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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does. The best articles are often "classics" from several years ago that haven't changed because they haven't needed to.

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I run into a similar problem trying to chose libraries for projects.

There's one project that is 'active'. Are they active because they're better, or because they arrived late to the party and are reinventing the wheel.

This other project is 8 years old and has hardly been touched in 2 years. Is that because it takes 4 years to cover the entire domain and a couple years to fix all the bugs that can be fixed? Or because it's languishing?

Novelty is not a good selection criterion. Sometimes the old ways are best.

You can have a look on LibHunt next time. Apart from project activity, you can compare different libs by their relevant popularity. That should help you make a better decision. E.g. https://ruby.libhunt.com/categories/21-a-b-testing

(disclosure - I've built libhunt)

Or they didn't change because the author moved on to other things. So their article is full of obsolete information, comparisons are no longer relevant, old APIs, invalid syntax, incorrect library assumptions, etc.

When I search for anything technical the first thing I do is change the date range to the past year.

> ... full of obsolete information ...

That would make it not "one of the best," right?

I'm sure the best PHP 4 article will be of no help to someone writing code targeting PHP 7.3 today.

When I'm looking for a book, I usually look for older but still popular books. New but highly rated books are hit or miss, but those old ones that people still recommend have consistently been great reads.

I find this is especially true of fiction or infotainment books. Older fiction and popularized non-fiction usually deals with many of the same social issues faced today, but because it has stood up to the test of time, often more effectively.

Whether it’s gender identity issues, technological warfare, jingoist politicians, class struggles, leadership advice, etc., somebody already wrote about it more effectively than the huge majority of modern writers churning out books.

I have missed so much media over the past 20 years that I operate like this. I'm not concerned with whether music or games are new or not. Media that came out 5 or 15 years ago is just as new to me as something that came out this year, and there's a much larger selection.

There's a whole community of video gamers who do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/

Cost is the most obvious motivator, but for me it's more about filtering for quality in order to best allocate my limited adult gaming hours— why sink the time and money into a just-released title that might turn out to be the next Anthem or Fallout 76, when you can wait a few years about pick it up for $10-15 once it's a known winner?

That said, even within r/patientgamers, there's a spectrum in terms of just how patient some people are. For example, some people are just getting into stuff from the Xbox 360 era, whereas others are already talking about whether RDR2 has stood the test of time or not, ha.

There are drawbacks though https://xkcd.com/606/ if your friends are gamers ^^.

And doesn't work as well with mmorpgs or online games.

I played Half Life 2 for the first time in 2010. True that consuming media late changes opportunities to be part of social groups about it.

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers. So that if a man wishes to improve himself in any subject he must guard against immediately seizing the newest books written upon it, in the assumption that science is always advancing and that the older books have been made use of in the compiling of the new. They have, it is true, been used; but how? The writer often does not thoroughly understand the old books; he will, at the same time, not use their exact words, so that the result is he spoils and bungles what has been said in a much better and clearer way by the old writers; since they wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject. He often leaves out the best things they have written, their most striking elucidations of the matter, their happiest remarks, because he does not recognise their value or feel how pregnant they are. It is only what is stupid and shallow that appeals to him. An old and excellent book is frequently shelved for new and bad ones; which, written for the sake of money, wear a pretentious air and are much eulogised by the authors’ friends. In science, a man who wishes to distinguish himself brings something new to market; this frequently consists in his denouncing some principle that has been previously held as correct, so that he may establish a wrong one of his own. Sometimes his attempt is successful for a short time, when a return is made to the old and correct doctrine. These innovators are serious about nothing else in the world than their own priceless person, and it is this that they wish to make its mark. They bring this quickly about by beginning a paradox; the sterility of their own heads suggests their taking the path of negation; and truths that have long been recognised are now denied — for instance, the vital power, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat’s distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence, or they return to crass atomism, etc., etc. Hence the course of science is often retrogressive.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship and Style"

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...

Emphasis, and wall of text, in the original.

