To a certain extent, any search engine will be "better" for avoiding some SEO tricks than Google since somewhere between most to all SEO people are only concerned with how things rank in Google, thanks to its overwhelming majority usage on the English internet - where their pages rank in the results of Bing or Yandex isn't a matter of concern to them. Granted, many of the tricks to satisfy Google are going to satisfy other engines too, but not all of them, and not in exactly the same ways or degrees. (Getting a different result page from Google and from search engine X can be a feature, not a bug.)
I personally have been using DuckDuckGo for several years at this point and am quite satisfied with their results and their commitment to privacy. You shouldn't use any Google product if you have any serious measure of concern for your privacy (he hypocritically types while a YouTube video plays in the background - hey, at least I'm not logged in).
I’d argue that having the internet limited to a handful of gatekeepers, all of whom are sustained by ad dollars, is probably far more responsible for ruining the internet.
I find it hard to believe that in a world where Google and Facebook’s users were its customers and not its product, it wouldn’t be able to find a way to combat SEO effectively, especially considering how they are basically hoarding the majority of the smartest people in the world.
I totally agree. Google has become useless for about half my searches. It gives me only the biggest, most commercial or most popular results. Anything obscure is impossible to find.
I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a common but complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I vaguely remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or am I in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?
Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me tweak the importance of some sites, rather than relying on Google's gameable algorithms.
I like playing around with "Million Short" - https://millionshort.com. It's a search engine that lets you logarithmically filter-out the top websites. It isn't perfect, of course, but its a fun way to discover things.
Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff that might be just what I'm looking for.
I have another "Google is shit now" anecdote: a few months ago I wanted to look up some trivia for the movie "Lord of War". I entered this term in Google, and since there was a game that was just released, it responded with "Showing you results for 'God of War'". No results on the front page had anything related to the Nic Cage movie.
It was "lord of war director's commentary". I thought it was because many more people were googling for the game, but I just tried and Google is still doing this!
Yes, you said it was happening currently, so I tried it. The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively.
I'm not trying to be rude, but I honestly believe a lot of the complaints people make about how useless Google's search results seem overblown. I use Google all the time, sometimes for obscure results, often for technical stuff, and the worst I've ever had to do is look past the first page, but often the first page suffices.
Google showing results for director's commentary of God of War when someone searches "Lord of War director's commentary" is arguably not a failure on Google's part if more people do search for the game than the movie, regardless of the incorrect title.
That said, I completely agree with the theses of TFA. SEO is a cancer.
They aren't being rude, just increasing the sample size and reporting back. Perhaps we're witnessing SEO for different regions, regulations, and aggregate history of the two.
I'm a native English speaker. You're feeling that there is a belittling connotation is valid.
The first quote is potentially a dismissal, which is belittling. However, if it stood alone, it could also be interpreted as the person backing off because they lack qualification to interpret the results. But the second quote includes dismissal terms like "complaining" and "not objectively" in a demeaning context.
So, with all that, I'd say your impression is valid. The context highly suggests that these responses were meant to belittle the parent author's contribution to the conversation.
Here is my take on the parent's search results. The God Of War director ( Cory Barlog ) was a big part of the marketing for the game. And he did some in-game commentary for it too. So, this suggests some kind of SEO manipulation. But it could also just be the google spellcheck guessing wrong.
Intentionally? I'll assume good faith. Under that presumption, my best interpretation of that poster is "socially unaware, likely prone to nitpicky argumentation."
The poster who said he was having difficulty getting good results from Google, was obviously venting about his own personal experience.
Next comes along another poster who says "I tried it. I don't have your problem." Another post down, "... The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively."
Excuse my outburst, but who the fuck says that?
The original poster was venting about a problem he experienced. What good can someone do when he comes in and says that he doesn't experience the same problem, and states that it likely doesn't exist? There is no upside here. There's an only a downside: being rude.
It doesn't appear that you did. The search term in question is "lord of war director's commentary," and you say you're trying "lord of war." And even if the problem didn't exist for you, but did for them, that does not mean it doesn't exist "objectively."
Google usually shows a link to "search for x instead" when that happens. And let's be fair, most people searching for "Lord of War" are probably really searching for "God of War."
Having to click an extra link or maybe scroll beyond the front page doesn't make Google a shit show.
Half your searches? Isn't it a bit dramatic? You can always check your search history, but I seriously doubt 50% of your searches Google can not find anything - assuming data is somewhere accessible-. Tell us a few of the obscure things that you know exist openly and google could not find for you.
I see these claims all the time, but usually with zero examples.
Agreed, I almost always find what I am looking for on my first search. It might be a few search results down the page, but usually what I'm looking for is found on the first search.
Maybe I've just adapted to typing in words and phrases into Google in a way that brings up the results I'm looking for.
It's a very rough estimate. I'm not going to check every search in my history. But it feels like the chances I'll find what I need are comparable to the chances I won't.
One example: this weekend I was looking for lyrics from the British folk band Why?. I know they exist; my brother has a bunch of their albums. I have quoted lyrics at Google, I've searched for it on Youtube, I've searched for the band name combined with song titles or names of band members, and I found tons other bands and other random crap, but not the band I was looking for. Eventually I searched for a very specific phrase that was also the title of one of their live albums: "Jig at a Why? Gig", and that finally turned up results.
It's an obscure band, and their name being a common word certainly doesn't help, but certainly combined with song titles, lyrics and band members, it should be pretty clear what I'm looking for? But with Google giving strong preference to the most popular results, Google becomes primarily good at finding things you don't need a search engine for to find them. I want a search engine that's good at finding things that are lost, rather than in plain sight.
Lyrics are notoriously hard to find on Google. I assume it's in part due to copyright issues, but it's also not how Google works. Searches are based on key words, not exact matches of several words in order.
There was once I time where I could type maybe 5 random words from a song and get it as the top hit.
Now there are times where I can’t remember the song title, but I can type a few lines of lyrics verbatim plus include the musician’s name and get only random, unrelated links.
I think this particular query has a problem with the with the unfortunate name "why" which is probably causing the confusion. I don't think search engines did a better job before, nor this has anything to do with Seo. Change the "Why" with another obscure band with a distinct name, you would get results, could Gogle do better, sure, is it worse than before, I reaaly don't think so.
This is how most complaints about "Google these days" play out.
Once pressed to give actual examples, we realize it wasn't a trivial search anyways and certainly not something better Google did long ago on a technical basis. And Bing certainly isn't doing much better.
Of course, there are some things that Google does filter out these days like things that seem like pirated content.
Somewhat unrelated to your point but the phrase "Google these days" made me think the following: Could Google freeze its index and capabilities every one or two years and make it available as a sort of "search the web like it was in 2008" archive?
That might also solve the problem of how to prioritize search results over time. The people in 2015 are likely to have been interested in different things than the people of 2040, especially for some search terms (vine for example). I mean they already do this by having different search engines for different countries/languages.
Those are the top 3 things that routinely yield absolutely no useful results for me. The first two seem to produce pages upon pages of spammy SEO sites (with titles like "fix errors now") which don't even contain the relevant error message or code, and the latter alternates between no results or, once again, pages of SEO spam.
When I was still in an office with coworkers a while back, we had developed the habit of yelling "fuck you Google!" and showing a middle finger at the monitor whenever a search yielded absolutely WTF or useless results, which was a cue to everyone else around to jump in and help. A stronger tirade of profanity was reserved for when someone managed to trip the bot-detector CAPTCHA hellban. At first only the former happened once or twice a week, but shortly before working from home, we were getting Google-screwed multiple times a day, and tripping the hellban so often that most of us switched to a combination of Bing and Yahoo; while still not ideal, and the results weren't much better, at least we weren't routinely getting banned from them for trying harder to find what we were looking for.
To me it seems the problem with Google goes far deeper than struggling with bad SEO.
- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.
- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my situation as well.)
- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors.
For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought just a month ago, the very same product. Or the products they recommend are way out of my zone, like woman clothing while I never purchased woman clothing or anything close to it.
So, I'm not sure how the ad market even goes around and my friends are describing the same behavior from the ads, even from companies that have my entire shopping history already (like Amazon)
I think we agree. What I mean is on average it works for Google, not that it works for us. They still makes boatloads of cash.
For what I know the targeting is equally bad for you and me and everyone and they are just convincing advertisers that is worth paying for despite this.
The ad market's business isn't delivering right ads to you, it's convincing people paying for those ads to part with their money. It doesn't have to work well, as long as it works a bit, and there isn't any better alternative around.
> "For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in."
Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words I type as vaguely related words. Sometimes that's relevant, but often it's not.
> "For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays,"
They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet. Except with bad advertising, apparently.
> They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it
Say you searched for a TV a month ago. Now you're seeing lots of ads about TVs. Stupid Google.
But is it? A substantial fraction of those people are returning their TV because something is wrong with it. Now they are looking for another TV set.
Sure, the majority keeps their TV. But it is still profitable to target all those TV buyers, because they have self-selected into the set of people who really want a TV now, and they are willing to pay.
Reaching the fraction of those who need another one is probably[1] very lucrative.
Agreeing: This thread of thought comes up semi-regularly here, I've argued similarly to you.
