9 ms·

> 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 o

by 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
[deleted]
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...
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically Isn’t this the intended effect?
      - logifail 5y ago
        > Isn’t this the intended effect? I hate clickbait as much as the next user, but using that technique to get users to click appears to have even become part of the core business model of previously prestigious outlets. Picking on the WaPo for no real reason: How the Washington Post pulled off the hardest trick in journalism https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-fluff-news.php https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-fluff-news... An Open Letter to the Washington Post: Please Stop Doing Clickbait https://thedailybanter.com/2016/05/letter-to-the-washington-post-please-stop-doing-clickbait/ https://thedailybanter.com/2016/05/letter-to-the-washington-...
        alisonkisk 5y ago
        reaperducer 5y ago
        As a subscriber to several newspapers, it's always interesting to see how different the headlines are between the dead tree editions, and the online versions — even for the same story. The dead tree headlines are almost always very factual and to the point. I don't think I've ever seen anything close to something like "Here's four awesome tricks to get China to admit to the Tiananmen Square massacre" as a headline in actual print.
        dpark 5y ago
        The easiest fix for clickbait would be to penalize them for it.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    It would be a great feature if they tracked the date when the content actually changed... significantly. I guess that could still be gamed.
  - LightG 5y ago
    Not obviously. If true, adds credibility. "Phone Fixer" sounds more scammy to me, lol
    - alisonkisk 5y ago
  - josefx 5y ago
    Wouldn't it be better for the users to penalize the sites ranking instead hiding the fact that the result is your usual click bait drivel? Rewriting the titles just hides that the results Google found are low quality garbage.
    - slater 5y ago
      Maybe Google does both?
  - fma 5y ago
    If Google believes the site is being disingenuous by writing a click bait headline, then they should punish the site by decreasing their ranking, not reward it by keeping it high and rewriting a more fitting headline.
    - karaterobot 5y ago
      But if the title is spam, and the content is good (this is a big 'if'), the best solution would be to rewrite the title so that it's useful and keep the page at its original rank, based on the content. Ideally, Google would be able to handle all these different cases and just give me the best search results. Now, we all know that's increasingly less true, but in theory that's how it should work.
      - jtbayly 5y ago
        But “for 2022” is a guarantee that the content is bad if it hasn’t changed in 2022. And yet, I don’t see how Google can automate checking this. It’s possible to add a couple of sentences about how you’ve not seen anything to change your mind about last year’s recommendations. That may well be true. Or false. How can Google know? It just sees content that has changed. So it has been updated in 2022. The bigger issue is brand trust (as a reviewer brand). The NYT bought Wirecutter, I think, because it had established itself as a trustworthy brand. That’s in direct line with the reputation the NYT wants to have as a whole.
        ziml77 5y ago
        I hate how true your second paragraph is. Google should punish sites that change the date without updating the content, but all the SEO spam is just going to automate changing content when it changes the date. And then what does Google do? Figure out how to make an AI that can understand all the indexed content and accurately determine if it's truthful? That seems fundamentally impossible without defining trusted sources. But then that means that you're trusting that Google's trusted sources are good. And if you do think they're good, then why not just check those sources directly? The only answer I have is to find your own sources that you trust and go to them first.
  - eulenteufel 5y ago
    > Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Nobody would write [Tested by novices] into their headline, but leaving out the part in the brackets would leave it open if it was tested by experts or novices. So in this case the removed bit does provide some information.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >>> Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? And yet from TFA: >> In fact, we found that matching your H1 to your title dropped typically dropped the degree of rewriting across the board, often dramatically. Users don't look much at titles - they end up in the browser tab or somewhere like that. If a title doesn't match the H1 heading it's often to get more stuff in for SEO. OTOH short titles might be useful when they show up in a tab where there is limited space. Maybe they shouldn't lengthen them for that reason.
libertine 5y ago
I don't get this, why are you ok with bots changing your content, even if it's to be displayed on Google SERP? Why stop at the titles? I have an idea, let's have bots rewrite the content in a compact tl;dr format and have it be directly displayed on Google SERP, as user, the less actions I take the better right? You don't even need to leave the SERP. Why can't I just choose what title I want in my blog to be indexed, and if Google wants to penalize it, so be it?
- NavinF 5y ago
  > let's have bots rewrite the content in a compact tl;dr format and have it be directly displayed on Google SERP, as user, the less actions I take the better right? Fuck yeah! I’d pay monthly for a search engine that does this consistently. Google already does this for the articles that are easy to parse, but I’d love to see what newer methods based on language models can do. Btw this article is talking about the <title> tag which is mostly used for SEO since users don’t see it on the page. I don’t think search engines have ever cared about it all that much.
ricardo81 5y ago
Can't say I agree. Google should be a neutral middle man providing the results as they are found. If they feel the title is not of their version of quality they should rank it lower. I'd prefer the version of title of several hundred million individuals rather than Google's aggregated version. They used to 'borrow' DMOZ titles before DMOZ became defunct. At least in that case it's another point of view on top of their own (and the site author)
- edave64 5y ago
  Google can't be a neutral middleman because everybody is trying to manipulate the search results. If everybody is clickbaiting their page titles, and Google just displays them as is, it makes their product worse.
  - worldofmatthew 5y ago
    The solution is not to re-title, the solution is to de-rank clickbait.
    - azurezyq 5y ago
      Well nowadays a lot of well known websites use clickbaits regularly, e.g., wsj and NYTimes. Many times, they are willing to summarize the news in the title when the news itself is not that complicated.
      - crtasm 5y ago
        I'm sure they'd change to better headlines to avoid getting downranked.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      That's assuming there aren't click bait false-positives based on page title.
- TheCowboy 5y ago
