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Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

I know it's buried deep, but it's kind of weird for the reporting to not even show an image of the area? Perhaps a map with a little pin indicating where the Deniliquin structure is?

They say it's near the city of Deniliquin, which is here [0]. Oddly, that spot doesn't even show on the map of yellow dots of likely impact structures! Did they forget to mark their newly discovered largest-impact-crater-in-the-world on the map?

[0] https://goo.gl/maps/shvRY2CiEs3eR8iw5

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> I know it's buried deep, but it's kind of weird for the reporting to not even show an image of the area?

It’s something I have seen becoming the norm nowadays. Articles about art or photographs without a single image. Political articles about borders without a single map. Articles about some thing some scientist has done, maybe with a picture of the scientist, but not of the actual thing. And it’s not a technical limitation of the medium; most articles will have numerous (but irrelevant) images.

I suspect that SEO measurement has told people that it doesn’t matter what images an article has, as long as it has some images, optimally interspersed with the text. Spending any money on getting relevant images thus becomes an unnecessary expense. Readers will still click on the article (because of the click-bait headline), and will still read (or at least scroll through) the article if the text is broken up by images by an optimal amount.

I think you're right. We know ChatGPT-4 can do image analysis, so all Google has to do is say that they're down ranking articles that don't have relevant images, and we'll be back to having useful images in artichokes again.

too late to edit, but -2? if there's feedback for me on why, I'm all ears!

(also, lol artichokes. ducking autocorrect.)

Could be as simple as the fact that images make the page take longer to load. Google penalizes that, as I understand it.

What specifically does Google measure? Entire load time, or just first contentful paint?

No, probably not, since many articles have images, but only irrelevant ones (i.e. stock images).

Perhaps putting a relevant image on the page quickly satisfies the users, so they click off the page quickly. But _not_ putting a relevant image on the page makes the user scroll more and stay longer, thus exposing all the advertisements and increasing engagement and retention metrics.

KPIs and A/B testing led to this. But those manager KPIs are directly against user-interest. Which managers measure user-happiness?

There is no Javascript API for to measure user-happiness.

Researchers often obscure the location of sites on purpose so that tourists and vandals don't show up and damage them. They'll share better photos and maps in person, but not anywhere that the public can see.

This probably applies more to something like the archaeological and geological digs at Lake Mungo than a 520km-wide buried crater, but there can be a "better safe than sorry" attitude in the field.

It's a huge area and it's very, very flat. Australia's geologically very inactive so any visible crater was gone many millions of years ago.

An image would just look like this: https://earth.google.com/web/search/Deniliquin+NSW/@-35.3522...

To give an idea of scale, the area they're talking about is equivalent to from Boston to Philadelphia. It's big.

1. I would love to still have that very photo! Captioned, “Buried under a swathe of never ending desert wasteland, the crater lies hidden under 8 kilometers of sand and rock”

2. You can still show me a map with a marker indicating where the hell the site is.

There's not a lot of interest around there. Deniliquin is a town of less than 8000.

This picture shows some surrounding towns https://images.theconversation.com/files/541855/original/fil...

The whole article seems AI generated to me.

The AI did not know to include THAT picture.

Maybe it's not yet considered likely?

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