

What’s the best thumbnail for this page? - Swizec
http://www.zemanta.com/fruitblog/whats-the-best-thumbnail-for-this-page/

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SeoxyS
For certain things, thumbnails make sense: online, articles about photography,
etc. But for regular articles, instead of figuring out how to extract
thumbnails, we should realize that in most cases, the article would be highly
improved by a lack of thumbnail.

There's a trend lately to illustrate low-quality content with low-quality
stock pictures (most likely acquired from a Google Image search without a
proper license.) For an example, just look at TechCrunch or Pando. We should
strive to rid the internet of this plague.

Good articles and real journalism have standards when it comes to
illustration. Open up nytimes.com and look at what's illustrated with photos
versus illustrations versus nothing.

~~~
Swizec
Even the best of articles need to be broken up visually otherwise they are
difficult to read.

Anecdotal proof: all written publications ever.

~~~
SeoxyS
Sure, but that can be done with good layout and typography, or tasteful
illustrations (à-la New Yorker). Simply using bad filler stock images is a
really bad way to go about this.

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bravura
"Unlike article extraction, it doesn’t seem anyone anywhere has ever put a lot
of thought into getting thumbnails out of a website."

Incorrect. Diffbot does a visual analysis of the page to determine the best
thumbnail.

[edit: I also get the impression that Prismatic does intelligent grokking of
the thumbnail image, especially because I know the team, but I'm not aware of
anything they published about their methodology.]

~~~
Swizec
Wasn't aware of that when writing the post. Thanks for the suggestion :)

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MitziMoto
I just wen't through this exact exercise for a project I'm working on where I
want to figure out the best image to display from a given craigslist listing.

I used an approach most similar to Goose where I download the image to get the
meta data, then get rid of odd aspect ratio images (I think I have it set to
anything with bigger than a 3.0 aspect ratio, but it needs to be tweaked). I
also get rid of things like 1px wide images (or anything smaller than the
thumbnail I want to display).

So far it works "okay". It's far from perfect, but its WAY better than
nothing.

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tjlivesey
I built fetchful.com a while ago which is an attempt at this (as well as
generating preview text). After a lot of testing, and a few hundred thousand
generated previews, it can be quite hard to get consistent results for
thumbnail, it obviously is very simple if developers plan for this and use
appropriate metadata tags for their content.

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ittan
Offtopic: if you are posting to HN, then its always wise to ensure more
workers for your fastcgi process :).

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breakall
The news aggregators use this ambiguity to their advantage -- plenty of times
I've seen a innocuous headline shown with a bikini girl thumbnail because that
image was a sidebar gallery preview on the source page (or sometimes even an
ad!). Any guesses what effect this has on click-thrus?

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mmb
I wrote a ruby gem to do this: <https://github.com/mmb/plumnailer>

The current ranking is simple but I made it pluggable with the idea that it
could be improved or there could be multiple implementations.

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riffraff
In what it's what he describes as the Zemanta approach not "slapping together
a bunch of heuristics" ?

~~~
andraz
It is bunch of heuristics... just slightly more of them producing (in my
opinion) slightly better result.

The core of the article however points at the main problem: no evaluation
dataset on which we could compare these algorithms.

------
ittan
blog is down?

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Smotko
It seems it's down... Here is a cached page:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.zemanta.com/fruitblog/whats-
the-best-thumbnail-for-this-page/)

~~~
ittan
thanks.

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tantalor
> Goose actually writes all images to disk

What on earth for?

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julienc
Now make a Javascript implementation and I'll be forever grateful.

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ronbeltran
Anyone is interested?

~~~
asmosoinio
Honest question? Yes.