People will rebuy good products, or be stimulated to replace other similar products (bought a new TV for the kitchen, now the lounge TV seems dated, new boots feel awesome get another pair for when they wear out, new $thing is fun buy one for friends birthday.).
There's also a big place for brand enforcement. Show Sony stuff, to remind someone ['s subconscious!] they bought Sony.
A tertiary effect is what I call the "Starbucks Purposeful Bad Naming effect" - you get ads for the exact TV you bought -- beyond the brand reinforcement, etc., you also get to tell everyone you meet a weird story about how "internet advertising is broken ..." and "yes, my new Sony TV is great thanks, you should get one".
Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the second when your gut bacteria burps ...
> Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the second when your gut bacteria burps ...
Stupid they aren't, but I don't think they're smart in the way they are.
Ad attribution is a hard problem. Or, in other words, it's hard to estimate which $ spent on which advertising activities generated how many $ of profit where. That gap is a huge opportunity to scam the product vendor out of their money.
So the ad agency has a metric for their metric, and their reports overflow with numbers and various charts shaped like food or aquatic mammals. But does that mean anything at all? It might not. Statistics is hard, and as long as the vendor isn't better at it than the agency, money can be made. I used to work next desk to a group of content marketers who had no fucking clue about what their numbers mean, but their customers didn't have a clue either, so they happily paid money in exchange for reports that showed the Facebook campaigns "worked".
Now advertising industry is large, and by definition filled with companies that aren't a paragon of virtue and honesty. These companies specialize, providing building blocks and platforms for each other, and they compete internally. It's not like people building tools for lies and manipulation are suddenly honest when dealing with their in-industry customers and competitors. After all, convincing advertisers that your A/B testing package is worth the money requires... well, advertising.
So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
I used to work in Ad Operations (literally buying ad space and running campaigns) and can attest to the accuracy of this.
Clients were clueless: they had their metrics and they looked at them often, but from my interactions, deep understanding of those metrics and the realities behind them was lacking. The chain of technologies was patchwork and would rarely support all the required features from ad-serve back up to agency: click and view attribution was especially flaky and inconsistent. The adserving environment we worked in (in app) often had issues with view attribution, and we'd tell clients that, but we knew for a fact that some of our competitors didn't and clients would always ask us why our view attribution numbers were worse.
Combine that with more suspect behaviour from suppliers and competitors than you can poke a stick at (questionable traffic sources and campaigns that were probably outsourced from under you, suspect and plausibly forged numbers, etc) means that most of the metrics are plausibly poisoned with illegitimate data to a degree that is difficult if not impossible to nail down, which more or less makes lots of those metrics worthless.
> So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
The big reason advertisers show the ads for products you already purchased is also to reinforce their brand. If you buy some stupid cable, you wont remember the name of the company that made it, but you will if they show you the add couple of times in a row and will likely to buy the things there again even if it not the same product.
> "They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet."
There's an eschatological trait to targeted advertising, as it seems to be all about past sins. So I'm not too sure about your evaluation and AI's own claims…
> I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet.
The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms have greater and greater intelligence, we're still not much closer to teaching them to do what we want them to do. They can game the system better than ever, and then the universe is tiled with surgical masks.
If "what we actually want" even comes into consideration, we did orders of magnitude better than the current industry standard. (Poor consolation, I know.) Right now, the vast majority of AIs don't even have a concept of "human desire" – probably none of them, to be honest, though some that are good at manipulating their handlers might've come close to a particularly stupid dog's understanding. This is at the core of the Friendly AI problem: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intellig...
Just because we created the AI doesn't mean it'll care about us. That's like saying a maths problem will try to make your favourite number its answer, just because you wrote it. No, you are the one who must make its answer the number you want. It won't happen by chance.
Corollary: you can't patch broken FAI designs. Reinforcement learning (underlying basically all of our best AI) is known to be broken; it'll game the system. Even if they were powerful enough to understand our goals, they simply wouldn't care; they'd care less than a dolphin. https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/specification-gam...
And there are far too many people in academia who don't understand this, after years of writing papers on the subject.
The "AI" that Google's search engine seems to have is definitely feeling more "human" over time, but not in a good way --- it's like a stupid salesperson who has trouble understanding what you're trying to find. An analogy I have is that you go into a pet shop and ask for a black cat, and instead the salesperson shows you black dogs, white cats, and green gerbils (because they're absolutely cool these days and you wouldn't want to miss out on a great deal, no?)
You're not their customer, advertisers are, so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's never been the goal.
It is, however, technically a potential benefit that the more exactly advertisers can target you, the more relevant ads you could be seeing, which is a wonderful sales pitch for users who are agnostic anyway, but that's not how advertising works in practice.
3. I've read it so many times and seen it misapplied so many times it is getting annoying.
> so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's never been the goal.
I doubt it was the intent of the advertisers to waste expensive impressions on people who weren't in the target audience at all, so I'm pretty sure they expected some personalization WRT which customers gets what ads.
I also very much doubt that it was Googles intention to annoy me to the point where I trash them in public foras, I just don't think they're capable of fixing it anymore as they are way to busy "being Google", e.g. doing cool stuff while not listening to customers (I was planning to add more here, but this single example seems to summarize it well.)
I recognize I might be a bit more direct than usual here and you aren't responsible for the first 97 times I've seen this meme here but as an answer to my question it is not applicable as far as I can see an also generally that meme is just noise here at HN now.
(Anyone who is actually in todays 10000 lucky WRT the "you're not the customer" meme, feel free to prove me wrong.)
My post may contain a meme but it was directly relevant to the post above.
Mentioning that I'm not Googles customer is significantly less relevant (I think irrelevant) when it is obvious that it should have been in the actual customers best interest to avoid spamming me with expensive and utterly irrelevant ads.
That's why I miss pre-Google search engines such as AltaVista and alltheweb. "If you searched for "some obscure string of words" you would only get results that matches that exact string. I really don't like how Google just chooses to vary the spelling of your query when a match isn't found. I often search for electronics components using their part number. I'll type in something like "P204PPX" (a random code I just made up) and despite there being no match Google still gives me pages of results that are nowhere near what I was looking for.
And the worst thing is that this is all done to keep those ad dollars flowing. Look at how many companies always have a paid advert associated with their name when a search is made. They are paranoid about losing rank due to Google fiddling their algorithm or someone else doing a better SEO job using their brand.
Google used to respect search operators, and dramatically tone down query optimization for queries that contained operators. As I've written elsewhere, I suspect learn-to-rank is to blame[0], by optimizing ranking for generic sloppy queries despite your query being very focused.
> - Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
To intentionally discourage you from using Firefox so you give in and switch to their stalker browser.
- Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly impossible to find actual reviews of products.
- People who type whole sentences in natural language into Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary. Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens the results.
Not OP, but let's say you want to find out the protein content of brussels sprouts.
I would type `protein content brussels sprouts` (without quotes) because I fully understand that the information I'm seeking might be in some tabular form, or phrased in a way I don't anticipate.
Most non-technical people however would type in `What is the protein content of brussels sprouts?` literally.
This leads content creators who see these queries in "keyword analysis tools" to dump SEO-optimized crap into millions of blog posts, with completely irrelevant word soups with countless varations of the question, and the actual information buried deep within that gibberish essay, unreadable by humans, only optimized to drive ad traffic.
Google's optimization for the non-technical use case has lowered the overall search result quality immensely.
There was a time when Google didn't simply ignore some of your search words, or when control characters like +, -, and "" were actually respected (~pre 2010), and the introduction of verbatim mode didn't change much IMHO.
Interesting. Why do you think that content creators wouldn't see `protein content brussels sprouts` in "keyword analysis tools"? Why do you think they wouldn't create millions of blog posts containing words `protein content brussels sprouts` or countless variations thereof?
One can easily make them minority by creating a script which issues keyword-only searches to Google and let it work 24/7/365 from a few hundred machines.
Because Google optimizes for "quality content" since at least the Penguin update. They're using NLP tools to assess the writing quality (similar to algorithms telling you at what school grade level your writing is).
This was good, because it cured all the copy&pastable 2000s era "tag cloud" sites which simply dumped tons of search keywords all over the place.
Ideally, it lead to a stronger emphasis on high-quality human-written content, but it turns out that this algorithm, again, is easily fooled by feeding it "SEO essays" that looks like prose, but is irrelevant text gibberish, but written coherently.
That lead content creators to expand data that would ideally be presented in tabular form on one page, to multi-page "SEO prose" that looks like it's written for humans, but is completely undigestible.
That, along with Google's auto-suggestion feature that finish your sentences after you type in some words, especially on mobile, lead to the impression that people actually like to search in full sentences.
My experience is the opposite: while there certainly was a time when I felt DDG actually respected my queries [1] that time is now gone. The results I get often have very little to do with what I typed in the search box. I find myself resorting to !g more often than ever before.
After the last bout of anti-google posts on HN about a month ago, I took the comment advice and switched fully to DDG.
My experience was horrible. I don't tend to search 'popular' subjects, only technical ones, and hobbyist stuff. DDG was just plain useless for this, I had to switch back to google after about a week as I was using the !g prefix almost all the time.
This was my experience as of a year ago. Nowadays when I do a search on DDG (my default choice) the results are terrible. Then I add !g and the results are even worse. I’ve had so many recent searches for information on technical subjects result in abject failure, leaving me to throw my hands in the air in frustration.