  You step away from neutral as soon as you introduce "version of quality". There will always be an introduction of bias and judgement calls that need to be made to get useful results, especially because bad actors on the web are part of the geography that aren't going away. Just like the press trying to force a neutral "view from nowhere" leads to confused and problematic journalism that can be exploited by bad actors. https://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/ https://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questio...
tweetle_beetle 5y ago
I think I see where you're coming from, but come to a different conclusion. If you are, rightly, disappointed about low quality results in SERPs, then why not direct your frustration at Google's search algorithm? But ultimately once the algorithm has decided what to return, I don't want any of it to be tampered with. Maybe there's an argument that once you're using a black box, it might as well be the best black box it can be, but I don't agree. I wonder whether there is a case for legal action here. Google would not have wasted time developing this rewrite engine unless it had an effect on clicks. Whether that is positive or negative, only they truly know. What if it was found that it was, or wasn't, being applied consistently to the results of their competitors, but not their own sites, for example?
pavon 5y ago
I think that is the worst reason for them to rewrite titles. If they left the title as-is, then I would be able to see in the search results that it was a spammy site and ignore it. Instead Google is helping to launder their SEO and present it as a more legitimate site. If Google thinks a site is gaming their algorithms they should de-prioritize it, not rewrite it.
- ashudeep 5y ago
  +1
- lelandfe 5y ago
  "Gaming their algorithm" sounds like a fancy way of saying SEO. If Google can produce for me a more accurate (or concise) title, it should only help me find what I'm looking for. Forcing folks to trudge through inaccurate titles – or hoping people know the tells of a "spammy site" title – does not seem a better alternative.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    My favorite is when the title sounds like what you’re looking for only to discover it’s a page full of ads and keywords. The original title doesn’t even match. That causes me to lose faith in google not a better experience.
    - lelandfe 5y ago
      If that actually happens, I'm surprised the article doesn't cover it. I've never experienced that.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        I’ve found it most on the 2nd or 3rd page when googling specific but not common error messages.
  - addingnumbers 5y ago
onion2k 5y ago
As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this. The problem there is that "optimizing for clickbaitness" means "making the titles as appealing to click on as possible when they're displayed in search pages". Google deliberately making them less appealing to click on means Google are reducing the effectiveness of organic search results, and that favors adverts instead. In other words, what you are saying is that you believe it's valid for Google to rewrite website content to make search page adverts more appealing than the actual search results. That is very hard to justify. If Google wanted to 'punish' sites for being too clickbaity then they should drop that site's position in the search rankings. Ranking it highly but rewriting the title to be something worse (or 'less clickbaity') is a massive abuse of their search market position to favor their ad business.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
Some titles of the past before they were optimized for clickbaitiness: Omelas, bye-bye (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas) Things are looking up (Great Expectations) A crying cop (Flow, my tears, the policeman said) The one that got away (The Old Man and The Sea) on edit: I expect someone will point out those are the names of works of literary fiction not webpages, but obviously if we assume that webpages do not deserve the kind of respect we would give a creative work in book form and not change the title because it suits our needs, then we should not spend all our time complaining that the content of the web is just lousy stuff that nobody would care if you changed with an algorithm.
ren_engineer 5y ago
Google isn't doing this for the user, they are doing it so Ads are more clickable than organic search, they want people clicking on Ads. I can guarantee they won't rewrite the clickbait ads written by marketers who are paying for space. The result is ads are more likely to be clicked 100% of the above the fold content is now ads on many search terms, Google is doing everything they can to squeeze more ad clicks, not provide the best information to their users
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  "How to growth hack your old website after reaching market saturation"
falcolas 5y ago
If this were being done by a person, I might agree with you. But it's not. It's being done by an algorithm which was carefully crafted to improve someone's chance for getting a promotion. It won't be maintained long term, yet it will continue to punish articles based on wholly arbitrary, biased, and opaque logic.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  If this were being done by a person, I might agree with you. But it's not. It's being done by an algorithm which was carefully crafted [by a person] to improve someone's chance for getting a promotion. I made a little change there. Algorithms don't just magically appear like leprechauns and unicorns.
- greiskul 5y ago
  Google search is one area of Google in which this big company problem actually doesn't happen that much. Changes in the algorithm are never implemented by fiat, Google employs raters, and performs blind experiments to test if a change to search actually improves user satisfaction before rolling it out to everyone. So at least they must have some data that it increases user satisfaction, both with the metrics of the signal they measure, and with subjective raters satisfaction.
worldofmatthew 5y ago
They should de-rank clickbait websites, as many of them qualify as webspam.
avivo 5y ago
I agree in theory for SEO mills... but it can apparently go a bit overboard! Concrete personal example: - Title shown by Google: "Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure" - Original title: "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure" Rather large difference! More details in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087485 , but search term is just "platform democracy" (2nd result)
ransom1538 5y ago
"I'm fine with Google counteracting this." The ministry of truth. Google shall own all truth.
yucky 5y ago
>As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this. Would you be fine with Google changing the work of all authors? Maybe "The Brothers Karamazov" doesn't get enough clicks and Google decides it needs a better title. Or "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" doesn't quite convey what Google thinks it should... How is that different?
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  To be fair, The Karamazov Brothers is arguably a more natural English translation.
  - yucky 5y ago
    Should Google adjust it then?
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    It's perfectly cromulent English.
hffftz 5y ago
ASalazarMX 5y ago
Specially when the article ends with: > Want to optimize your titles for increased traffic? > We built a title optimizer to take advantage of the outsized role titles play in SEO. Free to try. Definitely SEO gaming.
duxup 5y ago
And every site has different motivations. How many times do we bicker about titles that make no sense / are deceptive on HN... The whole situation is a mess.
0xedd 5y ago

