[HN Gopher] Google no longer producing high quality search resul...
___________________________________________________________________
Google no longer producing high quality search results in
significant categories
Author : lando2319
Score : 1319 points
Date : 2022-01-02 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| xenihn wrote:
| This quote from a Wikipedia article about a Heinlein book is apt
| for this. It makes me think that what has happened here is not
| only inevitable for any disruptive tech company that grows large
| enough, but also any other sort of human collective in general:
|
| "This theme is echoed elsewhere in Heinlein's works - that real
| liberty is to be found among the pioneer societies out along the
| advancing frontier, but the regimentation and legalism that
| follow bring restraints that chafe true individualists."
| superasn wrote:
| This will always happen because there are people who make good
| content and then there are people who are good at
| marketing/spamming or have deep pockets to pay people who do.
|
| Also people who are the experts in their field and produce great
| content are also terrible marketers and couldn't be bothered to
| create "backlinks" or whatever google wants from you to get your
| content on top. Which is why Google sucks to bad these days.
| lehi wrote:
| You shouldn't expect DuckDuckGo to be better. DDG results have
| also gotten even more terrible with time.
|
| I realized just today that adding quotes around search phrases in
| DDG makes it return nonsense (3 screenshots):
| https://imgur.com/a/2SHpjPG
| xibalba wrote:
| Google is now openly boosting/penalizing pages based on
| "inclusiveness"[1] in language. In other words, enforcing
| Google's politics.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1468309343531642891
| pxmpxm wrote:
| What's even the definition of "inclusive language"? I thought
| the whole idea behind certain groups embracing post-modernism
| lately was to avoid inconvenient things like reality; meaning
| is meaningless.
| swalls wrote:
| I was thinking this last night, as I searched for where Android
| Studio installed NDK and was directed to an article that started
| from _how to open Windows Explorer..._ with a whole bunch of how
| to troubleshoot _opening Windows Explorer_ to pad the article for
| adverts.
| oblib wrote:
| I've noticed this too. In fact, some of their results are pretty
| close to worthless. Last week I posted a link here to a demo I
| made for creating and using "blobs" with PouchDB. I titled it
| "PouchDB/CouchDB Save/Update/Load Image Blob Demo".
|
| After I posted it I monitored my web logs for a bit and watched
| both Google and DuckDuckGo hit the page.
|
| 3 days later I did a search for "PouchDB Image Blob Demo" on both
| Google and DuckDuckGo.
|
| Google had almost nothing at all for that search and my page
| wasn't on any of the results they offered. DuckDuckGo had my post
| at #1 for that search.
| nyx_land wrote:
| I often have to search the web for information about hormone
| therapy for trans peoole, long story short being that doctors
| tend to be pretty misinformed about HRT for trans people because
| the standards they use are based off information that is 20 years
| old, so trans women in the know tend to do their own research in
| order to get a decent HRT regimen.
|
| Google is bad in general for health stuff, but it's particularly
| bad for searching anything trans-related because almost
| everything that comes up will either be clickbait liberal
| feminist listicles or clickbait right-wing transphobic FUD.
| Either way it's completely irrelevant to searching for something
| like differences in administering estradiol valerate vs estradiol
| enanthate. Like other people I tend to just look on reddit to
| find stuff that isn't SEO'd to hell, and there's a big community
| of trans biohackers on reddit, but it's very worrisome that it's
| this hard to find good content on the web without looking on yet
| another platform owned by a corporation that siloes peoples'
| content and can delete or mismanage that data at a moment's
| notice. It would be a tragic loss if reddit suddenly decided that
| the TransDIY subreddit violated the TOS for some reason, and I
| could very well see that happening.
|
| It's no wonder the United States is as politically divided as it
| is considering that these services that are so deeply engrained
| into the lives of everyone clearly favor divisive content like
| politics that generates engagement. This is a thing that's been
| known but it's so plainly obvious that it's the case when trying
| to find information for something specific to your life if you're
| a minority whose existence is constantly being used as a talking
| point to signal where you stand in the culture war, and it
| effectively serves as a reminder to me when I use Google that
| this is all my existence is to most of society. You might think
| it sucks trying to find information about a vacuum cleaner or
| something and getting only shitty SEO'd spam, but you haven't
| seen anything until you've seen that information about something
| essential to your existence is nothing more than another piece of
| chum to trick people into looking at ads.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| ive been noticing something specific that seems not good:
| sometimes if you search for a series of words as an exact match,
| sometimes it will match but other times it doesn't, depending on
| which string of words you use from an article.
|
| e.g. lets say a webpage has the following text on it: "hello my
| name is john my favorite color is red" .. searching for "my name
| is john my favorite" might find the page, but searching "is john
| my favorite color is" will return 0 results; even though the
| quote exists and should turn up the same result
| arkitaip wrote:
| It's not just those categories that are producing low quality
| SERPs, almost any niche you can imagine is being assaulted using
| weaponized SEO because content marketing has become the
| competitive advantage of many organisations and part of the
| default toolkit of any site team.
| csomar wrote:
| Is it weaponized SEO, though? Because I have been adding
| "wikipedia" recently to many of my searches. Google has
| penalized Wikipedia in search results significantly (at least
| for me). I'm not sure what's the logic behind especially that
| 1. Wikipedia is trustworthy and ad-free and 2. I click mostly
| Wikipedia, so from a MLearning perspective I should be getting
| more wikipedia results.
| Guest42 wrote:
| Same, I tend to trust wikipedia and it hasn't been showing up
| nearly as much
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Consider skipping a step and querying wikipedia directly.
| Bookmark https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title
| =Special... in your browser and giving it the shortcut w (or
| whatever you think makes sense)
| arkitaip wrote:
| I've been using a Firefox search keyword for Google+Wikipedia
| and it works great.
| eddieh wrote:
| Honestly, I think a good search engine would hardcode the
| first two results to be the official website for "thing" and
| the wikipedia page for "thing" if they exist. Then it can
| list out the organic results. Just that change would make
| search 10X better than it currently is.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Just use ddg. By nowadays its just better.
| chapium wrote:
| I prefer the results it provides over googles these days.
| Where it falls short is on maps.
| [deleted]
| paganel wrote:
| I found out today that one of my reddit comments (along with
| many random others) had been scrapped out and automatically put
| back together (together with those many random other that is)
| on a blogspot page. I stumbled upon that page today as I was
| googling for a very specific topic, it went something like
| this: that SERP looks really interesting, nice! => this page
| looks like spam => this page is spam => damn, that bunch of
| text is really mine.
| deltron3030 wrote:
| I'm wondering how you guys are searching, do you type in short
| word combinations like 20yrs ago or full sentences and questions?
| Thing is Google values search intent above anything else right
| now, and if you don't show clear intent they have to guess, and
| the selection of search results will be mixed in consequence.
|
| Here's a up to date PDF from Google explaining search intent:
|
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Very useful info but that reads like Apple's "you're using it
| wrong" press releases.
|
| In my experience Natural Language queries return very poor
| results except when you are doing a largely popular search.
|
| It is also far more verbose to write: "What is the frequency of
| the ultrasonic driver in phacoemulsification?"
|
| Instead of: "Phacoemulsification+resonant"
|
| The second query is shorter and gives me a correct answer in
| ddg whereas google returns irrelevant results mixed in with a
| long lists of patents.
| adsharma wrote:
| Try "testing" as a sample query. I only see results about covid
| testing.
|
| Would love to see dictionary like factual results instead of
| reflecting the controversial topics of the day based on what
| people are clicking on.
|
| If in fact the idea is that a search engine needs to reflect the
| political opinions of its users, the incumbents are doing a very
| poor job.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It is a fundamental problem in search.
|
| One important metric is precision for the first result or "P@1"
| which was something Google originally excelled at.
|
| I was working at a search vendor where I had the chance to
| debrief high-level defectors from Google and Bing and found
| that they (like us, with our patent search) struggled to get
| P@1 above 70%. They saw personalization as a way forward but
| also told us that personalization at both of those vendors was
| limited to a few cheap tricks and their were structural reasons
| why neither vendor would do it in a deep way.
|
| The trouble is that you can at best make an informed guess
| about what somebody searching for "testing" wants. You
| ultimately have to get them into a dialogue which might be "I
| gotta search for 'nondestructive testing'" or could be based on
| some diversity ranking so that 'covid testing', 'software
| testing', 'psychological testing', etc. are represented in the
| top few results.
| adsharma wrote:
| Right - this was called result diversity. But in markets like
| the US, where avg revenue per user is high, polarization is
| also high and there is some belief that big software
| companies have a role in changing societal wrongthink, you
| get these types of results. For this type of a query, I'd
| think P@1 would be 0% for some 30+% of the society.
|
| Perhaps that'll be readjusted in a year, when covid is not
| top of mind for a majority of the users.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For a mass market product the emotional response that
| people have to the results is pretty important.
|
| It doesn't seem crazy to me that people are seeking out
| COVID-19 testing now. On the other hand I don't have any
| question in my mind about where I would go for COVID-19
| testing because both Cornell and Cayuga Medical Center run
| testing sites that are well oiled machines. I am entitled
| to use one for free because I am staff, students are
| required to get testing once a week. If I am getting a
| medical procedures done I am required to get tested by CMC.
| For people in Tompkins County there is very much a "right
| answer".
|
| Is testing, particularly personal interested in testing
| really politicized? My wife was required to get tested once
| a week when she was helping out at a nursing home and she
| found that pretty annoying. If somebody wants to get tested
| personally though what could be wrong with that?
| adsharma wrote:
| > emotional response
|
| That makes it a social network optimized for engagement.
|
| Someone posted a link to you.com in another sub thread.
| The results for the same query over there is what I'd
| expect.
|
| I'm thinking that living in a deep blue geo is what's
| coloring my experience. Perhaps others can post what they
| see from an incognito browser.
|
| Ultimately this is where big data analysis should be
| used. Log incognito results from a geo-diverse set of IPs
| to understand (a) the ranking model (b) the consequences
| of the model.
| Volker_W wrote:
| Can't confirm. My results:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/t...
| https://www.testing.de/
| https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/en/coronavirus/i...
| https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery/software-testi...
| adsharma wrote:
| Here's the logged out search result in the US:
|
| https://smallpdf.com/result#r=65aec01a358fb33d67f37736c8c099.
| ..
| projectileboy wrote:
| It's possible that a decent search engine should be considered
| public infrastructure, just like water and internet and roads and
| a fire department. If not public, then forming a non-profit may
| be the way to go. I don't see how for-profit search doesn't turn
| to trash, given sufficient time.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Yeah, Google today feels like the end stage of many of the pre-
| Google search engines. They were ok for a while, but eventually
| SEO tricks took over and ruined everything for everyone. What I
| worry about is that back in the 90s, everyone had a healthy dose
| of skepticism for anything you read off the internet. That's not
| true today, and there's a whole lot more incentive to put false
| information out there these days.
| otherotherchris wrote:
| Getting on the internet in the mid to late 90's required a fair
| bit of intelligence to set up a modem and drivers, "kids what
| the hell is UART", configure DUN settings, download and
| maintain browsers, etc.
|
| I blame the iMac G3 and specifically Jeff Goldblum for all of
| this mess.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg
| pcurve wrote:
| It's not just text search. Bing's Search by Image performs much
| better than Google's
| Retr0id wrote:
| And Yandex outperforms them both.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Unfortunately, there's no superior alternative. Anecdotally,
| Google produces substantially more relevant results (For things I
| commonly search for) than Bing and DDG.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| (1) No external competitor that is really better (e.g. DDG might
| make you feel better about yourself, but it isn't much better.)
|
| (2) The internal competitor of advertising. If the SERPs were
| perfect you'd have no reason to ever look at the ad.
| aantix wrote:
| What does it take these days to roll our own search engine?
|
| I'm working on a new kind of search - I'd like to create my own
| independent index. Bing is fine, but restrictive. Gigablast is
| ok.
|
| https://search-new.herokuapp.com/
|
| Looks like the Common Crawl .WET files are about 10 TB
| (https://commoncrawl.org/2021/11/october-2021-crawl-archive-n...
| ).
|
| Typesense recommends 3X the amount of RAM to hold the indexes.
|
| 30TB of RAM. Each TB server, what, $5k?
|
| I'm sure some pages can be reduced. Worst case, $150,000 for
| server costs?
| crazypython wrote:
| Brave Search and Bing wrappers like DuckDuckGo and EntireWeb as
| well as niche search engines like deephn.org and twitter.com are
| better
| tayo42 wrote:
| Ive wanted to share this similar sentiment but I had no idea
| where! Google search results are terrible lately. I'm frustrated
| by it. Im not sure how I feel about his categories though.
