23 ms·

More content by people, for people in Search

255 points by gingerlime 4y ago

kristaps 4y ago
Could it be that the results have gotten so bad that less people even bother with search, hurting ad revenue?
seydor 4y ago
The fact that this is news, is news.
- dazc 4y ago
  In a year's time you'll still be reading the same complaints about search quality though for the simple inescapable fact that there is little incentive for anyone to write impartial and authoritative reviews for anything that is isn't just a random hobby. What you may witness is less amazon affiliate posts and more made for AdSense posts - such as those recipes that begin with a random love story, for example.
  - plonk 4y ago
    I like to write impartial and authoritative reviews for things that aren't just a random hobby of mine. Especially on anonymous forums. This could be good, or it could make advertisers start spamming forums with more fake accounts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway290 4y ago
  The fact that the fact that this is news is news, is news.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I was sure they announced Big Plans years ago to combat content farms, to the point of e.g. browser add-ons so you could report these things. Either they just didn't work and the content farms outsmarted them, or they stopped caring. But it does feel to me like Google was a lot stricter 5-10 years ago than they are now. In the interim they tried to push AMP, but had to admit finally that it's more to keep people inside their ecosystem than make the web faster/better.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Hopefully this helps when looking for genuine product reviews / suggestions. The only way to get half-decent reviews at the moment is to append "reddit" to your search query, otherwise you get pages full of comparatives that haven't tested any of the items they recommend.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  And I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before Reddit stops caring and allows more and more bots, content farms, or paid posts on their platform.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    I don’t know what “Reddit stops caring” means. Currently most moderation is done by an insular unpaid group of redditors. There is already lots of stealth promotion/ad posts, astroturfing, and trust issues. There is not inherent way to fix the inevitable breakdown, it’s a societal problem of greed and dishonesty, and you can’t easily just “ban bots”.
  - paulgb 4y ago
    I’m mostly worried that they’ll disable the “old.reddit.com” trick to get the old layout. Finding information in reddit threads is a complete chore with the new design, which only a few comments displayed at a time.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Got bad news for you… it’s a huge outlet for content writers.
coding123 4y ago
https://devrant.com/rants/4578894/holy-shit-google-nobody-likes-this-retarded-fucking-art-style-just-stop https://devrant.com/rants/4578894/holy-shit-google-nobody-li...
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  Corporate Memphis is so awful.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Can’t decide what I hate more: the pandering or the infantalization or the forced cheerfulness of it all.
    - alecco 4y ago
      Smile or Die https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
      - emptyparadise 4y ago
        No wonder people are getting jokerfied.
    - throwaway1851 4y ago
      For me, it’s the nightmarish distortion of everyone’s form. Big sites have become a bad acid trip you can’t wake up from.
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        Fitting. Corporations don’t see us as real people anyway now. Just an amorphous collection of wallets and monetizable data.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rawoke083600 4y ago
Thanks Google. Now can we fix the recipes pages please. No one wants the back story for the "the best brownies", I want to know the ingredients, cooking temps (Celsius and Fahrenheit) and time.
- yunohn 4y ago
  Google doesn’t write recipes, dedicated and passionate cooks write blogs with recipes in them. I guarantee you that none of them are aiming to provide just a grocery list or instructions, they definitely enjoy writing their story as well. They’re building their own cookbook essentially, not a bunch of lists.
  - swiftcoder 4y ago
    Or, more likely, they are just SEO optimising by providing a lot of prose (which Google has historically prioritised in search rankings) - the same way as all those AI-generated article summaries on the astroturfing sites
    - yunohn 4y ago
      How do you propose anyone (Google or humans) differentiate between 500 mostly-similar recipes for brownies? I think HNers look at food blogs with a very depressing robotic expectation.
      - rawoke083600 4y ago
        How is picking the one with the longest word count the best ??
      - swiftcoder 4y ago
        This is what algorithms like PageRank were originally designed to do. Once upon a time the popular brownie recipes are the ones that everyone linked to, or the ones on the cooking sites that everyone linked to. To be clear, I don't really care if the person wants to put their life story on their recipe site. I am annoyed that they are forced to do so in a really mechanical and disingenuous way just to make a Google algorithm happy - and as a result I lean heavily on the recipe sites that have alternate marketing channels/revenue streams (i.e. Serious Eats, ChefSteps, etc)
TruthWillHurt 4y ago
We don't need an update. We need a rollback.
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  We need to roll back a lot more than just Google.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
emptyparadise 4y ago
It got so bad that I'm actually taking my own notes on topics again and trying to build up a personal knowledge database. Maybe it's not such a bad thing...
- jonasdegendt 4y ago
  Make sure to go full circle by publishing your notes on a blog and start ranking!
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    I bet I could make it to the front page of HN if I blogged about my notes on taking notes. Everyone loves that sort of thing.
    - TOMDM 4y ago
      HN is more of a notes of writing software for taking notes, but hey I'm sure people here would be happy to branch out.
      - emptyparadise 4y ago
        I don't know, articles about zettelkasten get a lot of love: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zettelkasten https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zettelkasten
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I have to append site:reddit.com before most queries now. Health and medical queries are the worst. The top results literally have the same generic content.
  - plonk 4y ago
    You don't want medical advice from reddit though. At least the university websites are trustworthy enough to decide if you need to see a doctor. Maybe a no-filler health info website could be viable if it spread by word of mouth and not via Google. After a while it should become well-ranked on Google anyway, like Wikipedia or StackOverflow. Getting it to that point is a chicken-and-egg problem though.
potamic 4y ago
The last couple of years have seen renewed interest in the search space and a lot of new comers in the market targeting the content search vacuum left behind by Google. Looks like they are finally waking up to the threat and ramping up their public relations. Too late Google, too late. Your veiled, corporate attempt at building a narrative around your product is not going to work. I have burnt many a neuron over the years using your product over and acquired an unrelenting PTSD from you. Thankfully I have found a cure and can breakup with you finally. You have a good one.
- aembleton 4y ago
  You've acquired PTSD from using Google search? Did you ever use Yahoo search?
nixcraft 4y ago
>Better ranking of original, quality content Hah. Just another day, someone sent me this link[1] which took images and text from my page[2] for the Google query "linux check disk space". Here is the thing my page doesn't even appear on Google. The ripped page points to the source[2] and has a link back to the original images. These scammers know how to game Google with their AI-driven sites, and they adopt it faster than Google rolling out new changes. I hope Google fix this issue. [1] Spam/scam page - http://blog.imm.cnr.it/content/linux-check-disk-space-command-view-system-disk-usage-df-and-du http://blog.imm.cnr.it/content/linux-check-disk-space-comman... [2] Original my page published on 2016-01-23 - https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-check-disk-space-command/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-check-disk-space-command... [3] Google search query - https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+check+disk+space https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+check+disk+space
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  DMCA notices are unpopular with the crowd here, but when your content is plagiarized and other people are profiting off of your work, I'd recommend the following workflow: * Use Copyscape and perform automated plagiarized content detection. * Automate the sending of DMCA notices to Google and the website host (using captcha solving services, if necessary).
  - mianos 4y ago
    As lame as it is, it's not really plagiarism when there is attribution, even if it is non obviously that URL at the top of the page.
    - janosdebugs 4y ago
      Attribution does not exempt an author from the need to get permission. Baring a few edge cases, such as fair use, a copying without permission is still a copyright violation, attribution or not.
    - JW_00000 4y ago
      Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. "Plagiarism" is not a legal thing: it's not a crime codified in law and doesn't appear in laws [1]. Instead, usually it's a violation of some internal code, e.g. a school's or newspaper's policy of integrity. As you say indeed, usually these policies only consider something plagiarism if there is a lack of (clear) attribution. However copyright is encoded in law and copyright infringement is a crime. The linked page clearly violates the copyright of OP. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects
antirez 4y ago
Great content is often found in pages without their ADs. I don't buy it: they will hardly leave so many dollars on the table.
akdor1154 4y ago
Cool, so will the relevant wiki page, which is almost certainly both the most linked to and most desired page for almost all "thing" searches, go back to being result #1 instead of buried under content farms, copyspam, and Medium trash?
- dannyw 4y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't run AdSense. Content farms run AdSense. Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core metrics.
  - pas 4y ago
    > Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core metrics. While this is almost trivially true based on what we know of (the world, big tech companies, Google in particular, etc), do we have direct supporting evidence for this?
  - gregw134 4y ago
    This is just completely untrue.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Maybe we’ll finally get recipe pages where the recipe isn’t buried under 2000 words of drivel just to bump the SEO score
  - gempir 4y ago
    Bread recipe Well you see already in ancient rome they made bread this way............... [2 pages of story time] AD AD AD Ingredients separated by more Ads
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
firasd 4y ago
I'm not sure this whole drive towards 'original content' makes sense. It encourages people to make long rambling pages that don't get to the point In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was almost always the first result on various topics What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly just filling up paragraphs for google like "so you want to learn about oranges? an orange is a great type of fruit. here's a bunch of text about oranges being described in historic literature"
- BillinghamJ 4y ago
  My impression is that this update is specifically about deranking those types of pages
- amarant 4y ago
  I think there's a different driving factor that. I've heard of a metric that is how long you spend on a given URL. Not sure how they gather that data, probably only gathered from Chrome users. Anyway, from what I've heard, that's the reason recipe sites have started posting 4 pages of drivel about the dish before getting to the actual recipe. Or so I've heard, I don't really have any good sources for this, could just be hearsay
