Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More content by people, for people in Search

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 320 posts

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#231

Post by stonemetal12 »

smoe wrote: post #135
amarant wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a different driving factor that. I've heard of a metric that is how long you spend on a given URL. Not sure how they gather that data, probably only gathered from Chrome users. Anyway, from what I've heard, that's the reason recipe sites have started posting 4 pages of drivel about the dish before getting to the actual recipe. Or so I've heard, I don't really have any good sources for this, could just…

A couple of months ago I read on various SEO blogs (they all seem to mostly copy and paste each other with little original research) that these days it is less about keywords and technical things like semantic html, but if and how long people engage with the search result. E.g. if a link to your page is shown to the user in search and they don't click or they return to search page too quickly, Google sees this as a s…

I guess that means we can use adds and tracking against itself. Any time you go to a webpage that is ad heavy quickly leave. Over time they get ranked down until they shape up or die.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#232

Post by hattmall »

layer8 wrote: post #197
civilized wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's going to require a social rating system. Which is why people append "reddit" to searches these days.

It’s safe to assume that a social ranking system covering the whole web will be gamed.

Yes, but if it's truly social it won't be easy. There need to be ways to see who did what and filter them out and various groups / spheres of influence. Just like in real life.

If it is a hidden algorithmically social function then of course it will be gamed.

But IRL there are certain people whose advice and recommendations you value and those whose you ignore. And in other cases you can easily ask the source of other information to find out if it is high value or not. MLM is the gamification of the IRL social structure and it's fairly easy to opt-out.

That's what search needs, a way to see the path information took to be presented to you and a way to filter it.

Unfortunately right now, so much of the best information is in Facebook groups, post and comments. The interface there is absolutely horrible though and not designed to provide you information, but to maximize the amount of ads that come across your screen.

The same is true for video information. It's not easily searchable or digestible. The web peaked when information was predominantly text form and not fragmented into walled gardens.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#233

Post by rchaud »

whage wrote: post #103

Reading through the comments here (and very much feeling the pain they describe), this idea came: Shouldn't we have a search engine that heavily favours the types of websites that we typically look for? You know, the classic 90s style tech blogs, the plain HTML documentation pages. Ignoring websites with ads, sites with lots of baggage (fonts, scripts, whatnot), sites with lots of images. Maybe increase the ranking o…

What you're describing is an internet that hasn't existed since 2006, or whenever Jquery and Ajax started becoming mainstream.

Sites containing "fonts and scripts" are not baggage. They have just been updated for modern times. Sites have to measure traffic somehow, and it's not going to be via a "Guest Counter" widget like they had back in the Geocities days.

You might be looking for an alt-web like that hosted on the Gemini network. It's all text and HTML-only as I understand.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#235

Post by NoMAD76 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #194
NoMAD76 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also you can use this for uBlock https://letsblock.it

What's the difference from letblockit to ublacklist? Is letblockit affiliated to ublock origin in some way?

Don't think they are affiliated, it's just something that I mainly use as a companion for uBlock to help me quickly generate filters etc.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#239

Post by dmix »

snowwrestler wrote: post #215
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…

Those types of rambling posts are clearly one of the targets of this update. From the Search Central guidance, here’s a question for site operators to ask themselves to “Avoid creating content for search engines first”: > Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't). https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co...

It's funny because one of the points is

a) dont summarize other sites

b) dont write overly long articles just to make google happy

It's a shame a) is never helping with b)

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#240

Post by jasode »

dalbasal wrote: post #210
jasode wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google refuse to see or present themselves in the role that they actually occupy. They avoid thinking of the search algorithm as encouraging or discouraging anything. It's just analyzing. Can you clarify what you mean by this? As an outside observer, it seems that Google recognizes that their search engine does have a "Heisenberg" effect akin to "measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the s…

OK.. In a sense, I am overstating. Having an anti-spam team is obviously a recognition that SEO/Spam exists and that Google is trying to discourage or mitigate. But Google is well beyond just attracting spam. Success in Google search rankings is, for many sites, the better part of online success. If Google ranks needlessly wordy recipes more highly than concise & useful recipes... then wordy recipes get written . It'…

>There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects.

Can you articulate what concrete actions Google could take that would address these 2nd order effects?

>, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. [...] A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished.

I've seen this repeated many times (especially from Youtubers making videos about "burnout") but the analysis about cause & effect seems incomplete. As one counterpoint, Ben Krasnow "Applied Science" channel slowed down from weekly uploads to a video every few months and yet his views and subscribers went up not down: https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos

Another yt channel that had a year between uploads and the views went up : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX7katl3DVmch4D7LSvqbVQ/vid...

My pet theory on the contradictory anecdotes: the Youtubers making videos on a topic with lots of competition from other Youtubers uploading every week -- such as fast fashion clothes shopping -- are the ones that seem to suffer if they slow down. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul

However, if you're making videos in niche topics with originality (maybe "weird ideas" as you put it), you won't be penalized by infrequent uploads. Many examples including Technology Connections, Applied Science, etc

So a different conclusion can be reached... if one makes a high quality videos, one can even upload just once a year and the Youtube algorithm won't penalize you.

Post reply on HN