|
| I have mixed opinions on recipes. The recipes that do show up are
| generally not great and seem to be there because of seo. And seo
| is really ruining the recipes pages them selves (extra content,
| misleading cook times) At the same time I don't really expect
| google searches to be a curator of good recipes. There is to much
| taste involved I think. But reputable site like serious eats
| almost never show up in results unless I search for it.
|
| Health is a big topic, but health has been full of snake oils
| salesmens forever too, so its not surprising. You should probably
| talk with a doctor in most cases anyway?
|
| Going on google for anything related to illegal drug use is a
| pita, it just brings you too like addiction sites and other
| useless info ime.
|
| I also don't think that people are creating websites anymore?
| Where is there supposed to be info for the search engine to
| crawl? All real user content is on reddit, instagram, twitter and
| youtube. Maybe medium sometimes. All of that is easier for people
| to set up but not really set up for search engine to include as a
| good result. Instagram and twitter are especially bad, black
| holes of information.
|
| For better or for worse, I usually use google to search to search
| reddit, then i can at least get some better starting point and
| return back to google with better terms. I don't really like this
| because reddit is a bit of a echo chamber.
|
| Ive also stopped trusting searches in fields Im not familiar with
| because I know how bad the results are in fields I am familiar
| with. But i don't really know where else to go.
| epolanski wrote:
| > Where is there supposed to be info for the search engine to
| crawl?
|
| You actually make me realize how rarely I end up on websites I
| haven't seen, and how different it is compared to two decades
| rego.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > I don't really expect google searches to be a curator of good
| recipes
|
| I don't expect Google (or any automated service) to be able to
| rank recipes from a culinary point of view. I absolutely expect
| Google to be able to detect someone's SEO life story bullshit
| at the top of a recipe and penalize that for ranking purposes.
|
| And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard, the
| presence of ads or other marketing-style element is usually a
| good proxy for weeding out shitty commercial content.
|
| > Health is a big topic, but health has been full of snake oils
| salesmens forever too, so its not surprising
|
| Most countries have national health services that have no (or
| at the very least less) bias to sell you something. Given the
| amount of these is finite, a list of their domains can be
| manually maintained to boost their results and outrank the
| other garbage.
|
| > I know how bad the results are in fields I am familiar with.
| But i don't really know where else to go.
|
| Same here unfortunately and I have yet to find a solution.
| luma wrote:
| > I absolutely expect Google to be able to detect someone's
| SEO life story bullshit at the top of a recipe and penalize
| that for ranking purposes.
|
| Agreed, but those life stories are there because Google
| penalized the site if they weren't.
|
| A whole lot of this is a problem of Google's own creation
| along with people adapting their behavior to fit how Google
| works.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| SEO is not the reason recipes have life stories, the reason
| is that the life story part of the recipe adds copyright
| protection because the story is a "substantial literary
| expression". Recipes by themselves are not copyright-able
| as they are considered to be basic facts/ideas.
|
| And Google won't penalize these sites because these sites
| are useful and contain useful recipes that many people want
| to find despite your particular annoyances you have about
| it. I do not want a search engine that filters out all
| these recipes.
| _vertigo wrote:
| Why would including a story with a recipe make a non-
| copyrightable recipe copyrightable?
|
| Every recipe I can find on Google that isn't from a
| super-site with already strong SEO includes some sort of
| life anecdote. I find it hard to believe that:
|
| 1) This purported copyright trick even works, and
|
| 2) Everyone who publishes recipes online got the
| copyright trick memo, and
|
| 3) Everyone who publishes recipes online is interested in
| copyrighting their recipes as opposed to just having good
| ad revenue
|
| I find it much easier to believe one of the following:
|
| 1) The life story section significantly improves SEO
| somehow, even if incidental. I'm not saying Google
| rewards life stories, but somehow there is a mechanism
| there that improves SEO, and people have cottoned on.
| Every recipe you're going find on Google has strong SEO,
| and hence every recipe you find has an SEO-improving life
| story attached to it.
|
| 2) Food bloggers include the stories for differentiation,
| to "build a stronger connection with their audience", and
| once a couple big ones started doing it, the rest
| followed.
|
| 3) Some sort of combination of 1 and 2.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| In this case, Google should adapt but they are not.
| 6510 wrote:
| recipes is a fun example.
|
| The obvious success formula IMHO would be to have a file
| format for recipes (with a wrapper file format) and display
| those as search results under a "recipes search" tab. (The
| user picks his own tabs)
|
| Then, like news results, the results have to be parsed and
| combined so that there is one main trend for mashed potatoes
| & gravy with creative alternatives presented in a beautiful
| crafted UI for the specific purpose that is cooking. One then
| elects to add the raisins and the cheese and stores this new
| combination some place private or public under a user name
| (possibly with pictures, the beef foo bar, soup and desert
| served with it) for future reference. If the raisins are a
| wonderful or terrible idea the rating can be merged into the
| mashed potato search result.
|
| There is no room for _good enough_ in my kitchen!
| fancy_pantser wrote:
| > And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard...
|
| I took the opposite approach in my browser extension,
| detecting if a recipe is on the page and cloning it to the
| top of the page. I suppose you could add an accumulator to
| see how much visible text is on the page outside the recipe
| on pages where recipes are present to see the distribution of
| signal:noise. I'd be very interested in the results of a
| large-scale survey like that!
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-
| filter/ahlc...
| [deleted]
| tome wrote:
| > Ive also stopped trusting searches in fields Im not familiar
| with because I know how bad the results are in fields I am
| familiar with.
|
| The Gell-Mann amnesia of the 2020s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
| tucosan wrote:
| Since the incentives are currently stacked against the user, we
| might need something similar to AdBlock for search results with a
| community managed blacklist.
|
| I personally use uBlacklist [1] to black useless sites like
| Pinterest or wikihow to appear in my search results.
|
| [1]:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
| aronpye wrote:
| Is there a plugin which allows you to curate your own index,
| i.e. a whitelist of sites to search?
| otherotherchris wrote:
| In addition to the site:reddit.com trick, I find prefacing every
| keyword in intext:keyword prevents most forms of substitution
| (but disappointingly not stemming) and ensures what you search
| for is actually on the page.
|
| Any other way of using google lets rankbrain swap your specific
| engineering jargon for high click-through kardashian news and rap
| lyrics.
| elboru wrote:
| I've been using HN search a lot more lately. In the past I just
| used it to find old posts. But now I use it to research topics,
| the same way I used to use Google.
| 63 wrote:
| I'd love to know why Google has started ignoring quoted terms and
| treating them like normal words in a query. I put it in quotes
| because I wanted that exact phrase, not something that sounds
| similar. If that exact phrase doesn't exist, tell me.
| firebaze wrote:
| This has been true for a long time. I think it is still safe to
| assume googlers are not stupid, so there must be a reason for
| that. My guesses, in order of decreasing confidence:
|
| (by far) 1) globally seen, the results given are best for the
| general population
|
| 2) search/ad revenue from "still-google-users" vs. switchers is
| in a sweet spot
|
| 3) ???
|
| I'd bet on 1), since google was historically nerd-focused, but
| that changed long ago, and including inertia and stuff, they have
| probably realized by now that the crowd of "i know what i want,
| just give me the link" is not driving key performance indicators.
| dageshi wrote:
| I've noticed the same thing and given it some thought recently.
|
| I think a structural shift has occured. A decade+ ago people made
| sites about their hobby's and interests, they were amateur
| experts on subjects and because they enjoyed what they wrote
| about they tended to build up extensive knowledge bases on their
| subjects, effectively their sites let you learn a subject rather
| than just trying to give you quick direct answers which might
| actually not be right for you, their sites let you understand
| what you really needed.
|
| I think the thing that changed, is those people or their newer
| versions moved to youtube instead. People make videos instead of
| articles and what's left on google is the seo'ified crap that
| lacks the deep knowledge and context the original sites had.
|
| Of course google owns youtube so it likely doesn't care, but yes
| google search is now a lesser product and I'm not actually sure
| google can do anything about it.
| didip wrote:
| I am starting to think that Panda in 2011 caused Google to take
| such a huge revenue hit that they never attempt similar move
| anymore.
| marstall wrote:
| The one thing Google is good at is finding a specific named
| thing:
|
| - google a company name, it will find the company's website.
|
| - google a historical figure or event, it will bring you to the
| appropriate wikipedia page.
|
| - google a product, it will show you the amazon link.
|
| Google anything less specific, anything that requires some
| judgment to discern, and you are dropped you into the SEO bramble
| of bad information and hostile web design. That Google itself has
| created.
|
| What a failure for a company with infinite resources, and which
| has recruited the best minds in computer science.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| 100% I end up prefixing my searches with Reddit it.. or
| stackoverflow. It wasn't the case even just 4 years ago.. now if
| if top results aren't it chances are that rest is even more
| completely off mark
| buybackoff wrote:
| > In another way it doesn't - I get no direct benefit if you are
| using the same search engine as I am. We don't interact with each
| other directly through search. So if the search results being
| displayed are no longer high quality... isn't the network effect
| broken?
|
| This sounds like a need for a trusted community, not a bazaar-
| like marketplace. Some system is needed where an intermediary is
| responsible for its advice. Maybe Google was such an intermediary
| initially, but now it's just a bazaar that charges for a place or
| % of sales.
|
| Not a better search algo, but a better trust model. Staking comes
| to mind, not only like in crypto betting, there was Pakistani
| success story with micrifinance that was essentially based on
| staking.
| TechTiki wrote:
| I don't believe 100% of the blame lies with Google. It could
| partly be that there is just a lack of good content on the
| internet nowadays. Take product reviews for example. You'd have
| to pay for a web developer, designer, buy a lot of products, hire
| journalists to test the them and produce content, that all costs
| a lot. Is it feasible to do this based of a few ads and affiliate
| links a lot of which will be blocked anyway?
|
| I think what we need is a global micro payment system which
| enables good content creators to be funded for their work
| directly.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I wonder if the world needs a stackoverflow for
| products/travel/restaurant/recipies etc. Something with a
| reputation system that works pretty well in SO - i.e. if you are
| constantly ask stupid answers or given stupid/marketing answers,
| you get downvoted and at some point lose your ability to vote.
| Problem is of course, the majority decides what is "stupid", and
| to my experience going over Amazon Reviews, the majority seems
| not to get the idea.
|
| Unfortunately SO doesn't allow questions a la "Which is the best
| printer for doing X" :(
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Given the helpful replies on things here in these threads by HN
| people, I think the problem could simply be fixed by using HN
| karma as a reputation system for such a site. We would have a
| community of supersmart and helpful people with access to lot
| of specialists in their field. And 3-6 months later, when
| marketing affiliates are catching up, HN would have its
| "eternal september" moment and HN would no longer be the place
| it is now, with upscale and kind questions and answers...
| silisili wrote:
| I would advise against Googling anything medical. Outside of
| terrible SEO results, WebMD telling you you are going to die, the
| ads linger around forever.
|
| I remember Googling something I had read about or saw on TV out
| of curiosity. I got ads about help for said disease I don't have
| for at least a month...