by xg15 5y ago

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

[deleted]

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...
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > If we're going to start filtering all "obvious clickbait" then the search results are going to change fairly dramatically Isn’t this the intended effect?
    - logifail 5y ago
      > Isn’t this the intended effect? I hate clickbait as much as the next user, but using that technique to get users to click appears to have even become part of the core business model of previously prestigious outlets. Picking on the WaPo for no real reason: How the Washington Post pulled off the hardest trick in journalism https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-fluff-news.php https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-fluff-news... An Open Letter to the Washington Post: Please Stop Doing Clickbait https://thedailybanter.com/2016/05/letter-to-the-washington-post-please-stop-doing-clickbait/ https://thedailybanter.com/2016/05/letter-to-the-washington-...
      - alisonkisk 5y ago
      - reaperducer 5y ago
        As a subscriber to several newspapers, it's always interesting to see how different the headlines are between the dead tree editions, and the online versions — even for the same story. The dead tree headlines are almost always very factual and to the point. I don't think I've ever seen anything close to something like "Here's four awesome tricks to get China to admit to the Tiananmen Square massacre" as a headline in actual print.
      - dpark 5y ago
        The easiest fix for clickbait would be to penalize them for it.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  It would be a great feature if they tracked the date when the content actually changed... significantly. I guess that could still be gamed.
- LightG 5y ago
  Not obviously. If true, adds credibility. "Phone Fixer" sounds more scammy to me, lol
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
- josefx 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be better for the users to penalize the sites ranking instead hiding the fact that the result is your usual click bait drivel? Rewriting the titles just hides that the results Google found are low quality garbage.
  - slater 5y ago
    Maybe Google does both?
- fma 5y ago
  If Google believes the site is being disingenuous by writing a click bait headline, then they should punish the site by decreasing their ranking, not reward it by keeping it high and rewriting a more fitting headline.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    But if the title is spam, and the content is good (this is a big 'if'), the best solution would be to rewrite the title so that it's useful and keep the page at its original rank, based on the content. Ideally, Google would be able to handle all these different cases and just give me the best search results. Now, we all know that's increasingly less true, but in theory that's how it should work.
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      But “for 2022” is a guarantee that the content is bad if it hasn’t changed in 2022. And yet, I don’t see how Google can automate checking this. It’s possible to add a couple of sentences about how you’ve not seen anything to change your mind about last year’s recommendations. That may well be true. Or false. How can Google know? It just sees content that has changed. So it has been updated in 2022. The bigger issue is brand trust (as a reviewer brand). The NYT bought Wirecutter, I think, because it had established itself as a trustworthy brand. That’s in direct line with the reputation the NYT wants to have as a whole.
      - ziml77 5y ago
        I hate how true your second paragraph is. Google should punish sites that change the date without updating the content, but all the SEO spam is just going to automate changing content when it changes the date. And then what does Google do? Figure out how to make an AI that can understand all the indexed content and accurately determine if it's truthful? That seems fundamentally impossible without defining trusted sources. But then that means that you're trusting that Google's trusted sources are good. And if you do think they're good, then why not just check those sources directly? The only answer I have is to find your own sources that you trust and go to them first.
- eulenteufel 5y ago
  > Tested by Experts is obviously clickbait; nobody's going to say [Tested by novices]. Nobody would write [Tested by novices] into their headline, but leaving out the part in the brackets would leave it open if it was tested by experts or novices. So in this case the removed bit does provide some information.
phkahler 5y ago
>>> Because I want the title to be concise, but still help people explicitly understand what my writing is about? And yet from TFA: >> In fact, we found that matching your H1 to your title dropped typically dropped the degree of rewriting across the board, often dramatically. Users don't look much at titles - they end up in the browser tab or somewhere like that. If a title doesn't match the H1 heading it's often to get more stuff in for SEO. OTOH short titles might be useful when they show up in a tab where there is limited space. Maybe they shouldn't lengthen them for that reason.

