MarketRank: Anti-SEO Ranking Algorithm
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As implemented on Twitter and Reddit and HN, they are simply engagement features. In other words, the point of voting is not to surface quality content, it is to make site visitors feel like they’re doing something, and therefore be more likely to return. Karma scores, too, are not about rewarding quality but simply about creating artificial incentives for return visits.
Quality in forums comes mostly from careful human moderation. HN is carefully moderated by dang and others. Likewise, the highest-quality subreddits are those that have strict rules and active moderators that enforce them.
> Each of these communities has an upvote mechanism, which can be interpreted as an indication that the user believes the website is undervalued. They are willing to bid up the price by spending their upvote on it.
It's wholly misleading to talk about "spending" an upvote. Upvotes, unlike money, are not a limited resource. Most of the other problems (bots, spamming, optimizing for low-effort clickbait etc) flow from that.
If you want to create a way of ranking websites and call it "SocialRank", or "EngagementRank", that's fine, although see below.
However, users would have to be aware of the severe limitations. You've already highlighted some of the problems with social content: it's often spammy, low effort, clickbait, poorly written, misleading, or outright false.
The quality of the search engine and ranking algorithm is going to be judged by the quality of the results it returns, which I'd imagine will be pretty trashy in this case.
Ok, so upvotes on HN and Reddit are unlimited, and therefore not valuable.
Why not limit accounts to X upvotes per day or week? Or only allow upvoting as many times as you've been upvoted yourself? Suddenly upvotes are now scarce.
These aren't impossible problems to solve. HN has implemented tons of "dark" features you don't even realize are here to prevent spamming, and is largely successful at it.
For example, if you post to "New" and send a link to your friends telling them to upvote it, those upvotes will not be counted. Similarly, there is also a wait limit on how soon after visiting HN your upvotes will be counted, without you knowing it. There's a ton of these unwritten tricks like this behind the scenes, and as you can see from the quality level here, they work!
I think ideally the search engine of the future has a combination of user feedback (with HN-style dark patterns behind the scenes to protect integrity), plus some level of human curation.
I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug.
> I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug.
You're attacking a much broader proposition here than anything I wrote.
I guess I'm more broadly reacting to the sentiment in most comments I'm seeing (which is itself a trope in the dynamics of how upvote-based communities work).
Based off all the recent "Google results now suck" posts that went viral, it seems there's broad sentiment that Google is now a cesspool of SEO'd-to-death affiliate marketing.
But it also seems there's broad sentiment to shut down and discourage new possibilities before they even get attempted, regardless of potential merit.
It seems like an irrational dichotomy.
Any solution is going to have to think deeper than that.
On some (non-Reddit-derived) sites, they are, although usually you still get a daily allowance and not a persistent budget. There’s also the SO approach where upvotes are infinite but downvotes are limited, that could also work.
Is there a correlation between upvotes and truth or utility?
Sure, upvotes might be fine for recognizing good content or popular opinions. [best resorts in mediterranean], sure, upvotes are as good a signal as anything. Do you think it would be a good signal for queries like [why is there war in ukraine] or [how did covid start]?
1. Everyone now knows that Google favors long content pieces which covers the topic in depth (what, why, when, etc.)
2. So an army of content marketing firms are writing 2000 word posts for simple topics that can be covered in 200 words.
3. As the user gets lost in the 2000 word article, trying to find what they really need, Google treats this as a positive "lots of time spent on page" signal and rewards this behavior further.
The result is people trying to now write 3000 word articles to "one up" the other already long posts dominating the first few results.
There is already a search engine for feedback: Whaleslide.com [1] seems to let users curate content with collections. However, I haven't seen a link to a collection on their results pages.
[1] https://whaleslide.com/info/collections
*edit:
also: https://ninfex.com
>There is no crawler, our index is built solely by users submitting interesting and useful links. There is no complex search algorithm.
You can answer this yourself: just think about whether Google is incentivised by the quality of search results, or by something else.
It's like youtube clips of type "10 Best XYZ for beginners" which take 30 minutes while 1 minute is more than enough. Content dilution at its best.
So many tutorials on Youtube are front-loaded with a long ad advertising the creator's paid courses.
> a ranking algorithm that is immune to SEO
Counter point: Voting rings.
> An object with a higher market value is probably better
Counter point: Pricing psychology, Tesla stock.
> They are willing to bid up the price by spending their upvote on it.
Nobody spends anything. This sentence alone is a deal breaker. There is no downside to upvoting and I can upvote everything. Makes no sense.
I just upvoted your comment.
