[ricardo81]

Can't say I agree.

Google should be a neutral middle man providing the results as they are found. If they feel the title is not of their version of quality they should rank it lower.

I'd prefer the version of title of several hundred million individuals rather than Google's aggregated version.

They used to 'borrow' DMOZ titles before DMOZ became defunct. At least in that case it's another point of view on top of their own (and the site author)

[edave64]

Google can't be a neutral middleman because everybody is trying to manipulate the search results. If everybody is clickbaiting their page titles, and Google just displays them as is, it makes their product worse.

[worldofmatthew]

The solution is not to re-title, the solution is to de-rank clickbait.

[azurezyq]

Well nowadays a lot of well known websites use clickbaits regularly, e.g., wsj and NYTimes. Many times, they are willing to summarize the news in the title when the news itself is not that complicated.

[crtasm]

I'm sure they'd change to better headlines to avoid getting downranked.

[bduerst]

That's assuming there aren't click bait false-positives based on page title.

[TheCowboy]

You step away from neutral as soon as you introduce "version of quality". There will always be an introduction of bias and judgement calls that need to be made to get useful results, especially because bad actors on the web are part of the geography that aren't going away. Just like the press trying to force a neutral "view from nowhere" leads to confused and problematic journalism that can be exploited by bad actors.

https://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questio...

[ricardo81]

Indeed, quality/bias/judgement - I wouldn't argue about it wrt 'going away from neutral', I just meant that if a decision is to be made, either de-value it or show it in the top results, either way don't tinker with the information as it was laid out.