81,000 URLs they were interested in), I'd guess that some websites see a lot of rewrites and many other websites see none at all. [0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-generating-page-titles https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-...
- cyrusshepard 5y ago
  So an interesting distinction here is required! When Google says they use the title 80% of the time, they mean they use the title 80% of the time to create their search result title, which they may or may not modify. The other 20% of the time they use an H1 or other elements on the page.

the-dude 5y ago

HN rewrites page titles too.

rsimmonds 5y ago

Fascinating. Such a great study!

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butler14 5y ago

Zyppy's content marketing efforts aside, this wouldn't be so much of an issue if Google was any good at it But as with its meta description rewrites, they're often worse than what was there to start with, and in some cases completely change the meaning, to the detriment of searcher experience

tapland 5y ago

Every day my desire to be able to rate sites relevance after a search increases. And I'd love to be able to choose if the original or Google generated title was the most relevant. (Cmon there is some machine learning training potential in that). Rather that than ditching google search completely which is getting closer every day.

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

Speaking of rewriting titles... I noticed that HN reworte a self post title a few days ago. [0] Why is HN editing self post titles? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053890

slater 5y ago
Mods frequently rewrite submitted titles, either cos it's not the same title used in the article, or because there's a better wording for the HN crowd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Check dang's (HN mod) comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
- johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
  This title edit was not for an article, which is what confused me. A user submit a self post, a rant basically which got popular, and the title was edited hours later.
  - zerocrates 5y ago
    It's totally ordinary for a post to go front-page and attract hundreds of comments on the basis of a title that's later deemed too interesting/editorialized/whatever, and you later see some dry uninformative title like "Google account security" or whatever it was occupying a top slot. I can't say I've noticed it often before for text posts, but I do generally think this pattern of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is pretty silly in general.
    - johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
      It's just wrong to change the title of a self post imho. Without making it publicly known at least... you're changing what the poster intended to say. Editing sensationalised headlines back to sanity makes perfect sense though.

avivo 5y ago

I had this problem recently, was hoping there was a reasonable fix but it appears not... (the H1 already contains the title) I don't think about SEO, and just focus on useful writing / societal impact. However, I recently discovered by accident that I ended up with a top 2 search result for "platform democracy": https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy https://google.com/search?q=platform+democracy . But the title is missing the first 3 words—including the key words "Platform Democracy" — so that if I was a random person aiming to learn about the concept, I would likely skip over the result! (I almost did even though I wrote the piece!) This seems not ideal for either users or Google, and also an interesting exploration of AI/NLP impacts, so I tried to dig a bit deeper. I had a brief exchange with Danny Sullivan, Google's public @searchliaison on it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1484636387366289413 https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1484636387366289413) which linked to two guides from Google on this. Sadly neither were particularly helpful, but will share them here in case they are helpful to others: - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/title-link https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc... - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/09/more-info-about-titles https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/09/more-info-... (Also plausibly relevant: I have http://platformdemocracy.com/ http://platformdemocracy.com/ redirect to the piece. I imagine this might impact search ranking, but I would be surprised if it impacts the title rewriting.)

ttty 5y ago
Your Google result is actually "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure"
cyrusshepard 5y ago
Author here. Frustrating situation. As the title is long at 84 characters, we know that Google is definitely going to rewrite it. The simplest way is to break it into parts and get rid of the shortest part that still makes sense. So maybe take 'Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure' And 1) condense it and 2) lose the colon 'Platform Democracy is Policymaking Beyond CEOs & Partisanship' (60 characters) If that is too condensed, you could try a a short title in the <title> and a longer title in the copy.

travisgriggs 5y ago

I totally get this. Back in the day when I was a kid, we went to the local library and read about the world. When the librarians weren’t serving me by “checking out books” to me, they were busily putting new and improved titles on the books in receiving. /s Seriously. Google is starting to feel less like the librarian of the net (we index the world) and more like the Truman show: we craft your reality.

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stickfigure 5y ago
Given how site owners habitually attempt to distort reality with tag stuffing and other bullshit metadata, what do you expect? Reality is not what is printed on the tin.
- mdoms 5y ago
  I'd expect Google to downrank sites that are trying to manipulate the system. Not rewrite them.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    How could that work out? Low quality sites usually have more juicy ad spots? More seriously: incentives are stacked against search quality these days. Poor results means more trips into ad laden wastelands, and more returns to the ad laden search results page. Giving people the result up front and center would directly affect quarterly profit I am afraid. At least this is the model that makes most sense to me. The next most probably is machine learning is already out of control and the people who created it left. Edit: wild speculation of course.
- travisgriggs 5y ago

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

Surely the misconception is the belief that what google displays is the page title. Google displays a link to a page, with a short description of what you will find there. Likewise, when I link to a page from my page, I don't use the title of the page: I use some text that I chose. This a non-story, as far as "rewriting titles" goes. What is interesting is that Google has an automated way to briefly summarize a page.

travisgriggs 5y ago

I’m no search engine expert. Is this standard practice at some level across other search engines? Is “retitler” just part of every search engine stack (e.g. DDG, Bing, BraveSearch, etc)? Or is this unique to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” folks? Honestly curios.

