We Described the Same Page Two Different Ways

Every lab note carries a one-line description of itself, written by the person who wrote the note. It is what search engines show under the headline, and it is meant to be the same sentence a research tool reads when it asks what this page is about.

Those two audiences were being handed different sentences. The search description used the written one. The structured data a machine reads built its own instead, by gluing together the note’s subject line and its one-word result, and it never looked at the written description at all.

We checked every published lab note. The two descriptions agreed on none of them. On the notes about products that passed, the glued version came out as the product’s name followed by the words made the cut, which describes a research page about as well as a filing label describes a filing cabinet. A written description was sitting in the record on all but one, unused.

What changed

The structured data now reads the written description, the same one the search snippet uses. One page, one sentence, both audiences. Where a note has no written description, both fall back to the same generated line rather than to two different ones.

This was going to get worse before anyone noticed. We are in the middle of rewriting what the subject line holds, so that it names what was tested rather than what we found. That change would have made the glued description a bare product name on every rejection note too. The fix landed first.

The other thing on the same page

At the foot of every lab note is a short row of other products from the same category. Above it sat a line we had hard-coded, and on a note explaining why a product did not pass, that line read that these were the highest-rated products that passed our verification.

We do not rank products against each other, and that sentence did. It sat directly beneath the reasoning for a careful no, which is the worst place on the site for a leaderboard. We had already decided this row’s wording belongs to each note rather than to the template, and removed the heading that ranked. We left the line underneath it doing the same job.

It is gone. The heading names what the row is, each product carries its own score, and nothing on the page tells you which of them won.