  - wodenokoto 4y ago
    > probably only gathered from Chrome users. Or, Google Analytics. Or Google ads. Or, if you return to Google and try other links for the same query. Or if you return to Google and refine the query (e.g., a new search where the term is within a predefined threshold of word vector similarity) There are plenty of ways to approximate time spend on link.
  - smoe 4y ago
    A couple of months ago I read on various SEO blogs (they all seem to mostly copy and paste each other with little original research) that these days it is less about keywords and technical things like semantic html, but if and how long people engage with the search result. E.g. if a link to your page is shown to the user in search and they don't click or they return to search page too quickly, Google sees this as a signal that the result was not helpful.
mdmglr 4y ago
> Last year, we kicked off a series of updates to show more helpful, in-depth reviews based on first-hand expertise in search results. I find myself searching <product name> + "review reddit" to find real honest reviews. My anecdotal experience is that everything else is written by content creators who are given the product for free to use for a few days/weeks/months w/o going in depth.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I can assure you that 90% of these product review sites have never even used the product, and the content is almost always written by a $25/article writer from Upwork.
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    Awhile ago the company I used to work for used a local service that does 2 pieces of content per week for you for lime 50€ / month. Quality was shit but it did get us views and paying customers.
- permarad 4y ago
  Yeh I find myself adding 'reddit' a lot to my search queries. I'm looking for someone asking the same question, and someone answering it.
- marttt 4y ago
  Same here. For more niche stuff, <product name> + "site:news.ycombinator.com" is standard practice. Or Algolia's HN search. Another one is <product name> + "forum" or <product name> + <some trusted forum>. I train myself to use DDG, but, to my own dissapointment, I end up with "!g <query> site:something-trustworthy.com" way too often. For regular Google searches, I've had the feeling of being "scammed" for years, though. The "fishing devil" on the no-results page also feels like buttering up the user. I always subconsciously interpret this as a lightly humiliating, but cowardly way to say "we decide what you see, bro". But, YMMV. Never wanted to bash anybody, but this has got to be the most negative post I've ever written on HN. Please, please, please, Google, give me the search results of around 2008-2010. Pages, pages, pages of results for almost any query. I worked as a journalist then, and googling was actually useful, even educational, in real life.
eric4smith 4y ago
More and More above the fold content is coming from google sites. That’s not gonna change. Especially if you’re searching for local services above the fold will be ads then maps listings. I get it. But that blog post is some 1984 shit. Hahaha.
politelemon 4y ago
> tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people By my understanding, this should hopefully cause Pinterest pages to disappear from image searches too, but by my experience, they're a big site so Google will have made an exception for them. And it should likely deal with those StackOverflow 'clone' sites which sometimes rank better than StackOverflow itself.
sebow 4y ago
How does "more original content" doesn't sound like potential shitty results for a given query? We've already seen tailoring doesn't work universally and people often times want concrete results.
okumurahata 4y ago
On YouTube, there is an option called "Don't recommend channel". I wonder why Google doesn't have a similar option. Or even better, a "Recommend me this website as the first option" button. It would useful to avoid spammy sites and to benefit the good ones. To avoid gaming the algorithm, Google can't take this data into account to benefit/punish websites on search results. The button has the only purpose to customise the user experience one by one. Over time though, and organically, spammy sites would get less traffic. Eventually, they would be forced to shut down (lack of ad revenue).
- AraceliHarker 4y ago
  The "Don't recommend channel" feature on YouTube is not permanent, but the blocked channel will reappear after a while.
- Youden 4y ago
  Kagi has this feature. You can mark websites to prioritise for your results and websites to demote or completely exclude.
  - visarga 4y ago
    That's great, until they decide to nix it or you want to migrate your list to another search engine. I wish we could decouple these choices from the website providers. A web browser that puts the user back in control.
    - xzjis 4y ago
      There is no reason to think that a paid search engine like Kagi will get rid of one of it's signature functionality, but if you're interested in an extension for browser: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
skilled 4y ago
Well, I am excited to see the impact of this. These days there is no shortage of tools that monitor SERP fluctuation, and if this update brings about _significant_ impact it will be talked about everywhere. And I fully expect spammers to go ballistic once their content gets obliterated.
- rchaud 4y ago
  If anything, spammers are years ahead of Google. Did they go ballistic when Google introduced the Panda update in 2010, killing many of the the web-scraped, machine-generated blogspam that was poisoning search results? No, they moved on to fresh territory like Youtube, gaming the recommendation engines. And they eventually came back to the web to poison results with hordes of awful 'best bicycle for fitness in 2022' type afilliate marketing sites.
nfhshy68 4y ago
> More helpful product reviews written by experts You mean content farms? Oh yea, more of that please.
paganel 4y ago
A little OT, but is there a name for that design style that Google is using here? I'm talking about the bearded dude at the top of the article, with glasses and a phone in his hand. I've seen it more and more during the last few years, from ads around the city I live in to hipsterish magazines. There's something about it that has started bugging me the wrong way, I find it kind of infantilising but at the same time trying to "sell" me something as an adult (an insurance product, a "life is good" vibe because goofy drawings, that sort of thing). Or maybe I'm seeing too much into it. Later edit: I'm talking about visuals like this one [1], which, looking at it again, I find quite similar in style to the one Google is using (hence my question, there must be a trend or something). [1] https://www.reginamaria.ro/sites/default/files/inline-images/IMGL0456.JPG https://www.reginamaria.ro/sites/default/files/inline-images...
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Corporate Memphis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
- gempir 4y ago
  Corporate Art Style, also referred to as Big Tech Art Style, Globohomo Art Style and Corporate Memphis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-style https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Globohomo Art Style lol. That’s what I’ll call it from now on.
    - civilized 4y ago
      The name seems a gift to right-wing critics.
      - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alecco 4y ago
I don't buy it. Google search of basic programming concepts give almost always as top results sites like geeksforgeeks and other Indian proto-spam sites with very obnoxious sign-up floats covering up everything, while the content is almost copy pasted from docs or other sites. Google rarely gives you the official documentation or tutorials at the top. You have to restrict with site: (to the point I have "search engines" doing just that "site:"). It seems there's a new one I haven't seen before called appdividend blog, from India too. And another one "DelftStack", allegedly from Netherlands (tweets from 2019 and weird lack of info). programiz, from Nepal (you have to dig to find it). What should these search pages give, in order: Official documentation, then Stack Exchange and similar, then real people's blogs, and at the very bottom on page 25 these spammy copy-n-paste sites/blogs. Google is full of developers, so they have to know about this but for some reason the company does nothing about it. Almost like the company is fully driven by ad revenue and doesn't want users to find actual content.
- infinityio 4y ago
  It is a paid service, so probably not for everyone, but have you tried Kagi? It lets you 'pin' specific sites to the top, rank sites higher, rank sites lower, or block them entirely
mupuff1234 4y ago
Google used to have the ability to search for "discussions", no idea why they removed that. Nowadays I just append "site:reddit" to most of my queries (although I'm sure there's more and more paid/fake posts there as well)
- visarga 4y ago
  I'd like more search filters like that, they should be composable with logic expressions. For example, "forums" or "eu" (all EU national domains, so you can find a product that is easy to ship), but you could extend it with page categories like "reviews", "recipes", "python", "js", "in/out_top_1m", "blogs", not to mention verticals like "shopping", "hotels", "tickets". Especially for the shopping category Google dropped the ball. When I am, wallet in hand, ready to buy a widget, why doesn't it do the best to help me find it? Isn't that the essence of search? Or just to search again and show more ads? Such a failure of experience to try to use Google. Behaves like the doctor who secretly wants people to be sick so he can have more business. But the writing is on the wall. Dialogue based search agents are coming, snippet based search is on the way out. The language models become better and better, they can even do sub-searches. The trend towards natural language based search is being accelerated by the mobile phones who lack proper keyboards and large screens.
thallukrish 4y ago
What if unique content is not the one I want?
otobrglez 4y ago
What could possibly go wrong? O, wait. That's how the SEO hacking industry was born.
TedShiller 4y ago
lol
dalbasal 4y ago
>> We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers. So... Back when "SEO" was new, I would read the Matt Cutts blog. He was head of "anti-spam." I remember thinking back then that anti-spam was an ignorant frame. Once Google gained importance, websites started trying to improve their rankings. That might mean migrating from Flash to HTML. It might mean meta-tags, content, keyword stuffing, link collecting... paying a consultant. Google's early view/advice seemed to be: "Just ignore rankings. You do your thing, makes your site as useful you can. We'll do our thing: judging your site algorithmically and deciding how to rank it." Websites intentionally trying to improve rankings was ipso facto spam. The very idea of SEO was spam. Naturally, cracks appeared. Flash and embedded images was an early one. Google's initial position was: "HTML is better for users." They thought websites should use clean HTML regardless of rankings. No contradictions need be confronted Once a two sided conversation starts, that crack becomes a wedge. It becomes clear that website owners don't care about the usability of plain html text. Usability doesn't matter until you have users... and users come from Google. The "language" of SEO continued developing in this disingenuous way. Google pretended to be giving tips about accessibility or content, that tangentially also improve rankings. Websites pretended that their keyword stuffing was about usability or whatnot. Google have been carrying this culture of euphemisation for almost 20 years now. Elephants stampede all over the meeting room. Everyone tries hard to pretend they don't hear the deafening trumpeting. Youtube is an even more extreme example. Google's algorithms, policies and processes throw an entire media industry around, while Google pretend these are just minor side effects, or that it isn't happening. The gaslighting is awful.
- gsatic 4y ago
  They lost control long long ago. It's basically a Jurassic Park story at this stage.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- kylecordes 4y ago
  I agree with you, but Google also faces a perhaps impossible problem of how to detect good content on YouTube. They can look at how long people watch; but that ends up rewarding rambling pointless blather when a concise two minute video would be perfect. They can look at likes or subscribes, but that causes many wasted human lifetimes per day, of people saying and listening to pleading to click said buttons.
