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Rap Genius is Back on Google

news.rapgenius.com

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Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#171

Post by Kiro »

skrebbel wrote: post #123
JohnTHaller wrote: post #95

Honestly, this is just saddening. Google needs to have a consistent policy towards these blackhat SEO offenders and enforce it for everyone. RapGenius bought backlinks to artificially inflate their pagerank. They knew they were cheating but they did it anyway. They got caught. And they were hit with a manual action on Google. Sounds good so far. But that's where it stops. RapGenius, using the connections they have fr…

You're forgetting something. As a search engine user, I don't care whether the search engine firm is "fair", whether their rules apply equally to everyone or not. It's not a country, it's a search engine. You can say what you want about Rap Genius, but they're just about the only lyrics site that doesn't suck. As a searcher, I want to get to sites that don't suck. In the case of lyrics, that's Rap Genius. Google has…

When and how do you search for lyrics and what makes RG better than the rest?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#172

Post by [deleted] »

pmarca wrote: post #168
JohnTHaller wrote: post #95

Honestly, this is just saddening. Google needs to have a consistent policy towards these blackhat SEO offenders and enforce it for everyone. RapGenius bought backlinks to artificially inflate their pagerank. They knew they were cheating but they did it anyway. They got caught. And they were hit with a manual action on Google. Sounds good so far. But that's where it stops. RapGenius, using the connections they have fr…

Do you have any evidence "VC connections" had anything to do with anything? Or are you just making shit up?

[deleted]

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#173

Post by FreakLegion »

joelrunyon wrote: post #167
majormajor wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I search for "[song name] lyrics" and I get a site that has the lyrics. I've never thought it sucked. I don't care how many banners on the side, just that the words are there. And I prefer an "expanded" view with all the [Hook] type stuff replaced with the actual words, rather than the "more correct" RG presentation. Heck, sometimes I have to click more to get what I'm looking for with RG. After trying a few things,…

> All that to say: it's not clear to me that RG really sucks less for "[song name] lyrics" queries. 1000x this. I think Rap Genius is great for "song meaning" queries, but their interface is just as distracting (if not more) than other lyric sites that "suck."

Actually I'd be surprised if Rap Genius is any good for "song meaning" queries. Will it give you information? Probably. Will that information be accurate? I'm skeptical.

I've done a few spot checks on Poetry Genius, at least, and the annotations have consistently been either wrong or irrelevant, even for works that are well documented (e.g. The Waste Land).

My guess would be that if Rap Genius users aren't getting it right when large bodies of secondary literature are available, they can't be doing very well with pop music lyrics either. I could certainly be wrong, though.

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#174

Post by aaronwall »

blumkvist wrote: post #151
aaronwall wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try. Removing 200 links out of nearly 200,000 links in a holiday week is not a lot of work. In fact, Google has told others waiting to be reconsidered that the wait time is multiple weeks. https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/statuses/418734227228606464 Further, some sites which submitted reconsideration requests before RapGenius was penalized have not received a response. And in many such cases those other sites: h…

A very well known and funded business gets preferential treatment. BOO-HOO. Do you think Bill Gates waits on a line at the bank? At the mayor's office? Anywhere at all? In real life if you are powerful, you get respect. There is no such thing as fairness. It's a paradigm of the feeble minded. Most likely a defense mechanism - "look guys, he cheated on the exam, let's tell the teacher!".

So does this mean when Google talks about these same topics & uses the same sort of black-and-white framing (while encouraging "feeble minded" spam reporting and so on) we should consider them to be intentionally lying?

If no, please explain.

If yes, an important follow up on that front: how dystopian is it that the company in charge of organizing information requires spreading misinformation to succeed?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#175

Post by aaronwall »

jonknee wrote: post #112
ryanmerket wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much revenue do you think RapGenius brings Google? Even if it was $10M/qtr that is a drop in the bucket for Google.

RapGenius brings Google $0 in revenue. RapGenius brings in $0 in revenue for anyone--it's not monetized.

Another way to look at it is if Google detonates start ups from VCs they co-invest with, will their own internal venture arm get squeezed out of some deals?

And if implicit or explicit risk protection (and back channeled information about potential upcoming risks) comes as a fringe benefit of direct investment, doesn't that "free insurance" allow Google Ventures to guarantee themselves more favorable investing terms?

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#176

Post by aaronwall »

unreal37 wrote: post #139
JohnTHaller wrote: post #95

Honestly, this is just saddening. Google needs to have a consistent policy towards these blackhat SEO offenders and enforce it for everyone. RapGenius bought backlinks to artificially inflate their pagerank. They knew they were cheating but they did it anyway. They got caught. And they were hit with a manual action on Google. Sounds good so far. But that's where it stops. RapGenius, using the connections they have fr…

Banning Rap Genius also made Google look bad. I bet 100,000s of people search Google for "rap genius get lucky" and similar searches every day, and Google was not displaying the results they clearly wanted . In this case, the Google search result page was clearly "worse" for the ban. Google harmed itself also in this ban. Which does not happen when they ban your herb garden equipment website.

It looks as brand related searches were not that significant until the Google penalty happened.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=rapgenius%2C%20rap%20...

According to Compete.com about 5% of their searches were brand-related queries https://app.compete.com/website/rapgenius.com/

SimilarWeb also shows most their top queries were unbranded http://www.similarweb.com/website/rapgenius.com

Alexa puts the branded-traffic number closer to 2% http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rapgenius.com

(All these tools have errors, but sites like Amazon.com or eBay are more like 15% to 25%+ on the branded traffic front http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/amazon.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ebay.com ).

Re: Rap Genius is Back on Google

#179

Post by nknighthb »

dreamfactory wrote: post #169
nknighthb wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government bureaucrat. I don't care if Google, Microsoft, or whoever else has humans who directly modify search results. I'm free to choose among the competing search engines based on the value they provide me. Any external notion of correctness imposed industry-wide will destroy that choice.

I wasn't talking about anyone outside google, just critiquing the game being rigged internally, but it's maybe interesting you brought that in. On the one hand that could be criticised as an illusion of choice in the market (behind the curtain there is often ownership across entire industry sectors, regardless of 'competitors' within a sector). On the other, governments quite correctly get a say in any case (what do…

> has become part of our infrastructure

I think a comment[1] I wrote a couple months ago about Facebook is relevant here.

Infrastructure is what services are built on. It's a prerequisite, not the end result, and its absence is extremely costly.

Google is not infrastructure[2]. Like Facebook, it could disappear tomorrow, and we'd all just switch to other search engines. I assume Bing would immediately pick up most of the users, either directly or via Yahoo. I wouldn't like it as much, but I would not be materially harmed.

Google has done nothing to make it harder for someone else to build a search engine except raise the bar for quality. It has a better product for most people, so it has the most users. That's how it's supposed to work.

Using Google's popularity as an excuse for regulation is nothing but a demand for mediocrity. It's saying good things aren't allowed to exist, and that people shouldn't have the right to choose (or make) better products.

It's saying "CONFORM!".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6621525

[2] Well, Google does offer something closer to actual infrastructure of course, in the form of their App Engine/Compute Engine offerings, but they're even less dominant in that field.

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