I still think you're missing the forest for the trees here. Your counterpoints are not wrong, but disagreeing with three sentences in the post and deciding that invalidates the whole thing is even worse than what you are saying the author did.
upvotes != market value market value != value
votes are very gameable
It's also inviting dismissiveness to be dismissive of the algorithm that created one of the largest and most successful companies in the world, because it's dismissive.
I do think people generally upvote things they find valuable. I'm curious what the disconnect is there.
"MarketRank is built on the analogy of the market. An object with a higher market value is probably better."
This is already how SEO works: if you get a link from another website to your content, it's like a "vote" for your content. A vote from a website with lots of votes is worth more.
The result:
This system is intensely gamed. People and businesses buy high-ranked domains and create private blog networks to set up backlinks to content that companies want to rank. Billions of dollars are at stake.
It'll take a lot of effort to come up with something that can't be gamed. I appreciate the effort, but I don't think this is it.
> We do not think it is much of a leap to say that the Farnam Street and Slate Star Codex articles are higher quality than most of the articles on Google’s first page of results.
The author was like, I haven't heard to these blogs from other people, so they aren't quality. But hey, I know of fs and ssc, so they must rank higher because they are quality.
The biggest mistake you can make in tech is assuming everyone else would like what you like or think of that as quality. I mean even techies can't agree on quality or approaches, let alone the rest of the world.
The other paradox is that they compare the results on Google's first page to their marketrank score. If they could give us a top 10, we would be able to figure out better (subjective really) as to which set to 10 results do we want - when we know a lot about the search term, and when we know nothing about the search term.
It's almost akin to a Reddit post referencing Marvel, Minecraft and Keanu. Playing to the crowd!
My vote isn't really "spent", because I don't have a vote budget; but I do have an attention budget, and I'm certainly not going to vote on an article I haven't read.
Imagine if there was a multi-billion dollar industry focused on making fake accounts in order to increase vote counts for HN posts. I'd don't think dang would be very successful in fighting them off. So the claim that this is "immune to SEO" is debatable.
That's an easy one. Just ask for camera permission and record a video of the guy hitting the reply button. Have thousands of hamsters to analyze each one.
Probably in someday, general computational intelligence could solve this problem by understanding the content itself and use it for ranking in a meaningful way. But if you're just trying to utilize some arbitrary, accidental structure inside the data set for ranking, there always will be a way to exploit. That's the whole point of SEO anyway.
It looks so obvious to me yet the article doesn't even mention the word "bot" as a factor in modern Internet. To solve such a hard problem one has to try a lot harder than this.
Pagerank was initially a game changer until it became common knowledge that sites/pages need links to rank.
Being able to set up thousands of sock puppet accounts on Reddit/Twitter/wherever would be the logical consequence if this algo was implemented.
People will pay $5,000 (a number i saw once) to get a link from Forbes. Not because they give a shit about Forbes traffic but because Google still thinks that Forbes is some “above them all” content site.
But if you want to see the real dirty stuff people do, buy a subscription to a tool like Ahrefs and see how people manipulate links for SEO purposes. It might just give you gray hairs.
Can you please provide an example? I'm genuinely curious, I've used these tools but haven't seen the tools to manipulate links.
I can tell you this though:
- Brands buy paid guest posts on "established" sites. (Using a stuffed keyword for their money site, service or whatever.)
- They wait until Google indexes their sponsored post.
- They then go ahead and buy links that link to the sponsored post instead of their service / brand site.
- The idea is that they can avoid a penalty in long-term. And Google largely looks past it because the sites doing such tactics (buying hundreds of private network links) are still on page 1 of Google results.
Past a certain point (5,000+ referring domains?) Google isn't going to penalize your site because it can't differentiate between legitimate or spammy links, or even care for matter[0]. Though the internals on the algorithm are very scarce in this regard.
If you do use the tool (Ahrefs) you have full freedom to analyze sites you suspect are doing shitty tactics. And you will find inconsistencies like the one I mentioned above. Needless to say, because Ahrefs is a crawler, it can be blocked and I imagine quite a few blackhat networks do this to avoid further detection.
Lastly, this is a big problem for smaller niches / keywords because all you need is 20-30 links pointing towards an article and Google will assume you have a PhD on that topic.
[0]: https://twitter.com/KrisHolten/status/1412396082835906563
If you make it Fake Internet Points are worth real money, all you’ll do is fill all these places with SEO people and ruin them.
Please don’t.
So, yeah, it's going on.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Founder-Painfully-Honest-Start...
