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This Boring Headline is Written for Google
prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running an article on how newspapers around the country find their Web sites more dependent on search engines than before. The unexpected effect? Witty double entendres, allusions and sarcastic remarks are rewritten into boring straight-to-the-point headlines that rank higher on search engines and news-specific search engines. From the article: 'About a year ago, The Sacramento Bee changed online section titles. "Real Estate" became "Homes," "Scene" turned into "Lifestyle," and dining information found in newsprint under "Taste," is online under "Taste/Food."'"
Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....
.eu domains, many of which are going to be those article-wiki type affiliate marketing sites and search engines are already crawling them. Sorry guys, but the days of putting up hundreds of pages of content and waiting for Google to do your marketing are gone.
.. nobody is going to find you.
We don't do that anymore. Just like companies that hope to market their news agencies have got to stop depending on search engines to reel in traffic. The sites that attract visitors through searches and make revenue by serving ads are established and have consumed the available market share.
To be successful doing what they do, one of them has to go under right around the time you have something similar already seeding in search engines. Its quite a long waiting list folks.
If you want to reach a niche news market you need to hit people during rush hour in their cars with radio advertisements, or find another way of luring them to your site and when they arrive your titles had better not be crafted for Google.
Look at the explosion of over a million
Don't re-write the titles, take the hint that what you're doing just isn't working. Either change your marketing strategy or re-evaluate the fiscal sanity of continuing to publish.
Insanity is doing the same thing over, and over and over again yet expecting different results. The market is flooded - get creative in your advertising and MORE creative with your content and you may enjoy some success. Otherwise the sad fact is
Go take a look at shitlance and search for "need articles, need articles re-written, SEO content author". Trying to succeed doing what they're doing is like punching yourself in the nuts until you pass out.
Completely *wrong* direction, imho.
I'm boring, straight to the point, and can't be creative even if my life was on the line. Hire me!
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Personally, I can think of nothing that would improve newspapers more than getting rid of those idiotic puns often seen in headlines...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Witty or sensational headlines don't just deceive search engines.
Human readers can get fooled just as easily. Heres an example:
I was doing research to show that Kryder's Law (a kind of super Moore's Law for hard disks that says bit densities have increased factor of 1000 in 10.5 years meaning a doubling every 13 months) is no longer being achieved by hard drive manufacturers. Instead I discovered that Kryders Law was just a creation of Wikipedia's overenthusiastic editors that misinterpreted a single Scientific American headline. Wikipedia editors accidentally invented the "law", and it isn't even correct.
You can read about it at my site here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/Kryder's.html
The search engines are dong us all a favor getting rid of this problem.
If a site's content is good, people come regardless.
Slashdot's popularity is an anomaly though...
why on earth would you write an article about the style of headlines in Google's news aggregation? it really isn't like Google is creating its own summary by mashing all the aggregated news articles together. some reporter somewhere wrote that dry headline.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Some formulation of the hard disk law has been around long before the SciAm article. It seems to me that some Wikipedia author remembered such a variation, went looking for "verifiability" found the SciAm article, slapped Kryder's name onto the "Law" and voila! Kryder's Law was born!
"Some formulation of the hard disk law has been around long before the SciAm article"
Yes, and that law was called Moore's Law. I think the role of an encyclopedia is to document, not invent.
Maybe now the articles will be written in a manner which actually resemble a story rather than having a fistful of facts crammed down your throat in burst of staccato like phrases. It would be quite an innovation for the newspapers to tell stories that make you want to read them rather than wrap your fish. Might even include some room for style to enter into the picture.
For some reason my fountain pen doesn't work here.
Would it be that hard to develop a standard (perhaps much like meta-tagging), giving one set of data easily digestible by the bots (and not displayed to the human reader), while retaining an entertaining writing style for human consumption? Computers don't always have an easy time digesting data a human would find simple to understand, and vice-versa. Shouldn't that generally be acknowledged by design? (Disclaimer: I don't do much work with web design. If you do and you know why this hasn't been done or won't work, please let me know.)
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
"Sex" turned into "Scatting on a midget who's being busy with a horse"
I thought the boring, machine-readable stuff (i.e., not just headlines) was supposed to be in metadata. No need to do a hatchet job on a descriptive or witty title. Of course, I just may be an old codger in Internet time.
