will_critchlow

It seems like this is a common thing to go down the rabbit hole of. My version was trying to run pagerank on the directed graph: https://x.com/willcritchlow/status/2013598472562168056

I hoped as I read that sentence that "learning" could involve learning what not to do as well as learning what to do.

Has anyone ever heard of another case like this? I've been following search pretty closely for most of Google's existence and this is the only bug bounty payout I've ever heard of for a blackhat core algo exploit.

[Disclaimer: Tom's a colleague of mine at Distilled where I'm a founder]

More technical details here: http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/google-xml-sitemap-auth-byp...

(Tom works at my company)

Yep.

Will be sharing and writing about it too - still a bit of a work-in-progress. Hopefully it all comes together nicely!

I'm leaning towards comparisons between tables of data, metrics etc rather than visualisations for much of this.

Oh - I meant to say - that quote is from this book: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596514556.do

"Almost everything looks like a graph. Almost nothing should be drawn as one."

It's really hard to make sense of full link graph visualisations. I'm talking about this in an upcoming conference presentation. We should share notes :)

I think it's fairly similar - I remember showing Ryan a demo of our tool back when he was at 7cupsoftea before RankScience got going.

We just published an update on our first year of data: https://www.distilled.net/resources/distilled-odn-by-the-num...

(Distilled founder & CEO here)

PS - my email is in my profile if you have any questions.

Distilled (www.distilled.net) is hiring in London (UK), New York City (NYC) and Seattle WA - all permanent, full-time roles.

We have a whole host of open positions: https://www.distilled.net/jobs/ - particularly looking for paid and organic search specialists.

We recently had an all-hands email thread where the whole team discussed what brought them to Distilled, and why they are still here. It got many great replies (including a number talking about how people's friends had typically had 2-3 jobs in the time they'd been with us), but this one stood out:

"A combination of an informal environment, freedom, and high expectations - I wanted a place where I could be myself and grow doing/learning things that I was passionate about, while having lots of smart people around me to collaborate with in doing so. I came from a huge, strictly regimented and siloed company, and was fed up with being told "that's a great idea, but it's not your job", and Distilled seemed to be the polar opposite."

I'm pretty suspicious of the data and the analysis in this study - even though I "like" some of the conclusions. I wrote a post about it here: https://www.distilled.net/resources/5-things-that-make-me-su...

Hope someone finds it useful.

"if motorists find their tax rising due to cheating by car manufacturers"

This doesn't require new enforcement or new taxes - a large part of the purchase price of petrol is tax.

Distilled (www.distilled.net) is hiring in London (UK), New York City (NYC) and Seattle WA - all permanent, full-time roles.

We have a whole host of open positions: https://www.distilled.net/jobs/

We recently had an all-hands email thread where the whole team discussed what brought them to Distilled, and why they are still here. It got many great replies (including a number talking about how people's friends had typically had 2-3 jobs in the time they'd been with us), but this one stood out:

"A combination of an informal environment, freedom, and high expectations - I wanted a place where I could be myself and grow doing/learning things that I was passionate about, while having lots of smart people around me to collaborate with in doing so. I came from a huge, strictly regimented and siloed company, and was fed up with being told "that's a great idea, but it's not your job", and Distilled seemed to be the polar opposite."

The R&D position is based in London, though other positions are open in NYC (see the jobs page). Thanks!

Yes - it is - sorry for the slow reply.

Distilled (www.distilled.net) is hiring in London, New York City (NYC) and Seattle WA - all permanent, full-time roles. I'm the CEO - hit me up by email with any questions (email in profile).

We have a whole host of open positions: https://www.distilled.net/jobs/

In particular, we would very much like to talk to digital marketing / SEO consultants in any of our cities.

We recently had an all-hands email thread where the whole team discussed what brought them to Distilled, and why they are still here. It got many great replies (including a number talking about how people's friends had typically had 2-3 jobs in the time they'd been with us), but this one stood out:

"A combination of an informal environment, freedom, and high expectations - I wanted a place where I could be myself and grow doing/learning things that I was passionate about, while having lots of smart people around me to collaborate with in doing so. I came from a huge, strictly regimented and siloed company, and was fed up with being told "that's a great idea, but it's not your job", and Distilled seemed to be the polar opposite."

