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There's maybe a good argument there for blackbox (non-interpretable) ranking algos.
by rgbrgb 4y ago
There's maybe a good argument there for blackbox (non-interpretable) ranking algos.
- ketzo 4y agoHow would you really blackbox a search ranking, though? A website owner can always just search for themselves, and see how their ranking changes. When there’s so much money at stake, people will go to great lengths to reverse-engineer the things that put them higher in the page, no matter how you try to hide the levers that make the rankings work.
- leobg 4y agoPersonalized results. If you Google yourself, you just see what you see. But you can never know what others will see.
- nordsieck 4y ago> Personalized results. If you Google yourself, you just see what you see. But you can never know what others will see. That just turns it into a statistical problem. I don't think you can escape the problem of a search engine being used as an oracle.
- pornel 4y agoRanking has many many signals, which are mixed in non-linear ways, and are dampened and vary over time. You only get low-resolution low-frequency sampling of the result.
- rgbrgb 4y agoI mean blackbox in the sense that I can't explain how it works or look under the hood and understand it. Many machine learning models you want to be explainable for UX or debugging (e.g. Netflix's "because you watched X"). This is a rare case where it's better if you can't figure out how it produced a result. Instead, you want to throw queries and user behavior into a blackbox algo and have it tell you a result then give it feedback on whether the result was good (did the user come back and ask the same question? did they click the top result and leave or did they have to come back and click through many more?). I think this is kind of how google works now, though results are frequently meh. Millions of backlinks will get you noticed but your ranking will just keep dropping if users don't appear to find your content useful (e.g. they hit the back button a lot and keep searching).
- dorgo 4y ago>(did the user come back and ask the same question? did they click the top result and leave or did they have to come back and click through many more?). What stops me from writing a bot to simulate that behaviour for my website (or websites of my competitors) ?
- QuadmasterXLII 4y agoOne option is to create a 'slow search engine' that only re-ranks pages once a year, doing the computation during the year and then updating the ranks all at once. You could evaluate the ranking before releasing it and patch obvious exploits, or even patch out exploits after the yearly release using data from before the release. This should slow the info leak to a crawl
- PaulHoule 4y agoGoogle has a big bag of tricks to gaslight webmasters, they even have patents that describe some of them. One form of personalization that they applied early on is move results you click on a lot up in your results you can’t trust the serps you see at all. They also inject a lot of arbitrariness and randomness to make it impossible to make small changes to your site to incrementally improve it the way you would improve an advertising campaign. One reason the web seems so frozen is that if you have a successful site and make major changes to the layout, titles, link structure, etc. you will possibly trigger the ‘chaos monkey’ and wreck your ranking and it may never recover.
- TimTheTinker 4y agoThen you get SEO witchcraft consultants who charge an arm and a leg for what they promise is a secret but oh-so-good method of improving page rank.
- rgbrgb 4y agoThe current state of the world!
- yarg 4y agoThat looks a bit too much like 'security via obscurity' to suit my tastes.