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by rsync
4561 days ago
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"Anyone with an internet business taking your comment at face value will find herself ranking not in the top 20, no matter how good their content." ... which is a direct indictment of google and their (as you put it) ineffective search results. If the best content is not being served based on its merit, the search results are bad. A very good explanation for this is that optimizing for good search results and optimizing for high ad clicks from searchers are two different things, and you can't do both. Therefore the price of optimizing for search-ad-revenue is less than optimal results and the unintended consequence is a side-game that parasites play called "SEO". I mean parasite in the nicest possible sense and I think it's an apt description. "Please reconsider your tone, or realize you do not add anything of value to the debate, or to the many online business owners on HN." I'm not here for the business owners - I came for the hackers. |
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I think Google has the best quality index of all search engines. There is a Kaggle challenge for Yandex right now where you can optimize the search results taking into account data like user sessions and dwell time. It's hard, but very cool. Google owns hard and cool stuff. Web spam is a multi-faceted and complex problem. But these guys are training neural networks on Youtube stills and make it detect cats. The last time I found a top 10 spam result that irked me was months ago. I filed a report and move on to the otherwise great index.
>If the best content is not being served based on its merit, the search results are bad.
If the best content is in an image without an alt attribute or longdesc or HTML fallback, on a page with no surrounding text, no sourcing, no pagetitle, no meta description. On a domain that accidentally blocks search engines with robots.txt, has no structural interlinking of pages, no backlinks, takes 50 seconds to load, redirects crawlers to a different page by IP, and only works with javascript on. If that happens to be the best content, then that is a shame. Google could probably still index it :). But the search results are better for not ranking that inaccessible, untrustworthy, undiscoverable piece of content very high. A store can sell the best goods, but if they put blinds in front of the window, do not promote or advertise, make customers crawl over obstacles to place their order, then such a store will simply not do very well.
>optimizing for good search results and optimizing for high ad clicks from searchers are two different things, and you can't do both.
Why not? Major sites both optimize organic results and their SEM. AirBnb could create content for each major city they host in and rank organically. They could advertise locally or very targeted to people interested in making use of their services and link to the actual property page or listings.
>I mean parasite in the nicest possible sense and I think it's an apt description. I'm not here for the business owners - I came for the hackers.
Google compresses nearly every information in the world to a single search query. That search box is the shortest program to expand to any related content that is currently found in the world. A giant information retrieval intelligence sends out its bots to crawl information every second and store it in global time consistent databases. From a black box algorithm with supposedly 200+ ranking factors, an SEO has to give each web page the optimal chance to rank for what its worth, by reading public documentation, experiment, analyze, track, predict, format HTML documents in an information retrieval friendly way, do split testing with contextual bandits or multivariate A/B, improve accessibility, improve the link graphs of the internet and semantic web with metadata. You come for the hackers, yet you treat SEO's and Google like script kiddies.