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Elevating original reporting in Search

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Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#11

Post by Silhouette »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #9
erikig wrote: post #6

I found the rater guidelines document linked in this blog post quite insightful. Sections like how to assess the "E-A-T" rating (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) will be useful to me when writing content. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

I don't think anybody calling it "content" should ever be considered trustworthy. The word reeks of hastily rephrased Wikipedia solely intended for search engines.

It's a standard term of art, hence terms like "digital content creation" tools, "separating content from presentation", and so on.

I think any other connotations you're associating with the word are probably down to you, not the word.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#12

Post by tobylane »

I wonder how this will deal with content that evolves over time. Some breaking news was published to BBC News with only a sentence and was fleshed out within the hour, so the original publication time and the possible originality of content are disconnected. In theory Wikipedia is meant to be summarising other sites so it couldn’t be first.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#13

Post by saalweachter »

sverige wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

I haven't actually read any internal resumes, but why do you think no one working on Google News has any journalism education or experience?

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#14

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

Silhouette wrote: post #11
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anybody calling it "content" should ever be considered trustworthy. The word reeks of hastily rephrased Wikipedia solely intended for search engines.

It's a standard term of art, hence terms like "digital content creation" tools, "separating content from presentation", and so on. I think any other connotations you're associating with the word are probably down to you, not the word.

Yes, it's a standard term of art within the hastily-rephrasing-wikipedia-for-SEO community.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#16

Post by dmg826 »

danso wrote: post #10
kuu wrote: post #4

I wonder how they are going to make this... Only based on timestamp? Based in "trusted sources"? Based in a new API?

Besides algorithms, they have a team of raters who manually evaluate the results. The rating guidelines are specifically enumerated in this guide: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... For example, check out page 26 for their grid of "Examples of Highest Quality Pages" Algorithmic and signal-wise, there are common conventions in English-language journalism that signal "original reporting", o…

The human raters are used to assess the performance of the algorithms (i.e. do human opinions align with algorithmic ones), not to rank content directly.

A recurring theme with Google is that they always want to solve problems algorithmically.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#17

Post by jacquesm »

SalmndraCrypto wrote: post #2

Google made some pretty serious moves in the last year. Their recent algorithm update is forcing news sites to improve their overall content quality and by now highlighting original reports it will force news sites to write original content and not just rewrite each other articles. It's cool to see how Google is changing online journalism

> It's cool to see how Google is changing online journalism

It really isn't. That sort of 'cool' is what got us AMP, Chrome and search results mixed with advertising as well as Google products that are promoted at an unfair advantage compared to established products by competitors.

Monopolies have their occasional upsides but they also have structural downsides which is why they should be avoided.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#18

Post by [deleted] »

erikig wrote: post #6

I found the rater guidelines document linked in this blog post quite insightful. Sections like how to assess the "E-A-T" rating (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) will be useful to me when writing content. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

[deleted]

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#19

Post by dmg826 »

danso wrote: post #7
sverige wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

Isn't the original PageRank, and every iteration since, defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? They have a 160+ page guide that tells their ratings team how to identify high-quality content: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

"Quality" is a really hard thing to define algorithmically. Even if you had great journalists on staff, I don't know if their heuristic expertise could translate to an algorithm.

Most signals of trust/quality come via backlink profiles, which may be a poor proxy but are still the best that Google has been able to come up with.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#20

Post by dexen »

danso wrote: post #7
sverige wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

Isn't the original PageRank, and every iteration since, defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage? They have a 160+ page guide that tells their ratings team how to identify high-quality content: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

>Isn't the original PageRank (...) defined by what Google engineers believe to be a relevant and informative webpage?

No, quite the opposite.

The original PageRank was defined by what other internet publishers considered to be a relevant and informative webpage. Specifically, the original PageRank was weighting content by the links (and content around the links) it was getting. The trust was placed on the internet publishers linking to it. The trust was distributed and also transitive to a degree.

Which, if you think about it, is pretty close to what journalists do - they prop up the good ones in various ways. And also reasonably close to the peer review process popular in sciences - equal peers judging relevant materials and marking / linking the ones they approve.

All in all, the original algorithm was effectively a "wall" between Google engineering and the actual content, as ranked & searched. It was clear delineation that "we don't editorialize search results".

Granted, the later incarnations of Google Search take into account much more than just the original PageRank, and thus stray away from the idealized original formulation - and also get much closer to editorial decisions.

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