4 ms·

it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people talk about the 'good ol days' or times wh

it's not really that Google lags, but rather SEOers have optimized for Google. The problem is intractable. When people talk about the 'good ol days' or times when Google was better, it was simply because there was less SEO, less spam and generally fewer pages on the internet. Google could be better than it is now, but there's no incentive to do so, unfortunately. Say Google allowed you to blacklist entire sites from the results - inevitably those sites that have the most ads would be the most likely to be blocked, resulting in lower revenue for Google.

mywittyname 5y ago
The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case. Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut. Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.
- slaymaker1907 5y ago
  The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed throughout the recipe does have copyright.
  - cogman10 5y ago
    Nah, the stories are there so you have to scroll 6000 pages to finally find the actual recipe. Why do they want you to scroll? Because every 5th word is an advertisement. More scrolling, more ads, more revenue. All of these recipe sites (that I've seen) will drop the ingredients + directions on the bottom of the page.
  - chaxor 5y ago
    I thought it was so the site has longer to mine monero using your CPU while you scroll? Ever notice how incredibly slow any device gets when looking at recipes?
    - andirk 5y ago
      It's possible that the scrolling is giving the remote server time to use your CPU/GPU to mine some space cash, but it's also possible that attaching listeners to events that happen many times per second (such as scrolling, mouse movement) is common, especially if 3rd party ads are allowed to interact with the page, making it nearly impossible to know what those ads' scripts are doing.
  - Marazan 5y ago
    No, it's so the pages follow thr Google blessed "ideal" page format. X number of words, 2-3 pictures, iser stays on page for longer than Y time. Last one is the killer, a site that quickly gives you the info you are looking (or quickly shows you it doesn't have the info) for is punished by google search ranking.
- tfsh 5y ago
  Shout out to https://onlyrecipe.app https://onlyrecipe.app which allows you to extract just the recipe from SEO-corrupted ad-riddled websites.
- redmen 5y ago
  "Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut." I LOL'ed. Thank you for that.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Isn't that similar to what they tried for things like shopping for example, and they got sued for? The problem is that if they become an aggregator for a specific type of content, like let's say travel or lyrics, then other aggregator websites start suing.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Oh, I was not suggesting they be an aggregator. They should get people to produce original content and pay them per view like YouTube.
redmen 5y ago
those sites would just clone themselves with a different domain
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
You don't even have to blacklist... just look at user behaviour. Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site? Did many users do that? Something has to be wrong with that site, rank it down. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who clicks on pinterest results in eg. image search, and immediately click back to find another image somewhere else.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  No, that SEO shit works. The whole adbased internet is optimized to waste your time. Did I spend a minute or two trying to read a 1000 word article, because I was looking for how many pixels there is in a 4k monitor? Or did I spend 2 seconds visiting a chart?
- orthoxerox 5y ago
  > Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site? It usually takes me at least a minute to recognize a search-optimized text if it's a topic I am unfamiliar with. Let's say I am googling something about windproofing underfloor insulation. The article starts with some basics about underfloor insulation in general, so I skim through the introduction, start hunting for the part of the article where it actually starts talking about windproofing and realize it's been cobbled together out of six random introductions or generated by GPT-3.
rkangel 5y ago
It has been a constant battle of SEO improving and Google improving the page ranking algorithm. For a long time Google was winning that battle, but more recently they haven't seen as interested. The economic argument you're making may be the reason, but it's short termist if people slowly get driven away from Google by poor quality search results. Five to ten years ago no other engine was close - the fact that duckduckgo was even try was comical. Google had an effectively monopoly. That might not be true at all five to ten years from now if the trend continues.

mywittyname 5y ago

The fact that recipes on on this list suggests this is the case. Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut. Google has all of the tools to solve recipes. Make Google Recipe with a standard template and a way to link in and out of YouTube. People who contribute popular recipes get ad revenue. People with recipes and YT videos get even more. Adding ways to find similar recipes would be a killer feature. Who hasn't found a recipe that was almost what they were looking for, but was missing that je ne sais quoi.

slaymaker1907 5y ago
The stories also serve the purpose of providing copyright. A recipe alone doesn't have copyright, but the story mixed throughout the recipe does have copyright.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Nah, the stories are there so you have to scroll 6000 pages to finally find the actual recipe. Why do they want you to scroll? Because every 5th word is an advertisement. More scrolling, more ads, more revenue. All of these recipe sites (that I've seen) will drop the ingredients + directions on the bottom of the page.
- chaxor 5y ago
  I thought it was so the site has longer to mine monero using your CPU while you scroll? Ever notice how incredibly slow any device gets when looking at recipes?
  - andirk 5y ago
    It's possible that the scrolling is giving the remote server time to use your CPU/GPU to mine some space cash, but it's also possible that attaching listeners to events that happen many times per second (such as scrolling, mouse movement) is common, especially if 3rd party ads are allowed to interact with the page, making it nearly impossible to know what those ads' scripts are doing.
- Marazan 5y ago
  No, it's so the pages follow thr Google blessed "ideal" page format. X number of words, 2-3 pictures, iser stays on page for longer than Y time. Last one is the killer, a site that quickly gives you the info you are looking (or quickly shows you it doesn't have the info) for is punished by google search ranking.
tfsh 5y ago
Shout out to https://onlyrecipe.app https://onlyrecipe.app which allows you to extract just the recipe from SEO-corrupted ad-riddled websites.
redmen 5y ago
"Recipe sites are notorious for SEO tactics. They all follow the same highly optimized format with the stupid story about the author's grandma and how they just couldn't get enough of these cookies, and how the recipe was lost for 90 years until recently their great great uncle Lou found a copy of the recipe in an old donut." I LOL'ed. Thank you for that.
ehsankia 5y ago
Isn't that similar to what they tried for things like shopping for example, and they got sued for? The problem is that if they become an aggregator for a specific type of content, like let's say travel or lyrics, then other aggregator websites start suing.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Oh, I was not suggesting they be an aggregator. They should get people to produce original content and pay them per view like YouTube.

redmen 5y ago

those sites would just clone themselves with a different domain

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

You don't even have to blacklist... just look at user behaviour. Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site? Did many users do that? Something has to be wrong with that site, rank it down. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who clicks on pinterest results in eg. image search, and immediately click back to find another image somewhere else.

wodenokoto 5y ago
No, that SEO shit works. The whole adbased internet is optimized to waste your time. Did I spend a minute or two trying to read a 1000 word article, because I was looking for how many pixels there is in a 4k monitor? Or did I spend 2 seconds visiting a chart?
orthoxerox 5y ago
> Did the user come back to google and select the next result after two seconds on that site? It usually takes me at least a minute to recognize a search-optimized text if it's a topic I am unfamiliar with. Let's say I am googling something about windproofing underfloor insulation. The article starts with some basics about underfloor insulation in general, so I skim through the introduction, start hunting for the part of the article where it actually starts talking about windproofing and realize it's been cobbled together out of six random introductions or generated by GPT-3.

rkangel 5y ago

It has been a constant battle of SEO improving and Google improving the page ranking algorithm. For a long time Google was winning that battle, but more recently they haven't seen as interested. The economic argument you're making may be the reason, but it's short termist if people slowly get driven away from Google by poor quality search results. Five to ten years ago no other engine was close - the fact that duckduckgo was even try was comical. Google had an effectively monopoly. That might not be true at all five to ten years from now if the trend continues.