What's more, I thought the whole point of Pagerank was to make your page associated with what others think your page is about... that if your obituary about Gene Pitney is entitled "Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960's singer." it'll show up in a search for Gene Pitney because (hopefully) that string will be indexed from the page body and that as other people associate your page with Pitney — irrespective of the <title> that obituary will float towards the top. And if they use your witty title, not only will you get more popular for "Gene Pitney", but also "Tulsa Star" as well.
But there are unwashed masses that do use other search engines, but I thought the last people to rely absolutely on metadata were Alta Vista and WebCrawler.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
I thought most journalists were already "creative" enough without needing to put miserable puns in their headlines.
Copy editors write the headlines, not journalists. That explains why you get those kitshy headlines in the first place, it's their only creative outlet.
the author didn't seem to consider the possibility that readers prefer this..
i personally would rather actually know what articles are about based on their headlines, than be tricked into reading something by a misleading headline. most headlines aren't "creative", so much as they are "dishonest" in the newspaper.
i skim through my university's paper every other week, and i usually am reminded why i don't read it more often.
-- lol pwned
That's in essence what happened to BMW.
Google doesn't like you presenting different data to their search engine than the user would find if they visited. And I can easily see why. Sites would abuse the heck out of it.
See this link amongst many.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4685750.stm
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
(notice my to-the-point headline)
Really, not only is it good for search engines, it's good for my brain's relevance filter for trying to see if I care about the story the headline points to.
Start Running Better Polls
Copy editors write the headlines
I've got a few of those among my family and friends.
One of them lost his job over "32 Scoot to Shoot with Plane Aflame."
I'm afraid I wasn't terribly sympathetic.
KFG
I completely agree with the spirit of your remark insofar as you're suggesting that technology can trivially solve this problem.
Not just for this, but for an international audience generally (many of whom read English but have trouble with idioms, sarcasm, and other advanced usages), it wouldn't hurt to have an XML or HTML markup that is, effectively, the ability to associate a plainer meaning to text for alternate use. A browser could be put in a mode to show the fancy use, show the basic use, or show the fancy use but with plain use pop-ups like tool tips (or plain-use explanation-on-demand-by-right-click). Doing it this way would allow search engines to offer a radio button saying "search idiomatic uses" which was, perhaps, defaultly off, but that could be re-enabled if the witty text was what stuck in your mind.
Good headlines are like good subject lines in mail. One of the best subject lines I ever saw in email was the text "crowbar in head". No, it wasn't about crowbars, it was about a "brain-damaged program" someone was alleged to have written. It might be a bad search keyword if I was searching for info on crowbars literally, but it is very easy for me to find in old mail because it was unique and easy to remember. I would hate to see the net move away from the ability to make useful labels.
I also worked at a company where the User Interface people got overzealous and started to rename all the editor commands from things like "View xxx" and "Show xxx" and "Print xxx" and so on to just "Show xxx" because they thought that was more regular. But at some point someone noticed that the emacs-style command keys like Control-V (formerly mnemonic for View) no longer made sense. Those UI people were soon pejoratively nicknamed the "View Police" because their entire focus seemed to be on stamping out flexible use of language. People started to rightly question whether eliminating all the synonyms in the language was good, because it meant every time you searched for "Show" you got a zillion hits and every time you searched for "View" you got zero. There are times when this is right and times when this is absolutely wrong, but the problem is not fixed by renaming commands. A better fix would be to have search commands that understand likely synoyms and then the option to turn that on and off. I think that lesson might apply here, too.
So I think there's a lot you could do with, for example, an extended USAGE="sarcasm|wit|pun|joke|..." MEANING="this is a rewording" attribute in, for example, a SPAN element of HTML, for example.
What I don't agree with is doing something like making an IMG tag that has sarcasm or wit or whatever in it and then having the ALT attribute for the IMG element use the plain text. The reasons are many, but include such issues as: eventually Google will search text found in images so it's a temporary solution, people on non-image-based browsers (including the sight-impaired) deserve access to wit, and, most fundamentally, the whole point of markup is that it allows a flexible ability to tag things with their true nature. The true nature is not "wit is graphical and plain meaning is text"; that's just a way to shoehorn a solution into existing frameworks.
