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I worked at Google helping news publishers add metadata to extract live/evolving news coverage for the real time / breaks coverage carousel above the search res
by enos_feedler 4y ago
I worked at Google helping news publishers add metadata to extract live/evolving news coverage for the real time / breaks coverage carousel above the search results. Google will never believe what authors use for meta data. It is just a hint and that will always be the case. There is too much opportunity for deception.
- edent 4y agoI can understand that problem for some sectors. But what's the advantage to a restaurant in publishing an inaccurate menu (fake foods!)?
- vander_elst 4y agoMaybe fake prices... It could help lure customers in.
- enos_feedler 4y agoI don’t know, but maybe the metadata prices are inaccurate so that the query “burgers under $8” surfaces that menu. There are just all kinds of reasons to game the system to get your results in the page. Trusting meta data over user visible information just opens a portal to these kind of things where you tell the search engine one thing for SEO and show the user something else. You could police this of course, but it’s much easier to just extract the info from the page since there is more incentive to be accurate for readers.
- madisp 4y agoperhaps instead of nefarious usecases it could just be out of date
- enos_feedler 4y agoYes this too
- wzdd 4y agoI'm not really convinced by the "intentionally inaccurate" arguments (if they want to deceive, then surely they could also just serve a fake PDF to Googlebot). But I suppose it's reasonable to assume that restaurants would be less likely to keep their metadata up-to-date than they would their PDF menu. Unintentional inaccuracy, in other words.
- enos_feedler 4y agoMaybe not intentional but more like “inflation has raised our burger prices by $5 in the last 3 years and the meta data is wrong. Do we fix it?” Hmmm
- splonk 4y agoI've worked in this field. In every sector there will be someone trying to game the system one way or another. Someone will publish a menu including items they don't actually have in order to try to rank higher in a search ("oh, we don't have that any more, but since you're here, why don't you try X..."). Someone will publish a menu with lower prices to get someone in the door ("oops, Google must have an old menu of ours"). Someone will publish a menu including something with their competitor's name in hopes of hijacking their searches. A steakhouse will mark a steak as vegetarian in hopes of tricking someone into thinking they have a vegetarian entree. You'd be lucky if 50% of the restaurant supplied data is accurate, 40% is out of date, and 10% is actively incorrect. Personally I'd guess that the ratio would be more like 20/60/20.
- marban 4y agoGoogle News is a strict whitelist AFAIK so what's the problem?
- rightbyte 4y ago> Google will never believe what authors use for meta data. Then why trust the site at all if it fakes metadata? This fuzzy we-know-better algorithms has wrecked Google search.
- mitchdoogle 4y agoChances are the restaurant doesn't want to mislead people looking at their website. After all, that will just lead to disappointment and lost revenue.
- lmm 4y agoThe whole web runs on the principle of taking crazy tag soup and extracting as much as you can out of it. I wish XHTML had succeeded but the market has spoken.
- RicoElectrico 4y agoSorry, but Google is so stupid at times that it mistakes date-like strings in URLs for publication dates. Heuristics my ass.
- enos_feedler 4y agoYes that is a problem. And the worst part is because the heuristics are a black box there are no developer controls to fix it yourself. You are the whim of Google’s ability to correctly interpret what it sees. Sometimes its wrong