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve installed BasiliskII and SheepShaver [1] just so I can relive the nostalgia of the days when I had my first Macintosh, before I’d even had access to the Internet for the first time. The help system and the documentation for software back then was so much more exhaustive than it is today!
There are definitely sites who's results I wish I could ban from my results. I won't visit them so they are just a waste of space. My short list, thillist, collider, vulture.
Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a pattern for SEO or ads.
I'm surprised Google's own Search team doesn't get frustrated enough by Pinterest results contaminating their own day-to-day searches that they'd consider ranking Pinterest results lower.
They aren't going to de-optimize their careers in order to optimize search just for themselves. Google used to be somewhat optimized for power users, but I suspect that learn-to-rank is over-optimizing search ranking for the median user.
Given the uniformity of recipe site design I'm starting to wonder if there isn't more going on. Like maybe they are all run by the same company or maybe there is a template that every person that wants to run a recipe site is somehow pushed to use.
I mean literally, search for any recipe, click the first 10 links. Screens and screens if large pictures and superfluous text with actual recipe way way down the page.
How are you meant to find the most obscure content? If it's obscure, it probably means it is not relevant to your search. How would a search engine like that even work?
Tweaking importance of some sites seems like a nice idea though, but it could also be a bad thing.
I'm very confused by your definition of obscure. If I search for something rare and not covered very well using as set of precise search terms Altavista and company used to give me almost exclusively relevant results. Modern Google will give me windows helpdesk questions for a query about a linux driver using lots of of quoted terms, at most one of which will appear in the results. Rare results are _exactly_ the time that precise queries give higher quality hits. Substituting a different word will swamp them. Specifying sites to avoid or prefer is an extra signal to help with that
Recent example: I wanted to find out why the directions on those Banquet pot pies say to let it stand for five minutes. The words on the box say it finishes cooking in those five minutes. I want to find out more about that: why didn't it finish in the oven? Is it cover for liability, so people don't get burned?
All Google returns is page after page of recipes and posts about Banquet pot pies that have no connection to my input. Google used to be so good at this kind of thing. I know the answer exists somewhere because I found it once a long time ago searching for answers to the same question. Google found it then.
This could perhaps be illustrated well with a hard boiled egg. If you remove an egg at the 7 minute mark, the internal temperature is still around 100c, and it will continue to cook. To stop it cooking, dunk it in cold water.
Similarly with the pot pie, the filling retains a ton of heat, so it still is cooking for those few minutes, as the heat dissipates. If you left it in the oven five minutes longer (to 'finish') then put it in cold water (like the egg), you would have a pie in a similar, though wetter, condition.
I wish I would have seen this coming years ago. I would have built a Google Custom Search Engine, and every time I ran into a good website, added it to the whitelist. By now, it would probably be alright.
The article linked here has a good point it is trying to make, but makes a number of false points that undercut it's goal.
1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.
Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.
The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.
I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.
I agree, it's easy to hate on the current system and I think the ads are getting way too similar to the real results now. But all those websites that have a massive list of names/place at the bottom just to come higher up the search, that was the real worst time. When you'd search "Handyman in Leeds" and the top results would be for a company that isn't even in the right location but was big enough to list highly and had "Handyman in Leeds" in hidden text at the bottom of the page.
> Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.
Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at least it seemed to work, so we'll just keep doin' it.
I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google keeps its algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do except publish good content and hope for the best - which, in an ideal world, would be good enough, but…
> and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.
When a site is acting up like that I just click and hold, and this brings up an extended list of previous pages. I kinda assume everyone knew about that feature; it seems to work in all major browsers.
Wasn't SEO, it was a Google's "Suggest over Search" strategy, followed by the completely predictable bastardization of organic results by internal groups.
Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking Y over Z in the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes won't give us all their data, their users and their firstborns so they won't show up, even on page 2.
This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do this naturally when they get too successful, it's on us to remind them who pays the bills.
By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.
The article doesn't present complete facts. Regarding zero-sum game, this perhaps was true in the old pagerank algorithm. But I'd believe Google's ranking algorithm has advanced beyond simple keyword density, passing links. What I've noticed is it now gives much more emphasis to user experience. (With metrics like bounce rate meaning the searcher didnt find what he looked for and went back to search results)
We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even remotely close to the quality of results. Of course, there's a lot of spam associated with SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments, e.t.c. There are side effects of its algorithm of course, that are negative to web.
Google search result links don’t link to the site directly but go through a Google-provided redirect that presumably has a reference to the original search query.
If you were to go back to the same search result page and click on another result within a short timeframe they will assume you “bounced”.
They also have Google Analytics littering the majority of the web, so I’m assuming that gives them a signal as well.
Google links directly to search results now, they stopped using the tracking redirect years ago. They probably track clicks and scrolling directly on the SERP with JS.
Google Analytics is absolutely not used for ranking purposes. GA is far too unreliable and gameable to be used for anything like that. It's more likely that Chrome and Google Safe Browsing are used for tracking user hits.
Why it ruined content? You are not the only one that is searching for the answer to that question. Keep reading to know why SEO ruined content.
Many people think that SEO ruined content, in this post, we are goin to explain why SEO ruined content. When you finish reading this post, you will know why SEO ruined content.
In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of content created, unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a moment, it has been ruined by SEO.
¿Is it SEO really the reason content was ruined?
Some people argue that SEO is not really the reason content was ruined, we will review all the reason why SEO could be really ruining content.
Please, click "next" to know why SEO could be ruining content.
this x1000! By pandering to the algorithm of google, a lot of great content has become watered down, softened, or impacted in other ways. Titles have to be worded a certain way, article length has to be a certain length...
hoping someone else chimes in with other thoughts because I used to know more about this, and SEO cheapening quality content was one of the key takeaways I had.
Many now have an anchor directly to the recipe. I try to book mark those so I don't have to read about the author pontificating on the changing of the seasons or how an ingredient in the dish reminds them of childhood for the 800th time.
It's like we've flipped APIs on their heads - humans use tools to obtain the minimal data (just the recipe), while the bots make requests and receive the whole dump of pointless, extraneous fluff in return.
And here comes the business trick: API access is paid and restricted and requires you to enter a relationship with the data provider. Websites are purposefully made machine-unreadable, because otherwise a lot of people would use third-party scripts to avoid viewing ads and filler content.
The Internet is the exact opposite of what it was meant to be. Instead of giving efficient access to high-quality information, it gives inefficient access to watered down, spread-down, low-quality interaction. Site after site, query after query, we all continuously pay a little tax with our time.
This only really applies to the commercially-focused part of the Internet, though. Many Internet sites are still hosting academically-focused, non-commercial or broadly pro-social efforts, and those seem to be among the quickest adopters of Linked Open Data standards which are precisely meant to make content machine-readable, sometimes with standardized and freely available API-like endpoints for querying the underlying datastore.
More people would be willing to pay for subscription, directly or indirectly, if ad revenue model didn't exist. Otherwise, "free with ads" outcompetes all. That's why I'm in favor of banning "free with ads" wholesale.
I am not on a high moral ground to talk about ads.I am a web developer, yet I use ublock Origin.
Now, that I have some money, I am willing to pay for subscriptions, because that would mean high quality content, not because of ads. However, there were times in my life when I barely had what to eat and I barely afforded to pay for the Internet connection and paying subscriptions was the last things I was willing to do.
I suppose many of the 7 billion people living on Earth are poor enough to not afford paying for subscription.
A lot of the revenue models suck, if you pay they just put your name in a database sell it to everyone that offers still give you ads and make it impossible to cancel. I wanted to buy cooks illustrated for example but after reading about their business practices I chose not to.
> Websites are purposefully made machine-unreadable.
This is a sad result of incentives which ruined RSS, semantic web, and the original purpose of the Internet: to effectively share and communicate information globally.
Advertising (including propaganda and surveillance) and copyright are major forces in that ruination - not to say they don't have legitimate uses and benefits, but their concentrated financial interests conquered the domain. It's a kind of colonialism of public (cyber)space and collective mind.
Tax is an apt analogy, since the power lies in the control of "media" in the most general sense, to force itself in every transaction between things and people.
I believe "dis-intermediation" will help improve the free and direct flow of information. That is, to reduce the middle layers - the gate keepers, the walled gardens, intercepts (lawful or not), filters - by re-decentralizing the net.
I once came across a "world's most amazing curry recipe" that had two ingredients; rice, and a jar of storebought curry sauce. It was actually kind of tragic.
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
If I never have to read another article with "XYZ Is Happening. Here's What it Means" or anything to that effect as a headline, it will be too soon. SEO has created lazy writing, and as a former journalist, I hate what it's happened to my one-time profession.
I can also do without sites that think they're being quirky with their newsletter popups. "Click here to subscribe" or "I'm not interested in staying informed/saving money/being in shape". Stop. You're trying too hard.
To be fair, "SEO ruined content" is a pretty specific search string and doesn't even show up in the results that out-rank this submission. This comment specifically talks about "SEO ruined content" and is, correctly, a good results candidate.
I fear it's incredibly hard to fight fake content with automated systems. You need the ability to understand the content to determine whether the content is actually meaningful. For that, you need far better intelligence than just some fancy text processing.