(If this is not what you meant, then I've misread you and would appreciate a more detailed explanation of what you're going after.)
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
This is really only tangentially about search engines. It's really about people finding things by searching, rather than by browsing, today.
It used to be a potential reader would be standing in front of a magazine stand, or leafing idly through a newspaper. To grab that reader, a witty, slightly hard-to-understand headline was great - it catches your attention and makes you at least look closer since you want to know what that mysterious piece is actually about. And thus you made the single-copy sale, and perhaps, in time, sold a subrscription.
Today we increasingly don't start by picking up a paper and looking within for what we want; we find things by searching for what we want and end up on anyone of a large number of newspapers and magazine sites. The choice of paper isn't the start of the process - the search is. And when we search, that witty off-color headline is going to mislead us since it doesn't actually contain the key terms that would indicate relevance. Making headlines and summaries clear, straight and to the point isn't about pandering to search engines, but of adjusting to the changing behavior of the readership.
It's the reader behavior that has changed. The search engine angle is just a smokescreen.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I personally like them. Give me some dry wit - or "32 Scoot to Shoot with Plane Aflame" (see comments above) - over a boring summary of the facts any day of the week. Personally, I'm apt to think this is symptomatic of the decay within our society - but then again, I'm apt to think that over the latest Steven Spielberg movie as well, so go figure. Really, it harkens back to a day when those who read the paper, read the entire newspaper, and thusly would know the entire news. The headlines were there more to prepare your mind for the inevitable than to attract the reader's eye. This USA Today trend of posting full color buzzwords on the front page, so Joe Schmoe can skim it and knows what names to drop around the water cooler today, has got to stop.
-1 Flamebait out of the way, it's time to go for my weak attempt at +1 Insightful:
Wouldn't it be relatively simple for Google to allow newspapers the use of "alt" or "meta" tags for their headlines? Considering there's a small, reasonably finite number of trusted news sources, couldn't some sort of whitelist be easily implemented?
Obvious solution: use images to display the witty section names (scene) and alt text and hidden span text displaying the boring name (lifestyle). With a little work, the same could be applied to headlines.
Why shift content off screen when you can just tell it to not display it with your CSS? that's one of those things people do that I can't really see the point of (shifting, not hiding). Is there a benefit to only shifting it?
Be warned that you need to block your stylesheets from being crawled though if you try to hide text from users with CSS because search engines can mistake (or be correct in some cases) that as spamming and kill your search placement because of it.
It's a handy way to put more keywords in pages that users might not want to see. So you can put "Scene [Lifestyle]" and only have the user see the word "Scene" so you are actually helping people find you. Something I do is include common differences in how to write part numbers in that kind of hidden text. On my site the users can search and find stuff by that hidden text but they won't see it because it'd be confussing to them. I go ahead and include it in the page source though so that people searching on Google, Yahoo, etc can also find those pages. Pretty much what the keywords meta tag probably should be used for but isn't since search engine spammers devalued those tags.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Newspapers should focus on the news. Unfortunately, ours are trying to provide entertainment, sensationalism, titillation, thrills, and witticisms. Lets hope that, after the gimmicky double-entendre headlines are gone, we can also get rid of these other misfeatures of journalism. And, yes, the NYT is one of the biggest offenders.
There is an even better method for keeping witty headlines *and* be ranked in top position with google : pr0n. Here are some sample headlines :
- UN concerned about Iraq and free hentai
- Pope Benedict XVI replaces John Paul II in bondage
- France strikers and Natalie Portman arrested
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Search Engine optimisation is a contradiction in term
How come does anybody, not to speak of web designers, get the stupid idea that one has to optimise ones website for search engines anyway? Isn't that totally backwards? I should optimise my website for *users* and their expierience and the general webstandards. If the search engine is to stupid to find content on my site that is relative to a search, then it certainly isn't my job to optimise for them. That's the job of search engines themselves. That's where the name comes from.
Guess why Altavista missed out when Google appeared. The had the more optimised search engine.
