Ask HN: 75,000 books & an active member base - is Questia.com a "quality" site?

3 points by 3hoss 15 years ago | 8 comments

HNers:

There's been an abundance of discussion, misinformation, and general mayhem for many site owners in the preceding weeks over Google's latest algorithm update. Questia.com, one of my company's sites, was negatively affected by the change, in some surprising ways. .

Explicitly targeted at "low quality" sites, many companies feel that they were wrongly classified as low quality by this algo update, but I'm not here to make a stump speech for Questia. Accounting for my own bias, we feel like there's considerable value for users of Questia: with over 75,000 books, millions of peer-reviewed journal articles, and tools (annotation, citation generation) for students and researchers, offered at a reasonable cost.

The question, in my mind, is how closely can an algorithm model a human's experience of quality, using Questia.com as a case study? What is it about the site that might cause a person (or algorithm) to classify it as low quality?

patio11 15 years ago |

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/questia.p...

Are you of the opinion that this page should rank for something? If so, what would it rank for, and why?

3hoss 15 years ago | |

That's a completely fair analysis of that page: the experience on that page is not great, and we realize that we're not presenting the value to a user who lands on that page in a compelling way. We need to work on improving pages like that, and I'm fine with devaluing those based around a quality metric.

But what about a page like this: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9727120. Would you classify this page in the same way as the category page you reference above?

tptacek 15 years ago | | |

(a) What value is there on that page?

(b) Knowing the person asking you the question had just selected and reviewed a sample of 12 of your content pages at random, what would you say the average Questia page looks more like: the Pabst sample you provided, or the sample Patrick provided above?

barry-cotter 15 years ago | | |

It's not in the same category of burning uselessness, but speaking as someone with no taste or design talent por exerience it is ugly.

ffumarola 15 years ago |

I'll walk you through my actions on your site. Normally usertesting.com charges for this :p

1) I go to questia.com

2) Having never been here, I quickly gather that it is a resource for information.

3) I decide I would like to read about law, so I click on the "Law" link.

Sidebar) Screw that pop up I just got.

4) I get to the law page, and I get to more navigation. There is SEO-ified content on the page which I'm sure your SEO company told you is great for deep linking and telling Google where stuff is. But it sucks. It is of no value to the user, and hopefully Google downranks that kind of crap... to be blunt.

5) I tab back from Hacker News and get that damn pop up AGAIN!

6) I tab back from Hacker News and get it AGAIN!?!.. Oh, I see, its whenever my mouse goes over the banner ad (doesn't have to hover, just mouseover). Annoying.

7) I click Civil Law.

8) I get to more navigation. I click Alimony.

9) I scroll down to the bottom of the page to scout out where the content is.

10) I see the definition of alimony now. It looked like an ad before because of the intrusive "Newsletter" graphic. I click read more. That's how I'd like to see the page when I first get there... with content.

11) So, that isn't a lot of information. I click to read a sample book.

12) The design isn't very appealing.

13) I want to get back to the search results? How. I don't see a link, so I hit the back button a few times. But that would be a PITA if I had just read through 20 pages.

It is very obvious that the site is designed for people to click on ads. And I don't mean that in the way that a lot of sites generate ad revenue. Your site puts ads first, and user experience and usability a very distant second. The model isn't sustainable. Despite any good information your site has, I would have left at about Step 5 and never gone back.

Cheers, hope that helps.