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| With all due respect to Michael but has he not used Google in the
| past years? This has been an issue since at least 2016. SEO won.
|
| Maybe some googlers can answer this but i assume that Singhal was
| very conservative against AI for ranking. But when he left
| Giannandrea started rolling out the "natural language" queries
| with "let me just ignore your query because we know better"
| algorithms, also slowly removed operators/keywords used by power
| users. And well SEO really have gotten better so it all piles up.
| dleslie wrote:
| It's funny, I've gone through a number of search engines.
| Webcrawler, altavista, lycos, yahoo, google and now duck duck go.
| DDG is the only one that hasn't been an abrupt switch. I would
| search DDG, then !g if I didn't find a tolerable result. But
| that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the point
| that I have stopped using !g altogether.
|
| More often I want !w, !gh, !mdn, !msdn, !v, !osm or similar.
|
| It's that which makes DDG great: instead of being one search
| engine to fit all, it's a portal to services with specialized
| information. If you're using DDG's basic search to find specific
| information then you're using it wrong.
| yosito wrote:
| I think it would be really great if DDG suggested bangs when
| you do a search. I often don't know which sites may be best for
| the search I'm doing.
| seanw444 wrote:
| The bangs make it great. The keyboard interactivity makes it
| awesome. Being able to search, and then use the down arrows to
| select a result, and then press enter to follow the result, is
| super awesome, and I'm surprised Google hasn't gotten that
| right.
| TOGoS wrote:
| Aw neat; I didn't know about that feature of DuckDuckGo. I used
| to have similar keywords configured in my browser ("gg",
| "wiki", etc), but as the years go on I've become less and less
| willing to invest that time every time I switch to a new
| computer. Now I have a reason to set DDG as my default search
| engine again.
| mgh2 wrote:
| DDG is built on Bing, and their business model is the same as
| Google's. As long as you share this last part, search content
| quality will suffer.
|
| We will need a company that does not rely on this model- ex:
| Apple
| btdmaster wrote:
| Try Searx, it allows filtering search results with one !
| and redirection with two !!: https://searx.me/.
| wyre wrote:
| Yes, but what the comments are saying is that DDG has an
| advantage over other searches because their bangs allow
| anyone to easily use another websites search function, so
| by using DuckDuckGo you aren't limited to Bing and DDGs
| search.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > But that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the
| point that I have stopped using !g altogether.
|
| Funny thing. I'm used to DuckDuckGo results being
| unsatisfactory and reflexively append !g when the results are
| bad. Recently I've been doing that more on Google.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| One point about all the "Top X lists" and general blogspam that
| Google returns - I had once created a website that I was trying
| to get listed on these sites. I emailed a few of them to get my
| site listed and they transparently and directly offered to list
| my site for relatively small amounts of money. It was literally
| an exchange of 100 dollars for listing my site at number 1 and I
| got to write the description that went on their website.
|
| My point here is to add that in addition to the Google results
| being bad (they are listicles and blogspam rather than the
| answers you want) they are also corrupt in that people can just
| pay the owners of the spam sites to get the listings they want.
| This is a tax on the users by giving them indirect and bad
| results and also a tax on creators by forcing them to pay third
| parties to get their websites to rank in the appropriate Google
| searches or work on SEO voodoo to rank themselves.
| agencies wrote:
| Who has concrete steps to make this better? Seems like one or two
| people are making their own engines, but moving the needle is
| going to take a lot more than that...
| pastelsky wrote:
| I wish Google had a toggle switch that isn't slowed you real user
| generated content... Like filter out all sites that are in Alexa
| top 10 for the category, and just show geniune niche blogs and
| forums with rich informed discussions.
| jimrandomh wrote:
| Google is pretty bad at handling specific technical queries, and
| I'm pretty sure it's because their internal metrics don't account
| for the possibility that a query might have no useful results, or
| have only one result which requires some iteration on the search
| terms to find.
|
| What happens is, if you search for something that's specific
| enough that there are few results or no results, it will either
| ignore keywords, assume that you meant to put a space inside a
| multi-word identifier, or spellcheck-correct something that
| wasn't actually misspelled. This produces convincing-looking
| decoy results, and you have to look closely (or click through) to
| find out that it's wasting your time, them rerun the same query
| in verbatim mode or with more quotes.
|
| So then you've forced it to verbatim mode, and reached a query
| which, let's say, has one StackOverflow thread which you've
| already read and which failed to answer the question. Then your
| search results will be a couple pages of StackOverflow scraper
| sites. I _never_ want to visit a StackOverflow scraper site. They
| should be easy to detect. Why aren 't those domains being blocked
| properly?
| alecbz wrote:
| I admit I'm somewhat pre-inclined to defend Google here a bit.
| That said:
|
| I wonder how much of this is an issue of the incentives for
| producing different kinds of content, as opposed to just an issue
| of what Google chooses to optimize for.
|
| I.e., yeah, lots of searches turn up mostly listicle bullshit.
| But is that because higher quality content is more difficult to
| monetize (e.g., people that are inclined to click on listicles
| are more likely to click on ads?), and therefore less likely to
| be produced in the first place, and even if produced, its authors
| are less likely to put in money/effort into SEOing it?
| bravoetch wrote:
| This has been a known issue for years already. It's the
| 'attention economy' where nothing matters as much as engagement.
| Quality is not even an important metric. What we've been left
| with is visiting the same few websites we like, interacting on a
| couple of non-corrupted social channels where ads can't invade,
| like group chats in signal, and constantly unsubscribing from
| email lists because even the local ice-cream store knows that
| mailing lists are the best conversion channel.
| stavros wrote:
| Google sucks completely for me (I use DDG as my main search
| engine but that only sucks slightly less). It's all spam and I
| can't find anything. In particular, I used to be able to find
| useful blog articles on any programming problem I had. Now it's
| either SO or nothing, whereas I'm sure the articles exist
| somewhere.
|
| I saw kagi.com mentioned on an article here and tried it out, and
| so far it's been much better than Google. It gives me reddit
| results, which are very useful because it's just people posting
| their reviews/solutions, and it gives me small site results,
| which are usually helpful. If I have to pay for it, I will,
| because the free option is just useless now.
| ur-whale wrote:
| From the Twitter thread:
|
| > I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search
| aren't happy about the quality of results either.
|
| Strongly disagree.
|
| I'm pretty sure the kind of drive and passion that led to the
| very high quality of Google search back in the day is _long
| gone_.
|
| At this point, people do not join Google for the technical
| challenge or the reputation and/or ethos of the company, but for
| the fat bonuses and RSU grants.
| dahart wrote:
| > Also, how can a search category be SEO'd into ruin? Isn't
| search engine optimization supposed to produce "better results"?
| Doesn't Google exclusively control the results it displays...
|
| This seems almost willfully naive. Why would SEO produce better
| results for the _searcher_? It's optimizing rankings for sites
| who want to appear higher up in the results. Of course SEO is
| going to degrade the results. Of course every site on the planet
| is going to try to game Google search and appear higher in the
| list.
|
| Yes there are conflict of interest issues between serving high
| quality search results and making money serving ads in those
| results, and yes Google is consciously allowing some of this to
| happen. BUT - this was inevitable. Any popular search engine is
| going to be gamed by the entire rest of the world, and the scale
| is too large for Google to control it. Michael might not be aware
| that, despite the conflicts of interest, Google really does spend
| considerable amounts of time fighting against search-degrading
| SEO?
| baxuz wrote:
| I've tried searching for some technical details on some of my
| car's components. No matter what search query I used, the first
| few PAGES of search results were links to non-original parts on
| ebay, amazon, aliexpress etc.
|
| To get the actual details I had to go register on a forum and ask
| people there. Feels like pre-google all over again.
| spankalee wrote:
| I'm a current Googler, so yeah, I'm biased, but I work far away
| from search so I'm basically a plain consumer of it, and this is
| lazy thinking:
|
| "I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search
| aren't happy about the quality of results either. I'm wondering
| if this isn't really a tech problem but the influence of some
| suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases."
|
| I'm pretty sure Google doesn't make enough money on third party
| sites to intentionally make its own search results worse.
|
| What's happening here is the ever-growing battle between search
| algorithms and SEO. Most of sites that he is complaining about
| are likely doing an incredible amount of optimizations for search
| engines and human psychology to show on search results pages and
| get people to click on them. They A/B test, within singe sites as
| well as run the same or slightly modified content through site
| networks.
|
| So sites optimize to get crappy filler content on Google, and
| Google changes to demote those sites and produce better results
| (which people still complain about).
|
| This is also the reason that it's not so simple to do better than
| Google. A new search engine also has to have an algorithm and
| presumably it'll share many of the same approaches that Google
| has used and have been gamed by content farms. If a search engine
| does come up with a break-though mechanism to separate the bad
| from the good, then either sites will adapt to that, and/or
| Google and other engines will adopt similar mechanisms too.
|
| And if a search engine somehow made an un-gamable algorithm, then
| that would be a pure good for humanity and go them.
|
| But also in these types of discussions you really need to bring
| receipts. Otherwise it's hard to talk about what's even good or
| bad. What terms did he search for? Which results were bad? What
| should have been there instead?
|
| I did a quick search for "hip replacement" and the results look
| great to me: top result from American Academy of Orthopaedic
| Surgeons, a definition card, then Mayo Clinic, medlineplus.gov,
| Johns Hopkins, local MDs, new stories, images, WebMD, etc., and
| seemingly useful related searches like "What are the signs I need
| one"...
|
| Maybe that's just not a monetizable enough term. "quit smoking"
| should maybe turn up crappy help articles, but it's also pretty
| good. Two ads at the top this time, then CDC, Substance Abuse and
| Mental Health Services, lung.org, local results, WebMD, etc..
|
| Not that I don't believe the author, but he's certainly invested
| either directly or indirectly into companies working both sides
| of the SEO war, from search tech like Metaphor to algorithmic SEO
| like RankScience. So rather than trusting him that results are
| bad, it would help an honest discussion to point out examples.
| otherotherchris wrote:
| Google strikes out the least common (and therefore most
| important) keywords in my queries.
|
| Google replaces specific jargon with common words that are
| similar in meaning to laymen.
|
| Google returns pages which do not contain any of the keywords
| that I've searched for at all.
|
| If you use your example and search for "hip replacement", or
| any "what are the signs" variation, you get all of the content
| free SEO spam farms specifically catered to returning useless
| garbage to medical queries, but no informational
| academic/government/ngo health sites.
|
| If Google's AI is catering to the GPT-3 and future GPT-X SEO
| adsense spam vendor market and Google is not curating a
| collection of high quality reference sites like librarians have
| been screaming at them to do for 20 years, then it is doomed.
| It is nearly completely broken now, and will become more broken
| every year going forward as the algorithm/counter-algorithm
| fight continues and human content drops off the index
| altogether.
| bigodbiel wrote:
| Google broke it's own algorithm pushing too far their agenda, and
| forgetting to balance the cat and mouse base with SEO.
|
| The time is ripe for another search engine to dominate,
| preferably for niche segments of the web. I miss "I'm feeling
| lucky button" search button!
| cjlovett wrote:
| It's amazing to me it's 2022 and Google search results are still
| so useless. I'm finding myself use duckduckgo a lot more these
| days.
| Traster wrote:
| >I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search
| aren't happy about the quality of results either. I'm wondering
| if this isn't really a tech problem but the influence of some
| suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases.
|
| This seems like a pretty irresponsible and ridiculous thing to
| say. "I think X product is shit, and I'm fairly sure that the
| engineers working on X would agree and blame product managers"
| sounds like a valid thing to say if you were at reddit, or
| dropbox - where it's both true and Seibel should know about it
| (since he's in a position to know how rubbish they are), but to
| speculate about one of your competitors in this way is a
| little... self serving.
|
| Google search actually really reassures me, because Seibel is
| right, there aren't really any direct network effects, if it got
| bad I'd move. In fact I did move. I started using duckduckgo when
| I could, but any time I search for technical issues (something
| that's likely to result in stackoverflow results or similar) I go
| back to google. Why? It works.
| LaunchAway1 wrote:
| Internet is just for tourists now. We all know how it sucks but
| no one finds a solution. Now what?
| diegocg wrote:
| Google was still useful for things that are non-marketable. But
| in the last year or so, I have started to realize how awfully bad
| has gotten even at that.
|
| Case in point: Open source mailing list archives. For various
| reasons, some times I have to search for entire email threads
| that are available in the web interfaces of some mailing list
| archives. I have part of a phrase of some email, I put that into
| google with quotes, and it returns some results, usually with the
| main archive being in the first results. In the last year or so,
| Google has started returning no results for some phrases of
| emails that do exist and are available in one or more public
| archives.
|
| When that started to happen, I tried Bing. And Bing returns
| results with links to archive. So does duckduckgo most times. But
| for Google, it's like if that particular email I'm searching at
| that moment didn't exist (for other emails in the same mailing
| list it works fine). It only happens occasionally, but it's
| getting worse. So I have started to rely on DDG and Bing more and
| more, because they always find what I want.
|
| So Google is starting to fail at some of the most basic aspects
| of a search engine, it's not just the ordering of the search
| results - there are some public web pages that it won't see for
| whatever reason.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| One thing I learned from the unreliability of Google search is
| that we should not rely on an external service to organize our
| information. No matter the service, it _will_ change in some
| way, and you will lose access to some information.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| Curious to hear: what are some rising Google competitors that
| try to do a better job?
| XoS-490 wrote:
| https://you.com
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| https://neeva.com looks similar
| jart wrote:
| It's hard to compete with Google. Back when Google started,
| you could fit the world wide web on a single computer. Today
| you can only really get started the same way Google did if
| you focus on an unfancy subset of the web that hasn't been
| react'd and wasm'd into exabytes of opacity.
| https://wiby.org/ does it I think by refusing to index any
| HTML page that has <script> tags. Websites like
| https://millionshort.com/ provide pretty nice results
| sometimes, but I don't think they actually index the web on
| their own; they probably use the Bing or Google API on the
| backend. With million short if I want bike reviews for
| example, I get the authentic blog posts from 2010 with amazon
| affiliate links to bike listings that are no longer being
| sold lol.
|
| The problem is I don't think the Wiby model (rejecting
| JavaScript) or the MillionShort model (rejecting popularity)
| have done a good job capturing what we loved most about the
| old web and systematizing its curation. There's definitely an
| opportunity for someone to come along and create a focused
| niche alternative that's better.
