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To recap. Google's algorithm is terrible, and despite having more PhDs on board than my uni, can be played by anyone with two brain cells and a mildly popular T

To recap. Google's algorithm is terrible, and despite having more PhDs on board than my uni, can be played by anyone with two brain cells and a mildly popular Twitter account. To rectify this, they crippled my search results by penalizing Rapgenius and instead pushing some AZlyrics junk that not only lacks annotations but is inaccurate. Seems like an easy fix, for the end user at least, add a keyword search for 'lyrics' to go directly to Rapgenius, right? No. Here's a search for smoke on the water http://rapgenius.com/search?q=smoke%20on%20the%20water http://rapgenius.com/search?q=smoke%20on%20the%20water First result? Pro Era – Like Water. Second? Childish Gambino – I. The Worst Guys. Third? Smoke DZA – Diamond. Arguably the most popular song in the history of rock and roll? Sixth. Those are some of the smartest people on the planet. I'm not being sarcastic. How depressing.

dkuntz2 13y ago
They didn't really push AZLyrics, or any other lyrics site up. Those rankings haven't changed. Their position relative in the list you see based on your search terms has, but that's relative. Why should Google give special dispensation to RapGenius? Why should putting in something like "lyrics" or related content to someone being penalized get them to show up higher in the results? Why should Google be RapGenius' search engine? Why shouldn't RapGenius make their search better?
- spindritf 13y ago
  RapGenius should have a better search. And Google shouldn't give special dispensation to RapGenius, it should return best possible results. Which they don't after excluding RapGenius. They purposefully broke their search results to protect their broken ranking method.
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    How is their ranking method broke? Most searches you make probably give you what you want within the top five results (excluding lyrics, as you've shown a weird need to have RapGenius be the source of your lyrics). How can you prove RapGenius is the "best result"? Especially considering that courts have ruled that ranking algorithms are just opinions. You can be of the opinion that RapGenius is better, but that's your opinion. Multiple people can also be of the same opinion, which is a huge factor involved in Google's ranking algorithm. Another huge factor involved in their ranking algorithm is dissuading blackhat SEO techniques, which can make it appear like lots of people are of the opinion something is good. So, again, while you are of the opinion RapGenius is the best lyrics site, I'm not, even before all this brouhaha started I didn't really like their site, especially the annotations, which to me seemed like a bunch of bored English majors who didn't really have any insights on the annotations they were making, but wanted you to think they were really smart. I also don't listen to rap music, which might also affect my view on the annotations.
cycrutchfield 13y ago
What are you going on about? I don't think you have the slightest idea about how Google's ranking algorithm, or for that matter any ranking algorithm, actually works.
captainmuon 13y ago
Google is resting on their laurels. I'm convinced their actual algorithm hasn't changed much in the last few years, despite announcements claiming otherwise. They changed the handling of search queries (searches are interpreted much less literally than a few years ago). They changed the way that pages are indexed, and changed the intervals to be smarter (faster for news sites, slower for sites that don't change). They now even "render" the pages partially to account for CSS and JS. They have smart stemming and synonym algorithms when building the indexes. But the actual algorithm - "PageRank" and the parts surrounding it - hasn't changed much I think, except for some parameter tuning. Instead, they probably have a pile of semi-automatic "filters" to deal with spam and blackhat SEO. Engineers write a filter in code, test it against a test index, and then it goes into the new index version. I believe they are going more and more into manual intervention, and that they can now directly penalize/push sites without going down to the indexing level. I can't prove it right now, but I'm pretty sure that the first SERP for popular search terms is actually manually curated, with the really organic links coming later. (I'm still trying to figure out a test methodology to analyse it :-).)
siegecraft 13y ago
First off, who cares if the top result now gives you no annotations? No one cared about annotations until rapgenius started adding them so people could know what the more obscure portions of rap lyrics meant and then they gamified the shit out of it so that every single word in a song would be annotated so that you now know the meaning of "I set fire to homes, arsonist" is because it helpfully explains that an arsonist is someone who sets fires. And then put annotations everywhere even on their stupid blog posts, it's like they just discovered HyperCard. And how to find smoke on the water? Maybe put some quotes around it? http://rapgenius.com/search?q=%22smoke+on+the+water%22 http://rapgenius.com/search?q=%22smoke+on+the+water%22

dkuntz2 13y ago

They didn't really push AZLyrics, or any other lyrics site up. Those rankings haven't changed. Their position relative in the list you see based on your search terms has, but that's relative. Why should Google give special dispensation to RapGenius? Why should putting in something like "lyrics" or related content to someone being penalized get them to show up higher in the results? Why should Google be RapGenius' search engine? Why shouldn't RapGenius make their search better?

spindritf 13y ago
RapGenius should have a better search. And Google shouldn't give special dispensation to RapGenius, it should return best possible results. Which they don't after excluding RapGenius. They purposefully broke their search results to protect their broken ranking method.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  How is their ranking method broke? Most searches you make probably give you what you want within the top five results (excluding lyrics, as you've shown a weird need to have RapGenius be the source of your lyrics). How can you prove RapGenius is the "best result"? Especially considering that courts have ruled that ranking algorithms are just opinions. You can be of the opinion that RapGenius is better, but that's your opinion. Multiple people can also be of the same opinion, which is a huge factor involved in Google's ranking algorithm. Another huge factor involved in their ranking algorithm is dissuading blackhat SEO techniques, which can make it appear like lots of people are of the opinion something is good. So, again, while you are of the opinion RapGenius is the best lyrics site, I'm not, even before all this brouhaha started I didn't really like their site, especially the annotations, which to me seemed like a bunch of bored English majors who didn't really have any insights on the annotations they were making, but wanted you to think they were really smart. I also don't listen to rap music, which might also affect my view on the annotations.

cycrutchfield 13y ago

What are you going on about? I don't think you have the slightest idea about how Google's ranking algorithm, or for that matter any ranking algorithm, actually works.

captainmuon 13y ago

Google is resting on their laurels. I'm convinced their actual algorithm hasn't changed much in the last few years, despite announcements claiming otherwise. They changed the handling of search queries (searches are interpreted much less literally than a few years ago). They changed the way that pages are indexed, and changed the intervals to be smarter (faster for news sites, slower for sites that don't change). They now even "render" the pages partially to account for CSS and JS. They have smart stemming and synonym algorithms when building the indexes. But the actual algorithm - "PageRank" and the parts surrounding it - hasn't changed much I think, except for some parameter tuning. Instead, they probably have a pile of semi-automatic "filters" to deal with spam and blackhat SEO. Engineers write a filter in code, test it against a test index, and then it goes into the new index version. I believe they are going more and more into manual intervention, and that they can now directly penalize/push sites without going down to the indexing level. I can't prove it right now, but I'm pretty sure that the first SERP for popular search terms is actually manually curated, with the really organic links coming later. (I'm still trying to figure out a test methodology to analyse it :-).)

siegecraft 13y ago

First off, who cares if the top result now gives you no annotations? No one cared about annotations until rapgenius started adding them so people could know what the more obscure portions of rap lyrics meant and then they gamified the shit out of it so that every single word in a song would be annotated so that you now know the meaning of "I set fire to homes, arsonist" is because it helpfully explains that an arsonist is someone who sets fires. And then put annotations everywhere even on their stupid blog posts, it's like they just discovered HyperCard. And how to find smoke on the water? Maybe put some quotes around it? http://rapgenius.com/search?q=%22smoke+on+the+water%22 http://rapgenius.com/search?q=%22smoke+on+the+water%22