You need people, basically. If you want to automate it, you need some way to figure out what people think about that content. This has been tried by counting how many people link to it, or rate it highly, but those methods have also been gamed to death.
Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients.
How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.
I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?
>Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots?
Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant.
Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners.
When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you were looking for."
Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them to look like that if they want Google to send them any search traffic.
Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they present the information you were searching for? Is there a way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid engineers.
Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep people from switching to other search engines en masse, they're not losing anything.
Long time ago having your site in a high quality curated directory like DMOZ boosted your search ranks a lot.
I was an editor for a few categories at DMOZ. Not only I allowed only good content in our categories, but I checked older approvals from time to time to see if they behave. I had to delist some websites who thought they can trick us.
And if you want it all in one place, an entire compendium of tried and tested recipes, pick up a copy of one of Cooks Illustrated's New Best Recipe books, even an older one.
I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.
Cooks Illustrated is amazing, the rigor they go through testing everything, and adapting to available ingredients, makes for such incredible reliability!
You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good.
You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.
Or you could buy a cookbook. There's a bunch of them out there. Some are good, some are bad, some are long-lived classics, some are deep dives into a particular cuisine by someone who knows it inside out.
You'll still have to suffer through a certain amount of SEO bullshit, you probably don't wanna just go to Amazon and try buying the best-selling cookbook in whatever cuisine you're interested in because that's got its own Amazon-specific SEO clogging things up, but...
Yes! Books. Most cookbooks have a lot of full color pictures. They also lack ads, if they have a story to give context to the writer’s relationship with the cuisine it will be a few paragraphs introducing the whole book rather than at the head of every recipe. They do not have any DRM; once you buy one it is yours to keep, give, or loan as you will.
If one gets wet (not at all inconceivable for something used in the kitchen) you merely have to dry it out. It will be slightly wrinkly but it will work fine, unlike a wet phone/tablet/laptop. It’ll have the dish you’re interested in plus a whole lot more, you probably won’t want to make every single one of them but there’s probably gonna be a few that look worth trying.
It will not track you. It is easy to store where it is needed. If you want to make notes - maybe you loved this dish and hated that one, maybe you made a variant that your SO loved - it’s easy to make them with a pen or pencil, and have them visible without any extra interaction. It’s a pretty useful technology!
I know that different cultures are different, but I always think of Americans as being (kitchen) gadget-obsessed.
Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks.
(I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cooking without a scale just seems surprising. Even where I come from a grew up with a balance-scale with brass weights. Never hugely accurate, but always available.)
It's because Americans mainly cook with volumes ("1 cup flour") and not masses ("100g flour"). Just look at any American recipe book - it will use volumes instead of weights.
Yeah, cups of flour annoy me to no end. The difference between a cup of packed down flour in the bag vs flour that's been sifted is something like 30% by my rough estimate.
8 fl oz of flour spooned into the measuring cup or 4.5 oz. by weight.
I'm not at all trying to be snarky here. Like any other specialization people who cook have organic terminology that is useful to the in-group but confusing to the out-group. A /24 isn't the same as a class C network but we all know what is being conveyed.
And you'll get much more accurate measurements of small quantities measuring by volume instead of weight since kitchen scales aren't that accurate. Knowing that 0.25 tsp is about a gram for just about any granular thing will probably do better than your scale.
It also helps convey the sig figs in recipe. Very few recipes have a tolerance of 1 g. Even finicky bread doesn't get that accurate so it's ridiculous when some bloggers write something like 113 g when without question the recipe was originally formulated to be 4.0 oz and you just messed up the conveyed tolerances by blindly converting.
I understand how to make bread, bakers-percentages, etc. It's just that when it comes to flour a cup is a terrible measurement, due to the way it packs and the different volume involved in various varieties/types of flour.
Most of the time when I'm cooking and I see an American recipe I just google the conversion; a cup of milk is easy to deal with. Just a minor irritation most of the time, but for some things it matters.
This is because of a quirk of copyright; in the US at least, a recipe itself is not considered copyrightable if it is a mere listing of ingredients; however, they can be covered by copyright when they have "substantial literary expression – a description, explanation, or illustration, for example – that accompanies a recipe or formula…”.
If you want some recipes that don't have all that nonsense associated, I'd recommend the BBC's Food site[0].
And it's surprising how many sites that are half decent on its own, if you visit it without an ad blocker they still have Taboola ads about how person in {your location} got rich in the way they don't want you to know.
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
Online recipe sites will always be absurdly verbose, because if they just posted a list, Google would either rank it poorly because it is "thin content", or scrape it and post it as a Featured Snippet. There is seemingly no in-between.
The site authors have no choice but to fill it with a bunch of warbling about their childhood, to meet Google's minimum word count, which of course the company swears doesn't exist.
See there is a double edged sword here because outstanding recipes are thesis papers explaining the motivation, concepts, prior art and research, history, experiments, methodology, equipment, and then finally, optionally even, the reipce. They should be long and verbose. You should learn something by reading a recipe.
The problem of course is that search crawlers can't tell the difference between between the two and so long but empty content is treated the same.
Book recipes have a different problem that they need to fill 100 or so pages of content and most authors have maybe 3-5 good recipes. So you get a ton of filler as well
Every time I land on websites that have such content I am wondering why anybody would want that kind of traffic.
I mean, don't they have server costs? It's like they own an infinite amount of money bucket that constantly gets refilled somehow.
Why are advertisers even paying them for such impressions? Are they so ridiculously retarded in their business model? Can we all hurt advertisers by setting up a website like this?
I know little about the ad business but the insinuation I've heard is that the advertisers don't want those impressions, but struggle to block these sites for one reason or another. In other words, it's basically a scam.
The reason you even got a chance to click on it is because they wrote it that way. If they didn't, it wouldn't be as visible in Google = nobody would see it. When most websites do this (to survive) folks don't have a choice.
Also, advertisers don't pay for something that's invisible.
It’s all very parasitic and relies on a lot of disconnect. The advertisers often don’t even know what they are buying as these things go through “exchanges” that are basically computers buying and selling as real estate. The smaller the business the more likely they are to end up scammed by this because they will have less tools to monitor things.
These don't bring in much money on a per-site basis, but the owners usually own multiple sites, so it can add up.
If you're able to get the site to grow, it becomes the easiest digital property in the world to maintain. The content doesn't need to be fresh, or engaging. People will always search for generic recipes.
That reminds me of an ad network, which was usually displayed next to webcomics, with nearly all the adds pointing to other webcomics, who all had ads from the same network… I had no idea how that network was making any money or paying anything to the websites.
Perhaps you're thinking of Hiveworks? They're less an ad network and more like a publishing company for webcomics. Many of those types of "webcomic ad-rings" are.
If I had one word to characterize the modern web it would be "shallow". SEO and commercialization have led to a world wide web where I can easily find 100 shallow, keyword-optimized articles on "machine learning for IoT" published on high-ranking websites, but not a single page with actual in-depth information about the topic.
But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes harder to find in all the noise. I think websites like HN and Reddit and - to some degree - sites like Twitter with their human-based curation are really important for this, so I'm glad they're thriving.
I worked in SEO for ages, and it's shady as f.
You can buy links from anyone, the BBC the guardian, the times... It just costs money.
You can ask/force people to take links down (copyright scare, sue, threaten). Fake blogs, we used to run a bunch, some became so popular they became actual blogs on that subject. We'd get money from competitor SEO companies for links on it.
There are tons of niche subjects with no info on the internet. We'd often put it up for SEO purposes.
Wikipedia was started by an SEO company. The rumour was that Wales started it as a cheap way to get high page rank links to sites he owned.
But the rewards were huge. Get a struggling car insurance site from position 11 in Google to position 2 or 1 and their profits would be 10x. They would show us numbers from each advertising sector, SEO, radio, TV, newspapers, etc. Super interesting. Break that down by age / gender ... Very interesting.
No wonder the internet is a shit show. So much money involved and zero regulation.
The situation has gotten so dismal that I often have to look past page 1, and sometimes page 2 of search results.
Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).
Recently, on page 2 and later, and sometimes even on page 1, I see lots of *.it links that just dump a wall of text that seems like it's been scraped from legit resources but all tags content got smashed into one text block. Examples pages that now return 404:
Just use a different search engine. Right now DDG is the only viable alternative. Just force yourself to use it, regardless of all the edge cases that suck. When DDG becomes as crap as Google, we can use whatever alternative exists at that time to replace it. The same goes for Instagram, it's slowly but surely turned into an ad infested cesspit (Three consecutive ads between user stories? seriously?). This is how the cycle goes I'm afraid.
I think most spam websites today could be filtered out with very simple algorithms. But that would lead to fewer people ending up on these websites and clicking ads. So if your search engine is also an ad network, filtering out spam websites is not in your interest.
SEO will always be a game of cat and mouse. The original algorithms were designed to surface useful content relevant to the search query with the limitations of the technology at the time (so they could be gamed).
Nowadays technology has improved and processing power is much cheaper so it should be possible to use machine learning to recognise what’s “good” and what’s SEO spam and thus get ahead of the SEO crowd again.
The problem here is that the spam sites are also the ones with ads (often Google ads), so there is no financial incentive for Google to actually do anything about those.