>No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously

I feel this way about math books a lot actually, especially calculus. When we really formalized the foundations of calculus using limits and epsilon delta arguments in proofs (instead of alternatives like Non-standard analysis see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_analysis) I feel like a great deal of the intuition that actually built calculus was lost. I call it "differential reasoning", and I wish there was a class in just such a thing, formalized with operator theory and non-standard analysis techniques. It's still used a lot in physics but no one talks about the concept of a "ratio of differentials" in modern calculus.

In the case of calculus, do you recommend Newton, Leibnitz, or others?

Yeah, a book recommendation would be great! I’ve picked up this way of thinking over the last decade, but don’t know of a resource to recommend people.

I don't think your comment follows from the evidence presented by the author.

For example, the blog didn't even beat out the result above it which is "older content". For all we know, the blog was the last relevant candidate for that search query, the author doesn't demonstrate otherwise.

The only spammy thing we can tell from TFA is that the blog post's publish-date is set in 2019 when it was clearly published in 2016. But we don't know if Google knows that and is already penalizing them. Nor if it's an effective attack.

Also, the author doesn't demonstrate that the modified-date is inaccurate or spammy. CMS software will update this if you go back and correct a typo, or somehow mass-transform a bunch of blog posts. For instance, I once had a dead-link-finder plugin on Wordpress that gave me a UI to patch urls in old blog posts that would have updated the modified-date on all affected posts.

I don't see anything in TFA that suggests that the blog was benefiting from spammy behavior.

I work in content marketing so SEO is a big part of my work focus.

Google's algorithm tends to classify queries as "evergreen" and otherwise. With the former, recency doesn't seem to matter that much. I've had content stick a page 1 ranking for 3+ years without any updates.

For non-evergreen keywords, recency matters a lot. A fresh article on an established domain can often outrank better, but older content.

The query classification system works well enough for most keywords, but there is a grey area where Google doesn't really know what to focus on. Like with a query that focuses on "best practices". It isn't clear whether Google should prioritize classic, evergreen best practices, or focus on more recently developed best practices.

I would definitely appreciate a filter that only shows me old school content for my target queries. Some of the best content I've read online sits on websites that haven't been updated since 2002 and still use tables based design.

3+ years isn't a very long time. There is a lot of good old scholarship.

https://yarchive.net/

This website is a curated archive of Usenet posts.

It's far from universal, but if you understand quality content, you will recognize it here:

https://yarchive.net/comp/risc_definition.html John Mashey talking about RISC vs CISC.

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/lost+found.html Ted Ts'o on lost+found.

... and plenty more.

You want to read a "classical" comparison of SES vs SendGrid? Really?

There was a HN post a few weeks ago showing how Duck Duck Go was better at showing old content. I totally agree. We like what's fresh and new, but next time you go to a blog and read some tech article; look through their archive and see what else they've written. If you run your own blog, keep an easily indexd archive page. Mine goes back to 2007: https://battlepenguin.com/archives/

I had a blog for a decade but I realized that I would post something and nobody would read it, but then a famous programmer would post the same thing in their own blog a year later and everyone would hear about it. So I concluded that blogs are only for the well known programmers and that it’s a waste of my time to share my thoughts with “the web” as a general entity. Instead I share my thoughts with individuals when requested (which mostly just means answering my kids’ questions). Well, also commenting here but I’m not convinced that’s been beneficial to anyone either so I’m seriously considering giving up that too.

I blog to share my thoughts with myself, but in public. I blog with the intent of consolidating what I'd just learned or experienced in my mind. I've had some popular posts inbetween years of content that nobody cares about, and sometimes I'll have a reader email me about an old post I wrote and describe how it's helped them in a recent project. Or sometimes someone will comment about how they just saw a post mentioned in a conference slide, and they're commenting on it _from_ the conference. Or I'll notice traffic coming in from an online newsletter about some programming topic. Those emails and brief spikes make me feel nice. The occasional acknowledgement from a reader is like a bonus to what's essentially a private diary I don't expect anyone to take interest in.