|
| One way I suppose it could be done, is if you convinced a
| bunch of trustworthy high status trendsetter type people to
| subscribe to a paid service with a browser toolbar that lets
| them click a button for each website they visit to say "I
| like this" or "I dislike this" and then use that information
| to train a neural network that divides seo spam from content.
| Mix that with classic page rank and you might have something
| good. I'm not sure if it'd ever appeal to a more general
| public audience though.
|
| Anyone who does it is also going to want to make a deal with
| the archive.org to somehow get a snapshot of the old web, to
| recreate those original experiments. Or possibly even
| resurrect an old build of it. Plus Gutenberg. There's enough
| content from 2005 web alone and all the books published
| before to last anyone several lifetimes. That's actually one
| of Google's blind spots. They're so good at up-to-the-minute
| indexing of current events that sometimes if you just want to
| get the text to something like Seneca it's like pulling
| teeth.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| https://www.mojeek.com/ no-tracking, independent
| crawler/index
| JSONderulo wrote:
| I've been playing around with you.com after someone mentioned
| on HN. I dig the layout/quality of results. It's kind of
| interesting to have it feel like you're netflixing your
| search results by source (reddit, stack overflow, etc.) I'm
| still toggling back and forth on you to google because i feel
| like i might miss out something. Surprisingly some the
| results have exceeded my expectations. We'll see.
| bunnyfoofoo wrote:
| This site is quite laggy, I'm assuming because of all the
| JS. Tried to load it with JS disabled and it doesn't work
| at all.
| ffhhj wrote:
| The side scrolling is nice, but when searching some code
| related question it doesn't show useful results. Even the
| Code Complete snippets aren't displayed in a readable way,
| lines are too short, and the language highlight is not
| recognized (every script is python by default?).
|
| Thanks for mentioning it since I'm creating a snippet
| search engine and wanted some competitors to compare.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Blacklisting non advertisable media from the index. That's news
| to me. Hmm.
|
| Why? Cost savings? Missing hard dependency on marketing ops
| knowhow? Utter domination of non-marketing material? Forcing
| experienced privacy-conscious users to a different platform to
| reduce bad media coverage?
| noizejoy wrote:
| I for one am grateful that some of my worst mailing list
| accidents (like accidentally sending a privately intended
| message to a mailing list, rather then an individual email
| address) are starting to disappear from Google's relentless
| claws.
| neals wrote:
| Google is slowly becoming BING. I would love for Mircosoft to
| step up and weird everybody out by building some kind of open
| source superior search engine.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| What's a good alternative for recipes?
| hereforphone wrote:
| Ten years ago I complained on a random forum about Google's
| seeming refusal to give me information about running Skyrim under
| Linux with the Wine emulator. I tried various search combinations
| and all I could easily get was information about wine
| manufacturers and locations in the Skyrim world. Didn't matter if
| I used "emulation" or "wine emulator" or similar terms, even in
| quotes, or if I used the '+' character, or otherwise tried to
| harness Google's literal search functions.
|
| Was I searching wrong? Didn't seem so to me at the time, but I
| don't remember the exact queries. Those in the forum thread
| thought I just didn't know how to use a search engine. I still
| think it was Google telling me what it thought I really wanted,
| instead of what I was literally asking for.
|
| I still see results that don't include words that I search for in
| quotes, often.
| visarga wrote:
| I found that it confuses subject with object: do you want A for
| B or B for A. It's all the same. Maybe Google doesn't really
| use neural nets in ranking, or they are a joke.
|
| Desktop web search is trending down, voice and mobile
| interfaces up. They should be focusing hard on direct question
| answering based on retrieved web pages. A recent paper by Deep
| Mind shows how it can be done, not that it matters, they won't
| jump on it. Web search should be just as smart as Codex,
| adapting and combining knowledge for the user.
|
| https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving-la...
| hwers wrote:
| Just today I googled "torch normalize -1 1" and it said "zero
| documents matches your query". Insane stuff. (Censorship with
| crazy high false positives? Incompetence?) I went to duckduckgo
| and immediately found a useful answer.
| [deleted]
| melenaboija wrote:
| I tried just to see what is returning for just '-1 1' and is
| able to understand it, as latitude and longitude. But I use
| 'minus' for these cases.
| omegalulw wrote:
| Try torch normalize "-1" 1
|
| It gets me to
| https://pytorch.org/docs/1.9.1/generated/torch.nn.functional...
|
| Note that that will only normalize to (-inf, 1]. Tweaking the
| formula on that page You want (v - vmin) / (vmax - vmin + eps)
| with vmin and vmax produced along th dimensions you care
| normalizing against.
| anarazel wrote:
| Isn't that just because -1 is treated as a negative match?
| Which you then also request as a match?
| modeless wrote:
| Um, just in case you don't realize, "-1" selects pages that
| don't include "1". You just asked Google for pages that both
| include and don't include "1", and that's the empty set. I'm
| not aware of any way to search for negative numbers.
|
| This is really a UI problem. Google should probably use the
| context in this query to infer that you didn't literally want
| to exclude "1" from your results. However, half the comments
| here are complaining about Google _not_ taking their queries
| extremely literally. This problem is a good demonstration of
| why inferring user intent can be useful and taking user input
| literally all the time is not actually a great idea.
| evouga wrote:
| It's not just Google---the World Wide Web itself is rapidly
| becoming a defunct protocol, the culmination of a decades-long
| shift in the Internet's center of mass away from browsers and
| towards centralized and commercialized apps---from personal web
| pages to LinkedIn/GitHub/Twitter handles, from the ubiquitous
| WordPress blogs to YouTube videos and Medium posts, and from
| forums to Tweets and subreddits.
|
| The useful information on the Web is now concentrated in a few
| places---Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, etc. When I
| want reasonable search results, I search there instead of the Web
| as a whole. (And even many of these services are in the late
| stages of the Silicon Valley life cycle---desperate monetization
| and engagement-increasing gimmicks---with uncertain futures.)
|
| Wikipedia, bless its heart, lurches on as a cathedral to early
| Web's dream of information democratization. It stands as a wonder
| of the ancient world: incomplete, built from technology few now
| understand, and reflecting values and priorities that no longer
| quite align with contemporary culture. But it persists thanks to
| its inertia and the undeniable sense of awe it invokes even
| today.
| hirundo wrote:
| Yesterday I heard a Joe Rogan guest mention a particular non-
| Rogan podcast episode. It was a discussion about science and
| policy by two professional, well credentialed scientists and a
| layperson. I Googled it, couldn't find it. Same for Bing and DDG.
| Turns out it had been a popular YouTube video, but they objected
| to the conclusions and de-platformed it, from YouTube and the big
| indexes.
|
| It took maybe another dozen clicks to find it on one of the
| participant's own blog. And the podcast is still up and hosted by
| Apple. So it's something that you can find if you know about it,
| but not by searching on the topic. At this point, at least, the
| shadow ban is still soft.
|
| Add that as a data point for Google no longer producing high
| quality search results.
| stargrazer wrote:
| Perhaps with all the deplatforming, delisting, and other
| deleterious effects, all the 'good' content is removed, while
| at the same time those removals are affecting their machine
| learning data sets. It is almost a self-imposed adversarial
| attack on result quality.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Apple hosts an index of RSS feeds. The hosting for the files is
| elsewhere and varies.
| IronWolve wrote:
| Yup, Video got removed from twitter and youtube. But could
| easily be found on Rumble and Bitchute.
|
| When the video is originally hosted on Spotify on the JRE
| podcast.
|
| Seems crazy why twitter and google feels the need to remove
| legal content
| [deleted]
| bmarquez wrote:
| Rogan apparently* said that Spotify owns the rights to the
| JRE video, so they'll take down rehosted videos regardless of
| its content if they discover it. And if a video happens to be
| controversial by YouTube standards, it gets discovered faster
| and taken down faster.
|
| *2nd hand source, but seems plausible
| IronWolve wrote:
| But, Google Youtube and Twitter removed fair use clips, and
| only that episode.
| cronix wrote:
| > so they'll take down rehosted videos regardless of its
| content if they discover it
|
| If that were true then Joe's youtube channel would have 0
| posts since the time he joined spotify. It's chalk full of
| clips from Spotify broadcasts. I'm also fairly certain
| Spotify knows of Joe's YT channel considering that's where
| they found him and hired him away. It likely also would
| have been in his Spotify contract whether or not he could
| continue to post clips to his YT channel, or elsewhere.
| bmarquez wrote:
| > It likely also would have been in his Spotify contract
| whether or not he could continue to post clips to his YT
| channel, or elsewhere.
|
| I think this is very likely, to allow Rogan to post short
| clips on his own channel for marketing purposes and keep
| existing content, while enforcing copyright on other
| channels.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| > _" Yesterday I heard a Joe Rogan guest..."_
|
| I don't think that intentionally de-platforming whatever
| misinformation Joe Rogan is peddling this week falls under the
| same category as unintentionally serving up poor organic search
| results.
| hirundo wrote:
| I think a large portion of the internet agrees with you: the
| problem isn't that this podcast was de-indexed; the problem
| is that I was able to learn about it in the first place.
| Traster wrote:
| No, the problem is that you're conflating a decision by
| google to not serve relevant results for moral and business
| reasona with a failure by google to do what they intend to
| do. They don't care if you search for far right stuff, they
| aren't interested in serving it to you. They _are_
| interested in serving you infromation about other stuff you
| 're interested in.
| hogFeast wrote:
| rileymat2 wrote:
| To be fair, if you are specifically looking for that
| misinformation, those are poor organic results.
| coolso wrote:
| Agreed; the former - a large corporation engaging in "too
| much free time on their hands" Twitter/1984-tier cancel
| culture - is arguably far more egregious, but par for the
| course for a company whose leaders, directors, and executives
| were brought to literal tears of anger and frustration in a
| post-2016 election meeting within the company. [0], [1]
|
| [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/technology/leaked-
| google-...
|
| [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/google-vs-trump-leaked-video-
| reveal...
| [deleted]
| temikus wrote:
| Yeah I often have to add "reddit" afterwards and hunt for links
| there or use "site:" predicate to get decent results in addition
| to using a results blocker to filter out a lot of useless SEO
| results (e.g. Pinterest/Gitmemory)
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| As long as Pintrest keeps coming up in the top 5 results, the
| title holds
| Commodore63 wrote:
| Google seems to value recency over quality - a huge shame, given
| that the quality content has moved off the open web into walled
| gardens. If you elevate recently, you get churnalism, blogspam,
| and vacuous GPT3 bot content.
| firebaze wrote:
| The most advanced AI staff, their algorithms beating even go
| champions, still being worse in search than ever before. Beaten
| by bing.com, yandex.com and others, at least in my humble
| opinion.
|
| Something must be wrong, but I don't know what.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Has anyone noticed that we can't click past page 10 on many
| search queries? Isn't Google being misleading when it claims it
| found 2 million results, but it won't show past result 100?
| woodruffw wrote:
| Has anybody else noticed a decline in Wikipedia's placement on
| many Google search results?
|
| More often than not I want Wikipedia as my first result, both as
| a cross-reference for anything else I click on and as an index
| for other useful or interesting links. They were consistently in
| the top 5 results for anything that actually had a Wiki page for
| years, but now I have to pull the top few pages or even write
| `$query wiki` to get Google to reliably bring Wikipedia up.
| temikus wrote:
| Yep. Have to do that with medical/chemistry queries all the
| time.
| dennis-tra wrote:
| What a coincidence, just today I had a conversation about the
| decreased quality of Google's search results. Glad, I'm not
| alone.
|
| I'll give you.com a full weeks trial as it wasn't mentioned that
| often in the comments yet.
|
| Their CEO is following the twitter thread [0] and comments here
| [1] but is probably hesitant to advertise it here on HN.
|
| So, I'm doing it now as I have high expectations. I'm not
| affiliated in any way.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/richardsocher/status/1477748601539411971...
|
| [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=richardsocher#293994...