A MAJOR problem with google is it's assumption that if you search in English you don't care if the top results are American.
I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to do this.
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[1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am.
It's even worse when you are trying to search in a language that is not English from a region that is English speaking.
I often look for recipes in French or German and it's impossible to find anything. I try to browse to google.de/fr, I try adding site:.fr but it will still try and give me the most English results. My Google search settings indicate I am happy with German and French results but it seems to have no affect...
I have the reverse problem: Google would happily return me Polish-language results for everything, where I almost never want that. For the types of searches I do, there's almost never anything worthwhile in my native language. This, + their annoying attempt at detecting which country I'm in (so I would get German results when in Germany, and Chinese results when in China) led me one day to figuring out the magic URL incantation to force English results, and replacing the search in omnibar with that.
I don't have the original anywhere; I used it exclusively on my work laptop two jobs back, which was the only one that moved internationally somewhat frequently (for the rest of my machines, I clicked around Google settings until I got English-language results and that usually stuck). But I think it was https://google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s.
It doesn't matter which google tld you use.
.co.uk , .ca or whatever it will still give you results tailored to you, not to tld.
Just did a random search on a random country tld and still got a result at the top for my city.
Google with default settings is useless and using more sophisticated queries quickly walls off the user with increasingly annoying captcha.
The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid and brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed PDFs with most established books from various domains, git repository for each domain. Greppable in miliseconds, locally. Hijack this, SEO experts!
ImageMagick and Tesseract for OCR-ing each page of a PDF into a separate text file (through TIFF image format, disregard the huge TIFFs afterwards), private git repos for hosting, then ag/grep for searching. Not as easy to find the phrase back in PDF as with eg. Google Books, but then GB with copyright related content restrictions is useless most of the time.
How did you acquire the books? Are they in the public domain, or did you have to buy them? In either case is there a place to acquire/buy these books massively or did you do it one by one manually?
Whichever most convenient way to obtain a full restriction-free PDF of a book. Fetched one by one through various channels in my case. Very few are in the public domain, if any. BTW one can do the same with academic publications, device manuals, or whatever else content available in PDF.
Your personal solution sounds interesting. I'd be interested to know more details about it, and how it works for you. If it is how I imagine it, it could also be one of those things that could be built into a tool that could rival Wikipedia or search engines.
Based on your reply to handsomechad, you may think that it's easiest for people to just build one themselves. But there may be a business opportunity in providing a pre-packaged solution for the masses. In the same way that Dropbox provided a tool that was "trivial" to experts, but was difficult for non-experts (see the infamous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), if you have a tool that is essentially a rival to Google Books for reference texts, that is interesting.
Well yeah, maybe in former times, when there was pay-per-view. Don't know anybody who is still doing this. Nowadays (already 10+ years) ads are only paid-by-click, because of "conversion".
SEO effectively means catering to whatever metrics Google happens to be focusing on at the moment. It's supposed to reward "good" content, but there's really no way of automatically judging what's "good" content so Google relies on all these other methods that are open to abuse.
Whatever way Google rates websites has a direct effect on the web itself. In a way they're a victim of their own success.
Partially true because of how pervasive they've become, they're powerful enough to influence the lawmakers in my country. I don't really see myself as a victim though, I just use different search engines.
I wonder if some real competition in search would help things. It might be harder to create SEO that “fools” a handful of different search engines than just creating quality content. I’m not sure how we’ve come to accept a near total monopoly on search so willingly.
I'm actually really glad to have seen this and the comments. This has something I've been prattling on about to anyone who will listen for the last couple of years now. Glad to be somewhat vindicated!
One might add social media to that list as well. If there's a Dunbar's number in real life, there definitely is one for online communities too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
This article is good, but to go a bit deeper, it seems like part of the problem is ultimately capitalism or the commercial nature of the modern internet. As long as there are these incredible incentives to game the system, people are going to do so. And those same incentives apply to Google, since they are advertising driven too. They used to fight more against this stuff, but I think as they've realized they get their cut either way, they're less inclined to do so. And even if they were so inclined, it's sort of asking them hold back the ocean in my view, because the incentives are so stacked against them.
Early SEO efforts were actually good for the web. They forced you to make your content easier to find and more accessible.
But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start resorting to dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones.
During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more recipes online. Every one of them starts with the person's life story. And I get it, maybe how that recipe came to exist is interesting. But at least put a link right at the top that says "skip to recipe" or something. Sometimes I want to read the story, sometimes not. Make it easy for me skip!
I put a recipe on my own website, it's literally a .txt file with just the recipe, ingredients right at the top. I posted a picture of the final product on the internet recently, and a friend asked for the recipe, so I sent him the link.
He replied "the format and delivery method of this is almost more satisfying than the recipe itself".
SEO combined with Amazon (and other) referral revenue opportunities. Combined with human psychology and ignorance outside of the tech community of the wiles of online marketing. Honestly Hacker News is one of the few sources I trust nowadays, and that is of course not implicit. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of reporting about reporting. A lot of hyperbolic and misleading headlines. Stay safe out there.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadI'm really itching to start writing my own search engine now.
I personally have been using DuckDuckGo for several years at this point and am quite satisfied with their results and their commitment to privacy. You shouldn't use any Google product if you have any serious measure of concern for your privacy (he hypocritically types while a YouTube video plays in the background - hey, at least I'm not logged in).
I find it hard to believe that in a world where Google and Facebook’s users were its customers and not its product, it wouldn’t be able to find a way to combat SEO effectively, especially considering how they are basically hoarding the majority of the smartest people in the world.
I'd like to have a search engine where you get only the most obscure, hard-to-find content. One where you can tweak the kind of content you're looking for, or even switch between different modes: am I just looking for the definition of a common but complex term, am I looking for a specific article that I vaguely remember a phrase from, do I want something I've seen before, or am I in the mood to discover new, unexpected things?
Also, I just don't want to see results from some sites. Let me tweak the importance of some sites, rather than relying on Google's gameable algorithms.
Of course some of those top sites, especially the blogging and self-hosting platforms, can still contain obscure stuff that might be just what I'm looking for.
Also as a non native speaker you appear to be rude.
Google showing results for director's commentary of God of War when someone searches "Lord of War director's commentary" is arguably not a failure on Google's part if more people do search for the game than the movie, regardless of the incorrect title.
That said, I completely agree with the theses of TFA. SEO is a cancer.
- "Don't know what to tell you."
- "The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively."
In my limited experience I don't see any reasons to use these exact words in this context except to belittle..?
Anyone care to explain? My seatbelt is fastened and I'm ready to learn (and apologize if necessary :-).
The first quote is potentially a dismissal, which is belittling. However, if it stood alone, it could also be interpreted as the person backing off because they lack qualification to interpret the results. But the second quote includes dismissal terms like "complaining" and "not objectively" in a demeaning context.
So, with all that, I'd say your impression is valid. The context highly suggests that these responses were meant to belittle the parent author's contribution to the conversation.
Here is my take on the parent's search results. The God Of War director ( Cory Barlog ) was a big part of the marketing for the game. And he did some in-game commentary for it too. So, this suggests some kind of SEO manipulation. But it could also just be the google spellcheck guessing wrong.
The poster who said he was having difficulty getting good results from Google, was obviously venting about his own personal experience.
Next comes along another poster who says "I tried it. I don't have your problem." Another post down, "... The problem you're complaining about doesn't actually appear to exist, at least not objectively."
Excuse my outburst, but who the fuck says that?
The original poster was venting about a problem he experienced. What good can someone do when he comes in and says that he doesn't experience the same problem, and states that it likely doesn't exist? There is no upside here. There's an only a downside: being rude.
>There is no upside here. There's an only a downside: being rude.
Says the person who apparently created a green account just to shit on my grammar and cast aspersions on me.
Pot, meet kettle.
It doesn't appear that you did. The search term in question is "lord of war director's commentary," and you say you're trying "lord of war." And even if the problem didn't exist for you, but did for them, that does not mean it doesn't exist "objectively."
It's not even suggesting both God of War and Lord of War, for me all the results on the first page are about God of War.
Today I use DDG mostly, thanks to Googles choices. DDG is equally bad WRT this but
- it is easier to move from DDG to Google (just add !g) than the other way around
- and DDG isn't as invasive
Having to click an extra link or maybe scroll beyond the front page doesn't make Google a shit show.
I see these claims all the time, but usually with zero examples.
Maybe I've just adapted to typing in words and phrases into Google in a way that brings up the results I'm looking for.
One example: this weekend I was looking for lyrics from the British folk band Why?. I know they exist; my brother has a bunch of their albums. I have quoted lyrics at Google, I've searched for it on Youtube, I've searched for the band name combined with song titles or names of band members, and I found tons other bands and other random crap, but not the band I was looking for. Eventually I searched for a very specific phrase that was also the title of one of their live albums: "Jig at a Why? Gig", and that finally turned up results.
It's an obscure band, and their name being a common word certainly doesn't help, but certainly combined with song titles, lyrics and band members, it should be pretty clear what I'm looking for? But with Google giving strong preference to the most popular results, Google becomes primarily good at finding things you don't need a search engine for to find them. I want a search engine that's good at finding things that are lost, rather than in plain sight.
