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Google rewrites many page titles

zyppy.com

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Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#211

Post by zepearl »

karaterobot wrote: post #92
fma wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google believes the site is being disingenuous by writing a click bait headline, then they should punish the site by decreasing their ranking, not reward it by keeping it high and rewriting a more fitting headline.

But if the title is spam, and the content is good (this is a big 'if'), the best solution would be to rewrite the title so that it's useful and keep the page at its original rank, based on the content. Ideally, Google would be able to handle all these different cases and just give me the best search results. Now, we all know that's increasingly less true, but in theory that's how it should work.

I'm not convinced, in general I don't like this additional layer of "fiddling around" with the original contents.

What about the opposite, the title being great but the contents not really? Shall Google serve its own "improved"/"summarized"/whatever version?

Meh... - this reminds me of the snippets of text extracted by some websites that are sometimes shown directly in Google's results, which in my case were sometimes wrong because they didn't take into account the context of what was written in the original contents.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#212

Post by sidewndr46 »

titanomachy wrote: post #206
stickfigure wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got this wrong - they should heavily editorialize the titles. Honest titles of search results: * Five pages of flowery text and images before two lines of instruction on how to boil rice * A bunch of tantalizing pictures of exactly what you're looking for but zero further information about it * Product reviews machine-generated from public review sources with affiliate links. Top-rated product has the…

Ah, rice. The quintessential Asian grain, now consumed by billions around the world. When I was a child, my mixed-race family used to eat rice every day! Even today, the subtle aroma of rice wafting up from the kitchen brings a sense of nostalgia. It's a sure sign that dinner is approaching, my favorite meal of the day... [5 pages later] 1. Put rice and water in rice cooker 2. Press "start"

Woah now, shouldn't step 1 be broken up into 2 steps. Each with their own heading and a paragraph explaining how to do that?

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#213

Post by dorgo »

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.

>and more like the Truman show: we craft your reality.

It should be more like an assistant: here are some boring tasks/questions, find out everything about them, summarize it for me and present me my options. I dont't really want to search or find something. I want to get things done, questions answered.

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#214

Post by junon »

Why was the title edited here on HN? The original title is much better, and had more information. A bit ironic given the subject matter.

Dang, was this your doing? If so, can we please have an open discussion on this? It's happened a few times and it's annoying and seemingly randomly enforced. The guidelines state not to editorialize headers but this rule gets ignored a lot. What was deficient about the original title?

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#215

Post by [deleted] »

junon wrote: post #214

Why was the title edited here on HN? The original title is much better, and had more information. A bit ironic given the subject matter. Dang, was this your doing? If so, can we please have an open discussion on this? It's happened a few times and it's annoying and seemingly randomly enforced. The guidelines state not to editorialize headers but this rule gets ignored a lot. What was deficient about the original titl…

[deleted]

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#216

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#217

Post by [deleted] »

phreeza wrote: post #7

It's quite funny to me that people are running these kind of almost scientific experiments on a fully human-generated and in principle knowable system. The reason are understandable of course but it does seem like a waste of human energy.

[deleted]

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#218

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #204
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]

[deleted]

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#219

Post by gibspaulding »

spijdar wrote: post #54
gibspaulding wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see this a lot in gaming too. There are entire sites, devoted to figuring out what various weapon attachments actually do in Call of Duty. If you poke around the Minecraft wiki you'll find the same thing - people working out exactly how fast you can move with different potion effects or how scaling works when leveling up enchantments. Theoretically, all of this information could be found in the source code, but w…

At least in the case of gaming, I think (some) people actually enjoy this aspect. It's a waste in a lot of systems, but in an "art", I think it can elevate the experience, at least for certain games and genres. An interesting inverse of the norm is the Roguelike ADOM. Most similar games from the same time period like Angband, Nethack, and DCSS were open source, while ADOM was a free, but proprietary game. The other g…

You are certainly right, there's a certain appeal to the mystery!

I remember reading an article on the Minecraft wiki about how to achieve the slowest possible movement, which is of course a totally useless thing to do in game, but you could see someone had put a ton of thought into working out how to do it! And who's to say that your slow machine is less an expression of artistry than playing the game "right" and building castles!

Re: Google rewrites many page titles

#220

Post by bduerst »

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.

That's assuming there aren't click bait false-positives based on page title.
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