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| It's a bit ironic that this post is part of the problem. It's
| very hard to make money in decent product reviews but there is
| money in SEO optimization & referral links. Most product feedback
| and honest opinions are shared on sites like Twitter & Reddit
| which range from bad-SEO (Reddit, Youtube) to deliberately anti-
| SEO (Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest). While this thread/opinion is
| on HN ATM, it will quickly be gone and no one using a search
| engine will find it (if they do it will probably be via finding a
| HN or Reddit post first).
|
| That said I'm not sure what search results this person is
| actually getting but I really haven't had a problem using DDG or
| Google. I just know that what's marketed and used by the average
| consumer tends to be pretty bad if you ask any expert or
| enthusiast. I don't think this is search engines being bad at
| their job it's just that most topics bifurcate quickly into
| average people and amateur experts/enthusiasts.
|
| Here's an example. Coffee. It's a very common beverage that
| millions if not billions of people drink every day. However,
| coffee culture for the average person is very different from
| enthusiast coffee culture.
|
| Search engine's are not even that bad... if you look up a good
| coffee grinder. The top sites on both DDG/Bing and Google do
| mention the difference between a blade and burr grinder. The most
| recommended option looks pretty decent. This is probably a much
| better option for 90% of people than getting the 'enthusiast'
| (no-brand industrial burr grinder) option off of Ebay.
|
| Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a
| completely different demographic from the typical person. I don't
| think Google's search as gotten worse but rather typical user
| (i.e. training data) becoming more average.
|
| Another good example are TVs. Everyone and everyone's dad knows
| that Costco has some pretty good deals on TVs as well as offering
| a best in class warranty. However, if you read the forums and in-
| depth reviews you will quickly notice that Costco doesn't have
| 90% of the best TV in each price range. The average consumer
| wants the best Costco TV not the best TV as long as you get X%
| discount and you calibrate yourself, etc.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| > Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a
| completely different demographic from the typical person. I
| don't think Google's search as gotten worse but rather typical
| user (i.e. training data) becoming more average.
|
| I hear this argument a lot, and I think it is a cop out.
|
| Google literally bills itself as being able to personalize
| itself to your interests and being able to learn based on your
| queries. On top of that, google used to work 7 years ago
| essentially perfectly. If there were really such a divergence
| between myself and "typical users" you'd have heard them all
| complain about google then, because they were using it also.
|
| What's going on here is a misalignment of incentives between
| users and Google. They don't have an interest in being useful,
| they have an interest in herding eyes to the most profitable
| places and in using people to train their AI. They believe
| nobody can oust them as incumbent and so they no longer feel
| they have to deliver a good product if doing that hurts the
| bottom line.
| grishka wrote:
| Searching anything related to programming inevitably yields some
| of those StackOverflow mirrors. Sometimes they are crappily
| machine translated into my native language. And sometimes they're
| ranked higher than the actual StackOverflow.
|
| Google won't let people blacklist domains, so I had to write some
| uBO rules to get rid of those results on the browser side.
| Volker_W wrote:
| uBlacklist can blacklist domains on google
| laurex wrote:
| I've felt this pain and often wondered why search engines don't
| allow one to set fairly complicated ongoing preferences that lead
| to more trusted results. Yes, I might miss some information by
| aggressive filtering but I'd prefer it to the utterly useless
| results I usually get.
|
| I typically use DDG but it's gotten to the point where even
| putting quotes around terms still yields results without the
| term, and where there seems to be almost no way to avoid results
| that are untrustable SEO-driven dreck.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> This is why no software incumbent is truly protected from
| startup disruption
|
| Not quite. It's why publicly traded companies are not protected,
| they can _never_ make _enough_ profit. At least not in today 's
| world where the whole market looks like a scam.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Yes, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. There
| isn't a credible alternative either, so the world is basically
| returning to the altavista epoch with online tabloids everywhere.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| I'm going to start calling it googlevista...
| mey wrote:
| Give DuckDuckGo a try
| hartator wrote:
| I wonder if it will make sense to now build a meta search engine
| using SerpApi [1], weight couple of websites more like reddit or
| stackoverflow, remove adds, and repackage all this listings into
| a super simple UI.
|
| [1] https://serpapi.com
| ilamont wrote:
| This was the nail in the coffin for me:
|
| When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars?
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730) (October 2021)
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Months later and the live search still puts "July 20, 1969" at
| the top.
| fnord77 wrote:
| protip: add "forum" to your search. you'll get hits from actual
| forums and you'll bypass a lot of seo crap
| joelbondurant1 wrote:
| umvi wrote:
| Ugh, this is so true. It's getting increasingly difficult to
| break out of the SEO twilight zone. SEO is the worst thing that's
| ever happened to online search because it's completely poisoned
| the top N search results with garbage/ads. I have a very hard
| time finding organic content anymore. For example, I was trying
| to find an organic (written by a human who has tried the two
| products) comparison between two processors. It was impossible -
| I could only find AI generated sites that programmatically pulled
| the specs in a side-by-side comparison (which I had already done)
| but offered zero additional insights.
| bryguy32403 wrote:
| 300+ comments in a hour??? C'mon now, this all can't be genuine.
| I don't think Google returns the best results all the time
| either, but most "outage" posts don't get this much engagement so
| quickly.
| everydaybro wrote:
| I have a question: why is google still number one? everyone know
| that the search results are bad
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Inertia. It's the default on most browsers. Most people don't
| really think about it. "To Google" has become a verb, that's
| how entrenched it is.
| [deleted]
| com2kid wrote:
| Someone could make a fortune launching a search engine running
| Google's algorithms circa 2010!
|
| Actually, thinking about it, Google has always been fighting low
| quality results from spammers and SEO. I remember 2017-2019 there
| were multiple topics that you just couldn't research on Google
| because the SEO blog spam was so overwhelming.
|
| I can confirm that recipes are a mixed bag, but some team at
| Google is working hard to try and make them good, it is just a
| really difficult fight. It doesn't help that the number of recipe
| sites keeps exploding.
|
| Oh by the way, if you want good recipes, just pay for a Cook's
| Illustrated subscription. There. Done. Sadly NYT Cooking has
| started adding some really low quality recipes that honestly no
| one should be making.
| gumby wrote:
| Google remains pretty good if you're searching for pretty obscure
| topics.
|
| Which support's Seibel's point.
|
| You do have to go to extra lengths to keep the search on topic
| though. Google tries to DWIM the search ("seems unlikely the user
| is really looking for insect embryology"). Is this well meaning
| or steering the search to revenue-generating topics?
| bonyt wrote:
| One category I've noticed this kind of thing in is calorie
| counts. I'll search for a product that should have an official
| nutrition page from the brand's website, and get pages and pages
| of websites that just seem to regurgitate from some large
| database.
|
| I use MyFitnessPal to log calories, and it already has one of
| these large databases. I'm usually searching online to validate
| it against another source, so this is pretty unhelpful.
| Justin_K wrote:
| Their algorithms find it more engaging if I have to click through
| 50 crappy links to find one good one. If I spend 5 extra minutes
| browsing Google, that's a great metric, right?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If those crappy links have Google ads or analytics then it's
| absolutely beneficial for Google.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Not only that, there are still ads on the search page.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Depends if you have adblock or not.
| 15characterslon wrote:
| Maybe deliver high quality results for adblock users only.
| Lower server costs for adblock users while maximizing ad-
| revenue for users without adblock. Win-win.
| tonymet wrote:
| Let's be honest, with rare exception, compelling & relevant
| content is no longer on the web. It's found on chats where people
| can be candid, like Signal & Telegram. To some degree it's on
| twitter where you can curate trusted publishers, and other social
| media. There are exceptions e.g. Substack, but most of the web
| content is seo clickbait.
|
| The author ignores the more pernicious problem : ML fairness.
| Google is editorializing results by up-ranking positions it
| prefers. Check the results on any controversial topic like race,
| politics, abortion, covid treatments, etc.
|
| The problem is that 95% of consumers believe google represents
| the truth.
|
| Just go back to first principles before the internet and make
| sure you trust the publishers, sources & references. Also don't
| ignore your own observations. There's a PR campaign fighting your
| own critical thinking abilities.
| psyc wrote:
| The problem remains that Google no longer delivers the most
| compelling and relevant of _what is still on the web._
| omreaderhn wrote:
| > It's found on chats where people can be candid, like Signal &
| Telegram
|
| Can you recommend some of these channels?
| Volker_W wrote:
| > The author ignores the more pernicious problem : ML fairness.
| Google is editorializing results by up-ranking positions it
| prefers. Check the results on any controversial topic like
| race, politics, abortion, covid treatments, etc.
|
| Source/Proof?
| temikus wrote:
| Not the OP but I think he might be referencing this study
| from Columbia where they found that the "Featured" articles
| were mostly left-leaning:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300683
|
| The cause of this is debatable though - be it
| editorialisation, unconscious bias on behalf of people
| working on the algorithms or some common qualities to the
| websites that lean a certain way politically.
| quacked wrote:
| No, it's overt--I wish I could find this for you, but I saw
| a tweet from an apparently reputable source, it was a
| Google engineer saying "I'm so proud of the work our team
| has done to make it more difficult to find misinformation
| using Google". Naturally, "misinformation" means whatever
| the G-engineers want it to mean.
| temikus wrote:
| I used to work for GOOG and one thing I can attest to
| that bias is taken VERY seriously, so it's not quite that
| simple.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Yeah, I often wish you could search public Discords without
| joining them... it's where a huge percentage of information
| lives nowadays.
| lumost wrote:
| The comments seem to regularly reference the poor quality of
| content on crafting and other activities due to SEO spam and
| affiliate marketing. However I wonder if the root cause is a
| dearth of useful content _which is also not trying to sell you
| something_.
|
| Anecdotally the only "interesting" content I find while searching
| is either from the old internet or medium. I suspect that many
| content makers have moved on due to lack of audience.
| onion2k wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I've
| come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to blame.
| It's just that there isn't any good quality information on the
| web anymore. Google does its best, but it's working with crappy
| data. No one wants to spend time and effort making a great
| website about <insert literally any topic here> unless they're in
| it for the money. That means Google will only ever return
| blogspam, affiliate websites, and SEO-optimized ecommerce
| websites for practically any search now. This is in contrast to
| the good old days when people made websites for fun and searches
| actually found the high quality content that was out there. These
| days searches don't find quality content because, on the whole,
| it doesn't exist.
|
| This isn't universally true of course. There is some good
| content. But it's never what you're searching for; it's only good
| when you stumble across it, or you find a link on HN/Reddit/etc.
| It's just interesting rather than specifically good or useful.
|
| To an extent Google is to blame because AdSense and DoubleClick
| drove the shift from people publishing what they love to people
| publishing for dollars, but, and this is somewhat cynical I know,
| I genuinely wonder if we're actually on the brink of realising
| the web as a publishing platform _just isn 't that great_.
| visarga wrote:
| It's true that we're drowning in shit, but at the same time
| there has never been more useful content online. Google is just
| incapable of ranking it, or it doesn't suit their financial
| interests.
| EscargotCult wrote:
| > I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and
| I've come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to
| blame.
|
| I don't know about that, at least in the realm of programming-
| related searches. It's ridiculously frustrating when I'm
| searching for a standard library function and the top 3 results
| are geeksforgeeks, w3schools, and tutorialspoint, while the
| canonical documentation for the language is only 4th or 5th in
| the results.
| overkill28 wrote:
| Yeah much of the quality content for recipes and product
| reviews have moved to video, and two of the most popular
| platforms to host it on (Instagram and TikTok) are walled
| gardens.
| christophilus wrote:
| There is good content, it just never shows up in search
| results. So yes, I blame Google. Their ability to ban obvious
| spam / copycat content is laughably bad.
| o10449366 wrote:
| I disagree with the notion that good quality content just
| doesn't exist anymore. Quality content will always exist and
| more quality content exists now on the internet than ever
| before now that it's become more accessible to more people than
| ever, but Google, Facebook, and Amazon have made this content
| more difficult to discover because their algorithms reward
| gamification with profit, incentivizing the production of high-
| volume and low-quality but highly-optimized content.
|
| People passionate about sharing and learning will always be
| driven to produce quality content, even if they don't have an
| audience. The issue is that Google will never discover these
| people because they're only interested in discovering the best
| marketers on the internet.
| onion2k wrote:
| _People passionate about sharing and learning will always be
| driven to produce quality content, even if they don 't have
| an audience._
|
| Those people moved to content websites like YouTube and Udemy
| where they can cash in on what they do. They don't make
| websites any more, so Google doesn't find links to them.
| [deleted]
| Volker_W wrote:
| I wish there was a hackable search engine where you could e.g.
| write a python script that moves all websites down that have ads
| or appear in some list.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| This is an interesting idea! Would you be interested in doing
| with with: Wikipedia, reddit, stack overflow?
| Volker_W wrote:
| Yes
| rolph wrote:
| anything that results from ignoring a specified word count
| from the query terms.
|
| i.e. ignore 50% of the search query, go to the back of the
| line
| Volker_W wrote:
| ??? I cannot parse that sentence.
| rolph wrote:
| let suppose you ask google for "fresh baked bread"
|
| search results give many results for fresh, but none
| include baked or bread.
|
| this means less than 50% of the search terms are being
| honoured for first in line.
|
| so ---browser app, please send all results with less than
| 50% to the end of the line, until the results show 50% or
| more relevance.
| hk__2 wrote:
| You could achieve something similar with a browser extension
| like uBlacklist [1] with community-driven lists.
|
| [1]:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
| Volker_W wrote:
| I know of uBlacklist, and it's nice, but I think python
| scripting can be more powerful than a simple Blacklist.
| nikanj wrote:
| I agree with the author re: results being useless, but strongly
| disagree on the motivation.
|
| Google doesn't show crappy results to optimize adwords, blackhat
| SEO hackers force their crap onto the fromt page.
|
| The whole thread after the first tweet seems to assume Google is
| behind this, when in reality their failure comes from not
| successfully blocking the spammers
| redisman wrote:
| Oh poor Google. If only they had the resources to combat it
| nikanj wrote:
| " What would a paid version of Google Search results look
| like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible
| results and not be worried about generating revenue?"
|
| The author seems to genuinely believe Google is not
| combatting it, but trying to generate revenue via showing
| lame results
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Google generates revenue via ads (or analytics, which helps
| Google target ads down the line), which lame results often
| include.
|
| Downranking ad-supported websites in favour of ad-free one
| would cull a lot of spam and would be trivial to do, but
| yet Google isn't doing it. Curious right?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| The comments on both Twitter thread and here on HN goes something
| like "better have your own communities on Reddit and
| StackOverflow for your advanced queries". Sooo, we go back to
| Yahoo's grouping/directories that was the norm in 90's, eh? And
| Google bested that by going with their unique search algorithm in
| early 2000's. Hence next is going to be a reinvention of the
| wheel by DuckDuckGo I suppose.
| jeffbee wrote:
| DDG has literally zero search technology.