jl6 4y ago
It’s good that they recognize Search has become a cesspool, but their incentives fundamentally don’t align with users. One of the things that makes content farms suck is advert-delimited paragraphs, and I don’t see Google downranking those sites while they are taking a cut from the delimiters.
whage 4y ago
Reading through the comments here (and very much feeling the pain they describe), this idea came: Shouldn't we have a search engine that heavily favours the types of websites that we typically look for? You know, the classic 90s style tech blogs, the plain HTML documentation pages. Ignoring websites with ads, sites with lots of baggage (fonts, scripts, whatnot), sites with lots of images. Maybe increase the ranking of pages that don't change much in their look and content as time goes by. I don't know. Would it be useful? How would it pay for itself?
- debesyla 4y ago
  Are you talking about Marginalia? [https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/]
- rchaud 4y ago
  What you're describing is an internet that hasn't existed since 2006, or whenever Jquery and Ajax started becoming mainstream. Sites containing "fonts and scripts" are not baggage. They have just been updated for modern times. Sites have to measure traffic somehow, and it's not going to be via a "Guest Counter" widget like they had back in the Geocities days. You might be looking for an alt-web like that hosted on the Gemini network. It's all text and HTML-only as I understand.
- powerhour 4y ago
  Remember Hotbot? They had a way to limit searches to those that used JavaScript. ha! https://wikieducator.org/File:Hotbot.gif https://wikieducator.org/File:Hotbot.gif
- superkuh 4y ago
  millionshort.com used to be good but it recently joined the mega-corp search pack and hid it's search engine behind required code exectution that blocks non-megacorp browsers. https://searchmysite.net/ https://searchmysite.net/ is a curated search for exactly what you describe though. It's been on HN a couple times.
s1k3s 4y ago
> More helpful product reviews written by experts This translates to "more YT videos made by our content-creators", right? Searching for "macbook pro m2 reviews" gives me 5 YT videos at the top, all repeating the same stuff over and over again and (no offense) made by people who aren't really experts. Or are they?
- lloyddobbler 4y ago
  It's the internet. Everyone is an expert! (/s, if it wasn't blatantly obvious.)
  - s1k3s 4y ago
    What's funny in this specific search for macbook reviews is that the well known websites which really have interesting information AND dig deep in the product specs AND have been there for more than 2 decades are not even on the front page. It's literally just the ones repeating the stuff I can find in Apple's landing page, but rephrased by some copywriter.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Tech reviews online are largely useless. Just like the "shocked face" thumbnail, reviewers have realized that their viewers want entertainment more than they want a review. So the video largely ends up being an infomercial with a lot of product shots, rehashing of specs and largely generic opinions.
Ensorceled 4y ago
I'm cynical Google will be able to truly fix this or even want to. I think Google is part of a cartel; their search funnels people to sites that run ads that often are part of the Google network. Yes, they make a ton from search advertising but also a ton from the greater network. This is really the Mob boss cracking down on underlings who have gone over the line and are collecting too much protection money or are cutting the "goods".
- pushkine 4y ago
  Many creators have noticed that YouTube's recommendation algorithm is heavily skewed to favor videos with monetization enabled. I wouldn't be surprised if Google Search's algorithm was hard coded to favor websites using AdSense.
weystrom 4y ago
I wish they'd just un-screw the page ranking algorithm. The quality of search has been steadily going down for quite a while now due to spam getting better and better at SEO. I'm hopeful for this feature, but I'm not sure how scalable it can prove to be, to help manually rank pages for myriad of topics.
account42 4y ago
Using Corporate Memphis-style hero image for an article about "content by people, for people" has got to be someone at google trolling us. There is no way they can be this tone deaf.
- TOMDM 4y ago
  This was my first thought too. C'mon Google put Imagen to work, I'm so over this art style.
  - robotnikman 4y ago
    Same, and with just about every tech corp using it, it gets old rather quick.
dgudkov 4y ago
I don't think Google will ever be able to distinguish texts that are written for people from texts that are written for Google. It's effectively the Turing test, and Google won't pass it.
- JW_00000 4y ago
  It's worse than a Turing test: it's trying to distinguish between a honest human (writing content they are knowledgeable about or that is original) vs a dishonest human (who writes filler content just to get a higher ranking). It would almost need to be able to read the author's mind to figure out their intention. Or, given a text, figure out if what it is saying is original and/or true.
  - visarga 4y ago
    No, they are trying to distinguish between content that is going to make $ for them vs content that is not going to make $. They don't care about truth or utility.
- corille 4y ago
  The way I read it, this is aimed at derivative texts that were scraped from other sites. If Google indexes those sites, they can recognize when the content of a newly indexed site is copied from elsewhere.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Most of the blogspam on the Internet today are website filled with product 'reviews' and affiliate links. These aren't derivative of anything, so they won't be downgraded. Neither will the hordes of blogs breathlessly reporting celebrity and business gossip. A search engine won't be able to differentiate between the quality of a TMZ vs say Variety.
troelsSteegin 4y ago
What reading the post suggests to me is that they are identifying high quality chunks of content as unique, and then ranking pages up or down in part according to what was seen to have published a given chunk first.
stabbles 4y ago
Sure enough original, quality content will be generated by AI
shortformblog 4y ago
Anecdotally, my level of daily traffic from organic search (driven by evergreen history articles on esoteric topics) has roughly doubled from where it was a month ago and is at a significantly higher level than it’s been over the past year. Looking further back in history it seems there was a dip after the spring of 2020 that largely has defined my search-based traffic levels since then, and the traffic from search has largely bounced back in the past two weeks. While it’s still early, I will say that I’m seeing better results from a variety of search results, whereas I had 2-3 consistent search performers that drove most of the traffic prior to the recent change. Just the perspective from someone who runs a long-running tech-meets-history newsletter.
- nicbou 4y ago
  Mine dipped slightly, to the level of a year ago. It looks like it might have been bumped again this week. It's undeniably genuine, original, quality content. However I don't know how a machine reads and scores my content. Given the stuff YouTube thinks I like, I'm scared.
wilde 4y ago
It’s great to hear them admit that there is a problem. For years we’d get “our internal quality measures say we’re doing great. You’re imagining things. Fuck off to Bing and see how you like it.” I suspect they have an inventory problem, not a ranking problem. Why would any real humans publish publicly on the internet at this point? If you’re posting for fun you have to deal with moderation and stolen content. If you’re posting for pay Google just takes your content and shoves it onto the SERP, skipping your ads. Bill Gates had it right. If you want a sustainable ecosystem, you need to make sure the other players are making more money than you in aggregate. As far as I can tell, that’s only true on the internet for eCommerce and so that’s all that’s left.
seanwilson 4y ago
> Next week, we'll launch the “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people. This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search, and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content. I know Google isn't going to reveal the exact secrets behind what changes they're making to do this to avoid black hat SEO, but haven't they been trying to do the above all along? What stops the SEO community from observing how rankings change, guessing what the new metrics are, and then optimising for these metrics as usual until the search spam is back where it started? What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment on if a page was helpful? A big reason imo that Googling for "reddit <search term>" works is that spammy stuff on social sites (including Hacker News) gets punished quickly by spam filters, down-votes and negative comments - regular Google search lacks that because people can't down-vote or comment on a page. It feels inevitable to me they'll have to start doing something like this.
- dazc 4y ago
  There is no incentive to arranging a downvoting scheme targeted against a random poster on HN or Reddit, there is, however, a great incentive to do the same against a commercial competitor in Google search results. Negative seo is a thing and any commercial site that is remotely successful is targeted with it daily.
- layer8 4y ago
  > What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment on if a page was helpful? Difficult for such a system not to be gamed, e.g. via botnets.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    And difficult for the system to not be gamed by brigadiers. Also voting is an extremely skewed signal, what people say they like and what they actually like are very different and with search you can actually measure that by seeing which results users actually go to and don’t bounce from.
paxys 4y ago
I expect these changes will lead to a brief period where the quality of search results will get better, but then will be quickly reversed engineered and gamed by "SEO experts" bringing us right back to where we are. This is a fight Google simply cannot win.
gambler 4y ago
This is just 2nd order gaslighting. For many, many years Google was denying obvious problems with how their search system worked. Denial and gaslighting was clearly their marketing strategy. It kind of worked too, at least in terms of public opinion in tech space. Now something has changed and they're suddenly pretending to care. Problem is, this effectively gaslights people about their prior gaslighting. Why was the company blatantly denying obvious issues for so many years? What has changed? Why should I trust their judgment all of a sudden? It's kind of like someone who is a pathologic liar having been caught in various lies for many years, swearing to tell you the truth, but not admitting to the past lies.
- jsnell 4y ago
  Can you give a few concrete examples of these "blatant denials"?
iamjbn 4y ago
Just wait until cheap to write GPT3 articles learn SEO techniques inherently and bombard the internet suppressing human writers in the spam ocean. At https://aquila.network https://aquila.network we’re always thinking of this scenario.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Quora annswers basically read like GPT-3 if it were trained exclusively on recipe websites.
- ThinkingGuy 4y ago
  Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
mib32 4y ago
I think it’s quite clear: when I search for something, what I want to see, it’s people arguing with each other on my topic of search, and I want to read their various arguments, and make my decision. This is why I like HN and artisan forums so much, or even Reddit. Google could do just one thing - prioritize giving out the discussions of real people. But they just don’t wanna do it apparently
nyxtom 4y ago
The entire revenue model for Google is not incentivized to rank quality content and what you are looking for. Low quality content is filled with ads. As an alternative to this, I've been using Kagi (https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/) for a while and I love it
dzonga 4y ago
google search getting worse day by day. and they're increasing surface area for the results to become more garbage. what are trusted experts ? does google wanna be a publisher now ?
jccalhoun 4y ago
