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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."'"
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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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...
Idiotic puns? The English language is a beautiful one and not everything is about efficiency, speed and clarity. If it were, we'd all read dictionaries for fun and teach our children Lojban. I, for one, celebrate the wordplay practiced by newspapers and think it's intriguing.
It used to be that to get modded up you could read the article leisurely, understand what it's talking about, and then post your comment at any time... letting the merit of what you wrote stand on its own.
We don't do that anymore. These days, users become subscribers so that they can get first post and fool the moderators into thinking that what they wrote was insightful. Rather than discuss, as mentioned in the article, how a witty title that perhaps employs humor or puns is rewritten to something mundane so that a search engine can pick up on common keywords, people these days are engaging in what Linus Torvalds calls little more than a public wanking session trying to post comments more insightful than the rest.
Don't try for first post. Instead, take the hint that your posts just aren't really all that informative nor insightful and re-evaluate the sanity of continuing to post such drivel. Go take a look at comments like this and realize that trying to succeed with content like that is like punching moderators in the nuts trying to get excellent karma.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
90% of puns are bad.
100% of newspaper puns are bad.
I'd rather read Variances and Zoning Volume XIV.
Used to be to start a fire you took two sticks of about the same size and .....
then went looking for someone who actually knew how to start a fire, with two appropriately different sized sticks.
KFG
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
That won't ever happen (or more precisely, if it ever happens, it will fail). The problem is that we've done that before with the meta tags you mentioned. See what the SEO world has to say about them (summary: they're nearly useless now). Here's the deal. Any time you create a system for someone to deliver one thing to search engines and another thing to humans, what happens is a small group of opportunists will create massively spammy porn pages for human viewing, while making the search-engine content about every popular topic under the sun. You'll see a headline-made-for-Google which reads, "Britney Spears on Will and Grace" but when you click it, the headline-for-humans reads, "3 lesbian midgets have a pee party!"
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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?
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
Alas I work for a company that SWEARS by Google. GoogleAds get twice my annual salary every month from us and it amounts to... lots of dead leads. A veteran journalist / PRO-writer I am employed to make sure I write all my articles and website pages according to the Google-friendly template drawn up for me by a manager whose home language isn't English. I get crapped on if I deviate from the Holy Template. Any suggestions we try and break the mold and develop relations with the press to obtain credible editorial are laughed at. Of course I am looking for something else but you know what? Every company I try out for asks me the same question: "You can do Google Ads?" It's like the pre-windoze days when all a secretary had to do to get a job was know WordPerfect 5.1 yeesh In closing I recall a discussion I had with a former editor of the Jerusalem Post. He told me that all his jouralists use Google to find leads and implied I was a fool for suggsting otherwise. Investigative reporters have become librarians.
...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.
A journalist friend of a friend once made up an entire story about a library in Essex having its book budget cut just so he could use the headline (altogether now...):
BOOK LACK IN ONGAR
While a student, working on the campus newspaper, some anarchists invaded the stage at the student theatre, the Bedlam. This let me write the priceless (to my 20 yo ears) headline:
BEDLAM ANARCHY CHAOS
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Oh, come on. "Headless body found in topless bar" is a work of genius. "Sick Gloria in transit Monday", also.
I once worked for a Flight Simulator company, who came up with a rather innovative solution to the problem of displaying lights, especially at simulated night-time. The simulators cockpits are basically surrounded by a big curved mirror, onto which the final rasterised image is projected, to give a wraparound view. The projectors were called SPX projectors.
They found that if they just put the lights into the rasterised image that was displayed on the mirror, it looked a bit rubbish - pixelated, aliased etc. So someone came up with the idea of plotting point lights during the flyback period - they could control the beam on the way back to show up to N points of light (by flicking the beam on momentarily). I forget what N was. It looked significantly better, which is important when you're training to fly at night, as pretty much all you can see are landing lights, so you notice if it looks bad.
Anyway, they came up with the term 'calligraphic' to describe this technique - something to with it the beam being used in a more analogue, continuous way, I guess.
The real reason was, of course, so they could give the product this name:
I apologise on their behalf.
If I look at digg, the percentage of idiotic, flamebait and stupid-but-common-misconception posts that are modded up and of witty, insightful and thought-provoking posts that are modded down is disheartening.
Yes there are stupid mods on /.; a number of my posts have been modded down because the mod simply didn't know what he was doing or because he had an ax to grind (or modded up for the same reasons =). But overall the situation's much better here especially when the discussion's about things that tend to end in flamewars (Apple, Linux DEs etc =)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage