But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.
Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to chat.
First, start with a whitelist. Hand pick high quality publications, and rank them towards the top. This may tilt results back towards institutions, and away from blogs.
Second, punish similarity. If everybody is reposting AP or Reuters without any additional information, consider them a dupe and don't list them. They can run their portals, but they don't need to show up in search.
It's come up multiple times in this thread, car manuals is a good example. They would be better off throwing away every result they have and hand indexing the good information, than what gets returned right now.
Recipes in particular have turned into a giant story about the way grandma used to do it with a picture followed by the same couple variants with different proportions. Pick winners by hand.
Someone has a finance question, just put boggleheads at the top, instead of whichever 59 affiliate credit card sites sprung up.
Need health advice? Put examine.com at the top above WebMD and healthline. Why? Because a human exper compared them and decided examine is a better first result. You could comb through tens of thousands of sites with a team of hundreds of people, something Google easily has at its disposal. What PageRank had, that seems to be missing now, is a seed of "we trust these most" and let the network grow from there. It tried to find expertise, instead of clickability. It was about getting you the best information first.
Correct. I would do that.
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>They also have their own bias introduced to their content.
Yes. Good.
I'm not necessarily saying they hand pick the best article for every single story. Although techmeme.com and hn do that to an extent, when they notice a better version of an article, they replace the top link with the better version.
I spent a few days thinking about it not so long ago and I have thought of something rarely mentioned. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I have completely solved the problem, just noticed it changes the perspective.
If I remember well, from my user perspective, the biggest change Google introduced was the ranking by page. Yahoo used to rank by site not by page. Maybe going back to a ranking by site would help creating a good index.
A site would be associated to a number of keywords, say 20 and that's it. That would give incentive to pick the keywords you want to rank for carefully and really be an expert about them instead of having SEO experts deciding which keywords they want to rank for this week and write empty TF-IDF optimized blog posts.
This sort of search engine would not give you the answer to everything but it would give back power to the websites. The information retrieval process would then be 2 steps :
- find a good website
- find the information within the website
Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.
1. It was slow to add categories/sites, which especially hurt categories where things change pretty quickly (gaming, tech and media are good examples, since new systems and frameworks need to have categories added ASAP).
2. Editors were often drawn into corruption, and either judged submissions based on how much they were paid elsewhere or prioritised their own/friends/family's websites.
Both of these issues could potentially be fixed with some more resources and better oversight, but it may mean any future DMOZ equivalent would need a lot more funding than the previous one.
Federation would help with both factors, though. A workable "right to fork" is a powerful incentive against corruption. Notably DMOZ was not federated or "forkable" in any real sense, even though it did have a reasonable amount of sites mirroring it.
1) look for references to source materials
2) check references quality - is reference real? does the quoted text match the text from the reference? is it an academic paper published in a journal?
3) authorship quality - what is the academic "impact factor" score for the author?
4) confirmed viewer reviews - subjective review by confirmed users
5) accessibility score - automated user interface usability analysis
High quality data exists, but it's not much of the ad supported web and not much of what users what to read.
Now we are at a point where normal website users have very little ways to be high in search results. And people with money can buy it either with very expensive SEO or with expensive Ads.
Sometimes i wonder why the heck should normal website user even try to please Google. As a normal website owner i dont feel Google gives me as much as it expects me to do.
Dont link to this, use AMP, God forbid to Exchange links. There are books about how to please Google. But what is the point? It all comes to who has more money. I dont, so i will never win a good position.
I think we should just forget all these Google rules because they destroyed the Internet how it used to be. Autodiscoverable.