Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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I have the same hard-learned rule of thumb wrt. websites in general. The cleaner looking, the more up to date with current web trends a website, the worse information on it. I've also spotted an inverse correlation between the amount of ads on page and trustworthiness of the information on it.

I explain it to myself in a similar way: people with nice, clean, heavy websites, sprinkling ads in between the text, are content marketers. Their job isn't to educate you. It's to regurgitate whatever bullshit they can find on topic[0] in order to create SEO and social-share optimized vehicles they can then attach advertising or affiliate payload to.

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[0] - I worked alongside content marketers few jobs back. There was zero verification or care about accuracy of what was posted, and a lot of copy-pasting+rewriting of similar content from competition.

Similarly for math: When learning calc, websites from universities that were written in basic HTML with some latex/examples or on some pdf were far better than anything else. There are also some good YT videos where they do the problems which were good as well.

Quality significantly diminishes the moment you use your face in the video (because it's completely unnecessary when explaining how to do some series testing in calc for example)

It’s time for the anti-seo spam filter for search engines

I have been thinking about this recently. That applies to physical products too: the highest quality products are usually not the ones with the best marketing. What we need is a SEO-resistant search engine (for tutorials, products & services). Maybe a way to approach this would be to have the engine function more like an independent amazon-review engine where it's really hard to put fake reviews and have a "quality index" that's community based. I think that the successor to google will look like this: a search engine that cuts through SEO and marketing, and shows you the actual good stuff.

This is quite a difficult thing to build. Google has a whole web spam team dedicated to trying to fight SEO.

Yes it is difficult which is probably why no one has built it. The only solution I can think of requires a social graph which is another challenge to build in itself.

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