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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

> Google has fallen victim to spam.

Google is intentionally dropping five year old results from the index and prioritizing five hour old results. They have complete control over whether they're doing this. Part of SEO is making five year old results look like five hour old results, which is something that Google did to spammers, not something that spammers did to google.

Google has decided that it is more profitable to make sure that somebody who types "chicken" into the search box gets either chicken restaurants nearby, or listicles and video covering the story on the news today about a chicken that scared away a bear. They've given up on depth.

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lol, on a lark, I did type chicken into Google, and surprise, I got: 4 maps suggestions for local chicken restaurants, 4 news stories suggestions about Wendy's introducing some new chicken food item, a complete sidebar explaining the nutritional properties of chicken, including images of chicken dead, skinned, cooked, fried, battered, recipes for chicken, a link to KFC....and one link buried in the middle: a link to the Wikipedia article on chicken. This is running an adblocker, by the way.

I mean, forgive me for thinking that "chicken" is actually a term referring to live birds. Instead, humanity's view is clearly very distorted by our stomachs.

One does not use the internet for facts. One uses the internet to be directed towards where to spend their money and/or time as sold to the highest bidder, who is just looking to line their pockets with money--a digital sugar rush for digital stomachs. The internet doesn't think with its brain, it doesn't tell you what you want to know, it thinks with its stomach and expects you to as well.

Is the 5 year old result actually still available though? Link rot is real, and there are lots of pages that don't make it 5 years.

I thought about this too.

After testing with marginalia I found that much of it is still there - it is just suppressed by Google and Bing.

That is interesting. I would have imagined honest link rot being a much larger problem.

My feeling is that the Lindy effect largely holds: The expected lifetime of any given document is proportional to its age. Old websites for the most part seem extremely stable. Young websites change drastically and often.

These pages die from starvation. If people can't get to your page even if they specifically google the name of your page, eventually you'll shut it down.

I understand why pages disappear. I'm just saying the expecting a search engine to return a result from 5 years ago is kind of a bad metric to be using in whatever point was attempting to be made.

I don't want results to be dropped arbitrarily. It kills all of the good content. I don't need a book to change every week to remain relevant.

edit: and to directly address what you said, excusing a search engine's loss of content because sites have disappeared because the search engine dropped them is circular.

I’d love to agree with you, but are you sure the depth is there? Where is all the quality content about “chicken”? Where are the legions of chicken experts creating high quality content? We might be starting from the (slightly) false premise that the internet is full of quality content.

I honestly have no idea what the "best" results would be for chicken. Maybe the Wikipedia entry? Not sure what else. It's sort of just a lazy search.

Well, if not all of humanity’s knowledge is freely and openly available on the web, how can we expect a search engine—any search engine—to provide a meaningful answer? I remember when Google aimed at scanning and indexing entire libraries, but then they had to stop due to copyright laws.

>It's sort of just a lazy search.

A bad search deserves a bad result. If you walked up to me and just said one word "chicken", I'd be insulted. If you said one word "chicken" while pointing at your mouth, I'd perhaps think you spoke little English and wanted a place to eat chicken. Providing a bit more info is useful to get decent results.

As Jerry Maguire once said, "help me help you"

There's no quality content for "chicken," in fact I'd say that local chicken restaurants and funny animal news are the best content for "chicken." That's why I don't want every search to favor new material and drop old material. The problem that I have with Google is that they know that most searches will be simple and timely [edit: and badly phrased and nonspecific], and they've just ignored everything else.

There's plenty of quality content about chickens on the internet. Permaculture forums especially love poultry. You can read about how to raise, breed, and slaughter chickens, different varieties of chicken, and how to incorporate chickens into your lifestyle. This type of quality content was easy to find back in the day, now you have to know what you're looking for, and where to look for it.

I feel like people on HN are really detached from reality sometimes. For 99% of people, typing "chicken" into Google search means they want chicken, or don't know what a chicken is. Does anyone here actually expect the average person to be looking for in-depth guides on how to raise a chicken? That's like saying the "hotel" query should return compelling information about the supply chain and inner workings of the hotel industry.

Google's "problem" is that they need to cater to the most common intents per query (see: lowest common denominator), and believe it or not, those intents are usually not biased toward in-depth educational content - isn't this why HN is such a nice niche?

Google could think about adding a different search result sorting option that attempts to prioritize high quality, thought provoking, or otherwise educational content above all else, but it makes sense to me why their primary search ranking algorithm works the way it does.

Ah, chicken. The quintessential centerpiece of a weeknight meal. I fondly remember my childhood in Kentucky, rolling in a pile of leaves until the warm, scrumptious smell of roast chicken wafted out from the kitchen into my eager young nostrils. I can go on for hours about this, and I will, but I knew that someday billions of people would lovingly read this long, overcooked story before dinner because it was their inner heart's desire.

Preheat oven, insert chicken.

Spot on. I have an in-depth article about a niche topic and ranked on place 1-3 for many years. Everybody who typed the short keyword would want an in-depth explanation.

These days, the search volume went way up and my article went down to 6-10. The first three spots merely give a rough explanation of my in-depth topic. Quite insulting actually.

But upon further reflection I realized that most people these days only want a rough definition and no in-depth explanation. Google gives this to them.

The people who used to search for my keyword now add 2-3 more words to get to my in-depth article. The typical long tail.

What I find worrisome is that sometimes, the long tail query I use to find quality content gives me the same results as the unspecific short query. Some stuff is close to impossible to find without knowing a very topic-specific thing.

The second order effect is intense competition to create lowest common denominator content. You're right that it would be nice for Google to separate it from better content, but this leads to the yet deeper problem--there isn't enough money in that idea.

> Where is all the quality content about “chicken”? Where are the legions of chicken experts creating high quality content?

Try something like this (just imagine a word or two that would appear in quality content about chicken and put it into marginalia):

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=poultry+farming&pr...

> We might be starting from the (slightly) false premise that the internet is full of quality content.

Well maybe it isn't but at least using Marginalia I get more of the results I want for these kinds of searches.

(I've also had good luck with a query about git a few weeks ago and yesterday with one about kubernetes.)

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