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

Google rewrites many page titles

zyppy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 273 posts

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#141

Post by wizzwizz4 »

yardstick wrote: post #138
travisgriggs wrote: post #107

I totally get this. Back in the day when I was a kid, we went to the local library and read about the world. When the librarians weren’t serving me by “checking out books” to me, they were busily putting new and improved titles on the books in receiving. /s Seriously. Google is starting to feel less like the librarian of the net (we index the world) and more like the Truman show: we craft your reality.

There’s a grain of truth here, in a bit of a tangent: librarians classify all books using a system like Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classification. While not adjusting titles, librarians do have some influence on how a book is classified and thus filed/organised within the library. Check out the wiki article on Dewey[1] for the various options for homosexuality, which has numbers for it including under areas…

The Dewey Decimal classification system is ridiculously flawed, and no self-respecting library uses it these days (unless it always has, and hasn't got around to re-organising). Even my school's little one-room library didn't, something I found annoying at first, but came to appreciate.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#142

Post by KerryJones »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #38

Thinly veiled content marketing for Zyppy, complete with CTA at the bottom, and mentions of themselves throughout, including: "Fortunately, here at Zyppy, we have a large database of titles thanks to our title tag analysis tool. Armed with this data, we set out to determine how often Google rewrites titles and the scenarios which trigger this behavior." Furthermore, "HTLM" instead of "HTML"? Needs proofreading. Lol.

Are you implying that what they're saying isn't important or invalid? Or, what is your point?

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#143

Post by foxfluff »

dpark wrote: post #117
logifail wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t this the intended effect? I hate clickbait as much as the next user, but using that technique to get users to click appears to have even become part of the core business model of previously prestigious outlets. Picking on the WaPo for no real reason: How the Washington Post pulled off the hardest trick in journalism https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-fluff-news... An Open Letter to the Washingt…

The easiest fix for clickbait would be to penalize them for it.

More importantly, if the content is actually relevant to the user's search, does it matter whether the title is clickbait or not?

Clickbait pisses me off when it's used to waste my time, but a good search engine wouldn't give me results that waste my time.

In other words, it could give me a relevant result with a clickbait title.. I guess that'd be a little annoying but I don't know if I would want Google to be the judge on what's clickbait or not, and even then I don't feel like it's their place to override titles. I wouldn't want useful pages be downranked just for having a poor title.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#144

Post by biztos »

travisgriggs wrote: post #137
sjtindell wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the ads. The way Brin and Page phrased it in their 1998 paper, they considered ad-oriented search engines to be lower quality. They were going to be more academic. They thought that there was lots of user data to mine in search…for academic purposes. Then innovation #2 at the actual startup was the ad auctions and that was the beginning of the end, all the way back at the beginning. I’ve recently read a lot abou…

Agreed. The industrialization of ad tech has been a loss for humanity. It’s a runaway mechanization at this point. What I don’t understand, is why we don’t tax it. If an industry generates lots of wealth, but has a questionable impact on society, the “f(r)ee market” west’s response has usually been to throw a stiff vice tax on it. It doesn’t make the vice go away, but it puts a governor on its excess and redirects so…

Doesn't the tax usually come when the consensus about the societal harm carries more weight than the money produced by that harm?

Or at least enough weight to be competitive. Sin taxes have a way of permanently tying the sin (at some reduced level) to the general budget.

I don't think we're there yet. People can get plenty mad at "tech" without connecting the ad-tech dots.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#145

Post by ASalazarMX »

xg15 wrote: post #29

> Many site owners find that the titles they carefully craft almost all get rewritten. Yeah, I'm with Google on this one. I don't see many reasons why a site owner would spend extraordinary amounts of time to "carefully craft" page titles other than SEO and optimizing for clickbaitness. As a user, I'm fine with Google counteracting this.

Specially when the article ends with:

> Want to optimize your titles for increased traffic?

> We built a title optimizer to take advantage of the outsized role titles play in SEO. Free to try.

Definitely SEO gaming.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#146

Post by tenpies »

sjtindell wrote: post #132
travisgriggs wrote: post #107

I totally get this. Back in the day when I was a kid, we went to the local library and read about the world. When the librarians weren’t serving me by “checking out books” to me, they were busily putting new and improved titles on the books in receiving. /s Seriously. Google is starting to feel less like the librarian of the net (we index the world) and more like the Truman show: we craft your reality.

It’s the ads. The way Brin and Page phrased it in their 1998 paper, they considered ad-oriented search engines to be lower quality. They were going to be more academic. They thought that there was lots of user data to mine in search…for academic purposes. Then innovation #2 at the actual startup was the ad auctions and that was the beginning of the end, all the way back at the beginning. I’ve recently read a lot abou…

It's the exact same thing with almost every "technology" company out there today.

We're sinking our best and brightest (and also plenty of perfectly useful and adequate) talent into getting people to look here, buy something they don't need, or press button.

It's comically to contrast that with the same people who pretend climate change is an existential crisis. Meanwhile, so many scientists and engineers idealistically interested in that, leave for software-related subjects where they'll make 10X the money making the problem worst.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#147

Post by [deleted] »

travisgriggs wrote: post #107

I totally get this. Back in the day when I was a kid, we went to the local library and read about the world. When the librarians weren’t serving me by “checking out books” to me, they were busily putting new and improved titles on the books in receiving. /s Seriously. Google is starting to feel less like the librarian of the net (we index the world) and more like the Truman show: we craft your reality.

[deleted]

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#148

Post by hammyhavoc »

KerryJones wrote: post #142
hammyhavoc wrote: post #38

Thinly veiled content marketing for Zyppy, complete with CTA at the bottom, and mentions of themselves throughout, including: "Fortunately, here at Zyppy, we have a large database of titles thanks to our title tag analysis tool. Armed with this data, we set out to determine how often Google rewrites titles and the scenarios which trigger this behavior." Furthermore, "HTLM" instead of "HTML"? Needs proofreading. Lol.

Are you implying that what they're saying isn't important or invalid? Or, what is your point?

I'm saying that we should expect better from HN, and the people who frequent it. Otherwise, it's just a poor alternative to Reddit. If I wanted content marketing that nobody could even be arsed to have proofread then I'd go elsewhere. The ever-decreasing standard continues.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#149

Post by igouy »

The issue isn't that Google search results exclude stuff that was in the page title.

The issue is that Google search results insert stuff into the page title that wasn't there.

So the issue isn't that the overly long + pipe

    Which programming language is fastest? | Computer Language Benchmarks Game
is abbreviated. The issue is that the domain of the hosting service is inserted, which gives the misleading impression that this is a project in-some-way approved and promoted by the Debian organisation:

    "Which programming language is fastest? - Debian"
:when it would be better just to snip:

    "Which programming language is fastest?"

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#150

Post by partiallypro »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #38

Thinly veiled content marketing for Zyppy, complete with CTA at the bottom, and mentions of themselves throughout, including: "Fortunately, here at Zyppy, we have a large database of titles thanks to our title tag analysis tool. Armed with this data, we set out to determine how often Google rewrites titles and the scenarios which trigger this behavior." Furthermore, "HTLM" instead of "HTML"? Needs proofreading. Lol.

Pieces from Cloudflare and even Google themselves are posted here all the time, and have CTAs at the bottom.
Post reply on HN