Elevating original reporting in Search

I found the rater guidelines document linked in this blog post quite insightful. Sections like how to assess the &quot;E-A-T&quot; rating (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) will be useful to me when writing content.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guidelines.raterhub.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;&#x2F;searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;guidelines.raterh...</a>

Authoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Anytime you search for a game guide&#x2F;faq&#x2F;hint you get drivel from the big name sites that are super short on content and have bad advice. Almost in all cases the content I’m looking for is in some tiny blog that barely ranks but matches all the search words.

If this change is executed well, it will be a relief for original content creators such as myself. I am involved in researching and writing original content, and in recent years our articles keep getting buried by low-effort regurgitators who slightly rewrite our work, then rank above us because their version is newer. I&#x27;ve even bellyached about this on HN before:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19766276" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19766276</a><p>So, here&#x27;s hoping Google succeeds in setting thing slightly straighter.

Am I the only one who thinks it&#x27;s a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

For everyone who complains about Google having worse results, have you blocked or disabled Google&#x27;s tracking? I haven&#x27;t and haven&#x27;t had any trouble finding things with Google and I wonder if the two are related in some way.

Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless?<p>Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I&#x27;m actually trying to ask.<p>Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words.<p>My queries end up looking like this after several tries and fails:<p>&quot;something&quot; &quot;another phrase&quot; &quot;also&quot; &quot;this&quot;<p>If I type the whole phrase without quotes I just get a bunch of ads, blog spam, and irrelevant stuff that is pretending to be useful.<p>Hell, most dev-related queries will return shallow medium-style blog articles instead of SO &#x2F; Github.

Google recent algorithm update made a massive change in the way news sites write their content.<p>It forced them to be original.<p>I believe elevating original reports is the incentive google gonna bring sites who follow their guidelines

This is cool, i&#x27;ll have to dig less to see what the original source was for a news report. Also giving more weight to news sources with pulitzers and such is EXACTLY how search SHOULD be rather than ranking up Buzzfeed writers who rewrite news in clickbait worthy fashion

Yeah I hate how the top result for any search is 10 news organizations all with the same low effort headline.

Okay let&#x27;s give this a try<p>news.google.com -&gt; Democratic debate<p>Websites:<p>BBC, Vox, Guardian, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Slate (wow), The New Yorker, USA Today<p><i></i>Absent:<i></i><p>National Review, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, reason, Forbes, RT<p>So basically the news algorithm considers these kinds of stories high quality:<p>1) Stephen Colbert plays Democrat Drinking Game (NYT)<p>No Greg Gutfeld sketch ?<p>2) Funniest one-liners at the Democratic Debate (CNN)<p>3) Where was Mayor Pete Buttgeig at the Debate? (NYT)<p>4) OPINION: Winners and Losers of the Democratic Debate (NYT)<p>actually has the word opinion in the title<p>5) Who won the Democratic Debate? Texas. (NYT)<p>I think there ought to be more representation from right-leaning organizations

I wonder how this will deal with content that evolves over time. Some breaking news was published to BBC News with only a sentence and was fleshed out within the hour, so the original publication time and the possible originality of content are disconnected. In theory Wikipedia is meant to be summarising other sites so it couldn’t be first.

I like the idea of putting a spotlight on original stories, yet this also incentivizes racing to break a story even if it is just a rumor<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cobra_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cobra_effect</a>

On the surface, focusing on original reporting should be a very good thing. But this goes way beyond that. These raters are going to effectively be the arbiters of truth and reality. This is a very dangerous opaque centralization of information control given the monopoly Google has on search.<p>Maybe take a look at some search alternatives like DuckDuckGo or YaCy.

I&#x27;m all in on DuckduckGo.<p>No longer doing !g as I don&#x27;t accept the Google privacy policy (although I have peaked behind the popup using Ublock)

I wonder how they are going to make this... Only based on timestamp? Based in &quot;trusted sources&quot;? Based in a new API?

Google is scared shitless with the DOJ investigation on them.

Google made some pretty serious moves in the last year.<p>Their recent algorithm update is forcing news sites to improve their overall content quality<p>and by now highlighting original reports it will force news sites to write original content and not just rewrite each other articles.<p>It&#x27;s cool to see how Google is changing online journalism

In December 2018, Sundar Pichai testified under oath to US lawmakers that search results are completely algorithmic with no human reranking of search results. I wonder if they are still going to stick with this story.