Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realise they had done that to ehow. I wonder if they could kill some of the region specific crap. If you search for a company here in Auckland you get these junk sites (localist, hot frog, finda) that have out of data that's been scraped an age ago and for some reason ranks high. This would probably be a deciding factor in browser choice for me.

View on HN

I didn't either. Disclaimer: I work for Demand Media on another property (Pluck), and have only been here about 10 months. I do know a few people on the various teams that do work with eHow and the titling algorithms, though.

Looks like that was in early 2011, before Panda came and nearly wiped eHow out, and over a year before I started. After that, they made a concerted effort to fix their algorithms and focus on providing good, non-automated content. Are they still considered a content farm to be avoided these days?

I think eHow managed to build up a certain reservoir of whatever the opposite of brand loyalty is among techies, so there's some lingering effect. These days I personally don't think eHow is uniquely bad. I don't think it on average has particularly great content (there are a handful of very good entries, but they're unusual), but it's not spam, or at least not more spammy than seems to be the norm in large-scale commercial media properties. A lot of it is just run-of-the-mill mediocre content on popular keywords, vaguely like About.com or the array of recipe sites, or (with some tilt towards current events) the kind of stuff published by Gawker, HuffPo, Cracked, etc.

To be fair, they own Cracked, too.

On the plus side, I think they're going to use my team's Hackathon project on eHow to replace all the irrelevant remnant ads with relevant, related ones, and clean it up a bit.

I've found that for utterly and moronically basic stuff that I've forgotten about, eHow does an okay job. Of course, I can't speak for anything remotely complicated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com