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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

anyone else really surprised that ehow isn't on that list? I mean seriously they are some of the worst offenders I've seen.

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As a single live-alone late 20s male, I do not understand this position. eHow's content often seems perfectly tailored to people like me (I suck at cooking, carpet stain removal, calcium buildup removal, ..., all questions I've found perfectly satisfactory answers to via eHow).

In the meantime I'm deeply disappointed to see that the collateral damage of a change largely driven by a problem I don't understand includes faqs.org losing most of its ranking.

my problem with eHow is that it's very common to search for: "how to do X"

And get Google results with eHow as #1 with title: "How to do X"

And when you click it, you get..."you can't do X"

When in reality you actually can do X...all you have to do is hit #2 result for a forum to find out how.

Granted these were usually automotive questions...but still...the fact that eHow outranks legitimate sources with BS 1 paragraph of wordy text should qualify for penalizing them in the rankings.

I half agree with you. I think everyone loves to hate eHow, but it has its place in answering seemingly common sense questions. For queries like the ones you mentioned, I'd say that Demand Media's usual line about "filling in the gaps" on the web is somewhat true. My qualm is that eHow often outranks much better content in places where their basic step by step articles don't deserve to be ranked. This is an example I've cited before... the two eHow articles with highly relevant titles don't deserve a spot above the state department's great resource that I see as #3. (Unfortunately, the state.gov site has a crummy title tag that isn't doing it much good.)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=how+to+renew+an+expir...

eHow has taught me how to tie a tie more than once.

Ha. :) It's taught me how to cook a burger at least twice.

I did some casual analysis of data I collected for a small set of queries, and the exact opposite seems to be true - eHow saw substantial increases on many queries following the update. It's possible that this is because smaller sites above it were wiped out in the update, and my set of queries is very small - but it's clear that they weren't hit negatively.

This update seemed to have a much larger impact on user generated article directories than it did the new-wave content farms like eHow. That ezinearticles and Hubpages finally got hit doesn't surprise me much, because they are frequently exploited as a source for followed links by site owners.

eHow actually improved in the rankings. eHow is usually decent enough relative to the internet. Search for how to change your car's oil and you can find a helpful article that includes video from eHow, for example.

I know there is loads of crap out there, but I'm a bit confused by the overall attitude towards user written articles. It seems like a baby with the bathwater approach.

The same people most against articles sites, don't seem to have a problem with search results full of crappy youtube vids, yahoo answers, amazon and other shopping, twitter gibberish, and whatever else that isn't exactly Pulitzer Prize winning content.

account created 1 hour ago

Why is it that whenever someone negatively comments on eHow, a bunch of new accounts come out of nowhere to defend it?

They probably have Google Alerts set up on eHow search terms, or something like that.

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