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I was shocked looking at the market rank algorithm giving 0 to the Zero to One book review on Goodreads (which shows up as a second result on Google).

> We do not think it is much of a leap to say that the Farnam Street and Slate Star Codex articles are higher quality than most of the articles on Google’s first page of results.

The author was like, I haven't heard to these blogs from other people, so they aren't quality. But hey, I know of fs and ssc, so they must rank higher because they are quality.

The biggest mistake you can make in tech is assuming everyone else would like what you like or think of that as quality. I mean even techies can't agree on quality or approaches, let alone the rest of the world.

The other paradox is that they compare the results on Google's first page to their marketrank score. If they could give us a top 10, we would be able to figure out better (subjective really) as to which set to 10 results do we want - when we know a lot about the search term, and when we know nothing about the search term.




ironically, a post like this may get more upvotes on HN simply because the prominent examples of sites shown all happen to be sacred to HN: slatestar, paulgraham and waitbutwhy.

It's almost akin to a Reddit post referencing Marvel, Minecraft and Keanu. Playing to the crowd!




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