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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Can't prove it, but it seems to me like black text on white background sites from the past are poorly ranked compared to sites with "modern" layouts.

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Yes. I love black text on white background. A rare find these days.

Browsing today is like: “You ask for a spaghetti recipe and the page tell you the whole history of civilization.”

Thats specific to recipes because they can’t be copyrighted

I had a look and definitely learned something today so #til.

Also, note to self to collect my favourite recipes in markdown files from now on.

#til! https://www.justtherecipe.com/

I heard that before and have trouble believing this is the cause at least for Internet recipes. Sure for a recipe book in 1950, but are recipe content farms going to sue each other? Isn't the lawyer costs way more than could be gained?

Don't forget how Google will now drop search terms if it thinks you mean something else, or add unrelated synonyms to your search (presumably to "help" folks who aren't good at writing queries)

At least it still lets you force whatever you write in...

Allegro (big polish auction/e-commerce site) in their mobile app will unconditionally rewrite the search terms instead of showing you no results

They're even better than black text on white backgrounds. They're unstyled and use your browser default styling. granted it's rare anyone configured those so it's almost always black on white.. but for people who do specify their own preferences it's really nice to have them respected and not rely on hacking in my own css or js to override theirs

I have a website that is just a few black text on white HTML files I maintain in whatever text editor I have at hand. Loads lightning fast, and if you cannot view it, its not a web browser. Last I checked, the total site size was about 60KB.

As time goes on, even the amount of text I am putting out get trimmed down. Make the words count, don't count the words.

Further, is it true that Google factors in whether sites have ads?

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