8 ms·

My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia. I

My incentive was merely to catalogue some historical things that were not catalogued elsewhere. Google, Wikipedia etc. LLMs knew only what was on Wikipedia. I don't mind that LLMs will find it....I used a bunch of agents to find sources for them and produce summaries of it, and even to build the site. It took a lot of human research too, but all my notes and snippets were sent to LLMs. I hope this means no more of these objects are lost. I wrote all that not intending to plug, but now it seems obtuse https://murder-stones.org https://murder-stones.org In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!

swed420 8d ago
My goal was to share complex things I've learned through IRL experience, and explain them in detail. Unfortunately in my case, I can't justify the distilling/production time sink unless there is some kind of monetary incentive. I already donate time to other projects, and there's only so much time in a day. YMMV
- jimnotgym 8d ago
  Absolutely, and it wasn't a criticism. Just to point out there are other goals available!
SyneRyder 8d ago
Neat idea for a website! My tiny search indexer is going through now, and not finding any problems with indexing your site so far. If you see a Go program in your logs accessing with a 10 second delay between each page... hi! :D Looking at your sitemap, I notice that only the front page (the one indexed page) has a priority of 1.0. Maybe experiment with making some other pages have a 1.0 priority as well, and see if that helps with indexing. It's clear to me that much of the site was created & designed with an LLM, and that might be getting penalized. I imagine search engines are able to detect AI text and use that as a quality signal. For example, it's a big block of text under the Context & Sources section here, I think a human would break that up into paragraphs and use different phrasing. https://murder-stones.org/stones/charlotte-dymond-memorial https://murder-stones.org/stones/charlotte-dymond-memorial Oh, and your Meta Descriptions are getting clipped, and clearly just the first words of the page. eg: "Charlotte Dymond, an 18-year-old servant at Penhale Farm, was killed on Bodmin Moor by fellow servant Matthew Weekes after an argument; he confessed and was han" Humanizing those descriptions could help too. Personally I hand-write the descriptions for every page on my sites, and try to make them look good for search engine display & helpful to humans. It's also possible I have no clue what I'm talking about :) But I hope that helps!
- jimnotgym 8d ago
  Thanks. The problem was Google had not even crawled the other pages, so I don't think there was an LLM penalty! I'll look into the priority, thanks. The idea is for human research to slowly replace the LLM descriptions, hence all the boxes for submissions. I was going people might write up their local ones. I am hoping to get out and visit some myself, get proper photos, and write them up properly. My first move was finding some to visit! I put all my early efforts into dicovery. The map itself was the important bit. I asked Claude code to extend the meta descriptions since bing said they were too short, now I see it found a shortcut! Thanks for taking a look.
Isofarro 7d ago
What a fascinating subject. Nice one! With LLMs replacing Google search results, the incentive for creating website content is changing again. And I'm reaching the same conclusions as you: "In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!". I think we are reverting back to our original form of the Web. Before the commercialisation of content. Also of the early blog days, when we wrote about stuff because we found it interesting, not because of conversion rates and eyeball counts, and session lengths. And we found great stuff by serendipity and casual mentions in conversation -- like you right here. :-) I suppose, with a rekindling of writing for our own amusement, we're going to need a catalogue of sites, to help people serendipitously discover these varied interests. yet another hierarchical officious oracle, maybe?
- jimnotgym 7d ago
  Webrings, perhaps?

swed420 8d ago

My goal was to share complex things I've learned through IRL experience, and explain them in detail. Unfortunately in my case, I can't justify the distilling/production time sink unless there is some kind of monetary incentive. I already donate time to other projects, and there's only so much time in a day. YMMV

jimnotgym 8d ago
Absolutely, and it wasn't a criticism. Just to point out there are other goals available!

SyneRyder 8d ago

Neat idea for a website! My tiny search indexer is going through now, and not finding any problems with indexing your site so far. If you see a Go program in your logs accessing with a 10 second delay between each page... hi! :D Looking at your sitemap, I notice that only the front page (the one indexed page) has a priority of 1.0. Maybe experiment with making some other pages have a 1.0 priority as well, and see if that helps with indexing. It's clear to me that much of the site was created & designed with an LLM, and that might be getting penalized. I imagine search engines are able to detect AI text and use that as a quality signal. For example, it's a big block of text under the Context & Sources section here, I think a human would break that up into paragraphs and use different phrasing. https://murder-stones.org/stones/charlotte-dymond-memorial https://murder-stones.org/stones/charlotte-dymond-memorial Oh, and your Meta Descriptions are getting clipped, and clearly just the first words of the page. eg: "Charlotte Dymond, an 18-year-old servant at Penhale Farm, was killed on Bodmin Moor by fellow servant Matthew Weekes after an argument; he confessed and was han" Humanizing those descriptions could help too. Personally I hand-write the descriptions for every page on my sites, and try to make them look good for search engine display & helpful to humans. It's also possible I have no clue what I'm talking about :) But I hope that helps!

jimnotgym 8d ago
Thanks. The problem was Google had not even crawled the other pages, so I don't think there was an LLM penalty! I'll look into the priority, thanks. The idea is for human research to slowly replace the LLM descriptions, hence all the boxes for submissions. I was going people might write up their local ones. I am hoping to get out and visit some myself, get proper photos, and write them up properly. My first move was finding some to visit! I put all my early efforts into dicovery. The map itself was the important bit. I asked Claude code to extend the meta descriptions since bing said they were too short, now I see it found a shortcut! Thanks for taking a look.

Isofarro 7d ago

What a fascinating subject. Nice one! With LLMs replacing Google search results, the incentive for creating website content is changing again. And I'm reaching the same conclusions as you: "In summary, if the incentive is to find things for your own amusement, the incentive is still there!". I think we are reverting back to our original form of the Web. Before the commercialisation of content. Also of the early blog days, when we wrote about stuff because we found it interesting, not because of conversion rates and eyeball counts, and session lengths. And we found great stuff by serendipity and casual mentions in conversation -- like you right here. :-) I suppose, with a rekindling of writing for our own amusement, we're going to need a catalogue of sites, to help people serendipitously discover these varied interests. yet another hierarchical officious oracle, maybe?

jimnotgym 7d ago
Webrings, perhaps?