6 ms·

Tell HN: Poorly SEO’d tech is more searchable

37 points by dvrp 4y ago

When one searches what the DataTransfer object spec is in, the IANA article pops up and pretty much everything you need is there—or close. As soon as you look for React related or for certain trendy Pythonic Data Science things, you are going to do a lot more filtering to find what you need. To the point that empirical analysis or source code understanding may have a better return of investment for your time. Has this been the same for all of you? It certainly has for me. This probably has a name, but I like to call it the quality-redundancy paradox: if there is information abundance to the point of over-redundancy, the harder it becomes to find what you need[1]. I thought about this because of the Django Auth post and how the web has gone to JWTs instead of good ol’ sessions; or how people use React in ways that are embarrassingly similar to how PHP or Rails (used to?) work. I wonder if being aware of this phenomenon is something that experienced engineers take into account when choosing tools for the job. [1]: David Perell wrote something about this as well at https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/

ttoinou 4y ago
Interesting. Makes me think about science vulgarization or good online courses/explanation in general : I absolutely love the new solutions to learn quickly and efficiently new knowledge. But at the same time I remember all the good knowledge I acquired was the result of me spending hours trying to figure out and writing on a notebook tons of stuff (for example solving maths equations on my own). And not the result of me finding someone's else amazing explanation. The better / easier the explanation, the less efforts the learner has to produce to get to his / her ends. The path to his / her ends is the process of learning and is more important than the end goal, and being better at learning is more important than one little piece of knowledge you just acquired. Another learning / creating paradox famous here is The Telescope Rule : "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror" https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule
- dvrp 4y ago
  Wow! Thanks for the comment. I take a main learnings from your comment: 1. Learning can be pseudo-defined as the total distance[1] traveled from A to B. A is your starting learning point, your current level. B is what you want to know how to do. If what you want to do is hard (far from you), you can find simple explanations (shorter distances) or curvy explanations (longer distances). But regardless of the explanation, depending what you want to learn and your current skill, you may need to put in the hours either way! This relates to your mirror example. Once you have attained the knowledge to create a four-inch mirror, the distance to the six one is drastically lower. So, you do not have to assume that you will have to go through all that hardship again. Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC! This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? [1]: I said distance, not Euclidean distance!
  - ttoinou 4y ago
    Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC It's the opposite ! The triangle inequality doesn't always hold when it comes to learning (unless you meant longer = you learn more, here I meant longer = you spend more time / efforts on it) This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? Good question. Sometimes a real breakthrough can also happen without working really hard, it's just not very common. And some of the knowledge you got can be useful quite quickly in your daily life or profession, so there are definitely /some/ benefits in learning efficiently. Ee'll always need to simplify some past discoveries / knowledge and focus our time / energy on more complex problems. Our children will get access to much more knowledge than us anyway, it's all about explicitly deciding where our efforts should be focused on. Some people might loose, some might win. I think it's related to your last link https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ in abundance, the ultra smart will rise, the median people will fall behind. For now, I would like to produce more high quality learning material. But if I had to mentor someone to learn stuff, I wouldn't always recommend to constantly look for a ready-made answer online for example.
dvrp 4y ago
[Edit] When I mentioned the IANA article, I actually meant to talk about the “text/uri-list” MIME-type; not about the DataTransfer object that most web browsers implement. The reason I got confused was that the other day I found—and successfully—reproduced a bug in Chromium that had to do with DataTransfer objects and “text/uri-list” formatted messages. That led me to accidentally write “DataTransfer object spec” instead of “uri-list spec”.
ehnto 4y ago
SEO has ruined search in my experience. The web is hyper commercialized in certain sectors, when there is money to be made there is an abundance of shallow articles and sales pitches to wade through for your information. This includes React and other pop technology because people are trying to make money off commercializing advice for it. Search for good mountain bike routes and you will be served not by guides or enthusiasts, but by stores SEO writers and product reviewers affiliate laden posts. Everything with a fanbase has something to sell now too, searching your favourite TV show doesn't net you fan groups or genuine discussion, it's just going to be merch and products. I usually blame social media for hoovering up all the people and squashing blogs and forums and other communities, but perhaps people were also fleeing the cesspit of thinly veiled sales articles that the web has become.
- dvrp 4y ago
  Yes. That is my experience as well. Some people think LLM-powered models will be able to solve this issue. I think that is being overly optimistic. But maybe that's what we technologists have to be—especially the ones building the apps of the future. To be fair, there *are* golden nuggets of information out there. But you have to know where to look for; be an information connoisseur. Anyways, how do you cope with the current shallowness of the web?
  - Rastonbury 4y ago
    I tend to use reddit for reviews, but need to pick through all the fake self promo, just a matter of time before it becomes as useless as Google
    - ehnto 4y ago
      Especially with GPT generated reviews becoming so convincing. GPT detection is a startup idea with commercial legs I think. Reddit would want to ne able to weed them out, as not to end up with a "market of lemons" effect on the whole site's legitimacy.
  - joenot443 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
This is actually the point of SEO. The problem that SEO solves is not "How do I make sure that the end-user searching for information sees the best information?" The problem that SEO solves is "How do I make sure that the end-user searching for information sees my page?" SEO is an attempt to subvert search engines for ad revenue. Once you have the ad impression recorded, the actual page content isn't so important.
dns_snek 4y ago
Could we reverse the trend by integrating concepts like the web of trust into our search results? Alice recommends niche but highly valuable content from sites A, B, C. Bob recommends site D and trusts Alice, so his search results heavily favor results from A, B, C, and D. Jane recommends site E and trusts Bob, so her results heavily favor A, B, C, D, and E. And so on, this would have the power to bring those valuable, niche, but low ranking websites into the forefront. Some of the new search engines like Kagi have a partial implementation of this idea where users can uprank or downrank certain websites, but I think the true power of these rankings would come from a crowdsourced list that doesn't rely on very slow word of mouth distribution.