bobbyi 5y ago

This data is based on what's seen in the wild, right? So if they see text in brackets removed more often than text in parentheses, that could reflect what sort of text people tend to put in brackets vs parentheses rather than (or in addition to) how google treats those characters.

shockeychap 5y ago

One think I don't see getting discussed in the pros and cons is the simple fact that you can't even tell what titles have been rewritten. Google gives no information in the search results to tell you what is original and what they've rewritten. This matches other trends like how it's become ever harder to discern sponsored ads from organic search results. I used to love Google for how it presented relevant results and made it easy to discern sponsored ads. Today, I avoid Google products like the plague. (I can't escape all of them, but I'm about 90% off.)

igouy 5y ago

The issue isn't that Google search results exclude stuff that was in the page title. The issue is that Google search results insert stuff into the page title that wasn't there. So the issue isn't that the overly long + pipe <title>Which programming language is fastest? | Computer Language Benchmarks Game</title> is abbreviated. The issue is that the domain of the hosting service is inserted, which gives the misleading impression that this is a project in-some-way approved and promoted by the Debian organisation: "Which programming language is fastest? - Debian" :when it would be better just to snip: "Which programming language is fastest?"

friendlydog 5y ago

Unless the website is public domain or license to freely remix, isn't Google violating copywrite law by creating a derivative work?

xnx 5y ago

Good. Google's interests more closely align with my own than page authors. I'm glad to have Google as an agent working for me to make more useful page titles.

xnx 5y ago

20+ years ago also used the meta description tag from a page instead of page text snippets. We're many decades past blindly accepting page author provided content as being the most useful thing to display. People keep thinking of Google as a search engine greps pages to find matching text. That is old/obsolete thinking, any Google-like services has evolved how directly it can return the information/answer you seek instead of returning a page that may contain the information/answer you seek.

wodenokoto 5y ago

On modern browser, the page title is almost completely obscured. It’s not a thing users generally see, and the few views where users have access to the page titles that are not some sort of developer tool, the title is more often than not cut short. I don’t see why google has to use the page title as a headline for a link result.

pictur 5y ago

Google literally turns the internet into a garbage dump. There are so many spam news sites that can come to the fore thanks to their seo nonsense that the sites that provide real news are not even seen lol

jpswade 5y ago

Google has done this for practically as long as I can remember. If you remember when dmoz was still a thing, Google would favour the title from that, rather than the site's actual title because it perceived it as more useful to the user as it was moderated. By now I would expect that Google has used this and real moderators to train their machine learning model to rewrite titles, perhaps as a way to, you know, hopefully make the product more useful.

jedwhite 5y ago

Advertising corrupts. Ad-tech corrupts absolutely. The reason is the cumulative impact of two things: 1. Algorithmic optimization of results for ad click-through rates, and 2. The scarcity of space for organic results on results pages for queries with commercial intent (because of the large amount of space given to ads). The high value of the clicks on those pages (sometimes $100+) drives marketers to focus disproportionate resources on SEO tricks and gaming to show in one of the few spaces left on the front page. A search engine with ads and ad-tech tracking cannot work well for consumers in the long term. Google is now an ad-tech company, not a search company. It employs 3x as many people on advertising as search. [Edit for clarity] It makes sense in this context to programmatically re-write titles to optimize conversion, rather than consumer experience.

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uptownfunk 5y ago

Oh I missed the memo where we added Google to the list of things Hacker News loves to hate on.

junon 5y ago

Why was the title edited here on HN? The original title is much better, and had more information. A bit ironic given the subject matter. Dang, was this your doing? If so, can we please have an open discussion on this? It's happened a few times and it's annoying and seemingly randomly enforced. The guidelines state not to editorialize headers but this rule gets ignored a lot. What was deficient about the original title?

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cyrusshepard 5y ago
My guess is because it was self-submitted, it was held to a higher standard. Fair enough. And in some universes the title could be considered click bait, although it is accurate in this case. Moderation is a tough job. You never win. That said, the revised HN title seems like it was written by bad AI. The point seemed to be to drive it off the homepage. In that, the HN title succeeded. Regardless, I'm happy the article generated a lot of interesting discussion before manually being deemed unfit. It is curious how at the same time the title changed, all the top comments (which were generally supportive) got pushed to the bottom. And now, including yours. Assuming this article touched a nerve at the same time someone was having a bad day.

t0mislav 5y ago

Oh, now I understand.

Zachsa999 5y ago

I hate those dropdown things that say "How to change gamma values in gimp" and they lead to a YouTube tutorial. Please stop serving me YouTube tutorials; they all suck.

animal_spirits 5y ago

Hackernews rewrites many post titles

randrews 5y ago
Including this one, ironically.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

What I find fascinating is I’ve seen a small, but increasing, subset of results where: - the result title is clearly not original, usually derived from content on the page - the original title is known to be generated - the original generated title is as close to harmless as any web content could be - the result title is actively harmful and misleading - the original title is demonstrably better - this idiosyncrasy is applied to very high trust hosts (eg GitHub) - it’s not applied to the same content from obvious scraped content/spam/scam sites with obvious tells

jpswade 5y ago

Has anyone else started seeing results with titles as “Untitled”?

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 5y ago

Something has to be fishy with this because I get tons of "Untitled" results now which directly lead to spam. This sucks big time because I usually got really good results since I search a lot coding related things and now I cannot use this account anymore for searching