Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JSON-LD explained for personal websites

hawksley.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 94 posts

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#71

Post by trollbridge »

jack_pp wrote: post #23
reaperducer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic. All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.

Considering that LLMs will give increasingly better sources for their stuff you still want to make it easy for Google to index your stuff. Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

Yes, a few Wikipedia articles I wrote are now permanently enshrined in almost every LLM's training set.

Complete with a small mistake I made in one (that has since been corrected) which is now impossible to get rid of, because every LLM reinforces it, and slop generators in turn keep generating text which reinforces it.

Rather amusingly, I had a real life argument with an acquaintance once who cited this to me to tell me I'm wrong. I let him know I'm the one that originally wrote the article, made the mistake, and later corrected it, and pointed him to the original citation (which is in a print book that, for whatever reason, has not ended up in any training sets).

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#72

Post by ErroneousBosh »

JdeBP wrote: post #19

> It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking. This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor. As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Brea…

I have now started including Google in the "bots get a 10GB zipbomb when they hit the site".

They add nothing of value, now, and only cause more problems.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#73

Post by jgalt212 »

Since 2024, the traffic to our content based marketing pages is down about 85%. What I don't get is how Google has not been terribly impacted as well by the rise of the zero click SERP. Their SERP ad revenue, which is click-based, must be down by a similarly egregious amount. That being said, I've been unable to find any published numbers to refute or confirm this thesis.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#74

Post by bob778 »

unkl_ wrote: post #68

I found out some years ago that emails that have the fancy features like plane tickets embedded or tracking information are all done with JSON-LD in the emails. AFAIK only gmail supports it, though. EDIT: some more info about it: https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/s...

Outlook and iCloud support a subset (like tickets and reservations) too

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#75

Post by elevation »

trollbridge wrote: post #69
JdeBP wrote: post #19

> It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking. This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor. As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Brea…

No kidding. Our own business now comes up with this in a Google search: an $STATE-based IT firm that specializes in building practical AI workflows and information management solutions for midwestern businesses. Operating with an agile, fixed-fee engagement model, the company focuses on avoiding enterprise bloat while delivering concrete results. I did not know we were now offering "practical AI workflows". It then m…

> mixes in the name of a competitor

If I were your competitor and saw that your listing includes my business name but your contact info, you might be getting a letter from my lawyer. Have you let Google know they're putting you at legal risk?

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#76

Post by wongarsu »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #57
abstractbeliefs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a world where the data you present like this matters, seed it. Even if google doesn't use it, the collective internet applying this kind of metadata makes the web fertile for non-LLM-scraping competitors to provide an alternative option. Rolling over to google only ensures that they remain dominant, with a high bar for competitors, and driving them to use the same technologies.

Like other commenters have said, this is 25 years too late, and it's made even more irrelevant by modern tech. "The Semantic Web" and all related ideas were always a failure. The metadata quickly got out of date, was never correct in the first place, was only ever implemented on a teeny minority of sites, and always suffered from bad actors where the metadata didn't match the content. Heck, even before LLMs I'd argue…

JSON-LD is 12 years old. Just four years after Facebook introduced Open Graph to make their links prettier. Maybe an appeal to implement it today is 25 years too late. But there were plenty of appeals 10 years ago, or to implement open graph 15 years ago

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#77

Post by fauigerzigerk »

lolive wrote: post #64
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like other commenters have said, this is 25 years too late, and it's made even more irrelevant by modern tech. "The Semantic Web" and all related ideas were always a failure. The metadata quickly got out of date, was never correct in the first place, was only ever implemented on a teeny minority of sites, and always suffered from bad actors where the metadata didn't match the content. Heck, even before LLMs I'd argue…

The concept will re-emerge somehow. Webpages are 99.99% of the time the formatting of a data structure for humans. LLM can barely infer that data structure from the webpage and connect it with other data structure of other pages. [truth is that the LLM algorithm does not do that AT ALL internally, but from our user experience it really looks like it does]. But when webpages die and data is accessed only by machine2ma…

I agree that something like it will re-emerge. But I also think the semantic web has always been misunderstood and misapplied even by its proponents.

In my view, semantic web technologies should have been used to make databases interoperable, not to turn the hypertext web into an incredibly incomplete distributed database without any data quality process.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#78

Post by altmanaltman »

elevation wrote: post #75
trollbridge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No kidding. Our own business now comes up with this in a Google search: an $STATE-based IT firm that specializes in building practical AI workflows and information management solutions for midwestern businesses. Operating with an agile, fixed-fee engagement model, the company focuses on avoiding enterprise bloat while delivering concrete results. I did not know we were now offering "practical AI workflows". It then m…

> mixes in the name of a competitor If I were your competitor and saw that your listing includes my business name but your contact info, you might be getting a letter from my lawyer. Have you let Google know they're putting you at legal risk?

"This overview was generated with the help of AI. It's supported by info from across the web and Google's Knowledge Graph, a collection of info about people, places and things. Generative AI is a work in progress and info quality may vary."

Google puts this up in their overview to cover that. And there is no basis for you to sue the company for something google did, you'll be laughed out of the lawyer's office. If you want to sue google for it, sure go ahead see what happens

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#79

Post by phyzome »

trollbridge wrote: post #70
phyzome wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't even permit Google to crawl and index my site any more.

Doesn't matter, because they'll crawl and index other people who do, and their LLM-mode search ("AI mode") will end up having this information anyway.

What are you saying that they'll crawl? Bing search results? Seems unlikely.

Re: JSON-LD explained for personal websites

#80

Post by tosief »

we use JSON-LD on our SaaS and it made a noticeable difference for rich snippets. the FAQ Page schema in particular, google started showing our FAQ answers directly in search results within a week of adding it. one thing i learned the hard way: keep the FAQ answers in the JSON-LD identical to what is viseble on the page. google will ignore schema if the text doesn't match the page content.
Post reply on HN