I am so sick and tired of sites that have a bunch of filler content in them just to appear higher in search results. You search for something, say "How to change a light bulb" and you get all this front loading with sections on "what is a light bulb?" "Why do light bulbs need changing?" "Picking a light bulb" and then finally the answer. Maybe a search engine that could prioritize getting to the point would be good.
- skilled 4y ago
  I mean, I have seen some really funky articles relating to what you said - articles that are ranking on page one. I was looking up some niche stuff in JavaScript space, and the article started out with a sentence: "An increasing number of developers are looking to get started with web development. And because of this, they are searching to get started with <a fairly complex topic to grasp for a beginner>." Sooo.... developers are looking to get started with development... And like you say, the same goes for all the "What is a <topic>" - feels like a fundamental error on Google's part for parsing language intent.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Basic queries like "how to change a light bulb" are better answered on Youtube; it's not 1995 anymore, a web page explaining that with text and pictures is slower than creating a video. The only ones still writing web pages for things like that are trying to sell you something. If they weren't, they'd also just make a video.
  - albrewer 4y ago
    > Basic queries like "how to change a light bulb" are better answered on Youtube Hard disagree. If the best content for the problem is a video, then sure, bubble that up to the top of the search results. But to limit yourself to only one medium is ridiculous.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    Completely disagree. Videos take forever. Often times I have a specific query and text is easier to search than information within videos.
nyxtom 4y ago
Flash back to 1998 when Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page when they said an ad-supported model will never be able to rank quality content. Seems like they almost realize it > "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. > It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
SCLeo 4y ago
I write novels as a hobby and I publish them on my website. I recently noticed that there are websites that blatantly copy and sell my novels without my permission and are ranked higher than mine. I think it is because Google identifies their pages as the source. If anyone knows how to deal with issues like this, please let me know.
- codazoda 4y ago
  I would write up a simple cease and desist letter and send it to the registrar, web host, page owner, Google, and anyone else you can identify. You might even be able to write a script that does some lookups for you. May not work for foreign domains, hosts, etc. But, maybe. YMMV
  - Aulig 4y ago
    > script that does some lookups for you Might want to check out https://plagiashield.com/ https://plagiashield.com/ I use it occasionally but don't have an active subscription. But it's decent at finding stolen content (except for false positives on privacy policy & TOS)
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  Unfortunately it sounds to like a lawsuit may be your best bet.
  - robotnikman 4y ago
    Unless they are hosted by people in countries unfriendly with the US, in which case good luck.
- injidup 4y ago
  With what license do you publish them?
- fooey 4y ago
  Send DMCA complaints to google
WalterBright 4y ago
I infer that there is a point after all to having my extensive personal library.
bradhilton 4y ago
For medical advice I would see more serious articles/blog posts in search results and fewer listicles. For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not a blog post with dozens of ads. For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run by software developers they have to know about this problem lol.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not a blog post with dozens of ads. Why not just buy a cookbook? It doesn't seem like the convenience of accessing recipes at the touch of a button is worth the tradeoff of ads.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It's funny, I've had almost embarrassing success building a trivial recipe filter for my search engine. The code itself is comically simple[1], I just count how many recipe-words I find (from a manual dictionary), and then add a small penalty for excessively lengthy texts. Very much a soviet space pencil approach. It's hard to assess recall, but the precision seems to be in the 80%+ range. Check it: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scallops&profile=food https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scallops&profile=f... [1] https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/branch/master/marginalia_nu/src/main/java/nu/marginalia/wmsa/edge/converting/processor/logic/topic/RecipeDetector.java https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/branc...
  - bradhilton 4y ago
    NICE! I like it, thanks for sharing!
- powerhour 4y ago
  > For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run by software developers they have to know about this problem lol. This fact alone tells me they're not willing to take search result quality seriously. I'm sure medical professionals feel the same way about relevant content that is scraped and republished.
mclightning 4y ago
Adding "site:reddit.com" improves search results by 10 folds in many topics.
freediver 4y ago
The more accurate title would be "Less content by robots". Unfortunately, what is not mentioned in the article is that sole existence of these content-farms is enabled by Adsense. So basically they are in the chicken and egg problem, and the only way to really solve it is to acknowledge that ad-based business models lead to detoriation of content on the web, get rid of Adsense (probably miniscule revenue contribution compared to Adwords) and then figure out how they resolve their own business model incentives and outcomes for users. Tough one.
- dmix 4y ago
  These Google search blogs NEVER honestly talk about the problems or their (alleged) solutions. You basically have to act as a mind-reading translator to understand what they actually did.
dmix 4y ago
> Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your existing audience? This is something youtube should be updating their algorithm for
pcdoodle 4y ago
Good. I'm getting sick of adding -2022 and -best to my searches. The results are a wasteland...
- jfoster 4y ago
  That's a super interesting approach to culling the spam, since web spammers often are trying to make old content look new. Does it work well?
  - pcdoodle 4y ago
    YMMV. It seems like google only lists "authoritative" domains on the first few pages. Tried to fight the brightest TV by nits / mcd/m3 and that trick didn't work for me :( Sometimes adding "reddit" helps.
entwife 4y ago
Google's advantages are PageRank, a head start (time), and its sheer size.
xpe 4y ago
Most people want a search engine designed to understand what they want in context. But until people pay for that search capability directly, the economic incentives will not align. And there is the ever present temptation of accepting money from advertisers. This is potentially lucrative. Will consumers ever pay enough directly to offset seller interests to sway search results? I doubt it under the current regulatory framework. We need changes. Some people (policy people and economists mostly) know about Ronald Coase. One of his key points is we can rebalance who has the upper hand at the beginning of a market (initial conditions) and still have economic efficiency. Coase's classic analysis compares two hypothetical worlds. In one world, smoking is legal and non-smokers have to compensate smokers in order to have a smoke free experience. In the other world the opposite is true. Both worlds can be completely economically efficient (defined as the equilibrium where there are no additional exchanges that make all parties better off). The difference between the worlds is purely distributional -- who gets to have more money. Distributional questions have a considerable ethical component. Like most people, I prefer the second over the first. Regulation could also similarly apply to search engines. We could tilt the balance in favor of consumers instead of sellers (in the case of public companies, this means investors). What am I proposing? Simply put: more discussion about such options. I will not try specify the best legislation for all situations in this already long comment. This does not mean no significant improvements are possible nor feasible. I simply do not want to get mired in debate over only one policy option. --- About me: I listen to good libertarian style arguments as long as they are realistic about the standard economic model's limitations and failure modes: externalities, market power, imperfect information, nonrational consumers, and so on. / I lean liberal, so I care about transition costs too. Rapid change is hard because people have limited geographic mobility, especially in the short run. I also care about observable, measurable opportunities more than only hypothetical talk about options.
uncomputation 4y ago
> With this update, you’ll see more results with unique, authentic information, so you’re more likely to read something you haven't seen before. This phrasing sets off a little alarm in the back of my brain. Overall, I agree with the intent of the update and I think Google is maybe internally realizing that their questionable search quality combined with legitimate and privacy-focused competitors (DDG, Neeva [1]) could turn into a serious and existential threat to them. That said, this is not quite the issue a lot of people have with Google search results. For me, when I search a movie for reviews, it’s not that I want new reviews to show up from smaller sites. It’s that I don’t want the whole screen filled with Google’s own little special sideshow for movie reviews. I can easily see this becoming even more frustrating actually if I search for “x reviews” and rather than get the usual Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, newspaper reviews, I get RandomGuy.com. If I want RandomGuy.com, that is actually what a social media-esque site like Rotten Tomatoes or Letterboxd is for, not a search engine. Hopefully this will be what we want it to be and not, for example, the TikTok-ization of Google search results, constantly and algorithmically showing you something “new.” [1]: <rant> That said, the game is still very much for the taking and no one is still able to easily answer one of my most common queries for work: “python regex.” Seriously, it feels like a battle to get a simple example showing how to use groups/named groups to extract specific information. I don’t want a reference guide to common RegEx wildcards, I already know about \d and +! I don’t want a toy example showing how to use RegEx for seeing if “rain” is in “The cat is in the rain” (that’s using a hammer to kill a fly - you would just use “if rain in string” for example). I want a helpful and succinct guide on the specifics of Python’s RegEx so I can stop fiddling with it ASAP! </rant>
davidkuennen 4y ago
It's baffling to me that if you search for "Best xxx", you get hundreds of pages only filled with paid ads as top products. How is any normal person able to make informed decisions like this.
kylecordes 4y ago
AI content writing tools are now staggeringly good at producing a huge volume of pointless text, for incrementally $0.00 per word - previously the nonzero cost per word of hiring the lowest-cost writer available, was at least a little bit of drag on the whole Internet filling with pointless content. Google has a giant hard problem to solve here. I hope they are successful. If they aren't successful, it could be a door opening for someone else to take a stab at search.
superkuh 4y ago
Google Search only ever returns <400 results. Never any more. Apparently Google considers this fine. So, RIP Google Search 1998-2019, apparently. If google search really wants to improve results all they actually have to do is let people see the results instead of hiding them. 400 results is not enough.
pushkine 4y ago
Remember when Facebook was at its peak around 2014 (innovation, popularity) then announced radical changes on its feed algorithm in like 2016 to prioritize content made by friends? ...
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marttt 4y ago
I have started to consider Google's site: operator as the only tool that doesn't noticeably "game" the results. What's the reality, though? Have the results for site: searches actually also declined in quality during recent years, due to Google's general policy changes? Maybe somebody with a more analytical eye could elaborate on this. Thanks.

