Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Also, i'd be very surprised if they didn't have tens of thousands of workers aiding in spam review already.

The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is. Are all the pie recipes where there's a 2000 word essay about their grandma at the top 'spam'? They still have the recipe, and Google Home devices pick up the recipe instructions just fine so people end up not reading it, but many people would still consider that spam since it adds such an obstacle to getting the information you want. Same for cnet articles like "Best smart home devices to buy in 2022" - it's a reputable brand with a list of smart home devices, but it's hardly a review and exists to funnel people to their Amazon affiliate link.

View on HN

> The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is.

This is one area where Google could use personalised results to provide a better experience for the user. Let me decide what spam is for me. Let me mark results as good or bad, so that the algorithm knows what kind of pages should be prioritised or filtered out the next time. Google SearchWiki was a step towards this but they killed it off.

Is conservative leaning info spam or not spam? What about liberal leaning info?

We have seen what this leads to inside the social networks as well as YouTube, and at a macro scale I think we might want to have a shared concept of what constitutes a good search result for a given query.

At micro scale, it can seem more optimized to get exactly the type of result you want, but if we take an absurd example like an Apple Pie recipe shouldn't we all have shared understanding of what types of ingredients would make for an Apple Pie?

The shared understanding, I believe, is core to communication. If all of us have our own specific ideas of Apple Pie, then who is actually right on what an Apple Pie really is? What happens when your search results insist that an Apple Pie doesn't actually have apples in it, but instead pears?

Let's have niches where the content is hand curated by human beings instead of pure statistics by machines.

Hmm why stop there let's actually make the users do the curating and even the content creation by rewarding them with social validation. Let’s have hard working moderators who work on the community full time.

Then we could just build a search engine over it. We could call it Reddit. Or HackerNews.

Maybe the users aren't all as good as professionals at curating the information. Let's hire professionally trained curators pay them well and we could call them newspapers. Then we can come in disrupt them and replace them with an algorithmic marketplace that eventually becomes infested with click bait.

AFAIK the 2000 word essays in recipes are Google's fault - it prioritizes pages with a lot of content, so you have to add that junk to the top in order to rank highly. While I'm sure there's more going on behind the scenes than I'm aware of, it does seem like the rules could be altered on a category-specific basis where a lot of text isn't necessarily a positive.

This reminds me of the page inflation that struck tech books during the late 1990s / early aughts. The Marketing Wisdom was that fat books sold (or took up more shelf space), so texts got padded with weak writing, gratuitous puffery, and other elements, which (much as the recipie essays) simply got in the way of delivering actual informative content.

(The fact that many of these books were rushed out with very poor quality control also didn't help.)

Recipe intro text is useful for contextualizing the recipe and copyright purposes. In RSS days, it was a way to get readers to click through, so the author got the ad views. Also people who write recipes like to write about food.

I'd say it can be useful, but that's not often the case (especially not to the tune of 1000+ words).

This one is hard because it does actually seem to be the case that the cruft around the recipe is valuable if the content is right. Most of the recipe blog stuff is garbage, but if you look at youtube it is clear that creators who add extra flair around the recipe are a powerful force.

prioritizes is correct, but in some ways it's not the best descriptor.

Google's algos, while advanced, still rely a ton on text to actually tell what the page is about. They need it.

If they just relied on other factors (title, links, website, etc.) they would end up with worse results for users. Im sure they've tested it.

Google's core algo in a lot of ways is much simpler than people think (in other ways of course it's very complex).

While I think the essays are excessive, I appreciate that some of them document that the blogger actually made the recipe with progress pictures. With the more basic recipes websites, I wonder if anyone's actually made it before or if the recipe is from some scrapped database of unknown origin and quality.

Years ago I wanted to pursue micro blogging, but this "feature" of Google search stopped me from doing it.

What's the point of writing succinct, to-the-point mini articles about problems and solutions if nobody finds them on Google?

This is largely because micro-blogging means less content, and less content means you could write five 300-word blog posts instead of one 1,500-word post.

I've done blogging for the last 10+ years, and many of those I spent as a freelancer working with startups/brands/editorials. Everyone is after "word count" and I absolutely hate it.

Whenever I work on articles for my own blog, I just don't consider word-count at all. I think if your content is great and informative, then readership will be natural.

This is a very interesting approach. Do you have traffic data collection on your blog?

I collect post views, but not using Google Analytics or anything like that. I built a pretty substantial developer blog (tips, resources, etc,.) back in 2014. I think it peaked at around 350,000 monthly visitors after 12 months.

Later on, I sold it because I needed the money. Not so much that I didn't want to keep working on it. Unfortunately, the new owners didn't have any idea how to maintain a "healthy" content blog, and it has plummeted down to around 30,000 monthly visitors. All the content they're publishing now is some thin headline-clickbait bullshit.

I even gave them free advice on how to fix it, but I think that for a lot of people, they just don't care and will mindlessly pump out as many pieces of content as possible. And such blogs can be identified from a mile away.

And therein lies the problem with Google SEO at the moment. Even myself, someone who has done SEO work for more than a decade, I can see that results are getting worse. In some niches, the same crappy articles that dominated 6-7 years ago are still dominant today.

I guess we're stuck in time, or so Google thinks.

Could it also be due to reduction of public interest in blogs over the past few years? Most stuff are now published in the form of vlogs instead of blogs. I do miss the good old blogs era, tho, and I wish there were still high quality blogs around.

It's two-fold. If Google priortizes pages with a lot of content that's one thing, but longer content also means more space for ads, or more scroll events to trigger ads, etc.

Incidentally, prioritizing long content seems odd to me, in my experience the best pages are short and get right to the point, at least in the context of something like a recipe or other "how to" resources.

Yeah, the newest nuisance seems to be sites that clone Github Issues and StackOverflow with a crapper interface. Somehow they rank higher than the original sources. I'd say it's spam but it's definitely not traditional spam.

I'm not going to say solving spam programmatically is easy, but the gitmemory garbage site (for one example) has been around long enough that there's no excuse for not downranking or removing it. How hard could it possibly be for humans to spot these few sites and nuke em? I'm sure Google engineers see them all the time.

And the strange Wikipedia mirrors that are shown in Google Verbatim searches instead of the original. If I disable Verbatim, they disappear and I get regular Wikipedia instead.

Somehow you got down votted by their creators here :)

> and Google Home devices pick up the recipe instructions just fine so people end up not reading it

I think this isn't entirely related, but that's perhaps the beginning of a bias you might end up having that everyone experiences technology in the same way as it marches on. I've yet to encounter a Google Home in the wild, I imagine far more people are consuming recipes on phones, tablets and PCs.

Compounding the problem, the 2000 word essay is sometimes really useful if it's describing a technique used in the recipe (cf Stella Parks' recipe for homemade bagels on Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-bagels-recipe). But somehow only spammy blogs with plagiarized recipes, AI-generated "essays," and affiliate links for every ingredient and tool used make it into the first page of results on Google (or DDG, for that matter).

At some point, Google must have moved away from using site-level reputation in search rankings, as I almost never see recipes from reputable sources like King Arthur Baking, Serious Eats, or Food52 in the first page of results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com