libertine 5y ago

I don't get this, why are you ok with bots changing your content, even if it's to be displayed on Google SERP? Why stop at the titles? I have an idea, let's have bots rewrite the content in a compact tl;dr format and have it be directly displayed on Google SERP, as user, the less actions I take the better right? You don't even need to leave the SERP. Why can't I just choose what title I want in my blog to be indexed, and if Google wants to penalize it, so be it?

NavinF 5y ago
> let's have bots rewrite the content in a compact tl;dr format and have it be directly displayed on Google SERP, as user, the less actions I take the better right? Fuck yeah! I’d pay monthly for a search engine that does this consistently. Google already does this for the articles that are easy to parse, but I’d love to see what newer methods based on language models can do. Btw this article is talking about the <title> tag which is mostly used for SEO since users don’t see it on the page. I don’t think search engines have ever cared about it all that much.

ricardo81 5y ago

Can't say I agree. Google should be a neutral middle man providing the results as they are found. If they feel the title is not of their version of quality they should rank it lower. I'd prefer the version of title of several hundred million individuals rather than Google's aggregated version. They used to 'borrow' DMOZ titles before DMOZ became defunct. At least in that case it's another point of view on top of their own (and the site author)

edave64 5y ago
Google can't be a neutral middleman because everybody is trying to manipulate the search results. If everybody is clickbaiting their page titles, and Google just displays them as is, it makes their product worse.
- worldofmatthew 5y ago
  The solution is not to re-title, the solution is to de-rank clickbait.
  - azurezyq 5y ago
    Well nowadays a lot of well known websites use clickbaits regularly, e.g., wsj and NYTimes. Many times, they are willing to summarize the news in the title when the news itself is not that complicated.
    - crtasm 5y ago
      I'm sure they'd change to better headlines to avoid getting downranked.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    That's assuming there aren't click bait false-positives based on page title.
TheCowboy 5y ago
You step away from neutral as soon as you introduce "version of quality". There will always be an introduction of bias and judgement calls that need to be made to get useful results, especially because bad actors on the web are part of the geography that aren't going away. Just like the press trying to force a neutral "view from nowhere" leads to confused and problematic journalism that can be exploited by bad actors. https://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/ https://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questio...

tweetle_beetle 5y ago

I think I see where you're coming from, but come to a different conclusion. If you are, rightly, disappointed about low quality results in SERPs, then why not direct your frustration at Google's search algorithm? But ultimately once the algorithm has decided what to return, I don't want any of it to be tampered with. Maybe there's an argument that once you're using a black box, it might as well be the best black box it can be, but I don't agree. I wonder whether there is a case for legal action here. Google would not have wasted time developing this rewrite engine unless it had an effect on clicks. Whether that is positive or negative, only they truly know. What if it was found that it was, or wasn't, being applied consistently to the results of their competitors, but not their own sites, for example?

pavon 5y ago

I think that is the worst reason for them to rewrite titles. If they left the title as-is, then I would be able to see in the search results that it was a spammy site and ignore it. Instead Google is helping to launder their SEO and present it as a more legitimate site. If Google thinks a site is gaming their algorithms they should de-prioritize it, not rewrite it.

