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More content by people, for people in Search

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191–200 of 320 posts

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#191
I am so sick and tired of sites that have a bunch of filler content in them just to appear higher in search results. You search for something, say "How to change a light bulb" and you get all this front loading with sections on "what is a light bulb?" "Why do light bulbs need changing?" "Picking a light bulb" and then finally the answer.

Maybe a search engine that could prioritize getting to the point would be good.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#192
post #134
post #62

A little OT, but is there a name for that design style that Google is using here? I'm talking about the bearded dude at the top of the article, with glasses and a phone in his hand. I've seen it more and more during the last few years, from ads around the city I live in to hipsterish magazines. There's something about it that has started bugging me the wrong way, I find it kind of infantilising but at the same time t…

It's reminiscent of socialist realism -- with a modern, tech twist. The favored art-style of woke companies. It's their vision of utopia: a rainbow of skin tones, but everyone belonging to the same global monoculture.

Well at least we made it past the white woman eating salad stock-photo phase

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#193
post #32

I'm not sure this whole drive towards 'original content' makes sense. It encourages people to make long rambling pages that don't get to the point In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was almost always the first result on various topics What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly just filling up paragraphs for goo…

I hadn't thought that the reason they do this is to appear to have original content. It seems like distinguishing between the original source of information and a site that has a bunch of filler "original content" but just exists to republish/plagiarize some other site's content must be a difficult problem to solve.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share the url list?

Also you can use this for uBlock https://letsblock.it

What's the difference from letblockit to ublacklist? Is letblockit affiliated to ublock origin in some way?

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#195

>Better ranking of original, quality content Hah. Just another day, someone sent me this link[1] which took images and text from my page[2] for the Google query "linux check disk space". Here is the thing my page doesn't even appear on Google. The ripped page points to the source[2] and has a link back to the original images. These scammers know how to game Google with their AI-driven sites, and they adopt it faster…

FWIF, I get the original page as the first search result (and [0] as a “featured snippet” above it), and the crn.it page only as the third.

[0] https://opensource.com/article/18/7/how-check-free-disk-spac...

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#196
Flash back to 1998 when Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page when they said an ad-supported model will never be able to rank quality content. Seems like they almost realize it

> "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].

> It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#197
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resonates with me so freaking much. I am disgusted by how every bit of information on webpages seem to be buried between paragraphs of empty EMPTY talk and even when they seem to get to the point, most of the time there is no real information there. Sorry, this had to come out. We really need better search engines.

I think it's going to require a social rating system. Which is why people append "reddit" to searches these days.

It’s safe to assume that a social ranking system covering the whole web will be gamed.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#198

> Next week, we'll launch the “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people. This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search, and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment,…

> What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment on if a page was helpful?

Difficult for such a system not to be gamed, e.g. via botnets.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#199
post #135
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a different driving factor that. I've heard of a metric that is how long you spend on a given URL. Not sure how they gather that data, probably only gathered from Chrome users. Anyway, from what I've heard, that's the reason recipe sites have started posting 4 pages of drivel about the dish before getting to the actual recipe. Or so I've heard, I don't really have any good sources for this, could just…

A couple of months ago I read on various SEO blogs (they all seem to mostly copy and paste each other with little original research) that these days it is less about keywords and technical things like semantic html, but if and how long people engage with the search result. E.g. if a link to your page is shown to the user in search and they don't click or they return to search page too quickly, Google sees this as a s…

If it's based on length of engagement this does explain the trend towards verbosity I've noticed. I assumed the long leading paragraphs and introduction and background sections were just excuses to keep dropping the keywords in, but I guess it's to make me have to spend a lot of time reading and scrolling to get to the meat of the answer.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#200
I write novels as a hobby and I publish them on my website. I recently noticed that there are websites that blatantly copy and sell my novels without my permission and are ranked higher than mine. I think it is because Google identifies their pages as the source. If anyone knows how to deal with issues like this, please let me know.
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