Permanent, full-time roles in London, New York City, and Seattle.

We are hiring for a bunch of roles at the moment - you can read more about the positions (and the company) here: https://www.distilled.net/jobs/ but in short, we're a digital marketing company, specialising in organic and paid search, content, and digital PR.

The jobs - in order of those most obviously of interest to HN:

LONDON: Front-end developer with some experience (£30-35k) http://distilled.workable.com/jobs/55137

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LONDON / NYC / SEATTLE: Digital marketers (range of experience) See list - http://distilled.workable.com/

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LONDON / NYC: Client development / Sales consultant London: http://distilled.workable.com/jobs/54965 NYC: http://distilled.workable.com/jobs/55636

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LONDON / NYC / SEATTLE: Recruitment & HR manager UK: http://distilled.workable.com/jobs/55167 US: http://distilled.workable.com/jobs/56764

---------------------

We recently had an all-hands email thread where people discussed what brought them to Distilled, and why they are still here. It got many great replies (including a number talking about how people's friends had typically had 2-3 jobs in the time they'd been with us), but this one stood out:

"A combination of an informal environment, freedom, and high expectations - I wanted a place where I could be myself and grow doing/learning things that I was passionate about, while having lots of smart people around me to collaborate with in doing so. I came from a huge, strictly regimented and siloed company, and was fed up with being told "that's a great idea, but it's not your job", and Distilled seemed to be the polar opposite."

True.

Though: we speculate that it may eventually come to affect all searches - as mobile-friendliness becomes more pervasive (and hence as non-mobile-friendliness becomes an outlier), we anticipate that they may prefer a good mobile-friendly result to an equivalent non-mobile friendly result even on the desktop.

The main user-centric argument for this is the increasing amount of multi-screening (i.e. returning to the same page on multiple devices) as well as sharing a link via email or social (where the recipient is highly-likely to open it on mobile at least some of the time).

This is a fascinating read - and an adventure down the rabbit-hole.

I think they missed an opportunity to make the IDs map 1-1 with human-readable titles though. They use the argument that they have many versions of "pride and prejudice" and don't know which they may have in the future, but that sounds to me like a cop-out. There must be something differentiating those different shows to viewers (else, why make them?) so refer to that, surely? That doesn't mean /prideandprejudice2, but whatever differentiates that series from the first one.

I'm not particularly addressing this from a search perspective (they address that in the post) but more from a UX / readability / shareability perspective.

There's a few other pieces of weirdness to my mind e.g. "And hacking back to /episodes would have returned what? A list of all episodes ever?"

Yes. That's similar to what /programmes is isn't it? Obviously you can segment / add hierarchy.

Distilled, London - Front End Developer

http://www.distilled.net/jobs/creative-front-end-developer/

Distilled is looking for a front-end developer to work on all sorts of fun projects. You’ll be a recent graduate or someone with a few year’s experience. We’re more interested in hiring the right person than the number of years under your belt.

You’d be joining a fun, sociable office with a great culture and work-life balance. Perks include weekly beer o’clock, bi-monthly parties, a Mario Kart room, table football, and a personal happiness & productivity budget (which you can choose to spend however you want - anything from training courses to noise-cancelling headphones and iPads).

£30,000 to £35,000 - with opportunity for rapid salary growth (we're also willing to consider any reasonable salary request). Applying takes 3 minutes - just send your CV and some examples of your work.

How long would the streetcar have taken vs the time to travel via manhattan on the subway? (Londoner here so trying to put it in context).

Distilled, London - Front End Developer

http://www.distilled.net/jobs/creative-front-end-developer/

Distilled is looking for a front-end developer to work on all sorts of fun projects. You’ll be a recent graduate or someone with a few year’s experience. We’re more interested in hiring the right person than the number of years under your belt.

You’d be joining a fun, sociable office with a great culture and work-life balance. Perks include weekly beer o’clock, bi-monthly parties, a Mario Kart room, table football, and a personal happiness & productivity budget (which you can choose to spend however you want - anything from training courses to noise-cancelling headphones and iPads).