Now there are times where I can’t remember the song title, but I can type a few lines of lyrics verbatim plus include the musician’s name and get only random, unrelated links.
Once pressed to give actual examples, we realize it wasn't a trivial search anyways and certainly not something better Google did long ago on a technical basis. And Bing certainly isn't doing much better.
Of course, there are some things that Google does filter out these days like things that seem like pirated content.
When I was still in an office with coworkers a while back, we had developed the habit of yelling "fuck you Google!" and showing a middle finger at the monitor whenever a search yielded absolutely WTF or useless results, which was a cue to everyone else around to jump in and help. A stronger tirade of profanity was reserved for when someone managed to trip the bot-detector CAPTCHA hellban. At first only the former happened once or twice a week, but shortly before working from home, we were getting Google-screwed multiple times a day, and tripping the hellban so often that most of us switched to a combination of Bing and Yahoo; while still not ideal, and the results weren't much better, at least we weren't routinely getting banned from them for trying harder to find what we were looking for.
- For years it has been next to impossible to get a result that is faithful to the search you actually typed in. This is not dependent on SEO spammers at all, only on Googles unwillingness to accept that not every user is equal and some of us mean exactly what we write, especially when we take the time to enclose our queries in double quotes and set the "verbatim" option.
- Ad targeting has been so bad it has been ridiculous. Yes, on average it works but around the edges it is somewhere between tragic and hilarious. For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays, not tech conferences, not magazine subscriptions, not offers from local shops, but scammy dating sites that was so ridiculous that I cannot imagine how most people would fall for them. (For a while I wondered if this was all a fluke but now I have confirmed it happens to others in my situation as well.)
- Also in other areas it is becoming ridiculous. For example: what is the idea behind aggressively showing me captcas while I'm logged in with two different google controlled accounts, one gmail and one gsuite, both paid?
Maybe we frequent vastly different websites, but this has absolutely not been true for me, even for companies who are supposed to be experts at using their data. I don't think I've ever seen an ad that has actually been relevant, and I'm not even trying to hide my habits or behaviors.
For example, take Amazon. Their ads all over the web frequently recommends me stuff I've already bought just a month ago, the very same product. Or the products they recommend are way out of my zone, like woman clothing while I never purchased woman clothing or anything close to it.
So, I'm not sure how the ad market even goes around and my friends are describing the same behavior from the ads, even from companies that have my entire shopping history already (like Amazon)
> Maybe we frequent vastly different websites...
I think we agree. What I mean is on average it works for Google, not that it works for us. They still makes boatloads of cash.
For what I know the targeting is equally bad for you and me and everyone and they are just convincing advertisers that is worth paying for despite this.
The ad market's business isn't delivering right ads to you, it's convincing people paying for those ads to part with their money. It doesn't have to work well, as long as it works a bit, and there isn't any better alternative around.
Good lord, yes. If I type two words, I want preference for sites that contain both of them, yet the first results all have either one or the other, because surely I must be more interested in a popular site that uses only one of these, right? Google is sometimes too smart, trying to interpret exact words I type as vaguely related words. Sometimes that's relevant, but often it's not.
> "For ten years after I met my wife the most relevant ads Google could think of was dating sites. Not toys, not family holidays,"
They have a tendency to show you ads for exactly the thing you don't need anymore because you already found it. I don't think AI is in any danger of taking over the world just yet. Except with bad advertising, apparently.
Say you searched for a TV a month ago. Now you're seeing lots of ads about TVs. Stupid Google.
But is it? A substantial fraction of those people are returning their TV because something is wrong with it. Now they are looking for another TV set.
Sure, the majority keeps their TV. But it is still profitable to target all those TV buyers, because they have self-selected into the set of people who really want a TV now, and they are willing to pay.
Reaching the fraction of those who need another one is probably[1] very lucrative.
[1] I'm sure Google has run the numbers
People will rebuy good products, or be stimulated to replace other similar products (bought a new TV for the kitchen, now the lounge TV seems dated, new boots feel awesome get another pair for when they wear out, new $thing is fun buy one for friends birthday.).
There's also a big place for brand enforcement. Show Sony stuff, to remind someone ['s subconscious!] they bought Sony.
A tertiary effect is what I call the "Starbucks Purposeful Bad Naming effect" - you get ads for the exact TV you bought -- beyond the brand reinforcement, etc., you also get to tell everyone you meet a weird story about how "internet advertising is broken ..." and "yes, my new Sony TV is great thanks, you should get one".
Those ad agencies aren't stupid; they have metrics for their metrics and have tracking that can tell you to the second when your gut bacteria burps ...
Stupid they aren't, but I don't think they're smart in the way they are.
Ad attribution is a hard problem. Or, in other words, it's hard to estimate which $ spent on which advertising activities generated how many $ of profit where. That gap is a huge opportunity to scam the product vendor out of their money.
So the ad agency has a metric for their metric, and their reports overflow with numbers and various charts shaped like food or aquatic mammals. But does that mean anything at all? It might not. Statistics is hard, and as long as the vendor isn't better at it than the agency, money can be made. I used to work next desk to a group of content marketers who had no fucking clue about what their numbers mean, but their customers didn't have a clue either, so they happily paid money in exchange for reports that showed the Facebook campaigns "worked".
Now advertising industry is large, and by definition filled with companies that aren't a paragon of virtue and honesty. These companies specialize, providing building blocks and platforms for each other, and they compete internally. It's not like people building tools for lies and manipulation are suddenly honest when dealing with their in-industry customers and competitors. After all, convincing advertisers that your A/B testing package is worth the money requires... well, advertising.
So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
Clients were clueless: they had their metrics and they looked at them often, but from my interactions, deep understanding of those metrics and the realities behind them was lacking. The chain of technologies was patchwork and would rarely support all the required features from ad-serve back up to agency: click and view attribution was especially flaky and inconsistent. The adserving environment we worked in (in app) often had issues with view attribution, and we'd tell clients that, but we knew for a fact that some of our competitors didn't and clients would always ask us why our view attribution numbers were worse.
Combine that with more suspect behaviour from suppliers and competitors than you can poke a stick at (questionable traffic sources and campaigns that were probably outsourced from under you, suspect and plausibly forged numbers, etc) means that most of the metrics are plausibly poisoned with illegitimate data to a degree that is difficult if not impossible to nail down, which more or less makes lots of those metrics worthless.
> So my personal view on the industry is that it's mostly self-reinforcing bullshit. Doesn't change the fact that it generates stupid amounts of money, though.
Couldn't agree more.
The big reason advertisers show the ads for products you already purchased is also to reinforce their brand. If you buy some stupid cable, you wont remember the name of the company that made it, but you will if they show you the add couple of times in a row and will likely to buy the things there again even if it not the same product.
> But is it?
Yes, because Google knows who started searching for TV's again and who didn't.
There's an eschatological trait to targeted advertising, as it seems to be all about past sins. So I'm not too sure about your evaluation and AI's own claims…
The scary thing about AI is that, even as the algorithms have greater and greater intelligence, we're still not much closer to teaching them to do what we want them to do. They can game the system better than ever, and then the universe is tiled with surgical masks.
https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
Just because we created the AI doesn't mean it'll care about us. That's like saying a maths problem will try to make your favourite number its answer, just because you wrote it. No, you are the one who must make its answer the number you want. It won't happen by chance.
Corollary: you can't patch broken FAI designs. Reinforcement learning (underlying basically all of our best AI) is known to be broken; it'll game the system. Even if they were powerful enough to understand our goals, they simply wouldn't care; they'd care less than a dolphin. https://vkrakovna.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/specification-gam...
And there are far too many people in academia who don't understand this, after years of writing papers on the subject.
Something as simple as Apache Lucene would beat Google's algorithm any day for relevance.
But I guess Google doesn't care for relevance, they just care to show you ads.
It is, however, technically a potential benefit that the more exactly advertisers can target you, the more relevant ads you could be seeing, which is a wonderful sales pitch for users who are agnostic anyway, but that's not how advertising works in practice.
1. I'm well aware of this
2. It doesn't contradict anything I wrote
3. I've read it so many times and seen it misapplied so many times it is getting annoying.
> so it's only natural that the ads you see aren't personalized. That's never been the goal.
I doubt it was the intent of the advertisers to waste expensive impressions on people who weren't in the target audience at all, so I'm pretty sure they expected some personalization WRT which customers gets what ads.
I also very much doubt that it was Googles intention to annoy me to the point where I trash them in public foras, I just don't think they're capable of fixing it anymore as they are way to busy "being Google", e.g. doing cool stuff while not listening to customers (I was planning to add more here, but this single example seems to summarize it well.)
I recognize I might be a bit more direct than usual here and you aren't responsible for the first 97 times I've seen this meme here but as an answer to my question it is not applicable as far as I can see an also generally that meme is just noise here at HN now.
(Anyone who is actually in todays 10000 lucky WRT the "you're not the customer" meme, feel free to prove me wrong.)
I'm sorry that I seem to have offended you.
My post may contain a meme but it was directly relevant to the post above.
Mentioning that I'm not Googles customer is significantly less relevant (I think irrelevant) when it is obvious that it should have been in the actual customers best interest to avoid spamming me with expensive and utterly irrelevant ads.
Then it's high time everyone but advertisers stopped using google search and start using anything but.
