More content by people, for people in Search • Hacker News Board

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#221

Post by rchaud » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

skilled wrote: post #50

Well, I am excited to see the impact of this. These days there is no shortage of tools that monitor SERP fluctuation, and if this update brings about _significant_ impact it will be talked about everywhere. And I fully expect spammers to go ballistic once their content gets obliterated.

If anything, spammers are years ahead of Google.

Did they go ballistic when Google introduced the Panda update in 2010, killing many of the the web-scraped, machine-generated blogspam that was poisoning search results? No, they moved on to fresh territory like Youtube, gaming the recommendation engines. And they eventually came back to the web to poison results with hordes of awful 'best bicycle for fitness in 2022' type afilliate marketing sites.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#222

Post by hattmall » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #85

firasd wrote: post #32

I'm not sure this whole drive towards 'original content' makes sense. It encourages people to make long rambling pages that don't get to the point In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was almost always the first result on various topics What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly just filling up paragraphs for goo…

You have just described the typical content-farm page created to game Google. I hope this update is going to lower the ranking of those pages (pages that usually have an ad every paragraph or more).

Every site needs a commercialization score and a way to filter them down. Number of ads should be a dead give away, but that's antithetical to Google's business.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#223

Post by jsnell » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

gambler wrote: post #179

This is just 2nd order gaslighting. For many, many years Google was denying obvious problems with how their search system worked. Denial and gaslighting was clearly their marketing strategy. It kind of worked too, at least in terms of public opinion in tech space. Now something has changed and they're suddenly pretending to care. Problem is, this effectively gaslights people about their prior gaslighting. Why was the…

Can you give a few concrete examples of these "blatant denials"?

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#224

Post by rchaud » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

jccalhoun wrote: post #191

I am so sick and tired of sites that have a bunch of filler content in them just to appear higher in search results. You search for something, say "How to change a light bulb" and you get all this front loading with sections on "what is a light bulb?" "Why do light bulbs need changing?" "Picking a light bulb" and then finally the answer. Maybe a search engine that could prioritize getting to the point would be good.

Basic queries like "how to change a light bulb" are better answered on Youtube; it's not 1995 anymore, a web page explaining that with text and pictures is slower than creating a video. The only ones still writing web pages for things like that are trying to sell you something. If they weren't, they'd also just make a video.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#225

Post by freediver » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

The more accurate title would be "Less content by robots".

Unfortunately, what is not mentioned in the article is that sole existence of these content-farms is enabled by Adsense. So basically they are in the chicken and egg problem, and the only way to really solve it is to acknowledge that ad-based business models lead to detoriation of content on the web, get rid of Adsense (probably miniscule revenue contribution compared to Adwords) and then figure out how they resolve their own business model incentives and outcomes for users. Tough one.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#226

Post by rchaud » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

iamjbn wrote: post #184

Just wait until cheap to write GPT3 articles learn SEO techniques inherently and bombard the internet suppressing human writers in the spam ocean. At https://aquila.network we’re always thinking of this scenario.

Quora annswers basically read like GPT-3 if it were trained exclusively on recipe websites.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#227

Post by marginalia_nu » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

bradhilton wrote: post #213

For medical advice I would see more serious articles/blog posts in search results and fewer listicles. For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not a blog post with dozens of ads. For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run by software developers they have to know about this problem lol.

It's funny, I've had almost embarrassing success building a trivial recipe filter for my search engine. The code itself is comically simple[1], I just count how many recipe-words I find (from a manual dictionary), and then add a small penalty for excessively lengthy texts. Very much a soviet space pencil approach. It's hard to assess recall, but the precision seems to be in the 80%+ range.

Check it: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scallops&profile=f...

[1] https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/branc...

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#228

Post by xzjis » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #166

Youden wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi has this feature. You can mark websites to prioritise for your results and websites to demote or completely exclude.

That's great, until they decide to nix it or you want to migrate your list to another search engine. I wish we could decouple these choices from the website providers. A web browser that puts the user back in control.

There is no reason to think that a paid search engine like Kagi will get rid of one of it's signature functionality, but if you're interested in an extension for browser: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#229

Post by rchaud » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

s1k3s wrote: post #105

> More helpful product reviews written by experts This translates to "more YT videos made by our content-creators", right? Searching for "macbook pro m2 reviews" gives me 5 YT videos at the top, all repeating the same stuff over and over again and (no offense) made by people who aren't really experts. Or are they?

Tech reviews online are largely useless. Just like the "shocked face" thumbnail, reviewers have realized that their viewers want entertainment more than they want a review. So the video largely ends up being an infomercial with a lot of product shots, rehashing of specs and largely generic opinions.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#230

Post by darkwater » Fri, Aug 19, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

hattmall wrote: post #222

darkwater wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have just described the typical content-farm page created to game Google. I hope this update is going to lower the ranking of those pages (pages that usually have an ad every paragraph or more).

Every site needs a commercialization score and a way to filter them down. Number of ads should be a dead give away, but that's antithetical to Google's business.

Yeah, I was going to suggest the same: farm-factory sites are easily identifiable by the number of Ads, especially on the doubleclick.net domain. But maybe for Google in the long-run would be a net positive to ban those sites anyway, due to better "organic" results and how people will see Google results.