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Comment by pavon | Hacker News Reader

I think that is the worst reason for them to rewrite titles. If they left the title as-is, then I would be able to see in the search results that it was a spammy site and ignore it. Instead Google is helping to launder their SEO and present it as a more legitimate site. If Google thinks a site is gaming their algorithms they should de-prioritize it, not rewrite it.

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I think you've got this wrong - they should heavily editorialize the titles.

Honest titles of search results:

* Five pages of flowery text and images before two lines of instruction on how to boil rice

* A bunch of tantalizing pictures of exactly what you're looking for but zero further information about it

* Product reviews machine-generated from public review sources with affiliate links. Top-rated product has the best affiliate revenue.

* You won't care about this solution to a problem you don't have.

etc...

This sounds like it would make a very entertaining Chrome extension.

Would also be nice if they edited things to actually be true, e.g.

* e-bike with 10 miles of actual range even though they advertise 30 miles

* laptop with 2 hours of battery life at 100% CPU usage even though they advertise 10 hours

* median $450 flight even though they advertise it as $199

> laptop with 2 hours of battery life at 100% CPU usage

Is there any laptop on the market that lives up to this. Even top specced MBPs I've gotten from work fall down when you actually use the CPU with compilers and VMs.

My simple M1 mpb 16gb seems to work for almost 2 hours when hammering the cpu. Haven’t timed it actually but I find it astonishing compared to the Dell mess I’ve had to deal with before.

Oh just an example. Hammer it at 100% CPU usage and report battery life based on that.

Or a (min,max) based on idle and 100% CPU.

You're never going to guarantee some kind of range on an e-bike. What's the temperature of the battery? Is it mostly uphill or down hill? How much are you going to brake?

And advertising laptop battery life based on the CPU getting pegged to 100% gives meaningless information as its rare for people to actually have their device running at 100% load anyways.

> You're never going to guarantee some kind of range on an e-bike. What's the temperature of the battery? Is it mostly uphill or down hill? How much are you going to brake?

Yeah but testing the e-bike on a track and telling the public it has 30 miles of range based on that is disingenuous.

Instead, go to a city with an average amount of hills, stop lights, and cold weather and give in a go, and tell that number to the public. If it beats that, in their actual city they'll only be pleasantly surprised. Right now you strand a shitton of people because they think they have 30 miles.

Ah, rice. The quintessential Asian grain, now consumed by billions around the world. When I was a child, my mixed-race family used to eat rice every day! Even today, the subtle aroma of rice wafting up from the kitchen brings a sense of nostalgia. It's a sure sign that dinner is approaching, my favorite meal of the day...

[5 pages later]

1. Put rice and water in rice cooker

2. Press "start"

Woah now, shouldn't step 1 be broken up into 2 steps. Each with their own heading and a paragraph explaining how to do that?

What kind of rice? Do you rinse the rice first? How much rice?

How much water? Do you salt the water?

and "rice cooker" is an affiliate link

Let’s also not forget the 55 auto-playing video ads that I need to vault over to get to Step 1. Each one determined to hijack my mouse as I scroll/hurry past and cause a click! It’s like the world’s least fun platformer game.

I got instantly annoyed by the first few words of this comment, thinking you’d gone off on some tangent about rice… until I saw the last part. Well played!

Isn't Google one major reason that recipe sites act like this? They've long favoured sites with a lot of textual content (which authors then break up with images) and also penalised sites that people tend to reverse out of quickly? A long story fits that because the majority of people need to read down for the content rather than get their instant answer and immediately retreat.

I find it annoying too, but it often feels like people ridicule the authors when they wouldn't get any traffic if it weren't for that approach. I don't think I've ever searched for a recipe and come across a barebones Gantt-chart-style engineer-thinking recipe plan.

It's not Google per se but a practical impossibility: it has to rank somehow, hopefully as a human knowing the answer would. They could theoretically hire humans to do it but they won't because it's obviously impossible due to how vast the dataset is, so they use software. Software is still far from human level reasoning so they use metrics. Metrics can and will be discovered and gamed, regardless of what kind they are.

As an AdSense user, if you don't use the maximum allowable number of ads (regardless of content length), Google literally emails you to suggest you add more ads. Their documentation encourages you to maintain a reasonable ratio of ads to content at risk of being shutdown, which pushes out page length. They push for unique content (so writers differentiate with personal stories), they measure time on page (longer details, pictures), etc.

> I don't think I've ever searched for a recipe and come across a barebones Gantt-chart-style engineer-thinking recipe plan.

https://clovegarden.com/recipes/index.html

Sorry, I might not have been clear enough. I know they exist. I'm saying that I've never searched for a recipe for something and a leading result has been in that sort of format. Google has created the environment in which the maligned 'epic story and photo album finished by actual recipe' formula wins through, yet the recipe creators get the ridicule.

> Google has created the environment in which the maligned 'epic story and photo album finished by actual recipe' formula wins through, yet the recipe creators get the ridicule.

They still deserve it, IMO. Willingly making a clown, a pawn of an ad-spamming corporation, out of oneself by doing one's darnedest to "win through" at some perverse game rigged by the aforementioned scourge of the Internet, is neither a natural human right nor a divine command. Not playing that game is still a valid move, and AFAICS the only honourable -- i.e. the only non-ridicule-worthy -- one.