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| It's time for a(nother) revolution with search engines. The web
| is, more than ever, filled with affiliate links, retarded ads,
| and crappy sites that exist for the sole purpose of redirecting
| traffic. Most of us browse less 2% of the web. I miss Archie and
| Veronica. I'm probably complaining too much and totally out
| there, but I miss discovering insane intellectuals, incredibly
| unique and valuable content, rebellious nerds, everyday. (Yes,
| I'm asking a lot). There's many brilliant people writing high
| quality content online, but's too diluted, hidden, forgotten,
| invisible, lost. Sometimes browsing feels like changing channels
| on a tv. I feel trapped in a rotten loop. I need a search engine
| that will rock my world. Show me the real stuff - I know it's
| there. Rant over.
| kvhdude wrote:
| (circa 2012) i bootstrapped a company that connects people
| searching for information to providers of said information in a
| real time chatroom created for the duration of the query. This is
| to solve pogo sticking when the website information is too dense
| (say search for quitclaim deed without knowing too much about
| it). I failed to get enough users on both sides ('two sided
| market'). I am not from search/web space - my expertise is in
| building routers/switches in the 90s. I extended xmpp so that you
| could query from any chat box that can interwork with xmpp.
| StreamBright wrote:
| Or high quality translations. It is actually really funny how
| broken translations Google translate produce.
| short12 wrote:
| They wll show you 49 YouTube results though _facepalm_
| busymom0 wrote:
| I have observed this for the past 3 years now. For example if I
| search for "reddit best soup pots" and set the date filter to be
| within last year, it gives me results which are 7 to 9 years old.
| This used to work perfectly fine 3 years ago.
| amarento wrote:
| helllloooo ... does anyone from Google Search engineering,
| product management, and/or leadership have any comments on this
| ... if this is true, at this rate Google Search, the foundation
| of the whole Google / Alphabet enterprise, faces the existential
| threat of becoming irrelevant in the world of search
| mtgx wrote:
| aronpye wrote:
| How are these sites created? Are they hand crafted or
| automatically generated with something like GPT?
|
| From what I've seen, a lot of them just seem to copy-paste
| content from each other and sites like stack-overflow. I'm just
| curious whether a human does this or a machine programmed to game
| SEO.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| Based on number of search engines appearing on HN recently I
| suspect disruption is around the corner.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I'm surprised anybody needs a random guy on Twitter to tell them
| this...
| Shorel wrote:
| This is true.
|
| But, the important issue is that no one else is producing high
| quality search results either.
|
| When this changes, Google can kiss his profitable search engine
| goodbye. But this is not an easy engineering challenge.
| yashap wrote:
| Yeah, the results are absolute SEO garbage far too frequently.
| However, I'm not sure if this is Google "losing" to SEO ppl, or
| them more short-sightedly choosing results that are more likely
| to get them $$$ (i.e. SEO garbage pages tend to be packed full of
| Google Display ads, so Google gets paid by advertisers whenever
| you load them). I can easily seeing it being either, or maybe a
| bit of both.
|
| Example of terrible SEO results - I saw an interesting magic
| trick on Reddit, and someone in the comments mentioned they did
| it using "Key BDM Scissors". I tried searching all sorts of
| different things along the lines of "how do Key BDM Scissors
| work", but literally every single result was just online stores
| selling the scissors, with the word-for-word exact same blurb on
| each page. No matter how I tweaked the query, the results were
| identical, and in no way explained how the trick scissors worked.
| Useless.
| ssiddharth wrote:
| I apologise, profusely, if this is bad form to talk about a
| personal app.
|
| After years of getting steadily deterioring quality search
| results, and being thoroughly fed up with it, I built an iPhone
| app (other platforms soon) that removes spammy websites from your
| Google search results and lets you add your personal, permanent
| exclusions. Launched it to Reddit which seemed to love the idea:
| https://searchban.com
| flenserboy wrote:
| This has been true for over a decade. What's changed is how
| _obviously_ awful the results are.
| mrdrozdov wrote:
| I don't believe this (yet) and here's why.
|
| The claim is that Google search is producing worse results than
| in the past. The analysis is mostly anecdotal, and similar claims
| have been made before in a more concrete way. A prime example is
| "time to cook onions" giving incorrect results, covered in this
| slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-
| cook-onions-...
|
| What we need is to see is specific queries, the results returned,
| why they're wrong, and what they should be instead.
| mrdrozdov wrote:
| Some folks should post comparisons between Google and other
| sites such as:
|
| * https://bing.com
|
| * https://duckduckgo.com
|
| * https://you.com
|
| Maybe use the categories mentioned in the twitter thread such
| as health, travel, recipes, product reviews, etc.
| freeflight wrote:
| This has bothered me for a while now, even DDG is getting
| increasingly less useful.
|
| Google works if I want to buy something, that's about it. But
| finding any kind of news or actual information, particularly
| about incidents in the past, often feels impossible past some
| Wikipedia article.
|
| At least until narrowing down the date range for the search to
| escape most of that SEO that just adds whatever you search to
| make it top of the list.
|
| But even then, on certain topics going back years sometimes
| yields very weird results, where it feels like there was some
| kind of purge that only left certain outlets as "valid sources".
|
| Which in practice means the web has become very good at
| forgetting, as often it's near impossible to rediscover the
| article for some headline from a decade ago, it's just drowned
| out by all the SEO if it never made any big waves to begin with.
|
| Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle, that's what a lot of these
| results often seem to boil down to, and it's bluntly depressing.
| lettergram wrote:
| Interestingly enough, I've been frustrated by this for years
|
| https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/
|
| I used to manage hnprofile.com which utilized a patent I wrote to
| target this exact problem. Effectively, Google optimizes for ads
| (as pointed out) and optimizes to ensure you have to click
| multiple links. In reality, we want to answer peoples question(s)
| right off the bat, i.e. no ads.
|
| How do you make money then?
|
| Well, that's why I created this: https://insideropinion.com (or
| https://metacortex.me/)
|
| I think the only way to make profit off of it is by targeting
| corporations, where their revenue comes from maximizing
| productivity. I think it's possible to create a paid service
| ($5/month) for good search, but you'd still likely have to target
| companies.
|
| At least that's the best I could come up with.
| dpweb wrote:
| G could just offer an ad free tier included with Google One or
| something.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I agree that Google search is much less relevant to me than it
| was > 10 years ago. I love some Google products (GCP, YouTube
| Music, Play books/movies, and paid for no advertisements YouTube)
| but search is no longer one of them.
|
| That said, Google search works better for me if I use a private
| browser tab so the results don't depend on search history. I find
| DDG to be useful. One good use case for Google search in the
| logged in mode is when I am searching for work related things
| that I might want to influence what I see in YouTube, but I could
| simply search in YouTube.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| My two big beefs with the Google search results right now are
| these:
|
| 1) looks like low-quality linkfarms (like Taboola and that other
| one) have a big comeback, under the guise of higher-quality
| content, but Google doesn't give a fuck anymore since 2013 or so
| when they kept twiddling their algorithm to reduce all the SEO
| shit;
|
| 2) Google started using those low-quality linkfarms and listicles
| as sources for its "authoritative" onebox answers to your queries
| ("featured snippets", or "knowledge graph", or how they call it).
| You look for answers, you get those things front and center as if
| they are "the" answer. Don't look further. The so-called "deep
| web" seems no longer to be a thing.
|
| Well, there's also this little problem that for some queries you
| can easily get a first page of results with one or two organic
| results and the rest being ads, but that's peanuts compared to
| the first two.
| beebeepka wrote:
| No longer you say. That ship sailed more than a decade ago.
|
| I can't know for sure why that is but I'd bet on accurate results
| not making as much money. It's been like a brochure for a long
| time
| eddieh wrote:
| You're right. I've been complaining about Google results for
| more than a decade. Things keep getting worse. People used to
| dismiss my allegations, but I'm seeing more people noticing now
| days.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's been a long time coming, but it seems to have hit a
| critical point recently where it's so obviously bad that it's
| becoming very apparent.
| hashtones wrote:
| Too bad page rank became the bastard child of SEO bots instead of
| the novel, mathematically innovative tool it was.
| thebetrayer wrote:
| I noticed this too over the past couple of years. Google,
| Alphabet, and its shareholders don't care because they are still
| making so much money. I truly think it's by design to further
| ruin the state of the internet, just my opinion.
|
| Has anyone else noticed how many important websites, such as news
| organizations, have Taboola or similar ads? Like it's the only
| way to make any money online. Sensationalized paginated joke
| content with ads on every page.
|
| It's crazy how many websites are scrapping stackoverflow and
| getting on the first page of google results. Like, is it hard to
| check if identical content is on stackoverflow? lol it's not
| hard.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| honkycat wrote:
| A while ago I was doing research on guitar products.
|
| I did what I usually do, open the first 6-7 websites in google,
| look at the quality of the website, and made a call which one
| looked the most reputable.
|
| Only, here is the thing: All of the websites had different names.
| They had different domains. But, they were all very... similar.
| And then I started to compare them, and I came to a realization:
|
| They are the same website, with the same content, with a
| different domain and slightly tweaked front-end. SEO has hit so
| rock-bottom, it is no longer good enough to be number one. You
| have to be number 1 - 10.
|
| Similar story researching fishing equipment. Different domain.
| Same website. Same 10 products.
|
| In both cases, I found a discord server and asked the enthusiasts
| on there for advice.
| Traster wrote:
| This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so
| much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1
| spot means x% of market share, so a perfectly legitimate
| strategy is duplicate your entire hardware 5x, since now you're
| not 1/10th of the leading edge, you're 5/15 instead. Especially
| when the costs of spinning up a new instance are low, but
| you're going a lot via a small increase in share.
| vecter wrote:
| It's more profitable to run identical clones of the same
| strategy N times?
| mrtksn wrote:
| I'm often critical of Google's recent product quality but how
| much of the blame is really on Google?
|
| There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, everything
| is produced by professionals that are guided by analytics and
| optimisation.
|
| The social media is searchable by it's vendor but the content
| there is also optimised for metrics that often don't align well
| with qualities like accuracy.
|
| Only at places like HN or Reddit there's some organic content in
| form of commentary. HN is kind of special IMHO as its probably
| optimised for reach to a specific audience and pays for itself
| that way, therefore it can be optimised for quality through
| content moderation.
|
| The web is well optimised for monetisation. Unless someone finds
| a way to optimize it for some other qualities, I don't think that
| Google or any competition can do anything about it.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Indeed. I suspect that, despite the sensibilities of the
| average HN'er, Google's metrics tell them these garbage results
| are actually _satisfying_ the average user more than results
| that alternative weightings would produce.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, but their metrics probably suck.
|
| So do mine of course, and so do yours. Metric design is a
| hard, hard problem.
|
| I've come to the conclusion that I should keep secret metrics
| from people so that they aren't captured by Goodhardt's law,
| but apart from the ethical implications, I haven't managed to
| implement this anywhere yet.
| politician wrote:
| HN is a special kind of job board to steer people towards YC
| companies. You can tell this is the case because they regularly
| post job openings at YC companies that have comments disabled
| on the front page. Is this form of advertising bad? I don't
| think so, but it's good to recognize that there is a
| transaction here.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| Google is not really fighting the political version of search
| results either. One visually obvious comparison is the searches
| for "happy black family" vs "happy white family". With such
| clearly politically adjusted search results, how much do you
| trust your search for "is the coronavirus vaccine safe?"
