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Google rewrites many page titles

zyppy.com

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Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#161

Post by hammyhavoc »

partiallypro wrote: post #150
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.

And you bet I flag them.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#162

Post by duxup »

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.

And every site has different motivations.

How many times do we bicker about titles that make no sense / are deceptive on HN...

The whole situation is a mess.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#163

Post by hungryforcodes »

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…

Hedge funds are totally over. What are you talking about?

https://www.investopedia.com/managing-wealth/hedge-fund-over...

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#165

Post by dpark »

foxfluff wrote: post #143
dpark wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

A poor title reduces the quality of the resource, though. I think it’s reasonable that there is some penalty imposed for poor titles, and that could include clickbait. If the result is the best one for the search, sure, surface it. But if it’s not clear, though, “clickbait title” is a signal that the result is not the best.

I do agree it’s not really Google’s place to be rewriting titles, though. That feels very suspect.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#166

Post by ajmurmann »

biztos wrote: post #144
travisgriggs wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you should try to establish the societal cost of the negative externality and then tax at that level. The idea isn't to destroy the thing but to make it's price reflect its actual cost

Edit: "then cost" => "then tax"

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#167

Post by NavinF »

libertine wrote: post #43
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.

I don't get this, why are you ok with bots changing your content, even if it's to be displayed on Google SERP? Why stop at the titles? I have an idea, let's have bots rewrite the content in a compact tl;dr format and have it be directly displayed on Google SERP, as user, the less actions I take the better right? You don't even need to leave the SERP. Why can't I just choose what title I want in my blog to be indexed,…

> let's have bots rewrite the content in a compact tl;dr format and have it be directly displayed on Google SERP, as user, the less actions I take the better right?

Fuck yeah! I’d pay monthly for a search engine that does this consistently. Google already does this for the articles that are easy to parse, but I’d love to see what newer methods based on language models can do.

Btw this article is talking about the tag which is mostly used for SEO since users don’t see it on the page. I don’t think search engines have ever cared about it all that much.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#168

Post by lelandfe »

withinboredom wrote: post #121
lelandfe wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gaming their algorithm" sounds like a fancy way of saying SEO. If Google can produce for me a more accurate (or concise) title, it should only help me find what I'm looking for. Forcing folks to trudge through inaccurate titles – or hoping people know the tells of a "spammy site" title – does not seem a better alternative.

My favorite is when the title sounds like what you’re looking for only to discover it’s a page full of ads and keywords. The original title doesn’t even match. That causes me to lose faith in google not a better experience.

If that actually happens, I'm surprised the article doesn't cover it. I've never experienced that.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#169

Post by sseagull »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #154
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…

> we craft your reality As mentioned above. It's also the AI. Ads are not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is tracking. More on that here and about search: https://www.mojeek.com/support/ads/

Ads are a fundamental problem. They skew the incentives.

The search engine could, for example, give semi-poor results, making the person search again, increasing ad impressions.

An ad-supported search engine would also prioritize pages with ads that are also conveniently sold by the search engine.

As a user, I want a search engine to give me the best page with the fewest searches. An ad-supported search engine wants me to view more ads and click on them. Those are, if not orthogonal, often in conflict.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#170

Post by withinboredom »

lelandfe wrote: post #168
withinboredom wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is when the title sounds like what you’re looking for only to discover it’s a page full of ads and keywords. The original title doesn’t even match. That causes me to lose faith in google not a better experience.

If that actually happens, I'm surprised the article doesn't cover it. I've never experienced that.

I’ve found it most on the 2nd or 3rd page when googling specific but not common error messages.
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