If advertisers are their customers, so be it; let them have it.
And the worst thing is that this is all done to keep those ad dollars flowing. Look at how many companies always have a paid advert associated with their name when a search is made. They are paranoid about losing rank due to Google fiddling their algorithm or someone else doing a better SEO job using their brand.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22747889
Random string of text still matches exact in quotes: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9CI%20really%20don%27...
To intentionally discourage you from using Firefox so you give in and switch to their stalker browser.
- Affiliate spam from douchebags that provide "reviews" of products just to link back to Amazon. Makes it nearly impossible to find actual reviews of products.
- People who type whole sentences in natural language into Google. I tried since I used the internet to serach for keywords, omit as much words as possible that aren't necessary. Most people (after I guess ~2010?) don't. This worsens the results.
I would type `protein content brussels sprouts` (without quotes) because I fully understand that the information I'm seeking might be in some tabular form, or phrased in a way I don't anticipate.
Most non-technical people however would type in `What is the protein content of brussels sprouts?` literally.
This leads content creators who see these queries in "keyword analysis tools" to dump SEO-optimized crap into millions of blog posts, with completely irrelevant word soups with countless varations of the question, and the actual information buried deep within that gibberish essay, unreadable by humans, only optimized to drive ad traffic.
Google's optimization for the non-technical use case has lowered the overall search result quality immensely.
There was a time when Google didn't simply ignore some of your search words, or when control characters like +, -, and "" were actually respected (~pre 2010), and the introduction of verbatim mode didn't change much IMHO.
This was good, because it cured all the copy&pastable 2000s era "tag cloud" sites which simply dumped tons of search keywords all over the place.
Ideally, it lead to a stronger emphasis on high-quality human-written content, but it turns out that this algorithm, again, is easily fooled by feeding it "SEO essays" that looks like prose, but is irrelevant text gibberish, but written coherently.
That lead content creators to expand data that would ideally be presented in tabular form on one page, to multi-page "SEO prose" that looks like it's written for humans, but is completely undigestible.
That, along with Google's auto-suggestion feature that finish your sentences after you type in some words, especially on mobile, lead to the impression that people actually like to search in full sentences.
[1] I seem to have thought so in last December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665232
I sometimes wonder if they've hired some ex-googlers lately because yes, this is my experience as well ;-)
My experience was horrible. I don't tend to search 'popular' subjects, only technical ones, and hobbyist stuff. DDG was just plain useless for this, I had to switch back to google after about a week as I was using the !g prefix almost all the time.
It’s gotten so bad that I’ve installed BasiliskII and SheepShaver [1] just so I can relive the nostalgia of the days when I had my first Macintosh, before I’d even had access to the Internet for the first time. The help system and the documentation for software back then was so much more exhaustive than it is today!
[1] https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/mac_emulation
Also related to SEO I think is every cooking recipe seems to be 6 to 8 large images and a bunch of unneeded text followed by the recipe 8 to 12 screens down. AFAICT it's entirely not related to me getting to the recipe and instead either a pattern for SEO or ads.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22747889
I mean literally, search for any recipe, click the first 10 links. Screens and screens if large pictures and superfluous text with actual recipe way way down the page.
Tweaking importance of some sites seems like a nice idea though, but it could also be a bad thing.
All Google returns is page after page of recipes and posts about Banquet pot pies that have no connection to my input. Google used to be so good at this kind of thing. I know the answer exists somewhere because I found it once a long time ago searching for answers to the same question. Google found it then.
Similarly with the pot pie, the filling retains a ton of heat, so it still is cooking for those few minutes, as the heat dissipates. If you left it in the oven five minutes longer (to 'finish') then put it in cold water (like the egg), you would have a pie in a similar, though wetter, condition.
If you're looking for more technical results, it'll take a more technical approach.
You should learn search operators - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en - that allow you to control the results for specific sites or very detailed requests.
Even better, set up a custom search engine - https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4513882?hl=en - with 100 of your trusted sites and now you have Google search precisely tuned to your needs.
... and then meet again, in say, 3 years, where this content is either only findable on tiktokterest or not at all anymore.
Google has not a search problem. It has a chronological and social one.
It was a lot easier finding things in 2004 than today.
That's because it tries to be clever and use synonims and search for terms it deems as related instead of actual search terms.
As soon as links became a signal to search engines, they stopped being an organic expression of page authors.
What's that old saying about metrics? "You get what you measure."
1998 - 2003 was one of the most difficult times to find what you were looking for, even on Google. Many searches for basic information would return results buried in spam pages, pornography, and scams.
Deleting old content to manage "crawl budget" is a myth and does not work or help your SEO.
The real problems are that Google is directing the bulk of traffic to certain brand name websites. Another real problem is that Google set a simplistic AI with a goal of increasing clickthrough from search results and decreasing bounce rates. This leads to developers building all those top 10 lists where you have to click through each item (harder to bounce that way), and some of the pages that disable the back button in various nefarious ways.
I also agree Google should be showing smaller websites more frequently - perhaps optimize for a different goal than the one listed above. More weight on keyword matching perhaps or maybe following only a few "authoritative" users CTR & bounce rate habits.
Typical SEO cargo cult behavior. This worked at one time, or at least it seemed to work, so we'll just keep doin' it.
I can't really blame SEO people, though. As long as Google keeps its algorithms secret, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do except publish good content and hope for the best - which, in an ideal world, would be good enough, but…
When a site is acting up like that I just click and hold, and this brings up an extended list of previous pages. I kinda assume everyone knew about that feature; it seems to work in all major browsers.
Biz ops says increasing revenue for [random Google bs] by ranking Y over Z in the results, so it happens. M&A says Rotten Tomatoes won't give us all their data, their users and their firstborns so they won't show up, even on page 2.
This is literally what antitrust was created for. Companies do this naturally when they get too successful, it's on us to remind them who pays the bills.
By us I mean the US govt so we're basically fucked.
I'd imagine Mr Trump tweeting: "Google is broken. I am the only one that can fix it."
We all like to shit on Google but there's no search engine even remotely close to the quality of results. Of course, there's a lot of spam associated with SEO, hacking attempts, spam comments, e.t.c. There are side effects of its algorithm of course, that are negative to web.
If you were to go back to the same search result page and click on another result within a short timeframe they will assume you “bounced”.
They also have Google Analytics littering the majority of the web, so I’m assuming that gives them a signal as well.
Google links directly to search results now, they stopped using the tracking redirect years ago. They probably track clicks and scrolling directly on the SERP with JS.
Google Analytics is absolutely not used for ranking purposes. GA is far too unreliable and gameable to be used for anything like that. It's more likely that Chrome and Google Safe Browsing are used for tracking user hits.
I rather open a new tab from search results and close it instead of clicking the link and going back. I imagine many people do that.
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In the last years we have observed a grown in the quantity of content created, unfortunately, as we are going to explain in a moment, it has been ruined by SEO.
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hoping someone else chimes in with other thoughts because I used to know more about this, and SEO cheapening quality content was one of the key takeaways I had.
The Internet is the exact opposite of what it was meant to be. Instead of giving efficient access to high-quality information, it gives inefficient access to watered down, spread-down, low-quality interaction. Site after site, query after query, we all continuously pay a little tax with our time.
Now, that I have some money, I am willing to pay for subscriptions, because that would mean high quality content, not because of ads. However, there were times in my life when I barely had what to eat and I barely afforded to pay for the Internet connection and paying subscriptions was the last things I was willing to do.
I suppose many of the 7 billion people living on Earth are poor enough to not afford paying for subscription.
This is a sad result of incentives which ruined RSS, semantic web, and the original purpose of the Internet: to effectively share and communicate information globally.
Advertising (including propaganda and surveillance) and copyright are major forces in that ruination - not to say they don't have legitimate uses and benefits, but their concentrated financial interests conquered the domain. It's a kind of colonialism of public (cyber)space and collective mind.
Tax is an apt analogy, since the power lies in the control of "media" in the most general sense, to force itself in every transaction between things and people.
I believe "dis-intermediation" will help improve the free and direct flow of information. That is, to reduce the middle layers - the gate keepers, the walled gardens, intercepts (lawful or not), filters - by re-decentralizing the net.
... And that was when we realized that the kindling was all damp. What to do! Four hours we ...
... it reminded of our travels in Italy ...
... And that brings us to our famous three-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe:
After a few years of writing recipes, one can transition to screenplays and novels. :)
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
I can also do without sites that think they're being quirky with their newsletter popups. "Click here to subscribe" or "I'm not interested in staying informed/saving money/being in shape". Stop. You're trying too hard.
We are very lucky that, as far as we know, an accumulation of irony doesn't create black holes.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=SEO+ruined+content&t=canonical&ia=...
To be fair, "SEO ruined content" is a pretty specific search string and doesn't even show up in the results that out-rank this submission. This comment specifically talks about "SEO ruined content" and is, correctly, a good results candidate.
And now on first page
Keyword Difficulty < 15
Ahrefs estimate that you’ll need backlinks from ~17 websites to rank in top 10 for this keyword
Google or not, what can help me discover the right recipe, the right content, the right answer to my coding error?
Search algorithms that keep “mutating” even randomly? Ranking system? What?
