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Comment by nojs | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but articles like this are a good case study in whether Google should return articles written for the sole purpose of marketing and SEO or not. It’s quite interesting, and probably useful when you’re researching flags. On the other hand, it’s obvious that the Kobadoo wrote it as “content marketing” ie probably paid someone to write it who has no organic motivation other than that and no particular interest in flags.

It’s easy to suggest Google just “remove the spam” but this can be a difficult conundrum.

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It's only a difficult conundrum if you posit that the goal of search is to produce a single result set. Google already allows you to drill down by publish date, by target locale and language, and by all sorts of other things. I'd love to see a search axis for websites with obvious monetary incentives.

> I'd love to see a search axis for websites with obvious monetary incentives.

Fascinating idea in theory, how would you do it in practise? Three concrete examples I’d be interested in putting on that axis:

1. I publish articles on my website to encourage people to pay for my consulting services.

2. Sites like dev.to, Quora, and StackOverflow. The authors aren’t necessarily doing it for financial reward, but the site is.

3. The Guardian explicitly encourages people to pay for its website, whilst also making it freely available.

Where do you put these sites on an axis of “rewarded monetarily”?

Wikipedia while the donation banner is visible? :)

In practice any solution is probably good enough so long as it actually differentiates those use cases. Just move the slider to the region of the web you're interested in :)

Spitballing a little, if I had to manually put those on an axis I might rank them as:

(0) Sites like the Guardian that think their content is good enough to stand on its own and ask for payment (I personally want that search slider to be able to remove/include sites trying to monetize things tangential to my query, and while the Guardian pretty clearly cares about money they're also likely trying to monetize the thing I actually want to see if they show up in my search results).

(1) A tech-focused personal website that incidentally also has your CV and consulting rates.

(2) Sites like StackOverflow where the user-generated content is probably similar to what it would be outside of the site, but a money-focused censorship/environment has filtered the nature of that content.

(3) An AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management site self-linking all of its articles and prominently displaying your AI on Kubernetes in AWS cost management consulting availability.

Not everyone has my personal preferences. I could definitely imagine somebody wanting all of those to be some kind of roughly the same monetary reward ranking and maybe want a separate axis/categorization describing the type of monetization.

I would love to be able to filter results to remove articles written purely for affiliate links - if I'm looking for a new washing machine, I want an impartial article from someone with industry knowledge, not someone who has taken the five most popular machines from amazon to post with Amazon Associates links

IMO, Google has continually trashed products that could have provided fantastic, human-curated signals for site quality. Reader, Bookmarks, several SERP experiments, and even FeedBurner could have given insight into sites that have high quality content.

The goal of google is not to provide good search results. Its to get you to view ads which make it money. The goal used to be about providing superior search but that changed a long time ago.

It also contains incorrect information like this: https://blog.kobadoo.com/2022/02/the-history-behind-worlds-o...

What’s incorrect about this? Nepal’s flag is indeed the only non-quadrilateral flag of a sovereign nation, shaped like two pennants.

The Swiss and the Vatican flag are not rectangular but square. Article implies rectangular being Oblongular.

That’s a stretch. I am certain that a square is a rectangle. A rectangle is a 4-sided polygon with four 90 degree corners. The sides can be of equal lengths.

A square is a rectangle but ask the general public. So many websites etc. all get it wrong. They all make the Swiss flag not square.

You said the information was incorrect, but it isn't incorrect, and you've been moving the goalposts ever since.

Every rectangular flag has a specific aspect ratio and it's incorrect to make it wider or narrower than that. The Swiss flag isn't special just because that ratio is 1:1.

"So many sites" also gets most (or all) of the other flags wrong, because they pretty much always just fit the pattern on one size of rectangle. Which isn't any more correct.

>A square is a rectangle but ask the general public

I went to a church that called a "rectangle" a "square". It drove me nuts.

For context, after the first round of singing, someone would announce "kids go to children lessons, light up by the door with the green square (it was a rectangle)". They did this every service.

Are you sure? All OOP tutorials disagree with you.

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