£30,000 to £35,000 - with opportunity for rapid salary growth (we're also willing to consider any reasonable salary request). Applying takes 3 minutes - just send your CV and some examples of your work.

Distilled, London - Creative Front End Developer

http://www.distilled.net/jobs/creative-front-end-developer/

Distilled is looking for a front-end developer to work on all sorts of fun projects. You’ll be a recent graduate or someone with a few year’s experience. We’re more interested in hiring the right person than the number of years under your belt.

We are aiming to build an environment that is the best place for the best people to work.

We aren’t there yet, but we like to set ourselves lofty goals, and we are constantly looking for ways to make this goal come true.

You’d be joining a fun, sociable office with a great culture. Perks include weekly beer o’clock, bi-monthly parties, a Mario Kart room, table football, and a personal happiness & productivity budget (which you can choose to spend however you want - anything from training courses to noise-cancelling headphones and iPads).

Salary: £27k to £32k. Applying takes 3 minutes - just send your CV and some examples of your work.

Having just been attacked by a bunch of credit card fraudsters and having to try to unwind the fraudulent transactions, I'm a big fan of moves like this. Thanks Braintree!

Distilled, London - Creative Front End Developer - http://www.distilled.net/jobs/creative-front-end-developer/

We're looking for a front-end developer to build all sorts of creative content. You'll be someone with experience but not yet at a senior level, keen to pit your wits against a variety of new challenges in this ambitious online marketing agency. You'll work both on client and internal projects.

- Lively, fun office in central London - 30 people Mario Kart room, table football, beer o clock, an annual happiness budget for each employee.

- Relaxed working environment with an energetic and passionate bunch of people.

- A growing company that never wants to stop learning.

- The chance to take ownership of problems and solve them in creative ways.

Requirements:

- Fluency in JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3

- Strong understanding of user-interface design principles

- Comfortable with the Adobe Creative Suite – particularly Photoshop and Illustrator

- Experience with responsive/mobile web design, jQuery, cross-browser testing and JSON

£27,000 to £32,000 - while we are willing to consider any reasonable salary request, we reckon it’ll be around this amount.

Beautiful. Nice work Dave.

Oh, there are many businesses at least that exposed. I personally wouldn't particularly relish running one, but that's another story...

I can't put words in the mouth of the SEO quoted, but (unless you know he was one of the people making removal requests against your site) I suspect he is not talking about you or sites like yours.

I should add that I don't agree with the rhetoric btw, but I think he is targeting a different kind of webmaster.

I think he is referring to webmasters who sold links (knowingly outside the guidelines) for years. They would previously have instantly removed the links if someone stopped paying.

As soon as Google stepped up their game and removing those links was important, those same webmasters started charging to take down the same links.

I would personally point to the irony of this (google creating a market that enriches people who have been abusing their system for years) rather than calling it immoral. Ymmv.

Hope that helps clarify some things and I hope I'm not distorting the guy's real meaning.

(written on my phone. Please excuse typos).

I'm pretty sure we should just ignore my code for the purposes of this discussion - my math(s) may be fuzzy, but my code has never been a strong point.

I was mobile when I wrote the original question - perhaps a better way of phrasing it would have been something like:

Don't many (most? all?) of these theoretical approaches assume that the sequence of results for each page (call them a_i and b_i for i=1,2,3... where each x_n is 0 [no conversion] or 1 [conversion]) are sequences of iid random variables with underlying conversion probabilities p_a and p_b? In reality, these sequences are much more complex and, if the scale of the variation in conversion probability within the sequence is greater than the difference between p_a and p_b won't the test be much weaker than we originally thought?

To use an example that is simplified vs. reality but hopefully indicates what I mean, imagine that we have two traffic sources - one with a conversion probability twice that of the other (on each page variant - so p_1_a = 2p_2_a and p_1_b = 2p_2_b). We randomly send traffic from both sources (1 and 2) to each variant (a and b). Do the standard tests work even though our sequence of conversions are not iid?

How do you approach this issue? http://www.distilled.net/blog/conversion-rate-optimization/w...

I haven't come up with a decent answer yet especially for smaller sites that can't run tests on very specific segments...