255 points by gingerlime 4y ago

kristaps 4y ago

Could it be that the results have gotten so bad that less people even bother with search, hurting ad revenue?

seydor 4y ago

The fact that this is news, is news.

dazc 4y ago
In a year's time you'll still be reading the same complaints about search quality though for the simple inescapable fact that there is little incentive for anyone to write impartial and authoritative reviews for anything that is isn't just a random hobby. What you may witness is less amazon affiliate posts and more made for AdSense posts - such as those recipes that begin with a random love story, for example.
- plonk 4y ago
  I like to write impartial and authoritative reviews for things that aren't just a random hobby of mine. Especially on anonymous forums. This could be good, or it could make advertisers start spamming forums with more fake accounts.
deleted 4y ago
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throwaway290 4y ago
The fact that the fact that this is news is news, is news.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I was sure they announced Big Plans years ago to combat content farms, to the point of e.g. browser add-ons so you could report these things. Either they just didn't work and the content farms outsmarted them, or they stopped caring. But it does feel to me like Google was a lot stricter 5-10 years ago than they are now. In the interim they tried to push AMP, but had to admit finally that it's more to keep people inside their ecosystem than make the web faster/better.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Hopefully this helps when looking for genuine product reviews / suggestions. The only way to get half-decent reviews at the moment is to append "reddit" to your search query, otherwise you get pages full of comparatives that haven't tested any of the items they recommend.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
And I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before Reddit stops caring and allows more and more bots, content farms, or paid posts on their platform.
- yunohn 4y ago
  I don’t know what “Reddit stops caring” means. Currently most moderation is done by an insular unpaid group of redditors. There is already lots of stealth promotion/ad posts, astroturfing, and trust issues. There is not inherent way to fix the inevitable breakdown, it’s a societal problem of greed and dishonesty, and you can’t easily just “ban bots”.
- paulgb 4y ago
  I’m mostly worried that they’ll disable the “old.reddit.com” trick to get the old layout. Finding information in reddit threads is a complete chore with the new design, which only a few comments displayed at a time.
- junofan 4y ago
  Got bad news for you… it’s a huge outlet for content writers.

coding123 4y ago

https://devrant.com/rants/4578894/holy-shit-google-nobody-likes-this-retarded-fucking-art-style-just-stop https://devrant.com/rants/4578894/holy-shit-google-nobody-li...

emptyparadise 4y ago
Corporate Memphis is so awful.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Can’t decide what I hate more: the pandering or the infantalization or the forced cheerfulness of it all.
  - alecco 4y ago
    Smile or Die https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
    - emptyparadise 4y ago
      No wonder people are getting jokerfied.
  - throwaway1851 4y ago
    For me, it’s the nightmarish distortion of everyone’s form. Big sites have become a bad acid trip you can’t wake up from.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Fitting. Corporations don’t see us as real people anyway now. Just an amorphous collection of wallets and monetizable data.
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rawoke083600 4y ago

Thanks Google. Now can we fix the recipes pages please. No one wants the back story for the "the best brownies", I want to know the ingredients, cooking temps (Celsius and Fahrenheit) and time.

yunohn 4y ago
Google doesn’t write recipes, dedicated and passionate cooks write blogs with recipes in them. I guarantee you that none of them are aiming to provide just a grocery list or instructions, they definitely enjoy writing their story as well. They’re building their own cookbook essentially, not a bunch of lists.
- swiftcoder 4y ago
  Or, more likely, they are just SEO optimising by providing a lot of prose (which Google has historically prioritised in search rankings) - the same way as all those AI-generated article summaries on the astroturfing sites
  - yunohn 4y ago
    How do you propose anyone (Google or humans) differentiate between 500 mostly-similar recipes for brownies? I think HNers look at food blogs with a very depressing robotic expectation.
    - rawoke083600 4y ago
      How is picking the one with the longest word count the best ??
    - swiftcoder 4y ago
      This is what algorithms like PageRank were originally designed to do. Once upon a time the popular brownie recipes are the ones that everyone linked to, or the ones on the cooking sites that everyone linked to. To be clear, I don't really care if the person wants to put their life story on their recipe site. I am annoyed that they are forced to do so in a really mechanical and disingenuous way just to make a Google algorithm happy - and as a result I lean heavily on the recipe sites that have alternate marketing channels/revenue streams (i.e. Serious Eats, ChefSteps, etc)

TruthWillHurt 4y ago

We don't need an update. We need a rollback.

emptyparadise 4y ago
We need to roll back a lot more than just Google.
deleted 4y ago
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emptyparadise 4y ago

It got so bad that I'm actually taking my own notes on topics again and trying to build up a personal knowledge database. Maybe it's not such a bad thing...

jonasdegendt 4y ago
Make sure to go full circle by publishing your notes on a blog and start ranking!
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  I bet I could make it to the front page of HN if I blogged about my notes on taking notes. Everyone loves that sort of thing.
  - TOMDM 4y ago
    HN is more of a notes of writing software for taking notes, but hey I'm sure people here would be happy to branch out.
    - emptyparadise 4y ago
      I don't know, articles about zettelkasten get a lot of love: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zettelkasten https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zettelkasten
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I have to append site:reddit.com before most queries now. Health and medical queries are the worst. The top results literally have the same generic content.
- plonk 4y ago
  You don't want medical advice from reddit though. At least the university websites are trustworthy enough to decide if you need to see a doctor. Maybe a no-filler health info website could be viable if it spread by word of mouth and not via Google. After a while it should become well-ranked on Google anyway, like Wikipedia or StackOverflow. Getting it to that point is a chicken-and-egg problem though.

potamic 4y ago

The last couple of years have seen renewed interest in the search space and a lot of new comers in the market targeting the content search vacuum left behind by Google. Looks like they are finally waking up to the threat and ramping up their public relations. Too late Google, too late. Your veiled, corporate attempt at building a narrative around your product is not going to work. I have burnt many a neuron over the years using your product over and acquired an unrelenting PTSD from you. Thankfully I have found a cure and can breakup with you finally. You have a good one.

aembleton 4y ago
You've acquired PTSD from using Google search? Did you ever use Yahoo search?

nixcraft 4y ago

>Better ranking of original, quality content Hah. Just another day, someone sent me this link[1] which took images and text from my page[2] for the Google query "linux check disk space". Here is the thing my page doesn't even appear on Google. The ripped page points to the source[2] and has a link back to the original images. These scammers know how to game Google with their AI-driven sites, and they adopt it faster than Google rolling out new changes. I hope Google fix this issue. [1] Spam/scam page - http://blog.imm.cnr.it/content/linux-check-disk-space-command-view-system-disk-usage-df-and-du http://blog.imm.cnr.it/content/linux-check-disk-space-comman... [2] Original my page published on 2016-01-23 - https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-check-disk-space-command/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-check-disk-space-command... [3] Google search query - https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+check+disk+space https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+check+disk+space

stevewatson301 4y ago
DMCA notices are unpopular with the crowd here, but when your content is plagiarized and other people are profiting off of your work, I'd recommend the following workflow: * Use Copyscape and perform automated plagiarized content detection. * Automate the sending of DMCA notices to Google and the website host (using captcha solving services, if necessary).
- mianos 4y ago
  As lame as it is, it's not really plagiarism when there is attribution, even if it is non obviously that URL at the top of the page.
  - janosdebugs 4y ago
    Attribution does not exempt an author from the need to get permission. Baring a few edge cases, such as fair use, a copying without permission is still a copyright violation, attribution or not.
  - JW_00000 4y ago
    Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. "Plagiarism" is not a legal thing: it's not a crime codified in law and doesn't appear in laws [1]. Instead, usually it's a violation of some internal code, e.g. a school's or newspaper's policy of integrity. As you say indeed, usually these policies only consider something plagiarism if there is a lack of (clear) attribution. However copyright is encoded in law and copyright infringement is a crime. The linked page clearly violates the copyright of OP. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Legal_aspects

antirez 4y ago

Great content is often found in pages without their ADs. I don't buy it: they will hardly leave so many dollars on the table.

akdor1154 4y ago

Cool, so will the relevant wiki page, which is almost certainly both the most linked to and most desired page for almost all "thing" searches, go back to being result #1 instead of buried under content farms, copyspam, and Medium trash?

dannyw 4y ago
Wikipedia doesn't run AdSense. Content farms run AdSense. Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core metrics.
- pas 4y ago
  > Google algo updates have revenue as one of the core metrics. While this is almost trivially true based on what we know of (the world, big tech companies, Google in particular, etc), do we have direct supporting evidence for this?
- gregw134 4y ago
  This is just completely untrue.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Maybe we’ll finally get recipe pages where the recipe isn’t buried under 2000 words of drivel just to bump the SEO score
- gempir 4y ago
  Bread recipe Well you see already in ancient rome they made bread this way............... [2 pages of story time] AD AD AD Ingredients separated by more Ads
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firasd 4y ago

I'm not sure this whole drive towards 'original content' makes sense. It encourages people to make long rambling pages that don't get to the point In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was almost always the first result on various topics What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly just filling up paragraphs for google like "so you want to learn about oranges? an orange is a great type of fruit. here's a bunch of text about oranges being described in historic literature"

BillinghamJ 4y ago
My impression is that this update is specifically about deranking those types of pages
amarant 4y ago
I think there's a different driving factor that. I've heard of a metric that is how long you spend on a given URL. Not sure how they gather that data, probably only gathered from Chrome users. Anyway, from what I've heard, that's the reason recipe sites have started posting 4 pages of drivel about the dish before getting to the actual recipe. Or so I've heard, I don't really have any good sources for this, could just be hearsay
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  > probably only gathered from Chrome users. Or, Google Analytics. Or Google ads. Or, if you return to Google and try other links for the same query. Or if you return to Google and refine the query (e.g., a new search where the term is within a predefined threshold of word vector similarity) There are plenty of ways to approximate time spend on link.
- smoe 4y ago
  A couple of months ago I read on various SEO blogs (they all seem to mostly copy and paste each other with little original research) that these days it is less about keywords and technical things like semantic html, but if and how long people engage with the search result. E.g. if a link to your page is shown to the user in search and they don't click or they return to search page too quickly, Google sees this as a signal that the result was not helpful.