| rightbyte wrote:
| What is the difference for you? I get "happy family" stock
| photos of either all white or all black skin color for both
| queries. The only difference is that there are like 10x more
| "happy black family" hits.
| donio wrote:
| > There are no longer "organic" content on the internet
|
| There is plenty of "organic" content, probably more than ever
| before. But there is also 100x more junk and Google is no
| longer good at surfacing the right stuff. Even for something as
| seemingly obvious as github issues it will often prefer
| spammified versions of the same.
| anonymous9023u wrote:
| > spammified versions of the same
|
| Seriously. What's up with these websites that are copies of
| Github/stackoverflow with a different UI? Cash grab for ad
| pennies?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Everything is measured and optimised by some simple metrics
| like profit, growth, reach or fame as far as I am aware.
|
| Can you give some examples of great, contemporary organic
| content that Google fails to surface?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| > There are no longer "organic" content on the internet...
|
| There are billions of people on the internet. The likelihood
| that this is true is miniscule. Sure, it's probably smaller
| than it used to be, seeing as most people not in it for some
| commercial reason use silos to publish instead of their own
| websites, but if it looks like there's no organic results
| anymore, it's probably because your search engine isn't ranking
| organic results, because the websites are out there.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It is an ironic if not sad fact of this global system. It's
| become its own metric with all the bias and larsen you can
| think of.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > There are no longer "organic" content on the internet,
| everything is produced by professionals that are guided by
| analytics and optimisation.
|
| Then you detect commercial content and downrank it. Ads or the
| aforementioned analytics should be included in ranking signals
| to prioritize websites without them.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| And then the partner manager raises hell about how you
| downranked their client, and it gets escalated, two VP's
| enter a room, one VP leaves and the penalty is quietly
| removed.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Of course, for such a search engine to be viable the only
| "partners" need to be the paying users.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I ditched google (including my alphabet stock) a few years ago.
|
| They're become so big and bloated they think they know better
| which is death to innovation.
|
| DDG is my default search engine one every device and has been for
| ages.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Also, how can a search category be SEO'd into ruin? Isn't
| search engine optimization supposed to produce "better results"?_
|
| No, SEO is supposed to get your particular website higher up in
| the rankings, regardless of whether or not the results are better
| for users.
|
| "SEO" is just a nice marketing term for "figure out how the
| search engine works and trick it into listing your site higher".
| It's learning what metrics a search engine prioritizes, and then
| playing to those metrics.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I recently tried to find some reviews for a computer I was
| considering purchasing. A "review" from this website was on the
| first page:
|
| https://ecomputertips.com/
|
| This is an example of what the reviews read like:
|
| >As a desktop manufacturer Dell as an international company has
| established itself very well in this competitive market of
| digital gadgets. Check out best Dell desktop computers for
| specific requirements and beginner's guide. In this 21st century,
| a computer has become a very necessary product to everybody's day
| to day life.
|
| This is what Google thinks is a front-page relevant search
| result.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Basically nowadays Google shows me Ads links on top, bunch of
| medium or content-grabber sites (think a website full of blogs
| from other blog sites).
| londons_explore wrote:
| Is there good evidence that Google isn't doing a good job of
| finding content anymore, or that good content _doesn 't exist on
| the public internet_ anymore?
|
| Google is only doing a bad job if what you're looking for exists
| but can't be found. I have a feeling that for many searches, what
| you're looking for simply doesn't exist anymore.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| And as long as Google is in the business of both search and
| advertising, that will not change.
|
| They actually are not in the business of search, though -- at
| least not anymore. Search is just the hook to show the ads.
|
| As long as the incentives are the way they are, things will not
| change and will get worse from a search quality perspective.
| sixothree wrote:
| So the results listed higher all use google as advertiser?
| alphabetting wrote:
| >And as long as Google is in the business of both search and
| advertising, that will not change.
|
| This has always been the case and general sentiment hasn't
| always been that search was bad. The only way they wouldn't be
| in search and advertising is if they charged for search,
| because ads pay for it. They know it is in their best interest
| to keep search results good so that people will keep using them
| and see ads. They seem to be losing the battle right now
| against SEO and marketing firms.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think this hits the head on tbe nail - its not a technical
| problem, its all about insentive
| wmu wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is also not good. Last week I switched to Bing and its
| results are surprisingly good.
| throaway6942 wrote:
| for opinions like product reviews or entertainment I usually
| append my search query with 'reddit'
| pastelsky wrote:
| It's impossible to get accurate information about travel, hotels,
| locations. Results are often filled with listicle crap that each
| copy each other and contain outdated pop content.
|
| I've become so used to suffixing these queries with "forum" or
| "reddit" to get articles written by real humans.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| One useful feature I use before visiting new places is sorting
| Google Maps reviews and photos by date. I've found Google Maps
| comments more accurate than TripAdvisor or Airbnb.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Exactly my experience this year. For products I have to watch
| so many videos. Last year it was easier and all reading.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| This! Had a printer bug and all results where like top 3 ways
| to share a printer
| dleslie wrote:
| You ought to try using duck duck go. It's all about being a
| portal to other search services.
|
| Ie, searching for `foo` on reddit is: "!r foo"
| sefrost wrote:
| The problem with that is it redirects you to the Reddit
| search page, which isn't great. It's much better for me to
| use "site:reddit.com [query]" on DDG than to use the !r.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| Duck Duck Go is great at naive searches, though having
| context into why I'm searching for something can be helpful
| too.
|
| I couldn't make the switch over for my work while
| programming.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Seems like we need a search engine for trusted sites, something
| like MetaCrawler that searches more specialized search engines.
| There are some sites I trust for travel information. There are
| other sites I trust for reviews of consumer products and others
| for movies.
| baxuz wrote:
| I've made a custom search in Chrome with the "r" hotkey, that
| searches Reddit in the past year. Sites are also starting to
| just fake the dates so I'm getting really old results on
| regular. This takes care of both:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Areddit.com&tbs=qdr:y
| goodells wrote:
| Even appending "reddit" is often inadequate, as the algorithm
| seems to artificially limit one search result item (potentially
| with some children under it, but unrelated threads, 2-3 more
| items) per host. So it becomes necessary to use
| "site:www.reddit.com" to get more than a few non-sucky results.
| sidibe wrote:
| Reddit is a great place to get recommended the most expensive
| stuff. 99% of the time the best sellers on Amazon work great
| for me, but if I look at Reddit they insist only a couple very
| expensive brands are worth owning in any category of item. It's
| crazy and sometimes I even fall for it. Can't tell if it's
| marketing or if people very into their hobbies become obsessed
| with tiny differences.
| neuronic wrote:
| Reddit is full of subversive marketing. The real communities
| discussing their passions are absolutely exploited by
| "undercover" PR agencies.
| [deleted]
| rowanajmarshall wrote:
| I find that's true in specialised subs, but not wider ones.
| Like, if you're looking for a good coffee grinder, r/coffee
| will only recommend the top-end stuff, but if you search in
| something r/AskReddit you get more 'approachable' results.
| kristofferR wrote:
| They are correct for coffee grinders though, it's almost
| pointless to cheap out of them, you negate all the benefits
| of grinding it yourself when you buy a subpar non-burr
| grinder that doesn't produce a consistent grain size.
|
| Buying a blade grinder is like buying a hammer with a
| spongy face.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Buying a blade grinder is a waste of money, but burr
| grinders range from $50 to $500 and while there is a
| significant quality difference, it can be reasonable to
| buy one at the cheaper end.
| raegis wrote:
| You can do OK with a blade grinder. I used to have one
| from Target, and I would grind in two or three stages,
| stirring the grounds with my finger (!) in between to get
| more consistent grinds.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Getting a bur grinder now
| raegis wrote:
| I disagree. The most common recommendation is the $150
| Baratza Encore, which is about correct for
| price/performance on the low end. The manufacturer sells
| cheap replacement parts for it, which is a massive
| convenience. They also sell cheaper refurbished grinders
| occasionally. I've had mine for 5-6 years and expect it to
| last much longer. Better electric grinders start at
| hundreds of dollars more (in the U.S. market).
| deelowe wrote:
| I had no idea others have begun resorting to this as well these
| days. My assumption was that I had just somehow gotten
| worse/impatient at researching things or that reddit was just a
| more reliable source these days. Thinking back, may search
| quality has just gotten wrose.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A funny thing is that the spammers are adapting to this. I
| found a bunch of websites that all had "reddit" in the title a
| while back, because that is something people add to filter out
| the spam.
|
| https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/reddit-spam.png
| daxuak wrote:
| I use `site:reddit.com` instead of `inurl:...` or just
| reddit.
| thangalin wrote:
| A combination that works well for product recommendations:
| site:reddit.com inurl:bifl
| chana_masala wrote:
| What does inurl:bifl do?
| derimagia wrote:
| Searches for "bifl" within the URL. As others have said
| though, I find it easier to only use "site:". Like
| "site:reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife"
| chana_masala wrote:
| Ah I see, I didn't realize what bifl means. That's
| helpful, thanks!
| brewmarche wrote:
| You can also do `site:reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife`
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Why bifl? What's for?
| [deleted]
| Dachande663 wrote:
| Buy It For Life. Subreddit aimed at buying once vs the
| modern buy cheap, buy twice.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| It's unfortunately a lot of survivor bias, but I like
| looking at photos of turn of the century items.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| You can just use a single "site" parameter in this case:
| site:reddit.com/r/bifl
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Serious question:
|
| Why don't you go straight to reddit, and search there?
| skeletal88 wrote:
| At reddit they decided that you should not have to option
| to restrict your search to a specific subreddit anymore.
| Why they did that? It's a terrible idea!
| detaro wrote:
| For me reddit defaults to "search in current subreddit",
| with a link to "Show results from all of Reddit" at the
| top?
| vxNsr wrote:
| Bec Reddit search itself is worse than google
| ncann wrote:
| Worse than Google is putting it lightly... It's more or
| less useless.
| drumhead wrote:
| reddit search is awful and has been since the beginning.
| Im hoping they spend some of the money theyve raised on
| improving that as a priority.
| tomrod wrote:
| They seem to be fixated instead on forcing a terrible UI
| front end and ... not much else.
|
| Maybe some moderator tool updates after a decade that
| were also user hostile.
| richardsocher wrote:
| If you get an account on you.com you can set that
| preference once and your preferred sites will always come
| up higher.
| umvi wrote:
| Companies are adapting to this too - marketers are
| increasingly purchasing or grooming high-rep accounts for
| astroturfing select subreddits related to company products
| jcfrei wrote:
| Let's hope reddit users catch on to this and downvote
| such posts / comments.
| not2b wrote:
| Suppose a Google competitor emerged that produced wonderful
| results in every category. Within a week, tens of thousands of
| SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the
| magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the
| top of the rankings. The wonderful results would quickly degrade,
| and it's unclear as to whether this new small company would have
| the resources to keep up.
| [deleted]
| daxuak wrote:
| I wonder if there's a project like sponsorblock, for google
| search instead of youtube. Basically a centralized community-
| driven database that blacklists certain urls (timestamps for
| yt) based on submission & vote. It would be much less of a
| clear cut than youtube's case, though.
|
| I personally just append `wiki` or `reddit` to queries. Crappy
| but kinda works.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It doesn't have to be community based. The search engine
| could be paid and employ actual people to sift through the
| garbage and vet domains/brands/etc before they are added to
| the index.
|
| The problem with Google is that their business model is to
| show you ads (either on their own website or third-party
| websites embedding Google ads/analytics) and not to provide
| you quality search results, therefore they have no incentive
| to combat even the most obvious SEO spam (see Pinterest &
| image search for an example).
| not2b wrote:
| That was the original Yahoo business model. It doesn't
| scale. You can't hire enough human beings to curate the
| entire web, and if you try to automate it, then the SEO
| spammers can game the automation.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You can enforce penalties (bans for the entire
| brand/domain/etc) to deter gaming the system, which
| should take some pressure off the humans which can then
| focus on the top issues reported by end-users.
|
| It won't be perfect, but at least Pinterest wouldn't be
| polluting image search for years for example.
| wyre wrote:
| If TikTok has the ability to human moderators then I
| don't understand how a search engine couldn't get away
| with the same thing.
| keewee7 wrote:
| The Google competitors should just permaban all sites that
| contain affiliate links. That will instantly solve 90% of the
| problem.
|
| The list of affiliate marketing sites might need to be human
| curated (just like SponsorBlock) to avoid false positives.
| wyre wrote:
| This will block sites like OutdoorGearLab which has great
| content and trustworthy reviews. I think doing a check on the
| copy on the SEO website and comparing it to other websites
| might do the trick though.