37 points by dvrp 4y ago

ttoinou 4y ago

Interesting. Makes me think about science vulgarization or good online courses/explanation in general : I absolutely love the new solutions to learn quickly and efficiently new knowledge. But at the same time I remember all the good knowledge I acquired was the result of me spending hours trying to figure out and writing on a notebook tons of stuff (for example solving maths equations on my own). And not the result of me finding someone's else amazing explanation. The better / easier the explanation, the less efforts the learner has to produce to get to his / her ends. The path to his / her ends is the process of learning and is more important than the end goal, and being better at learning is more important than one little piece of knowledge you just acquired. Another learning / creating paradox famous here is The Telescope Rule : "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror" https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule

dvrp 4y ago
Wow! Thanks for the comment. I take a main learnings from your comment: 1. Learning can be pseudo-defined as the total distance[1] traveled from A to B. A is your starting learning point, your current level. B is what you want to know how to do. If what you want to do is hard (far from you), you can find simple explanations (shorter distances) or curvy explanations (longer distances). But regardless of the explanation, depending what you want to learn and your current skill, you may need to put in the hours either way! This relates to your mirror example. Once you have attained the knowledge to create a four-inch mirror, the distance to the six one is drastically lower. So, you do not have to assume that you will have to go through all that hardship again. Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC! This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? [1]: I said distance, not Euclidean distance!
- ttoinou 4y ago
  Disclaimer: AB + BC may be longer than AC It's the opposite ! The triangle inequality doesn't always hold when it comes to learning (unless you meant longer = you learn more, here I meant longer = you spend more time / efforts on it) This begs the question, when we learn new knowledge “efficiently” and “quickly”. How much knowledge did we really acquire? Good question. Sometimes a real breakthrough can also happen without working really hard, it's just not very common. And some of the knowledge you got can be useful quite quickly in your daily life or profession, so there are definitely /some/ benefits in learning efficiently. Ee'll always need to simplify some past discoveries / knowledge and focus our time / energy on more complex problems. Our children will get access to much more knowledge than us anyway, it's all about explicitly deciding where our efforts should be focused on. Some people might loose, some might win. I think it's related to your last link https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/ in abundance, the ultra smart will rise, the median people will fall behind. For now, I would like to produce more high quality learning material. But if I had to mentor someone to learn stuff, I wouldn't always recommend to constantly look for a ready-made answer online for example.

dvrp 4y ago

[Edit] When I mentioned the IANA article, I actually meant to talk about the “text/uri-list” MIME-type; not about the DataTransfer object that most web browsers implement. The reason I got confused was that the other day I found—and successfully—reproduced a bug in Chromium that had to do with DataTransfer objects and “text/uri-list” formatted messages. That led me to accidentally write “DataTransfer object spec” instead of “uri-list spec”.

ehnto 4y ago

SEO has ruined search in my experience. The web is hyper commercialized in certain sectors, when there is money to be made there is an abundance of shallow articles and sales pitches to wade through for your information. This includes React and other pop technology because people are trying to make money off commercializing advice for it. Search for good mountain bike routes and you will be served not by guides or enthusiasts, but by stores SEO writers and product reviewers affiliate laden posts. Everything with a fanbase has something to sell now too, searching your favourite TV show doesn't net you fan groups or genuine discussion, it's just going to be merch and products. I usually blame social media for hoovering up all the people and squashing blogs and forums and other communities, but perhaps people were also fleeing the cesspit of thinly veiled sales articles that the web has become.

dvrp 4y ago
Yes. That is my experience as well. Some people think LLM-powered models will be able to solve this issue. I think that is being overly optimistic. But maybe that's what we technologists have to be—especially the ones building the apps of the future. To be fair, there *are* golden nuggets of information out there. But you have to know where to look for; be an information connoisseur. Anyways, how do you cope with the current shallowness of the web?
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  I tend to use reddit for reviews, but need to pick through all the fake self promo, just a matter of time before it becomes as useless as Google
  - ehnto 4y ago
    Especially with GPT generated reviews becoming so convincing. GPT detection is a startup idea with commercial legs I think. Reddit would want to ne able to weed them out, as not to end up with a "market of lemons" effect on the whole site's legitimacy.
- joenot443 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

This is actually the point of SEO. The problem that SEO solves is not "How do I make sure that the end-user searching for information sees the best information?" The problem that SEO solves is "How do I make sure that the end-user searching for information sees my page?" SEO is an attempt to subvert search engines for ad revenue. Once you have the ad impression recorded, the actual page content isn't so important.

dns_snek 4y ago

Could we reverse the trend by integrating concepts like the web of trust into our search results? Alice recommends niche but highly valuable content from sites A, B, C. Bob recommends site D and trusts Alice, so his search results heavily favor results from A, B, C, and D. Jane recommends site E and trusts Bob, so her results heavily favor A, B, C, D, and E. And so on, this would have the power to bring those valuable, niche, but low ranking websites into the forefront. Some of the new search engines like Kagi have a partial implementation of this idea where users can uprank or downrank certain websites, but I think the true power of these rankings would come from a crowdsourced list that doesn't rely on very slow word of mouth distribution.