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Google rewrites many page titles

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Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#191

Post by mostdataisnice »

pavon wrote: post #68
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 think that is the worst reason for them to rewrite titles. If they left the title as-is, then I would be able to see in the search results that it was a spammy site and ignore it. Instead Google is helping to launder their SEO and present it as a more legitimate site. If Google thinks a site is gaming their algorithms they should de-prioritize it, not rewrite it.

I think what HN and the SWE community at large has just missed about Google over the last 10 years is that the product is being built for the masses. Most people would prefer if you just rewrote the title to what it actually was rather than having to take on the cognitive load of understanding what SEO even is.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#192

Post by gregw134 »

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…

The idea that ads affect Google's search ranking just isn't true. There are purposeful barriers between ads and search at Google to prevent this, such that the ads team can't even file bugs with search.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#193

Post by krferriter »

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.

Sounds like it might either decrease sales, or increase the manufacturing of fraudulent or shill reviews.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#194

Post by skhr0680 »

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.

I can’t wait for “This product is awesome 5/5 btw I don’t own it” and “My favorite 1/5” in AR

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#195

Post by everfrustrated »

jt2190 wrote: post #180
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…

> Check out… the various options for homosexuality, which has numbers for it including under areas including mental illness! Classifying a new technology is another major area where the original taxonomies need to be extended in order successfully index material. The internet, for example, didn’t exist at when LC/Dewey were originally defined.

Last time I was in a public library books about the Internet were next to books about UFOs!

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#196

Post by jedwhite »

Advertising corrupts. Ad-tech corrupts absolutely.

The reason is the cumulative impact of two things:

1. Algorithmic optimization of results for ad click-through rates, and

2. The scarcity of space for organic results on results pages for queries with commercial intent (because of the large amount of space given to ads). The high value of the clicks on those pages (sometimes $100+) drives marketers to focus disproportionate resources on SEO tricks and gaming to show in one of the few spaces left on the front page.

A search engine with ads and ad-tech tracking cannot work well for consumers in the long term. Google is now an ad-tech company, not a search company. It employs 3x as many people on advertising as search.

[Edit for clarity] It makes sense in this context to programmatically re-write titles to optimize conversion, rather than consumer experience.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#197

Post by mattkrause »

tenpies wrote: post #146
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…

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 idealistica…

One obvious solution is to pay them more.

If you're not the principal investigator, a NIH grant will pay someone with a PhD + 7 years of experience...$65,292 with pretty weak guarantees on job security (etc).

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#198

Post by azurezyq »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #94
edave64 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google can't be a neutral middleman because everybody is trying to manipulate the search results. If everybody is clickbaiting their page titles, and Google just displays them as is, it makes their product worse.

The solution is not to re-title, the solution is to de-rank clickbait.

Well nowadays a lot of well known websites use clickbaits regularly, e.g., wsj and NYTimes. Many times, they are willing to summarize the news in the title when the news itself is not that complicated.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#199

Post by igouy »

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…

> … why we don’t tax it.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#200

Post by dorgo »

sseagull wrote: post #169
ColinHayhurst wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>An ad-supported search engine wants me to view more ads and click on them

Is this really the case? Assuming pay per click model and rational and competent advertisers. More clicks would increase their costs and reduce the generated value per click. The advertisers would limit their maximum cost per click. This would limit the revenue of the ad-supported search engine to the previous level (from before introducing bad search results).

It is possible that more clicks (generated by tricks and bad search results) produce more revenue for the advertisers. This would (slightly) benefit both the advertisers and the search engine.

In the end and in the long run the incentives of the ad supported search engines are alligned with their customers ( advertisers ) if the above assumptions are met.

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