ashudeep 5y ago
+1
lelandfe 5y ago
"Gaming their algorithm" sounds like a fancy way of saying SEO. If Google can produce for me a more accurate (or concise) title, it should only help me find what I'm looking for. Forcing folks to trudge through inaccurate titles – or hoping people know the tells of a "spammy site" title – does not seem a better alternative.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  My favorite is when the title sounds like what you’re looking for only to discover it’s a page full of ads and keywords. The original title doesn’t even match. That causes me to lose faith in google not a better experience.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    If that actually happens, I'm surprised the article doesn't cover it. I've never experienced that.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      I’ve found it most on the 2nd or 3rd page when googling specific but not common error messages.
- addingnumbers 5y ago

onion2k 5y ago

As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this. The problem there is that "optimizing for clickbaitness" means "making the titles as appealing to click on as possible when they're displayed in search pages". Google deliberately making them less appealing to click on means Google are reducing the effectiveness of organic search results, and that favors adverts instead. In other words, what you are saying is that you believe it's valid for Google to rewrite website content to make search page adverts more appealing than the actual search results. That is very hard to justify. If Google wanted to 'punish' sites for being too clickbaity then they should drop that site's position in the search rankings. Ranking it highly but rewriting the title to be something worse (or 'less clickbaity') is a massive abuse of their search market position to favor their ad business.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

Some titles of the past before they were optimized for clickbaitiness: Omelas, bye-bye (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas) Things are looking up (Great Expectations) A crying cop (Flow, my tears, the policeman said) The one that got away (The Old Man and The Sea) on edit: I expect someone will point out those are the names of works of literary fiction not webpages, but obviously if we assume that webpages do not deserve the kind of respect we would give a creative work in book form and not change the title because it suits our needs, then we should not spend all our time complaining that the content of the web is just lousy stuff that nobody would care if you changed with an algorithm.

ren_engineer 5y ago

Google isn't doing this for the user, they are doing it so Ads are more clickable than organic search, they want people clicking on Ads. I can guarantee they won't rewrite the clickbait ads written by marketers who are paying for space. The result is ads are more likely to be clicked 100% of the above the fold content is now ads on many search terms, Google is doing everything they can to squeeze more ad clicks, not provide the best information to their users

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
"How to growth hack your old website after reaching market saturation"

falcolas 5y ago

If this were being done by a person, I might agree with you. But it's not. It's being done by an algorithm which was carefully crafted to improve someone's chance for getting a promotion. It won't be maintained long term, yet it will continue to punish articles based on wholly arbitrary, biased, and opaque logic.

reaperducer 5y ago
If this were being done by a person, I might agree with you. But it's not. It's being done by an algorithm which was carefully crafted [by a person] to improve someone's chance for getting a promotion. I made a little change there. Algorithms don't just magically appear like leprechauns and unicorns.
greiskul 5y ago
Google search is one area of Google in which this big company problem actually doesn't happen that much. Changes in the algorithm are never implemented by fiat, Google employs raters, and performs blind experiments to test if a change to search actually improves user satisfaction before rolling it out to everyone. So at least they must have some data that it increases user satisfaction, both with the metrics of the signal they measure, and with subjective raters satisfaction.

worldofmatthew 5y ago

They should de-rank clickbait websites, as many of them qualify as webspam.

avivo 5y ago

I agree in theory for SEO mills... but it can apparently go a bit overboard! Concrete personal example: - Title shown by Google: "Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure" - Original title: "Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure" Rather large difference! More details in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087485 , but search term is just "platform democracy" (2nd result)

ransom1538 5y ago

"I'm fine with Google counteracting this." The ministry of truth. Google shall own all truth.

yucky 5y ago

>As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this. Would you be fine with Google changing the work of all authors? Maybe "The Brothers Karamazov" doesn't get enough clicks and Google decides it needs a better title. Or "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" doesn't quite convey what Google thinks it should... How is that different?

time_to_smile 5y ago
To be fair, The Karamazov Brothers is arguably a more natural English translation.
- yucky 5y ago
  Should Google adjust it then?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  It's perfectly cromulent English.

hffftz 5y ago

ASalazarMX 5y ago

Specially when the article ends with: > Want to optimize your titles for increased traffic? > We built a title optimizer to take advantage of the outsized role titles play in SEO. Free to try. Definitely SEO gaming.

duxup 5y ago

And every site has different motivations. How many times do we bicker about titles that make no sense / are deceptive on HN... The whole situation is a mess.

0xedd 5y ago