Matt Cutts and Hacker News

[seodudez]

There is a great post going on at Hacker News with Matt Cutts. Someone is complaining about getting banned from Google and Matt is talking about quality and do no evil...

[news.ycombinator.com...]

"It's a fair question, but our quality guidelines have been quite consistent for the last decade or so. Our team takes action without regard to whether a website is an advertiser, partner, or competitor. The long-term loyalty/trust of our users is worth much more than any sort of short-term revenue that a sneaky deal would provide. And Google's culture is such that anyone inside or outside of the company can claim that a particular practice isn't in line with "Don't be evil" and kick off a fair amount of self-scrutiny."

[Simsi]

I now have to advise anyone we work with that any income that relies on Google for either lead generation or direct income (AdSense) has to be treated as though it could evaporate at any time and for any reason without any real opportunity given to restore it in a timely fashion.

You could remove the words "Google" and "Adsense" from that paragraph and apply it to anyone. No stable business model will have any fundamental part of its supply chain dependent on a single 3rd party.

Probably the single biggest mistake made by Internet based businesses is not to examine where their dependencies lie and therefore they fail to investigate or implement contingency measures.

For example, every affiliate should have at least two websites, two sources of traffic, two revenue streams, two people that can manage the sites, two ISPs (etc). If you don't, then the business isn't really stable. If you physically can't, then the business model is flawed and at risk.

So yes, it's a "powerful statement" - but just common sense.

[diberry]

@tedster, that explains a lot.

Matt Cutts mentioned last year that Google News uses sentiment analysis, but as far as I know, no web search engine does. If Bing seems to do better in this area, it may be because their indexing for most sites it a lot less deep so they miss alot of red herrings.

I figured it must be something like that. I don't think anyone is more sophisticated at algo development than Google, despite whatever opinions we hold about the quality of results from Panda.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that sentiment analysis and satire/irony detection is just not part of Google's organic ranking - although it may be in play for Reviews, where it's a more critical factor.

I wonder if this is why +1 is so important to them. It's a way to let people weigh in on what a site is about - by observing their other +1s, you would be able to tell if a site the algo can't understand is pro or anti the topic. In theory, at least.

I don't see how this area could apply to the Hacker News site under discussion, either. The reasons for their exclusion from the index are much simpler than assessing factuality.

True, and also a manual penalty rather than anything to do with the algo. And yet, I wonder if there's ever any attempt to manually boost a site that the algo struggles with, but humans can recognize as desirable to certain visitors. (My site's PR is very high considering my backlinks, but I have a dedicated community of commenters and contributors, and newbies frequently talk about working their way through every article on the site once they find it. A human could see the value of that to certain visitors where an algo could not.)

[aristotle]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that sentiment analysis and satire/irony detection is just not part of Google's organic ranking - although it may be in play for Reviews, where it's a more critical factor.

Most people tend to like webpages that support their views about controversial social and political issues, but dislike pages that promote opposite views. As a result, pages that support majority views will tend to attract more backlinks, +1s, etc, whereas pages that promote minority views are more likely to be blocked.

[tedster]

Some people (even from the search engines) calls +1s, Likes and 0-to-5-star Reviews "sentiment analysis". However these things are not true sentiment analysis, which is a kind of linguistic discipline. Likes etc are a kind of substitute, something that is more easily quantified, yes, but a far cry from being able to do text analysis and extract the sentiment it communicates.