Tell HN: Google should drop Quora from search results

But plenty of times I see a question on Quora and it sparks an idea or leads to questions of my own that I then seek answers for independently. It's kind of like browsing Pinboard's "recent" section. Lots of noise but once in a while it gives me the spark I need to find, learn, or create something new.

However, I seek out Quora answers often for questions about people's experiences. I have a long dropdown in my history of searches that start "What is it like..." What is it like to become a parent? What is it like growing up in New York City? Things like I don't know of any better place to find those answers.

I'd expect this behavior to be a red flag in Google's ranking algorithm. Don't drop Quora, but just let them slide below the fold on results.

I feel at least a little weird about giving crawlers a carte blanche to paid content. Creating relevant pages, showing them to the crawler to get ranked higher, and then not showing them to the user but requiring something in return first... I don't know.

I do see your point: it would be good to have everything indexed, even paid content or content available only in certain regions or whatever, just so you know what your options are if you're willing to pay for it. But then I think there should be a button to hide those results (either opt-in or opt-out, to show paid content).

As it is, it just weirds me out to show the crawler different content than you show the user and not be seen as fraudulent and get delisted altogether.

What does "average" mean here, though? Do you rank restricted sites higher if more people have accounts?

They could probably do a better job if they knew what you're subscribed to. For example, people with a Quora account or Washington Post subscription should get that ranked higher. But this would mean telling Google more about you, which seems to be unpopular around here?

This was nondiscriminatory, and I think it was a great policy.

Maybe a flag for the pages that require accounts would be in order. But for the shills on Quora, well, why would Google show ads for businesses' services as top results for free - especially since that's the vast majority of their revenue?

This is where the early search engines started out at. Turns out there is a LOT of content found for many searches, and the real value to most people is in finding _relevant_ content.

The devil is in the detail of how do you define relevance? This is why I think it is so important to have multiple search engine choices, each with their own algorithms and different sets of user options.

Isn't that what a lot of us are already doing? Quora used to actually be OK, but it's been total trash for the last few years and I can't think of a single time I've found a good answer through that site.

Maybe Google doesn't deindex them because it will seem anti-competitive? After all, they've publicly stated that they're more interested in providing "answers" than being a search engine.

Maybe you can filter out those results by domain? It would be nice if you could just add it as a setting, though.

Other times I was able to scroll through hundred on 'pins' before the sign up screen. I also remember times when I had three seconds to look at a screen and then most visuals are blocked by the sign up screen.

Not sure if they are playing with this on a global scale or if my ublock and similar plugins affect it.

The times when I could not see what I had expected - just an overlay nag screen, I certainly wish they were not in the results. Other times I found the curated visual content of pinterest to be better then google results or google image search.

I had thought the big G algo already punished for showing full content to the crawler but blocked content to average web browser.. however I had the feeling some time ago that some manual tweaking on google's side and perhaps pin's side started affecting how all that was working together or not.

It was one of those cases where I was getting ready to build it, and then I thought "wait, I bet this already exists for free." Sure enough....

EDIT: It looks like Google took down their extension. boo they suck

Not sure how you are expecting sites that are driven by the userbase to exist since your phrasing sounds like you believe providing all of the infrastructure, management and marketing for information isn't enough to morally receive payment for that information.

Now, it would be tyrannical not to give you any way to transfer rights to your creative output. So some publishers do allow you to agree to a Terms And Conditions waiving certain of these rights, or transferring them to said publishers. It goes without saying that no one would ever compel you to agree to such conditions, but some publishers might not agree to publish your work without such an agreement.

There's bound to be at least one googler in this thread and since the ASN check would be the hardest to fake and easiest to setup... someone go change their UA and go to nytimes or something from the office and see if it works(bonus points for any SRE who does it from a data center).

("For some reason" -- to prevent monster queries of course, but I mean, removing sites doesn't cost much computational power at all. With some literal quotes and AND/OR operators you can create short queries on which it basically times out after 5 seconds and only returns a few dozen results that it found so far, and when you reload the page, there are suddenly a lot more results. So it shouldn't be limiting input length but complexity, which it already does by timing out.)

It's a good thing I have a moral compass.

However, if you have the iOS app installed, it opens the app when you click the link, loops twice (never loads the listing) and lands you on the Amazon US homepage. I've tried everything to stop this behaviour (changing regions, loading in logged out state etc), but to no avail.

It finally frustrated me so much yesterday (especially in the lead up to black friday) that I outright deleted the app to stop those links being captured by the native application.

It feels so liberating to click a link and get the desired result.

However, that stupid popup of their or suggestion to install an app is beyond bad.

"Engagement" - corporate

It's annoying because if you open a bunch of these links in the background, you would not be happy if your browser crashes, because then you lose all the links.

Or they insist on sending redundant notifications. Or there's a mysterious number and no way to see that actual notifications. Or the notifications won't go away. Or the notifications go away instantly. Or, naturally, the notifications are abused for spam.

As to why... I think it's one of those features that tends to get neglected, and because users are way too forgiving of broken software.

But this is the regular desktop version of their site. Whenever I link of a link in their digest on my phone, their website is a completely unusable piece of crap. None of the buttons work, most of the content is empty.

done! (mostly)

`-site:quora.com`

[Edit: credit the author of the script]

1. top 10 X near you August 2019

2. top 10 X near you July 2019

3. top 10 X near you June 2019

etc.

They're just taking the top 10 reviewed places on yelp that may or may not serve that food item and then publishing these monthly "posts" to be indexed. If I wanted to look on yelp I would search yelp!

Quora and Pinterest are particularly routine spam sites in my search results.

They rank just below word reference site spam, like dictionaries, thesauruses, or translation dictionaries (sites which I do benefit occasionally from), and below Wikipedia mirrors (which I feel has become so bad that I can't even get legitimate results talking about the problem itself! Try searching something like: search results spam wikipedia mirror "revolvy" "wikiwand").

But for me, the worst (and most obvious!) offenders by far are "pronunciation guide" spam sites. Just a few examples:

  howtopronounce.com
  howtopronounce.co.in
  pronouncekiwi.com
  pronouncenames.com
  pronunciationof.com
  rightpronunciation.com

(If you search for something like "Deidesheimer pronunciation" or "pronounce Canynge" on Google, the vast majority of results will be those spam sites, plus maybe an ancient forum thread from 2004 that veered off topic before anyone even tried to give a serious yet uninformed answer.)

These ad-infested spam sites purport to teach you how to pronounce an unfamiliar name or tricky word (an important and underappreciated service that many people use!). But usually they merely contain computer-generated bullshit, as if fed directly into all available text-to-speech algorithms. Even the ostensibly human-generated recordings and sites are often flagrantly wrong, unsourced, and untrustworthy.

There are a few legitimate sites (such as Forvo, Youglish, etc.), but too often they are woefully incomplete (by nature of their being crowdsourced). Forvo even contributes to the spam with "do you know how to pronounce this word?" false positives.

I once blocked all of the spam sites when the domain-blocking feature you mentioned was built into Google Search; then had to do it once again when I needed a browser add-on to replace the removed feature (which naturally only worked on desktop); and recently I was astonished to find that the add-on also stopped working! The spam never ends.

Though I'll say this -- it's hard to optimize Quora's feed, but once you do that by carefully curating the topics and the people to follow, Quora can be an incredible source of super insightful answers on niche topics. But it does take a lot of work, which is a barrier to many.

Their feed display mechanism needs a lot of work imo.