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Google rewrites many page titles

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Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#181

Post by hammyhavoc »

floatingatoll wrote: post #176
hammyhavoc wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoting the last paragraph of the guidelines, which has a bunch of supporting hyperlinks: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. I dislike that they’re an SEO company, but I don’t object to self-serving posts, as long as they’re also curious and interesting to me. Seeing a comprehensive list of how Google rewrites page titles is interesting…

This isn't outrage. This is my opinion. I'm outraged by many things, some bullshit on HackerNews and your opinion of my opinion does not bother me. Have a nice day.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#182

Post by zerocrates »

johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #151
slater wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mods frequently rewrite submitted titles, either cos it's not the same title used in the article, or because there's a better wording for the HN crowd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Check dang's (HN mod) comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

This title edit was not for an article, which is what confused me. A user submit a self post, a rant basically which got popular, and the title was edited hours later.

It's totally ordinary for a post to go front-page and attract hundreds of comments on the basis of a title that's later deemed too interesting/editorialized/whatever, and you later see some dry uninformative title like "Google account security" or whatever it was occupying a top slot.

I can't say I've noticed it often before for text posts, but I do generally think this pattern of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is pretty silly in general.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#183

Post by kokekolo »

stickfigure wrote: post #129
travisgriggs wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I ask Walmart to kindly start relabeling products on their shelves because what’s on the tin is rarely as good for me as what the maker purports? Maybe that’s what we need. An FDA metadata label for every website served, kinda like the fav-icon, but useful. - Readable word count (protein) - Ad count (fats) - Image count (carbs) - Embedded script size (the list of nasty sounding chemicals it contains) - Average…

This might actually be the killer app for AR. Reviews of products as you look at them on the shelf.

Vivino kinda does that but for wine only. You can scan any bottle with it and it shows you its rating based on user reviews.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#184

Post by QuercusMax »

ajmurmann wrote: post #174
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are some alternative systems? I'd expect that any categorization system for content needs to make subjective choices.

Library of Congress is the standard for academic and professional institutions, at least in the US.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#185

Post by xnx »

20+ years ago also used the meta description tag from a page instead of page text snippets. We're many decades past blindly accepting page author provided content as being the most useful thing to display. People keep thinking of Google as a search engine greps pages to find matching text. That is old/obsolete thinking, any Google-like services has evolved how directly it can return the information/answer you seek instead of returning a page that may contain the information/answer you seek.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#186

Post by ConceptJunkie »

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.

> 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.

"Feels"? This has been the reality for many years.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#187

Post by yardstick »

whatshisface wrote: post #156
yardstick wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those numbers were added as a consequence of the books that needed to be classified in the 1930s, and now that there are books that don't belong in the category there are new numbers.

It still comes down to librarian interpretation. Sometimes they will just defer to another source, like the national library of their country, or the publishers recommendations, but at least in my experience working part time in a library many years ago, the librarians out back doing the processing and cataloguing would refer to Dewey index guides and also make judgements based on the nature of the book (eg mostly practical vs theoretical nature would be the difference between a 6xx filing and somewhere completely different).

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#188

Post by wodenokoto »

On modern browser, the page title is almost completely obscured. It’s not a thing users generally see, and the few views where users have access to the page titles that are not some sort of developer tool, the title is more often than not cut short.

I don’t see why google has to use the page title as a headline for a link result.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#189

Post by pictur »

Google literally turns the internet into a garbage dump. There are so many spam news sites that can come to the fore thanks to their seo nonsense that the sites that provide real news are not even seen lol

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#190

Post by jpswade »

Google has done this for practically as long as I can remember. If you remember when dmoz was still a thing, Google would favour the title from that, rather than the site's actual title because it perceived it as more useful to the user as it was moderated. By now I would expect that Google has used this and real moderators to train their machine learning model to rewrite titles, perhaps as a way to, you know, hopefully make the product more useful.
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