mdmglr 4y ago

> Last year, we kicked off a series of updates to show more helpful, in-depth reviews based on first-hand expertise in search results. I find myself searching <product name> + "review reddit" to find real honest reviews. My anecdotal experience is that everything else is written by content creators who are given the product for free to use for a few days/weeks/months w/o going in depth.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
I can assure you that 90% of these product review sites have never even used the product, and the content is almost always written by a $25/article writer from Upwork.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  Awhile ago the company I used to work for used a local service that does 2 pieces of content per week for you for lime 50€ / month. Quality was shit but it did get us views and paying customers.
permarad 4y ago
Yeh I find myself adding 'reddit' a lot to my search queries. I'm looking for someone asking the same question, and someone answering it.
marttt 4y ago
Same here. For more niche stuff, <product name> + "site:news.ycombinator.com" is standard practice. Or Algolia's HN search. Another one is <product name> + "forum" or <product name> + <some trusted forum>. I train myself to use DDG, but, to my own dissapointment, I end up with "!g <query> site:something-trustworthy.com" way too often. For regular Google searches, I've had the feeling of being "scammed" for years, though. The "fishing devil" on the no-results page also feels like buttering up the user. I always subconsciously interpret this as a lightly humiliating, but cowardly way to say "we decide what you see, bro". But, YMMV. Never wanted to bash anybody, but this has got to be the most negative post I've ever written on HN. Please, please, please, Google, give me the search results of around 2008-2010. Pages, pages, pages of results for almost any query. I worked as a journalist then, and googling was actually useful, even educational, in real life.

eric4smith 4y ago

More and More above the fold content is coming from google sites. That’s not gonna change. Especially if you’re searching for local services above the fold will be ads then maps listings. I get it. But that blog post is some 1984 shit. Hahaha.

politelemon 4y ago

> tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people By my understanding, this should hopefully cause Pinterest pages to disappear from image searches too, but by my experience, they're a big site so Google will have made an exception for them. And it should likely deal with those StackOverflow 'clone' sites which sometimes rank better than StackOverflow itself.

sebow 4y ago

How does "more original content" doesn't sound like potential shitty results for a given query? We've already seen tailoring doesn't work universally and people often times want concrete results.

okumurahata 4y ago

On YouTube, there is an option called "Don't recommend channel". I wonder why Google doesn't have a similar option. Or even better, a "Recommend me this website as the first option" button. It would useful to avoid spammy sites and to benefit the good ones. To avoid gaming the algorithm, Google can't take this data into account to benefit/punish websites on search results. The button has the only purpose to customise the user experience one by one. Over time though, and organically, spammy sites would get less traffic. Eventually, they would be forced to shut down (lack of ad revenue).

AraceliHarker 4y ago
The "Don't recommend channel" feature on YouTube is not permanent, but the blocked channel will reappear after a while.
Youden 4y ago
Kagi has this feature. You can mark websites to prioritise for your results and websites to demote or completely exclude.
- visarga 4y ago
  That's great, until they decide to nix it or you want to migrate your list to another search engine. I wish we could decouple these choices from the website providers. A web browser that puts the user back in control.
  - xzjis 4y ago
    There is no reason to think that a paid search engine like Kagi will get rid of one of it's signature functionality, but if you're interested in an extension for browser: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

skilled 4y ago

Well, I am excited to see the impact of this. These days there is no shortage of tools that monitor SERP fluctuation, and if this update brings about _significant_ impact it will be talked about everywhere. And I fully expect spammers to go ballistic once their content gets obliterated.

rchaud 4y ago
If anything, spammers are years ahead of Google. Did they go ballistic when Google introduced the Panda update in 2010, killing many of the the web-scraped, machine-generated blogspam that was poisoning search results? No, they moved on to fresh territory like Youtube, gaming the recommendation engines. And they eventually came back to the web to poison results with hordes of awful 'best bicycle for fitness in 2022' type afilliate marketing sites.

nfhshy68 4y ago

> More helpful product reviews written by experts You mean content farms? Oh yea, more of that please.

paganel 4y ago

A little OT, but is there a name for that design style that Google is using here? I'm talking about the bearded dude at the top of the article, with glasses and a phone in his hand. I've seen it more and more during the last few years, from ads around the city I live in to hipsterish magazines. There's something about it that has started bugging me the wrong way, I find it kind of infantilising but at the same time trying to "sell" me something as an adult (an insurance product, a "life is good" vibe because goofy drawings, that sort of thing). Or maybe I'm seeing too much into it. Later edit: I'm talking about visuals like this one [1], which, looking at it again, I find quite similar in style to the one Google is using (hence my question, there must be a trend or something). [1] https://www.reginamaria.ro/sites/default/files/inline-images/IMGL0456.JPG https://www.reginamaria.ro/sites/default/files/inline-images...

spaceman_2020 4y ago
Corporate Memphis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
gempir 4y ago
Corporate Art Style, also referred to as Big Tech Art Style, Globohomo Art Style and Corporate Memphis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-style https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Globohomo Art Style lol. That’s what I’ll call it from now on.
  - civilized 4y ago
    The name seems a gift to right-wing critics.
    - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alecco 4y ago

I don't buy it. Google search of basic programming concepts give almost always as top results sites like geeksforgeeks and other Indian proto-spam sites with very obnoxious sign-up floats covering up everything, while the content is almost copy pasted from docs or other sites. Google rarely gives you the official documentation or tutorials at the top. You have to restrict with site: (to the point I have "search engines" doing just that "site:"). It seems there's a new one I haven't seen before called appdividend blog, from India too. And another one "DelftStack", allegedly from Netherlands (tweets from 2019 and weird lack of info). programiz, from Nepal (you have to dig to find it). What should these search pages give, in order: Official documentation, then Stack Exchange and similar, then real people's blogs, and at the very bottom on page 25 these spammy copy-n-paste sites/blogs. Google is full of developers, so they have to know about this but for some reason the company does nothing about it. Almost like the company is fully driven by ad revenue and doesn't want users to find actual content.

infinityio 4y ago
It is a paid service, so probably not for everyone, but have you tried Kagi? It lets you 'pin' specific sites to the top, rank sites higher, rank sites lower, or block them entirely

mupuff1234 4y ago

Google used to have the ability to search for "discussions", no idea why they removed that. Nowadays I just append "site:reddit" to most of my queries (although I'm sure there's more and more paid/fake posts there as well)

visarga 4y ago
I'd like more search filters like that, they should be composable with logic expressions. For example, "forums" or "eu" (all EU national domains, so you can find a product that is easy to ship), but you could extend it with page categories like "reviews", "recipes", "python", "js", "in/out_top_1m", "blogs", not to mention verticals like "shopping", "hotels", "tickets". Especially for the shopping category Google dropped the ball. When I am, wallet in hand, ready to buy a widget, why doesn't it do the best to help me find it? Isn't that the essence of search? Or just to search again and show more ads? Such a failure of experience to try to use Google. Behaves like the doctor who secretly wants people to be sick so he can have more business. But the writing is on the wall. Dialogue based search agents are coming, snippet based search is on the way out. The language models become better and better, they can even do sub-searches. The trend towards natural language based search is being accelerated by the mobile phones who lack proper keyboards and large screens.

thallukrish 4y ago

What if unique content is not the one I want?

otobrglez 4y ago

What could possibly go wrong? O, wait. That's how the SEO hacking industry was born.

TedShiller 4y ago

lol

dalbasal 4y ago

>> We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers. So... Back when "SEO" was new, I would read the Matt Cutts blog. He was head of "anti-spam." I remember thinking back then that anti-spam was an ignorant frame. Once Google gained importance, websites started trying to improve their rankings. That might mean migrating from Flash to HTML. It might mean meta-tags, content, keyword stuffing, link collecting... paying a consultant. Google's early view/advice seemed to be: "Just ignore rankings. You do your thing, makes your site as useful you can. We'll do our thing: judging your site algorithmically and deciding how to rank it." Websites intentionally trying to improve rankings was ipso facto spam. The very idea of SEO was spam. Naturally, cracks appeared. Flash and embedded images was an early one. Google's initial position was: "HTML is better for users." They thought websites should use clean HTML regardless of rankings. No contradictions need be confronted Once a two sided conversation starts, that crack becomes a wedge. It becomes clear that website owners don't care about the usability of plain html text. Usability doesn't matter until you have users... and users come from Google. The "language" of SEO continued developing in this disingenuous way. Google pretended to be giving tips about accessibility or content, that tangentially also improve rankings. Websites pretended that their keyword stuffing was about usability or whatnot. Google have been carrying this culture of euphemisation for almost 20 years now. Elephants stampede all over the meeting room. Everyone tries hard to pretend they don't hear the deafening trumpeting. Youtube is an even more extreme example. Google's algorithms, policies and processes throw an entire media industry around, while Google pretend these are just minor side effects, or that it isn't happening. The gaslighting is awful.

gsatic 4y ago
They lost control long long ago. It's basically a Jurassic Park story at this stage.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kylecordes 4y ago
I agree with you, but Google also faces a perhaps impossible problem of how to detect good content on YouTube. They can look at how long people watch; but that ends up rewarding rambling pointless blather when a concise two minute video would be perfect. They can look at likes or subscribes, but that causes many wasted human lifetimes per day, of people saying and listening to pleading to click said buttons.