The truth is any alternative search ranking to Google's will probably work well. The problem is the search mono-culture with one very dominant search engine, which permits extreme specialization. If you have real competition with multiple mutually incompatible ranking algorithms, black hat SEO patterns will drastically lose effectiveness. The unreasonable effectiveness of SEO spam is largely water assuming the shape of the cup.
I wonder about the approach @Jack was reputedly considering for Twitter, where users would select algorithms[0] out of a marketplace of options (perhaps with an interface similar to fonts.google.com, where they could sample the results of each algorithm for a given query). I don’t know if that would run within Google or would have to rely on something like Common Crawl. Google has a huge advantage not only because of its algorithms but also - as I’m sure you know - because of its index, and other miscellanea like click-and-query data.
[0] In that case for filtering/ordering, in this case for searching, though one could argue it’s basically the same thing except the latter has not only a user but also a search query as a parameter.
It doesn't matter if it's a search engine or half a continent growing nothing but wheat, the dynamic is the same.
I share your thought about this. I hope my comment wasn’t too unclear. I was just considering that a more diverse ecosystem of algorithms doesn’t necessarily imply a more diverse ecosystem of companies. Hence my thought experiment about a marketplace of algorithms within one search provider.
But of course I’m not wedded to that, and I have no reason to be. Both situations seem equally improbable to me: (a) Google’s losing dominance, or (b) Google’s providing a marketplace of different algorithms.
I’d be interested to hear any more thoughts you might have! Thanks again for your reply.
I also think that lots of upvotes on influential sites will soon turn into improved page rank so don't think that it will make a difference. Google isn't using the original, naive page rank algorithm, they have repeatedly refined it to fight the SEO folks.
"1,000 FB Post LIKES $15 (On sale for $12)"[1]
"1,000 Facebook Likes $14.5o (On sale for $8.82)" [2]
No, this idea isn't going to work.
I believe MarketRank is not completely useless, it shouldn’t be used as the only parameter for the ranking system though. Much more a single gear in a complex machine.
This seems like a decent attempt to resolve the the search engine problem. Has flaws yes and is limited to blogs with up votes so not universal.
Perhaps a universal search engine is impossible. Instead each type of content have its own search algorithm
Is it that Google actually benefits from having an algorithm that is susceptible to being gamed and therefore they are disincentivized to move away from that?
The second is a lot of the spammy sites are running Google AdSense so it is in Google's interest to send people to those sites even if they aren't what the user is searching for.
Why bad? People have largely said, but I’ll note that a new blog with a single legendary quality post on a niche topic would have no chance to rank, just like google. Plus this could be games if you engage in social media promotion, which many people choose not to do.
For a market analogy - while the market hyped up Apple and Microsoft, they also hyped up Theranos. Market had the 99 boom, and then 2000 crash, and a 2008 crash. That is, market can very easily by misled. Replacing a system with something slightly better is probably not a good idea. There are ways Google can be improved or replaced, but things like these are not the way.
> We can now calculate the “GDP” of a domain by adding the total value of all webpages produced by a domain.
This is very easy to game by spamming posts with one upvote on any platform, because the formula for calculating score increases strictly positively with the number of links.
You could have low-voted posts count against the total score, but then anyone could easily de-rank a competitor's content by creating low-voted posts about it.
No. We need an algorithm that returns relevant results for the search terms. A machine shouldn't try to decide what "good content" is.
Which would, as you note, instantly become havens for fake votes. They don't get gamed too hard now because they matter so little.
Hopefully the discussion here might help a bit. I read a lot of valid criticism here that should (in best case) already have been incorporated into the thinking process while researching the idea of a 'Market Rank'.
> An object with a higher market value is probably better
That was the moment the article lost me personally.
We have the smartest people working on this problem on both sides. Pretty much every easy / obvious solution has been considered already.
And the huge number of false negatives is not unimportant at all, as the author likes to think it is. Using an idea like this will transform the Internet in bubbles and if you are unlucky you will never find information that is outside your bubble.
Are Twitter upvotes really a useful guide to article quality?
I note that the searches the MarketRank people have reported on are all concerned with startups and software. I wonder how it performs on e.g. political analysis, recipes, DIY, living on a budget and so on.
I find it particularly hard to find product reviews that aren't rather shallow re-hashes of marketing material; a product review that points up the deficiencies of a product is a rare animal indeed.
> And so, the oversimplified description of MarketRank is “just add up all the upvotes”.
Cite please!
Then, those high karma accounts can be used to astroturf on more valuable real estate, the sections of Reddit where people ask for product recommendations. Posts made by high karma accounts are given greater visibility in the Reddit algorithm, which correlates to a higher number of upvotes as more people see it in their feed.
See also the brilliantly named plugin, Unpinterested.