So if you're super-keen on food and trying to establish a career as a recipe creator or food photographer, it's dishonourable to: put in a lot of effort custom-writing supporting material and taking quality photos of the dish you're pitching to people? Sounds like these things traumatise you! :)

I'd agree that misleading made-for-AdSense sites that purport to, but then don't, answer a question, farm out writing to $5/page content squads and intersperse stock photos - that's shoddy. But all the recipe sites I find in my searches and have to scroll down for the content, they always seem like genuine, personal efforts. If I'm getting the content for free, scrolling a little bit as a price isn't too laborious and a stretch to think of it as dishonourable work IMO.

> So if you're super-keen on food and trying to establish a career

IOW, you're trying to earn money. Sure, go ahead -- but then you get to pay the price. If the method you're trying to earn money by is going to involve playing along in the game of clickbait, then the price you get to pay is going to be, to be seen as a purveyor of clickbait. Which I, and I suspect quite a few others with me, see as distinctly less than honourable.

It's a free choice: Nobody is forcing anybody to "establish a career as a recipe creator or food photographer" on the ad-financed Internet. If they choose to play the clickbait clown/scum game, they're making themselves into -- so, in the end, are -- clickbait clown/scum. I sure didn't tell them to do that, so I'm perfectly free to see them as such for doing it.

They, OTOH, are perfectly free to try it some other way: publishing printed cookbooks in stead of Internet clickbait; or something adjacent, like run cooking classes, start a restaurant or catering business... Or to do something else altogether.

They could always go into the deeply honourable (/s) business of software engineering, which nowadays seems to consist to about 45% of running ad-spam networks, to about 45% of writing SEO crap to get your ads onto those networks, and about 10% other development... :-( What, me cynic? Bah, geroffmylawn!

I have dozens of cookbooks. Almost every single one is absolutely packed with personal details about the chef and background information on the recipe (who taught them the recipe, their beloved Nanna's method, the history of nut x in remote tribal desert y, etc).

I've been to cooking schools in multiple countries. All have gone into detail about the background of the chef and each recipe.

Same with restaurants. Many restaurants and certainly almost every fine-dining restaurant pushes the profile of the head chef.

I can't help that you paid God knows how much extra for this unnecessary fluff. If I were to get any of those, I'd look around for the least extraneous-fluff-y offer I could find. :-)

More seriously: At least the classes and restaurants already push that stuff in their marketing, don't they? So I get all that already doing my comparison shopping, and therefore would probably actually (at least to some extent) resent the time wasted on repeating it. And the few cookboks I (or we, my wife and I) have are also of the matter-of-fact, recipes and nothing more, kind... I am probably just much less of a "foodie" than you. I think my preference pattern is the overwhelming majority.

Note that Clovegarden has "the history of nut x in remote tribal desert y, etc" too -- but on pages separate from the recipes. (As I recall Mr Grygus started the site in preparation for starting a business of selling foodie stuff online after winding up his computing and automation consultancy business -- but that still seems to linger on, and he is nearing [or, probably, well past?] normal retiring age, so I don't know if that new business will ever materialise. But as long as he is up to updating Clovegarden every now and then it remains my favourite site for food-related stuff.)

[Edit: Ttypo.]

You forgot the part where there's a pseudo-recipe after the story that catches your eye but doesn't have any measured amounts, and then the actual recipe later.

Reminds me of Plain Old Recipe, a website that strips out fluff from big recipe websites. You provide a link to a recipe, it makes it to the point. I thought the site had closed but it's apparently still live!

https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23648864 (Thank you HN :))

Imagine if your CLI tools did this.

That depends on Google being both honest and accurate. Perhaps they have been so far, but my concern would be that a re-written title would cause quality content to get passed over by many viewers as undesirable/irrelevant because some algorithm misunderstood/misinterpreted what it was looking at, or because google wanted to subtly discourage people from content that competes or disagrees with whatever Google is attempting to promote.

In a better world, algorithms would be perfect and there would be a lot of healthy competition in search engines and google would be incentivized to provide users with the best possible results. In our current world Google's algorithm can't identify obvious spam well enough to keep it out of their results and there are no major search engines that haven't been lifting results from Google directly or indirectly and repackaging them as their own, so google has no pressure to do anything but promote whatever is in their own best interests or keep their results accurate and free of spam.

"Gaming their algorithm" sounds like a fancy way of saying SEO. If Google can produce for me a more accurate (or concise) title, it should only help me find what I'm looking for.

Forcing folks to trudge through inaccurate titles – or hoping people know the tells of a "spammy site" title – does not seem a better alternative.

> "Gaming their algorithm" sounds like a fancy way of saying SEO

It's quite the opposite, "Search Engine Optimization" is the fancy euphemism for gaming the algorithm.

My favorite is when the title sounds like what you’re looking for only to discover it’s a page full of ads and keywords. The original title doesn’t even match.

That causes me to lose faith in google not a better experience.

If that actually happens, I'm surprised the article doesn't cover it. I've never experienced that.

I’ve found it most on the 2nd or 3rd page when googling specific but not common error messages.

I think what HN and the SWE community at large has just missed about Google over the last 10 years is that the product is being built for the masses. Most people would prefer if you just rewrote the title to what it actually was rather than having to take on the cognitive load of understanding what SEO even is.

AMEN to that

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