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It means that our ranking algorithms have good recall but very poor precision. We value web page connectivity more than its content. We don't know how to teach

by zeratul 14y ago

It means that our ranking algorithms have good recall but very poor precision. We value web page connectivity more than its content. We don't know how to teach machines to evaluate web page for its merit so we hope that a large number of Twitting, Liking and Plusing non-experts will approximate single expert. Millionshort shows that this model isn't good enough.

RegEx 14y ago
I was able to rank for some moderately competitive terms just by paying someone minimum wage to go leave nice comments on dofollow blogs. The whole "Content is king" meme is a joke, really.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rudiger 14y ago
  Interesting. How do you find blogs that don't implement nofollow?
  - RegEx 14y ago
    Plenty of blogs promote themselves as DoFollow Blogs. It's a bit sad, really. They basically trade their "link juice" for your insincere, contrived comments.
    - robryan 14y ago
      Which in turn can help them rank for more terms.
_delirium 14y ago
We value web page connectivity more than its content. That's pretty much precisely how PageRank (in its original form) changed web search. At the time, at least, it worked because we were really bad at automatically analyzing content, and the connectivity signal provided better results.
brudgers 14y ago
It shows the problem with using tags <or metadata> for ranking rather than considering the source of the information. Yahoo became the goto portal because the quality of their links was high. Google overtook them because metadata was the only practical way to keep up with the pace at which the web was expanding. However, after more than a decade of SEO, it's limitations are evident as the long tail gets increasingly harder to reach with search engines based on the Google model, e.g. "Purchase empiricist philosophers on eBay." My suspicion is that Google is abandoning neutral search for personalized search in part because of the problems SEO represents when it comes to neutral searching and personal tracking provides an algorithmic way of establishing the quality of results for ranking purposes. One which is easier than attempting to develop a neutral curation algorithm.

by zeratul 14y ago

RegEx 14y ago

I was able to rank for some moderately competitive terms just by paying someone minimum wage to go leave nice comments on dofollow blogs. The whole "Content is king" meme is a joke, really.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rudiger 14y ago
Interesting. How do you find blogs that don't implement nofollow?
- RegEx 14y ago
  Plenty of blogs promote themselves as DoFollow Blogs. It's a bit sad, really. They basically trade their "link juice" for your insincere, contrived comments.
  - robryan 14y ago
    Which in turn can help them rank for more terms.

_delirium 14y ago

We value web page connectivity more than its content. That's pretty much precisely how PageRank (in its original form) changed web search. At the time, at least, it worked because we were really bad at automatically analyzing content, and the connectivity signal provided better results.

brudgers 14y ago

It shows the problem with using tags <or metadata> for ranking rather than considering the source of the information. Yahoo became the goto portal because the quality of their links was high. Google overtook them because metadata was the only practical way to keep up with the pace at which the web was expanding. However, after more than a decade of SEO, it's limitations are evident as the long tail gets increasingly harder to reach with search engines based on the Google model, e.g. "Purchase empiricist philosophers on eBay." My suspicion is that Google is abandoning neutral search for personalized search in part because of the problems SEO represents when it comes to neutral searching and personal tracking provides an algorithmic way of establishing the quality of results for ranking purposes. One which is easier than attempting to develop a neutral curation algorithm.