jl6 4y ago

It’s good that they recognize Search has become a cesspool, but their incentives fundamentally don’t align with users. One of the things that makes content farms suck is advert-delimited paragraphs, and I don’t see Google downranking those sites while they are taking a cut from the delimiters.

whage 4y ago

Reading through the comments here (and very much feeling the pain they describe), this idea came: Shouldn't we have a search engine that heavily favours the types of websites that we typically look for? You know, the classic 90s style tech blogs, the plain HTML documentation pages. Ignoring websites with ads, sites with lots of baggage (fonts, scripts, whatnot), sites with lots of images. Maybe increase the ranking of pages that don't change much in their look and content as time goes by. I don't know. Would it be useful? How would it pay for itself?

debesyla 4y ago
Are you talking about Marginalia? [https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/]
rchaud 4y ago
What you're describing is an internet that hasn't existed since 2006, or whenever Jquery and Ajax started becoming mainstream. Sites containing "fonts and scripts" are not baggage. They have just been updated for modern times. Sites have to measure traffic somehow, and it's not going to be via a "Guest Counter" widget like they had back in the Geocities days. You might be looking for an alt-web like that hosted on the Gemini network. It's all text and HTML-only as I understand.
powerhour 4y ago
Remember Hotbot? They had a way to limit searches to those that used JavaScript. ha! https://wikieducator.org/File:Hotbot.gif https://wikieducator.org/File:Hotbot.gif
superkuh 4y ago
millionshort.com used to be good but it recently joined the mega-corp search pack and hid it's search engine behind required code exectution that blocks non-megacorp browsers. https://searchmysite.net/ https://searchmysite.net/ is a curated search for exactly what you describe though. It's been on HN a couple times.

s1k3s 4y ago

> More helpful product reviews written by experts This translates to "more YT videos made by our content-creators", right? Searching for "macbook pro m2 reviews" gives me 5 YT videos at the top, all repeating the same stuff over and over again and (no offense) made by people who aren't really experts. Or are they?

lloyddobbler 4y ago
It's the internet. Everyone is an expert! (/s, if it wasn't blatantly obvious.)
- s1k3s 4y ago
  What's funny in this specific search for macbook reviews is that the well known websites which really have interesting information AND dig deep in the product specs AND have been there for more than 2 decades are not even on the front page. It's literally just the ones repeating the stuff I can find in Apple's landing page, but rephrased by some copywriter.
rchaud 4y ago
Tech reviews online are largely useless. Just like the "shocked face" thumbnail, reviewers have realized that their viewers want entertainment more than they want a review. So the video largely ends up being an infomercial with a lot of product shots, rehashing of specs and largely generic opinions.

Ensorceled 4y ago

I'm cynical Google will be able to truly fix this or even want to. I think Google is part of a cartel; their search funnels people to sites that run ads that often are part of the Google network. Yes, they make a ton from search advertising but also a ton from the greater network. This is really the Mob boss cracking down on underlings who have gone over the line and are collecting too much protection money or are cutting the "goods".

pushkine 4y ago
Many creators have noticed that YouTube's recommendation algorithm is heavily skewed to favor videos with monetization enabled. I wouldn't be surprised if Google Search's algorithm was hard coded to favor websites using AdSense.

weystrom 4y ago

I wish they'd just un-screw the page ranking algorithm. The quality of search has been steadily going down for quite a while now due to spam getting better and better at SEO. I'm hopeful for this feature, but I'm not sure how scalable it can prove to be, to help manually rank pages for myriad of topics.

account42 4y ago

Using Corporate Memphis-style hero image for an article about "content by people, for people" has got to be someone at google trolling us. There is no way they can be this tone deaf.

TOMDM 4y ago
This was my first thought too. C'mon Google put Imagen to work, I'm so over this art style.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  Same, and with just about every tech corp using it, it gets old rather quick.

dgudkov 4y ago

I don't think Google will ever be able to distinguish texts that are written for people from texts that are written for Google. It's effectively the Turing test, and Google won't pass it.

JW_00000 4y ago
It's worse than a Turing test: it's trying to distinguish between a honest human (writing content they are knowledgeable about or that is original) vs a dishonest human (who writes filler content just to get a higher ranking). It would almost need to be able to read the author's mind to figure out their intention. Or, given a text, figure out if what it is saying is original and/or true.
- visarga 4y ago
  No, they are trying to distinguish between content that is going to make $ for them vs content that is not going to make $. They don't care about truth or utility.
corille 4y ago
The way I read it, this is aimed at derivative texts that were scraped from other sites. If Google indexes those sites, they can recognize when the content of a newly indexed site is copied from elsewhere.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Most of the blogspam on the Internet today are website filled with product 'reviews' and affiliate links. These aren't derivative of anything, so they won't be downgraded. Neither will the hordes of blogs breathlessly reporting celebrity and business gossip. A search engine won't be able to differentiate between the quality of a TMZ vs say Variety.

troelsSteegin 4y ago

What reading the post suggests to me is that they are identifying high quality chunks of content as unique, and then ranking pages up or down in part according to what was seen to have published a given chunk first.

stabbles 4y ago

Sure enough original, quality content will be generated by AI

shortformblog 4y ago

Anecdotally, my level of daily traffic from organic search (driven by evergreen history articles on esoteric topics) has roughly doubled from where it was a month ago and is at a significantly higher level than it’s been over the past year. Looking further back in history it seems there was a dip after the spring of 2020 that largely has defined my search-based traffic levels since then, and the traffic from search has largely bounced back in the past two weeks. While it’s still early, I will say that I’m seeing better results from a variety of search results, whereas I had 2-3 consistent search performers that drove most of the traffic prior to the recent change. Just the perspective from someone who runs a long-running tech-meets-history newsletter.

nicbou 4y ago
Mine dipped slightly, to the level of a year ago. It looks like it might have been bumped again this week. It's undeniably genuine, original, quality content. However I don't know how a machine reads and scores my content. Given the stuff YouTube thinks I like, I'm scared.

wilde 4y ago

It’s great to hear them admit that there is a problem. For years we’d get “our internal quality measures say we’re doing great. You’re imagining things. Fuck off to Bing and see how you like it.” I suspect they have an inventory problem, not a ranking problem. Why would any real humans publish publicly on the internet at this point? If you’re posting for fun you have to deal with moderation and stolen content. If you’re posting for pay Google just takes your content and shoves it onto the SERP, skipping your ads. Bill Gates had it right. If you want a sustainable ecosystem, you need to make sure the other players are making more money than you in aggregate. As far as I can tell, that’s only true on the internet for eCommerce and so that’s all that’s left.

seanwilson 4y ago

> Next week, we'll launch the “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people. This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search, and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content. I know Google isn't going to reveal the exact secrets behind what changes they're making to do this to avoid black hat SEO, but haven't they been trying to do the above all along? What stops the SEO community from observing how rankings change, guessing what the new metrics are, and then optimising for these metrics as usual until the search spam is back where it started? What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment on if a page was helpful? A big reason imo that Googling for "reddit <search term>" works is that spammy stuff on social sites (including Hacker News) gets punished quickly by spam filters, down-votes and negative comments - regular Google search lacks that because people can't down-vote or comment on a page. It feels inevitable to me they'll have to start doing something like this.

dazc 4y ago
There is no incentive to arranging a downvoting scheme targeted against a random poster on HN or Reddit, there is, however, a great incentive to do the same against a commercial competitor in Google search results. Negative seo is a thing and any commercial site that is remotely successful is targeted with it daily.
layer8 4y ago
> What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment on if a page was helpful? Difficult for such a system not to be gamed, e.g. via botnets.
- Spivak 4y ago
  And difficult for the system to not be gamed by brigadiers. Also voting is an extremely skewed signal, what people say they like and what they actually like are very different and with search you can actually measure that by seeing which results users actually go to and don’t bounce from.

paxys 4y ago

I expect these changes will lead to a brief period where the quality of search results will get better, but then will be quickly reversed engineered and gamed by "SEO experts" bringing us right back to where we are. This is a fight Google simply cannot win.

gambler 4y ago

This is just 2nd order gaslighting. For many, many years Google was denying obvious problems with how their search system worked. Denial and gaslighting was clearly their marketing strategy. It kind of worked too, at least in terms of public opinion in tech space. Now something has changed and they're suddenly pretending to care. Problem is, this effectively gaslights people about their prior gaslighting. Why was the company blatantly denying obvious issues for so many years? What has changed? Why should I trust their judgment all of a sudden? It's kind of like someone who is a pathologic liar having been caught in various lies for many years, swearing to tell you the truth, but not admitting to the past lies.

jsnell 4y ago
Can you give a few concrete examples of these "blatant denials"?

iamjbn 4y ago

Just wait until cheap to write GPT3 articles learn SEO techniques inherently and bombard the internet suppressing human writers in the spam ocean. At https://aquila.network https://aquila.network we’re always thinking of this scenario.

rchaud 4y ago
Quora annswers basically read like GPT-3 if it were trained exclusively on recipe websites.
ThinkingGuy 4y ago
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

mib32 4y ago

I think it’s quite clear: when I search for something, what I want to see, it’s people arguing with each other on my topic of search, and I want to read their various arguments, and make my decision. This is why I like HN and artisan forums so much, or even Reddit. Google could do just one thing - prioritize giving out the discussions of real people. But they just don’t wanna do it apparently

nyxtom 4y ago

The entire revenue model for Google is not incentivized to rank quality content and what you are looking for. Low quality content is filled with ads. As an alternative to this, I've been using Kagi (https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/) for a while and I love it

dzonga 4y ago

google search getting worse day by day. and they're increasing surface area for the results to become more garbage. what are trusted experts ? does google wanna be a publisher now ?

