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The Web Is A Mess

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Re: The Web Is A Mess

#31

Post by Detrus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #11
Detrus wrote: post #8

Why would banning content farms draw the eye of regulators when the content farms are gaming the search engines? Because search engines fell asleep at the wheel and now content farms are a sizable chunk of the economy? And they can always release some features like curated/customized search to weasel around any regulation dangers. Maybe search engines just don't care about the health of the web.

> Why would banning content farms draw the eye of regulators when the content farms are gaming the search engines? I don't think OP meant content farms. I think he meant half of the sites that have articles repeatedly appearing on HN. All those smaller and bigger "news" services that write a lot of poor, shallow, lying or just plain wrong, controversial articles. The problem is with incentives - they do it for ad mon…

What are those sites repeatedly appearing on HN if not content farms? What do you want to call them? They game news aggregation sites and search engines. They push out so much content many users think farm content is normal and upvote it.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#32

Post by dreamdu5t »

"Most top blogs don’t deserve the top slot anymore."

What "top slot?" Blogs aren't ranked by a committee. I can only assume OP means traffic. The blogs with the most traffic have the most for a reason, and OP still doesn't realize why after many years in the industry.

I'm sure the author thinks the things he wants to have the "top slot" deserve the "top slot." The naivety.

"If I ran a search engine, I would ban these sites from the index."

I wish someone like you was around to curate the Internet for me.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#33

Post by bunderbunder »

Detrus wrote: post #27
bunderbunder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because search engines fell asleep at the wheel and now content farms are a sizable chunk of the economy? Fell asleep at the wheel? The major search engines run their own ad networks. They're content farms' key customers, and content farms are a core element in their business strategy.

Well it's hard to say how close the relationship is. Google changed algorithm to target content farms a while ago, caused a stir. They definitely see the problem. The current ad/SEO setup incentives all sites to behave like content farms, duplicating content, quantity over quality, short articles, etc.

I think they're just trying to walk a line.

Sort of like how radio stations make a bunch of hubbub about doing blocks of X minutes with no advertisements. It's not because they don't like ads, it's because they've also got to deliver enough of what their audience is looking for to keep them coming back.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#34

Post by spindritf »

I completely don't see the problem he's writing about, my favourite blogs don't post daily, some authors post 1-3 times a month[1]. Others are bringing co-bloggers on board, and even then only come up with a few posts a week[2].

That's why RSS must live on. It takes over 200 subscriptions to get a decent daily dose of reading out of blogs like that.

[1] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ [2] http://www.overcomingbias.com/

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#35

Post by Joe_Knapp »

unimpressive wrote: post #2

One innovative "solution" is millionshort: http://millionshort.com/ Basically the idea is that you take sites that perform too well on search metrics and remove them. Of course, that only works as long as a majority uses services like google.

The other nice thing about million short is that the user is in control. The user can choose which websites to exclude like Wikipedia, Ehow and others.

The listings are long, not seven organic listings. this type of philosophy, where the user is in control, Will give them a big competitive advantage. The filtering system is very good, and I expected to get better.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#36

Post by nirvana »

This is the failure of google. I stopped using google about 6 months ago and started using duckduckgo. But at the time I stopped using google, one of the reasons I stopped was that the quality was so low.

Hell, the quality of Google is so low that Bing is actually running ads right now with blind taste tests where people preferred bing. Of course this isn't scientific at all, but my point is-- no big scandal has erupted about how wrong this is. It's totally plausible for bing to do this because everyone realizes that google has gotten to the point where microsoft can plausibly compete with them!

Page rank was really cutting edge, but that was 10 years ago, yet it is still their primary mechanism. It's been gamed, but they seem uninterested in moving to more sophisticated mechanisms (they use them but the influence of better methods seems to be too low) ... meanwhile they've used their bully pulpit to influence the web to conserve page juice which has backfired in such a way that actual links to authoritative and useful sites are lower ranked than spam links, making it easier to game. (When wikipedia is using no-follow on relevant outbound links to pages that wikipedia is quoting or citing, things are fundamentally broken- no site on the web has a more favored ranking position than wikipedia. Not to mention hand curation of pages. You can't even correct errors there without having them reverted by some know-nothing whose sole accomplishment is rising in the ranks of wikipedia editors, so its not like they need this to prevent spam.)

This means the site that google unquestionably considers the most authoritative, when it cites a page that it considers authoritative, google gives that site no credibility. But let me create a web of sites that construct text that passes grammer parsers as "good english" but whose purpose is to spam keywords and link to each other and I can rank for those terms up close to wikipedia. (This is essentially what techcrunch is doing only they are having humans write low quality text instead of a computer.)

It's broken, and google broke it.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#37

Post by taxonomyman »

unimpressive wrote: post #2

One innovative "solution" is millionshort: http://millionshort.com/ Basically the idea is that you take sites that perform too well on search metrics and remove them. Of course, that only works as long as a majority uses services like google.

Glad you like it. We'll be realeasing some interesting features in the coming days and weeks.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#38

Post by ladzoppelin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
klibertp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I get a feeling that I saw it before, but I'm happy I got to watch this again. Now, doesn't solution seem obvious? Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more? Ok, this really is not my area of expertise. I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to writers and disastrous for society :(

> Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more? It could work for bloggers, but they're not the problem. The "news" services / aggregators / whatever are, and it's hard to put a cap on what a company should earn (I'm not even sure if it is a Right Thing to do). > I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to w…

I agree with the "disastrous for society" part. Information if becoming very hard to verify and I have seen with my own eyes this year the news being censored even from the "fire hose" aggregators like Google news.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#39

Post by TeMPOraL »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #38
TeMPOraL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shouldn't there be a cap on how much you can earn from ads on your site? Just enough "to take the issue of money off the table" and not a cent more? It could work for bloggers, but they're not the problem. The "news" services / aggregators / whatever are, and it's hard to put a cap on what a company should earn (I'm not even sure if it is a Right Thing to do). > I just feel that what we have now is both unfair to w…

I agree with the "disastrous for society" part. Information if becoming very hard to verify and I have seen with my own eyes this year the news being censored even from the "fire hose" aggregators like Google news.

What particularly annoys me are the article titles in popular news sites, that often are plain lies (that articles themselves later correct), intended to lure people into viewing full articles. The point is, people don't read all the articles, but they do skim the list of them, and they remember lies from the titles.

Re: The Web Is A Mess

#40

Post by SoftwareMaven »

nirvana wrote: post #36

This is the failure of google. I stopped using google about 6 months ago and started using duckduckgo. But at the time I stopped using google, one of the reasons I stopped was that the quality was so low. Hell, the quality of Google is so low that Bing is actually running ads right now with blind taste tests where people preferred bing. Of course this isn't scientific at all, but my point is-- no big scandal has erup…

DDG works great for general searches, but for anything technical, I can plan on doing the DDG search and following up with "g!". I have DDG set as my default search engine and get tired of the double searches, but I want DDG to work better.
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