You need people, basically. If you want to automate it, you need some way to figure out what people think about that content. This has been tried by counting how many people link to it, or rate it highly, but those methods have also been gamed to death.
Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients.
How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.
Something bothered me about this question, and I think it's the way it frames Google's role as being a passive participant.
Google doesn't "allow" anything. Google writes the rules and picks the winners.
When you search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe," Google's search algorithm goes "Here's a nice webpage with Grandma Betty's life story and a paragraph about how to make chocolate chip cookies at the bottom. This is what you were looking for."
Recipe sites look like they do because Google forces them to look like that if they want Google to send them any search traffic.
Is there a different algorithm that would give more useful results? Is there a way to rank the sites on how well they present the information you were searching for? Is there a way to factor in whether a site has good recipes or terrible ones? I don't know, but I don't have a giant advertising money fountain and teams of very well paid engineers.
Like you hinted at, I think it's reasonable to suspect Google for not having an incentive to fix this. They get their ad money either way, and they probably get more of it from worse sites. As long as it's good enough to keep people from switching to other search engines en masse, they're not losing anything.
It's not just some simple disinterested mathematical orchestration without any engagement or other layer
I was an editor for a few categories at DMOZ. Not only I allowed only good content in our categories, but I checked older approvals from time to time to see if they behave. I had to delist some websites who thought they can trick us.
Pay for a Cooks Illustrates or NYT Cooking subscription and all these problems go away.
I assume (?) it is not google engineers tuning for this particular outcome on purpose...
Not all that plain and simple.
I have a copy from probably 5 years ago that seems to be out of print and can be had for $7 used. It's 900+ pages of well-tested recipes where each one has a narrative about how they tested and arrived at the final recipe.
Cooks Illustrated is amazing, the rigor they go through testing everything, and adapting to available ingredients, makes for such incredible reliability!
You searching for a bibimbap recipe and their page is split into Hangul and English pages and this was the recipe their grandma uses? You bet your ass it's going to be good.
You find something on allrecipes.com, how do you know if this is a good recipe? Only if you already know it is.
You'll still have to suffer through a certain amount of SEO bullshit, you probably don't wanna just go to Amazon and try buying the best-selling cookbook in whatever cuisine you're interested in because that's got its own Amazon-specific SEO clogging things up, but...
Most are black and white only and don't even have pictures.
Grandpa used to read that.
If one gets wet (not at all inconceivable for something used in the kitchen) you merely have to dry it out. It will be slightly wrinkly but it will work fine, unlike a wet phone/tablet/laptop. It’ll have the dish you’re interested in plus a whole lot more, you probably won’t want to make every single one of them but there’s probably gonna be a few that look worth trying.
It will not track you. It is easy to store where it is needed. If you want to make notes - maybe you loved this dish and hated that one, maybe you made a variant that your SO loved - it’s easy to make them with a pen or pencil, and have them visible without any extra interaction. It’s a pretty useful technology!
What is one "cup" of flour? It obviously depends on how fine the flour is. Use grams! Use ounces! But above all use some kind of real measurement!
Maybe I've watched too many infomercials and soaps. I've reached a point where I know Americans don't have (electric) kettles, but a scale seems like a necessity for anybody who cooks.
(I guess there are lot of people, American, or otherwise, who just don't cook. So I'd understand in that case. But cooking without a scale just seems surprising. Even where I come from a grew up with a balance-scale with brass weights. Never hugely accurate, but always available.)
People seem to prefer to use the kinda old-fashioned manual kettles you place on the top of a stove.
8 fl oz of flour spooned into the measuring cup or 4.5 oz. by weight.
I'm not at all trying to be snarky here. Like any other specialization people who cook have organic terminology that is useful to the in-group but confusing to the out-group. A /24 isn't the same as a class C network but we all know what is being conveyed.
And you'll get much more accurate measurements of small quantities measuring by volume instead of weight since kitchen scales aren't that accurate. Knowing that 0.25 tsp is about a gram for just about any granular thing will probably do better than your scale.
It also helps convey the sig figs in recipe. Very few recipes have a tolerance of 1 g. Even finicky bread doesn't get that accurate so it's ridiculous when some bloggers write something like 113 g when without question the recipe was originally formulated to be 4.0 oz and you just messed up the conveyed tolerances by blindly converting.
Most of the time when I'm cooking and I see an American recipe I just google the conversion; a cup of milk is easy to deal with. Just a minor irritation most of the time, but for some things it matters.
If you want some recipes that don't have all that nonsense associated, I'd recommend the BBC's Food site[0].
[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes
"Here is this stock photo of something near, we're going to teach you how to make it!" {4 unrelated steps} {stock photo again} "Tada!"
> This Chrome browser extension helps cut through to the chase when browsing food blogs. It is born out of my frustration in having to scroll through a prolix life story before getting to the recipe card that I really want to check out.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...
Online recipe sites will always be absurdly verbose, because if they just posted a list, Google would either rank it poorly because it is "thin content", or scrape it and post it as a Featured Snippet. There is seemingly no in-between.
The site authors have no choice but to fill it with a bunch of warbling about their childhood, to meet Google's minimum word count, which of course the company swears doesn't exist.
The problem of course is that search crawlers can't tell the difference between between the two and so long but empty content is treated the same.
I wish I'd be around to see what future historians / archaeologists make of this.
I mean, don't they have server costs? It's like they own an infinite amount of money bucket that constantly gets refilled somehow.
Why are advertisers even paying them for such impressions? Are they so ridiculously retarded in their business model? Can we all hurt advertisers by setting up a website like this?
The reason you even got a chance to click on it is because they wrote it that way. If they didn't, it wouldn't be as visible in Google = nobody would see it. When most websites do this (to survive) folks don't have a choice.
Also, advertisers don't pay for something that's invisible.
What if algorithm changes will tank your all your fleet of poor content websites you've spent last few years on?
- Autoplayinig video ads
- Affiliate marketing (meal kits, cooking courses, etc)
- Adsense display ads
- Taboola/Outbrain
These don't bring in much money on a per-site basis, but the owners usually own multiple sites, so it can add up.
If you're able to get the site to grow, it becomes the easiest digital property in the world to maintain. The content doesn't need to be fresh, or engaging. People will always search for generic recipes.
That is, we will have them, once someone adds them.
I'd like to know when to water my mint plant without reading about the whole history of mint.
But there still is great content on the web, it just becomes harder to find in all the noise. I think websites like HN and Reddit and - to some degree - sites like Twitter with their human-based curation are really important for this, so I'm glad they're thriving.
Especially when looking for technical things or reviews on practically anything, the top 5 results are garbage sites (with content written or modified by people with names suggesting an SEO "content" factory in a particular region of the world).
That's hardly dismal. That not even mildly inconvenient.
http:// axlk.bebanni50.it/debian-i915.html
http:// bpnq.circoloambientalepiemonte.it/nfsv4-uid-mapping.html
IOW, if it's not on page 1 it's mostly crap (spam).
SEO will always be a game of cat and mouse. The original algorithms were designed to surface useful content relevant to the search query with the limitations of the technology at the time (so they could be gamed).
Nowadays technology has improved and processing power is much cheaper so it should be possible to use machine learning to recognise what’s “good” and what’s SEO spam and thus get ahead of the SEO crowd again.
The problem here is that the spam sites are also the ones with ads (often Google ads), so there is no financial incentive for Google to actually do anything about those.
I've noticed that on google.co.uk, unless you add 'uk' at the end of your search query you'll always get US sites first [1]. Google clearly lump all English based queries into the same geo-graphical bucket - they never used to do this.
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[1] Yes, I am logged in, and Google knows where in the world I am.
They never seem to know where you are in a way that would actually be useful to you, but always do for their own creepy tracking reasons.
I often look for recipes in French or German and it's impossible to find anything. I try to browse to google.de/fr, I try adding site:.fr but it will still try and give me the most English results. My Google search settings indicate I am happy with German and French results but it seems to have no affect...
The "world's knowledge under you fingertips" motto is still valid and brilliant though. My personal solution is library of OCR-ed PDFs with most established books from various domains, git repository for each domain. Greppable in miliseconds, locally. Hijack this, SEO experts!
Based on your reply to handsomechad, you may think that it's easiest for people to just build one themselves. But there may be a business opportunity in providing a pre-packaged solution for the masses. In the same way that Dropbox provided a tool that was "trivial" to experts, but was difficult for non-experts (see the infamous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), if you have a tool that is essentially a rival to Google Books for reference texts, that is interesting.
We lost that a long time ago.
I just tried it with my own number, and my site comes up with both search engines as well.
Never understood why there are so many of this pages and why you would build one...
Whatever way Google rates websites has a direct effect on the web itself. In a way they're a victim of their own success.
But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start resorting to dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones.
During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more recipes online. Every one of them starts with the person's life story. And I get it, maybe how that recipe came to exist is interesting. But at least put a link right at the top that says "skip to recipe" or something. Sometimes I want to read the story, sometimes not. Make it easy for me skip!
I put a recipe on my own website, it's literally a .txt file with just the recipe, ingredients right at the top. I posted a picture of the final product on the internet recently, and a friend asked for the recipe, so I sent him the link.
He replied "the format and delivery method of this is almost more satisfying than the recipe itself".
That's how I know we've gone too far in SEO.