I allways thought (and still think) that so-called webdesigners that offer their customers 'search engine optimisation' (whatever that's supposed to be) to be the used-car sales and multilevel marketing lot of IT field. Some shady semi-professionals offering some non-product. Whenever I'm finished building a Web CMS Site for customers I take the time to feed the URL into the searchbots so they do the first scan of the site more quickly, but that's it. If anyone comes to me bickering about the bad search results a searchengine comes up with I usually tell them that if the searchengine sucks, they should use a different one. It's that simple, really.
Bottom line:
If you're doing *anything* on the web, forget about search engines and just build a good site. If your site is good and the search engine is good, both will find each other fast. All else is just bogus.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I don't really mind drab headlines as long as the point is clear. What really gets my goat are authors that think they're being clever when they twist a headline's grammar simply to insert that lovely pause -- the comma -- thus saving a word or two.
You've all seen it before, but for example:
In house, wife murders husband
By all, a good time had
On spring break, not taking it Easy
I couldn't think of many good examples, (the last is taken from washingtonpost.com) but I'm sure you see my point. Why bother? It sounds dumb. It looks dumb. And in the case of my silly examples above, doesn't even save a character.
Stop twisting the headlines to make them sound like bad headlines.
Wit is good; puns are fine. God dammit, make it readable!
-- Shade
Technology tips and tricks.
This is bad news... these puns are quite entertining at times. The subject of this post is an example of one of my favorites: British Left Waffles on Falklands.
I find it hard to believe that posters don't see the value in this sort of word-play. For goodness sake, as a computer scientist, language and grammar are highly important and our wordplay sets us apart from the machine!
-Starfishprime
...anyone should be able to read a headline and quickly get an idea of what the story's about. Much better to have some snarky news editor misleading us to get us to read their stupid story.
I, for one, welcome "boring, straightforward" news headlines. After all, it's news. Not commentary, not opinion. If I see a newspaper section marked "Scene" I'm not likely to know what it's about.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good
--Lau Tsu
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
... has the worst puns and is the best online newspaper ...
As citizens of this democracy, workers in this nation, and technologist hobbyists, it's hard for all of us to find time to read anything from start to finish. So they're right on that point: the headline is often all you really get out of news. Funny thing is, I know lots of people who are more interested in Matt Drudge's headlines than the NYTimes headlines. He writes better headlines than the NYTimes. They're more timely, more revelent, and often more witty.
Stick that in your Google and search it.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Having said that, this boring headline business doesn't seem to have affected The Register. They usually have some clever ones.
planet texture maps and more
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
The Sydney Morning Herald has not only replaced its old-style "meaningless without context" headings with "boring" ones, but it's stuck them into its URLs - which is another SEO idea.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Xserv
"I love lamp."
is that computational linguistics still hasn't been able to make reasonable progress into Pragmatics; but then again, neither has plain-old-offline linguistics, so that's not unexpected.
s -to-be-sarcasm-or-wordplay?
Is there nothing Bayesian/connectionist we can do? Some sort of probabilistic contextual indicator of meaning? With-what-certainty-do-I-as-a-machine-believe-thi
It's still basically a mystery how we understand metaphor and sarcasm as quickly as we do (despite the Gricean notion that they involve some kind of reanalysis, there's no processing delay: an argument, some say, for a presemantic pragmatics...)
Something with a semantic web could probably determine what was going on in wordplay.... and might shed light onto how we as humans understand these "problematic" (from a generative/UG point of view) utterances. Maybe then we could get past issues like the following sentence:
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
I'm needfully vague here, as I myself am not (currently) a CL...
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I have read through the comments, and I haven't seen anyone mention (I could have missed it) the major change that's brought this about. Search engines are the outward evidence of a totally different way to use information. It used to be you would pick up a paper or turn on the TV news and see what someone else had planned for you. Now, it's information on demand. That's an immense change.
s _not_smart_to_be_clever.php
Oh - the Times article's own headline will be ineffective to search engines.
I've written more about this on my blog: http://www.geofffox.com/MT/archives/2006/04/09/it
I keep reading and hearing that news agencies have issue with search engines such as Google, and are threatening legal action because of sites like Google News for getting a "free ride" on news items which they are merely linking to and not doing the "hard work" for uncovering the story. Now I read they try to make it easier for Google to index their stories??? Did I understanding this article correctly or am I missing something?