Item — HN Reader

Strongly disagree

One reason google is an effective search engine is society has incentives to make their stuff findable. It’s not just magic algorithms. The perception of Google’s quality is as much because we all know when we write an article how to make informative titles and content, and knowledge if we’re too spammy we’ll be punished. Eventually black hat SEO suffers in the long run.

I work in search, and one huge reason a given companies enterprise or site search sucks is because content authors don’t care about making their content findable by search. A search system is a series of social incentives to make attractive, findable search results, not just technology.

1 comments

> The perception of Google’s quality is as much because we all know when we write an article how to make informative titles and content, and knowledge if we’re too spammy we’ll be punished.

Errr, I personally hate the top articles google presents me for pretty much every query. Keyword stuffed long-winded texts that hide the information they are promising in the headline somewhere in multiple irrelevant paragraphs or just don't provide it at all. To me, Google's perceived quality has fallen significantly over the past five years.

The same here. I usually just click "page 5" and then hit a few "results" that look promising to find an entry into the "sub-bubble" of that particular niche.

How do you proceed from there? Are the parts of that sub-bubble sufficiently interlinked?

Let's say there is a blog post amongst the mix. I'll check out the blogger's Twitter and see who he follows. Stuff like that. Depends heavily on the niche of course.