jccalhoun 4y ago

I am so sick and tired of sites that have a bunch of filler content in them just to appear higher in search results. You search for something, say "How to change a light bulb" and you get all this front loading with sections on "what is a light bulb?" "Why do light bulbs need changing?" "Picking a light bulb" and then finally the answer. Maybe a search engine that could prioritize getting to the point would be good.

skilled 4y ago
I mean, I have seen some really funky articles relating to what you said - articles that are ranking on page one. I was looking up some niche stuff in JavaScript space, and the article started out with a sentence: "An increasing number of developers are looking to get started with web development. And because of this, they are searching to get started with <a fairly complex topic to grasp for a beginner>." Sooo.... developers are looking to get started with development... And like you say, the same goes for all the "What is a <topic>" - feels like a fundamental error on Google's part for parsing language intent.
rchaud 4y ago
Basic queries like "how to change a light bulb" are better answered on Youtube; it's not 1995 anymore, a web page explaining that with text and pictures is slower than creating a video. The only ones still writing web pages for things like that are trying to sell you something. If they weren't, they'd also just make a video.
- albrewer 4y ago
  > Basic queries like "how to change a light bulb" are better answered on Youtube Hard disagree. If the best content for the problem is a video, then sure, bubble that up to the top of the search results. But to limit yourself to only one medium is ridiculous.
- juve1996 4y ago
  Completely disagree. Videos take forever. Often times I have a specific query and text is easier to search than information within videos.

nyxtom 4y ago

Flash back to 1998 when Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page when they said an ad-supported model will never be able to rank quality content. Seems like they almost realize it > "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. > It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

SCLeo 4y ago

I write novels as a hobby and I publish them on my website. I recently noticed that there are websites that blatantly copy and sell my novels without my permission and are ranked higher than mine. I think it is because Google identifies their pages as the source. If anyone knows how to deal with issues like this, please let me know.

codazoda 4y ago
I would write up a simple cease and desist letter and send it to the registrar, web host, page owner, Google, and anyone else you can identify. You might even be able to write a script that does some lookups for you. May not work for foreign domains, hosts, etc. But, maybe. YMMV
- Aulig 4y ago
  > script that does some lookups for you Might want to check out https://plagiashield.com/ https://plagiashield.com/ I use it occasionally but don't have an active subscription. But it's decent at finding stolen content (except for false positives on privacy policy & TOS)
CoastalCoder 4y ago
Unfortunately it sounds to like a lawsuit may be your best bet.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  Unless they are hosted by people in countries unfriendly with the US, in which case good luck.
injidup 4y ago
With what license do you publish them?
fooey 4y ago
Send DMCA complaints to google

WalterBright 4y ago

I infer that there is a point after all to having my extensive personal library.

bradhilton 4y ago

For medical advice I would see more serious articles/blog posts in search results and fewer listicles. For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not a blog post with dozens of ads. For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run by software developers they have to know about this problem lol.

rchaud 4y ago
> For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not a blog post with dozens of ads. Why not just buy a cookbook? It doesn't seem like the convenience of accessing recipes at the touch of a button is worth the tradeoff of ads.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
It's funny, I've had almost embarrassing success building a trivial recipe filter for my search engine. The code itself is comically simple[1], I just count how many recipe-words I find (from a manual dictionary), and then add a small penalty for excessively lengthy texts. Very much a soviet space pencil approach. It's hard to assess recall, but the precision seems to be in the 80%+ range. Check it: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scallops&profile=food https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scallops&profile=f... [1] https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/branch/master/marginalia_nu/src/main/java/nu/marginalia/wmsa/edge/converting/processor/logic/topic/RecipeDetector.java https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/branc...
- bradhilton 4y ago
  NICE! I like it, thanks for sharing!
powerhour 4y ago
> For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run by software developers they have to know about this problem lol. This fact alone tells me they're not willing to take search result quality seriously. I'm sure medical professionals feel the same way about relevant content that is scraped and republished.

mclightning 4y ago

Adding "site:reddit.com" improves search results by 10 folds in many topics.

freediver 4y ago

The more accurate title would be "Less content by robots". Unfortunately, what is not mentioned in the article is that sole existence of these content-farms is enabled by Adsense. So basically they are in the chicken and egg problem, and the only way to really solve it is to acknowledge that ad-based business models lead to detoriation of content on the web, get rid of Adsense (probably miniscule revenue contribution compared to Adwords) and then figure out how they resolve their own business model incentives and outcomes for users. Tough one.

dmix 4y ago
These Google search blogs NEVER honestly talk about the problems or their (alleged) solutions. You basically have to act as a mind-reading translator to understand what they actually did.

dmix 4y ago

> Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you'd write about them otherwise for your existing audience? This is something youtube should be updating their algorithm for

pcdoodle 4y ago

Good. I'm getting sick of adding -2022 and -best to my searches. The results are a wasteland...

jfoster 4y ago
That's a super interesting approach to culling the spam, since web spammers often are trying to make old content look new. Does it work well?
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  YMMV. It seems like google only lists "authoritative" domains on the first few pages. Tried to fight the brightest TV by nits / mcd/m3 and that trick didn't work for me :( Sometimes adding "reddit" helps.

entwife 4y ago

Google's advantages are PageRank, a head start (time), and its sheer size.

xpe 4y ago

Most people want a search engine designed to understand what they want in context. But until people pay for that search capability directly, the economic incentives will not align. And there is the ever present temptation of accepting money from advertisers. This is potentially lucrative. Will consumers ever pay enough directly to offset seller interests to sway search results? I doubt it under the current regulatory framework. We need changes. Some people (policy people and economists mostly) know about Ronald Coase. One of his key points is we can rebalance who has the upper hand at the beginning of a market (initial conditions) and still have economic efficiency. Coase's classic analysis compares two hypothetical worlds. In one world, smoking is legal and non-smokers have to compensate smokers in order to have a smoke free experience. In the other world the opposite is true. Both worlds can be completely economically efficient (defined as the equilibrium where there are no additional exchanges that make all parties better off). The difference between the worlds is purely distributional -- who gets to have more money. Distributional questions have a considerable ethical component. Like most people, I prefer the second over the first. Regulation could also similarly apply to search engines. We could tilt the balance in favor of consumers instead of sellers (in the case of public companies, this means investors). What am I proposing? Simply put: more discussion about such options. I will not try specify the best legislation for all situations in this already long comment. This does not mean no significant improvements are possible nor feasible. I simply do not want to get mired in debate over only one policy option. --- About me: I listen to good libertarian style arguments as long as they are realistic about the standard economic model's limitations and failure modes: externalities, market power, imperfect information, nonrational consumers, and so on. / I lean liberal, so I care about transition costs too. Rapid change is hard because people have limited geographic mobility, especially in the short run. I also care about observable, measurable opportunities more than only hypothetical talk about options.

uncomputation 4y ago

> With this update, you’ll see more results with unique, authentic information, so you’re more likely to read something you haven't seen before. This phrasing sets off a little alarm in the back of my brain. Overall, I agree with the intent of the update and I think Google is maybe internally realizing that their questionable search quality combined with legitimate and privacy-focused competitors (DDG, Neeva [1]) could turn into a serious and existential threat to them. That said, this is not quite the issue a lot of people have with Google search results. For me, when I search a movie for reviews, it’s not that I want new reviews to show up from smaller sites. It’s that I don’t want the whole screen filled with Google’s own little special sideshow for movie reviews. I can easily see this becoming even more frustrating actually if I search for “x reviews” and rather than get the usual Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, newspaper reviews, I get RandomGuy.com. If I want RandomGuy.com, that is actually what a social media-esque site like Rotten Tomatoes or Letterboxd is for, not a search engine. Hopefully this will be what we want it to be and not, for example, the TikTok-ization of Google search results, constantly and algorithmically showing you something “new.” [1]: <rant> That said, the game is still very much for the taking and no one is still able to easily answer one of my most common queries for work: “python regex.” Seriously, it feels like a battle to get a simple example showing how to use groups/named groups to extract specific information. I don’t want a reference guide to common RegEx wildcards, I already know about \d and +! I don’t want a toy example showing how to use RegEx for seeing if “rain” is in “The cat is in the rain” (that’s using a hammer to kill a fly - you would just use “if rain in string” for example). I want a helpful and succinct guide on the specifics of Python’s RegEx so I can stop fiddling with it ASAP! </rant>

davidkuennen 4y ago

It's baffling to me that if you search for "Best xxx", you get hundreds of pages only filled with paid ads as top products. How is any normal person able to make informed decisions like this.

kylecordes 4y ago

AI content writing tools are now staggeringly good at producing a huge volume of pointless text, for incrementally $0.00 per word - previously the nonzero cost per word of hiring the lowest-cost writer available, was at least a little bit of drag on the whole Internet filling with pointless content. Google has a giant hard problem to solve here. I hope they are successful. If they aren't successful, it could be a door opening for someone else to take a stab at search.

superkuh 4y ago

Google Search only ever returns <400 results. Never any more. Apparently Google considers this fine. So, RIP Google Search 1998-2019, apparently. If google search really wants to improve results all they actually have to do is let people see the results instead of hiding them. 400 results is not enough.

pushkine 4y ago

Remember when Facebook was at its peak around 2014 (innovation, popularity) then announced radical changes on its feed algorithm in like 2016 to prioritize content made by friends? ...

deleted 4y ago

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marttt 4y ago

I have started to consider Google's site: operator as the only tool that doesn't noticeably "game" the results. What's the reality, though? Have the results for site: searches actually also declined in quality during recent years, due to Google's general policy changes? Maybe somebody with a more analytical eye could elaborate on this. Thanks.