I get that idea and it’s not new: one blog said in its subtitle “letting google index my thoughts”. But it’s the equivalent of talking out loud. Sure someone might hear you accidentally and benefit but most of the time it should be kept to ourselves. If something should be said, it should probably be written in a book. That will set at least some bar to prevent the constant stream of noise on the internet. Everyone complains about the quality of content going downhill and the signal to noise ratio being unbalanced but the solution is for all of us to consider that we’re probably generating a lot more noise than signal. So I for one will quit blogging and comment a lot more rarely and if I have something more important to say I’ll write a book. Getting published isn’t infallible of a mark of signal but it’s better than git push.

Many of my blog posts were written mostly for this reason and I get occasional emails from people who find my thoughts helpful.

Most of the kinds of posts I get positive feedback on aren't something I'd ever consider interesting or important enough for a book. Personally I don't have a problem with blog noise/"talking out loud" on the internet. I think it's more up to the people who don't want noise to decide what noise is for them and to implement their own filter strategies. I can't even count how many times I stumbled across some blog post casually written that the author likely didn't expect to be noticed at all, but which provided some useful or just plain interesting information to me. It wouldn't make it into a book, but I'm glad it made it into this person's little corner of the Internet for me to discover.

Blogging is also for your own benefit, and to have a history of your ideas. You can also post your bog articles to HN, Reddit, etc. And blogging like much else is a bit of a marketplace / ecosystem. We don't need you are blogging on generic popular topics that anyone can and does write about, we need you to blog about niche topics that aren't being covered.

My own blogging has served, variously:

- As a public record of the evolution of my ideas and thinking. (Often embarassing.)

- As a reference for things I've found useful, and contextualised.

- A place I can post my highly original thoughts ... to be told "oh, X came up with that years / decades / centuries / millennia ago." Happens far more often than I'd have ever dreamed.

- As a place I can refer to / link to my own best efforts at explaining some idea or principle. Rewriting from scratch continuously is tedious.

- Rarely, for discussion.

- As a very loose bookmarking service. (Only a small fraction of references end up there, but the ones which do tend to be significant.)

- Something of a shingle, though I've not leveraged that as yet.

Every so often a particular post will take off, and it's generally exciting when it does. Rarely the pieces I pour my sweat and tears into, though that happens occasionally. What the World decides to Take an Interest in is a wonderously fickle phenomenon.

There's also the tinkering on the blog itself as a technical means of presenting, distributing, and organising information, which I find interesting.

Smart person. I've had the same thoughts. HN is often fun and occasionally interesting, though, so I keep engaging.

> Honestly, I feel like this is Google's fault. It shouldn't be prioritising new content as much as it does.

It is Google's fault, but the fault is that I can't choose.

If I'm looking for something about Beaglebone programming, there is a 90%+ probability that I need it limited to "last 6 months". If I'm looking for something about java.util.concurrent, 10 years old articles are probably just fine.

The fact that I can't make this choice is infuriating.

It depends on what you are looking for. I was having issues after an OS update and was looking for help, and ended up finding all sorts of out of date info for previous updates. Had to look for more recent posts.

When it comes to blogs, prioritizing new over old is generally a good idea.

If a blog post is worth publishing multiple times then it should be published as something different.

I think Google ranks microblogs, blogs, articles, wikis, discussions, books, etc differently.

It is Google's fault. So were those when you could rank no.1 for a term without having the term on the page because the links pointing at the site had them inside the <a href=""></a>.

The classic case is the Google search for "news". CNN used to come up first, now it is second. For the longest time, the word "news" did not appear on the CNN home page. At the moment, I see four uses of the word "news", not counting menu items.

But what is "often" in that context?

How is this Googles fault? They’re just following the market. People want “modern” information. They don’t want old stuff from two years ago.

What people say or indicate they want and what people need can be two very different things. The long term potential backlash from solving for the former should be weighed against the short term gains, but that's tricky!

Well, you'd expect Google to have some defenses against this sort of attack the same way they penalize keyword stuffing and cloaking.

But for all we know, they do. The TFA doesn't establish otherwise. It doesn't even establish that the author didn't update the content in June. Or that the blog unfairly ranked over better candidates.

Do people really want content from SEO spammers, though?

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