That's hilarious. Metafilter's content is great, especially AskMe.
The idea that pictures would improve things for metafilter is bizarre; it's a discussion site and the discussion is really deep on both MeFi proper and AskMe, which is where a lot of the search traffic went (very deep archives).
It's possible that people wouldn't "bounce" as much if there were lots of images, but it's not obvious that getting people to stay that way is a good thing. Google's algorithms shape the web, they don't just measure it, and I'd rather see more link-heavy, image-sparse pages.
lauradhamilton said Metafilter's content was thin, not that it was bad or wasn't great.
If you answer everything in two sentences, Google is still likely to punish you for it even if those are ideal answers. They punish thin content even if it's supposedly great.
I actually view the thin / thick content issue as a strong proof that Google's search engine is incredible dumb.
They have to constantly write edge case scenario algorithms because the overall of their search system is of very low 'intelligence.' They're whittling their way into a corner in the process, because they don't know any other way to deal with problems than to further narrow what's defined as the good with another specialty algorithm that someone inside Google hacks together to buy another day against spam winning.
The situation is: Google can't tell what's a good answer and what's not based on the content. They have to try to figure out what's good or bad based on every other measurement except the actual content. So if the ideal answer is a mere 47 words long, Google is too stupid to know the difference and understand there are many instances where short & concise is better than seven pages of verbosity. In the not so distant future, this is going to be laughable.
My opinion might be scoffed at today, but I think Google's search platform is little more than state of the art junk that scales well. It's the best junk we have right now, and that's not saying much.
Killing Google search should be on PG's list of hard things that someone should be tackling. They're a dinosaur.
You are talking about the difference between good content, and what is perceived to be good content.
Until google fully develops AI to actually analyse content, it has to go on meta data about content to judge it. This can be length of content. This can be things like images.
The idea that pictures would improve things for metafilter is bizarre; it's a discussion site and the discussion is really deep on both MeFi proper and AskMe, which is where a lot of the search traffic went (very deep archives).
It's possible that people wouldn't "bounce" as much if there were lots of images, but it's not obvious that getting people to stay that way is a good thing. Google's algorithms shape the web, they don't just measure it, and I'd rather see more link-heavy, image-sparse pages.