| Retric wrote:
| SEO isn't magic. Google decided to deprioritize Wikipedia for
| example which noticeably degraded results. Where major websites
| show up has nothing to do with SEO and simply relates to what
| they think is important.
| endisneigh wrote:
| How do you know Google is deprioritizing Wikipedia?
| Retric wrote:
| It stopped showing up on the same searches.
| endisneigh wrote:
| That doesn't mean Google has deprioritized Wikipedia
| specifically.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Somehow humans are very good at telling apart SEO crap from
| legitimate content even without understanding the content or
| the language itself - SEO crap has some common elements such
| as ads, affiliate links, a certain page layout, etc.
|
| I remember using an open-source ML model (trained on Buzzfeed
| article titles) to detect YouTube clickbait based on titles
| and it worked brilliantly, and that was just downloading some
| code on GitHub and running it as-is. I'm sure the same could
| be applied to search results and you could achieve much
| better quality if you actually put some effort into it.
|
| I very much doubt this is some kind of hard problem as
| opposed to Google just giving up because their business model
| doesn't actually incentivize good search results.
| not2b wrote:
| The sites are serving Google a different version of the
| page than they serve the rest of us.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This isn't a new problem and I'm pretty sure Google has
| countermeasures for that, and even if they didn't, it
| doesn't look like an unsolvable problem - automation can
| help but having a "report" feature on the search results
| page or literally paying real people (using real
| browsers) to review results can work and is virtually
| bulletproof.
| Volker_W wrote:
| > I remember using an open-source ML model (trained on
| Buzzfeed article titles) to detect YouTube clickbait based
| on titles
|
| Link to the Repo please?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| https://github.com/peterldowns/clickbait-classifier
| Volker_W wrote:
| Thank you very much
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| It is all about incentives isn't it? Google gave all the
| power to these SEO websites by making it difficult to get
| your content listed as a search result on the first page.
|
| Google could start incentivizing high quality unique content
| and websites from domain experts, but they have decided they
| can't make as much money off of independent publishers as
| they can from marketing/content farms.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Suppose a dozen Google competitors emerged that produced
| wonderful, but slightly different results in every category.
|
| They all use different algorithms, so the SEO specialists can't
| game them all.
|
| Making crappy sites would maybe no longer be worth it.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Doman-Specific Search Engines is a great idea. I already use
| PriceRunner to find products I need.
| tobr wrote:
| What if the search index was much more manually curated? For
| example, say that you could create a custom search index
| relevant to your field of expertise, and that other users would
| rank their results to let the engine know which indices are
| actually good and for which types of queries. You could still
| game it, but probably not with traditional SEO techniques.
| notriddle wrote:
| > What if the search index was much more manually curated?
|
| Google would need to not have a monopoly if they wanted to do
| that. Otherwise, they would be accused of anti-competitive
| practices (since their policies would be aligned with their
| policies in other services, they would rarely ban
| themselves).
| tobr wrote:
| Yeah this is in the context of how a competitor could avoid
| running into the same problems.
| ByteJockey wrote:
| > Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be
| on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how
| to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings.
|
| An algorithm could punish things inherent to SEO optimized
| sites (ads and tracking). Removing the ability to passively
| generate money without providing useful content is the key.
|
| Of the top of my head, a system like the following would be a
| pretty good start:
|
| Scale of 0 to 100 (closer to 100 being higher up on the
| results).
|
| You are penalized for the following:
|
| - subtract 10 points for any ad, using ublock origin's list as
| a good starting point (this stacks, it's 10 points off for each
| link)
|
| - subtract 100 points for google tag manager
|
| - subtract 100 points for the facebook like button
|
| - ... etc for each of the major tracking scripts
|
| This would obviously need to be updated as ad-tech evolves, but
| it would cut out 90% of the current SEO spam.
|
| Can google do this? No, they have a conflict of interest around
| placing ads. Somebody else, however, can absolutely do this.
| cge wrote:
| You can unfortunately see this with DuckDuckGo: people are
| clearly targeting more than just Google. Python results, for
| example, are so infested by SEO-specialist spam that searching
| for standard library functions will return spam above the
| actual standard library documentation, particularly for more
| popular functions. Searching for "python datetime.now" or
| "python json.loads" will both return spam above documentation.
| This problem heavily impacts anything 'data scientist' spammers
| see as important as well; it's actually worse on DDG than
| Google.
|
| What's frustrating is that these often seem to be a handful of
| domains, like 'geeksforgeeks' and 'towardsdatascience'; for a
| while, of course, there was also the "gitmemory" spammer who
| seemed to be able to push out Github results on both DDG and
| Google. Yet I think Google removed reporting and blacklisting
| domains from searches long ago, and I think DDG never had it,
| leaving the only option for removing them client-side scripts
| and extensions that work poorly. Likewise, no search engine
| appears to be manually blacklisting them. Yet as you point out,
| if one did, then the spammers would probably just move to using
| many domains, which would probably be worse.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Domain age & quantity/breadth of content should be taken into
| account in ranking.
|
| A fresh domain that suddenly has a ton of content should be
| viewed with suspicion and downranked as it's likely a spammer
| (copying GitHub/Stackoverflow/official docs).
|
| Legitimate sites that are starting out shouldn't be affected
| as they are unlikely to have a ton of content from the start.
|
| Of course, this isn't perfect, but it should take care of the
| majority of spam copycat sites.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Yeah, it's an arms race. That's the business you enter into
| when you decide to run a commercial search engine.
|
| To me it seems to be compelling evidence that search engines
| are _not_ a viable way to organize information on the web, but
| that 's a different topic.
| rolph wrote:
| i remember a time when teacher would say form a line, and there
| would be a chaos of who was getting there first.
|
| This was met with a second instruction, the first five people
| in line, move to the back of the line, and last five in line
| move to the front.
|
| it became a trial and error, with the usual kids jostling for
| position now wanting to be, at the back of the line, then in
| the middle of the line, hunting for the condition that creates
| pole position.
|
| the idea that it was the personalities and the value sets, not
| the position on the line, that triggered the condition,
| seemingly was too abstract to be deduced. keep in mind this was
| grade 2.
|
| so may the browser filter the first to the nth SEO spammers in
| the query results be sent somewhere away from the front of the
| line until a match for query terms occurs.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be
| on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how
| to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings.
|
| The Google competitor will have a human nuke their entire
| domain or business (based on a manual index of banned
| products/brands) from the search results forever, or have by
| default a bias against ad-filled websites which would remove
| any commercial incentive for those websites to exist in the
| first place.
| justaguy37 wrote:
| I hope they'd have a human complaints department too, for
| when (a real) business is upset
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Complaints need to require a small refundable fee to deter
| spam.
| ncann wrote:
| That kind of manual intervention doesn't scale though. The
| only way it can work is to have community-curated lists of
| bad domains, similar to adblock lists, that users can upload
| to personalize their search result.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Somehow a distributed community of unpaid volunteers
| manages to keep the entire advertising industry (where
| billions are at stake) at bay by curating adblock lists.
| I'm sure a company can achieve the same. It will never be
| 100% perfect, but it will surely be better than what we
| have now.
|
| But yes, supporting community-supplied adblock-style lists
| would be a start, and Google isn't even doing _that_.
| wumpus wrote:
| Congratulations, you just invented Blekko! Which in turn
| was inspired by the success of DMOZ.
|
| Maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The efficacy of SEO is largely dependent on a search
| monoculture. They only need to optimize for one set of unknown
| rules, and that's something that is relatively easy to do well
| with simple machine learning tools.
|
| Real competition in search is probably the best way of reigning
| in the SEO sector.
| scaredofgoogle wrote:
| They have us - that is, the wider internet - (by the **s) so why
| would they do anything other than return the most profitable
| results?
|
| Wouldn't you do the same thing? (don't forget to toss billion-
| dollar scraps to competitors, to head off monopoly restrictions).
| neuronic wrote:
| I have recently researched a laundry machine. No chance - if you
| dont know where to ask or look you will be bombarded with fake
| marketing crap and affiliate cancer.
| gitgrump wrote:
| [deleted]
| ra-mos wrote:
| Could the issues be less presumptuous about googles business, and
| more technical? E.g the incorporation of NLP model(s) in search
| that don't perform well in the wild?
|
| Curious about their query parsing as well. I can't recall exact
| queries, but I had instances where scrambled typos (but still
| obvious words to me) broke the results all together & no
| suggested fixes.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Easy to blame some "suit" but when the rubber meets the road,
| Googlers want their RSUs to be valuable maybe more than any other
| group. Zero incentive to put user experience first at any level
| of the organization.
| ghoomketu wrote:
| A thread like this happens every month now and the main point of
| discussion always comes to how companies like Pinterest, Quora,
| Stackoverflow clones, etc are openly gaming the search engine and
| making results shit (1)
|
| I think first time I read this was like 5 years ago yet Google is
| doing absolutely nothing about it and these sites still dominate
| the results by gaming whatever metrics Google is using to rank
| them.
|
| (1)
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| deadalus wrote:
| Yandex is the best when it comes to reverse image search, it
| almost matches Pimeyes.
|
| Bing is the best when it comes to video search.
|
| Brave is great when searching for controversial or censored
| topics.
| fart32 wrote:
| Google is best for searching Russian sites automatically (and
| very poorly) translated to my language that hijack
| history.back(). I'm getting those a lot lately.
| [deleted]
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I was wondering for a while if SEO has gotten so good, or its
| Google that's gone to this - and I have a feeling that it's the
| latter.
|
| Search for COVID rules for entry to moldova - for me and my
| friends the official website was like page 10 of search. Search
| for various government services, and most of the time top result
| is some scam.
|
| This is inexcusable - is is to hard to prioritise official
| government websites? They could hire two dudes per country to
| index them all by hand and they'd be done in a couple weeks.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Tip: add NHS or CDC to the end of any health search to get better
| results from the NHS or CDC instead of however many pages of
| grifter sites.
| [deleted]
| ape4 wrote:
| But shouldn't google's page rank find those pages most
| reputable and list them first?
| jf wrote:
| I also recommend buying a paper copy of the Family Medical
| Guide by the American Medical Association
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Or go to NHS official website and search there? What's the
| point of google in this case?
| fnord123 wrote:
| Theres no point. But people want to search using their url
| bar. People don't want to change their default search from
| Google. I use DDG and !nhs so I'm with you.
| truculent wrote:
| Another problem with google search is that it's no longer
| something that you can become good at. Yes, the queries may have
| improved on some KPIs (although the link here would suggest
| otherwise), but you more or less get what you're given. It's very
| difficult to tweak your query to get better, or more specific,
| results.
| Cwizard wrote:
| Something I have noticed lately is that when searching for
| technical information I often get result near the top of my
| search that are crappy skins of StackOverflow, usually with many
| more ads. Has anyone else noticed this too?
| effable wrote:
| Yes, I have definitely experienced this too. I also sometimes
| get results from websites that seem to be reskins of github
| (usually issues and pull requests).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree with this 100%, and could totally admit that I have a
| giant deficit of imagination, but I still have a huge problem
| imagining how a company could disrupt Google search at this point
| (unless that other company is Amazon, Microsoft or Apple, i.e.
| another company with gigantic resources).
|
| The costs of setting up a comparable search engine these days
| must run in the multi-billions. The Internet is huge now, so your
| crawling and indexing costs would be giant. Not to mention that
| it can actually be _hard_ to crawl many sites that attempt to
| restrict indexing to "the big boys" of Google, Bing and a couple
| others. Also, Google controls the primary on-ramp of Android and
| Chrome. They also control the primary ad networks that make
| running a search engine profitable.
|
| I compare it to Microsoft. Nobody really ever "disrupted"
| Microsoft in the desktop OS space - they still have a greater
| than 75% market share. The thing that changed, of course, is that
| the "desktop operating space" as a category became much less
| important with the rise of mobile, and Microsoft famously lost
| that OS battle. So my point is that I find it hard to see Google
| being "disrupted" when it comes to the "Internet search market" -
| the only thing I really see being possible is if some other
| technology came along and superseded "Internet search" as a
| category.
| visarga wrote:
| > the only thing I really see being possible is if some other
| technology came along and superseded "Internet search" as a
| category.
|
| Free natural language search, based on dialogue. A cross
| between GPT-3 and web search.
| (https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving-
| la...)
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Search doesn't really that much anymore - not even to Google -
| their monopoly on advertisement brokerage does though ...
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| SEO is so annoying, I recently searched "Is XYZ healthy?", then
| just some blogs/lifestyle magazines/whatever showed up, just
| written in an absolutely verbose manner. I would have expected
| Yes/No, not 4 paragraphs introduction, some about the advantages,
| some about the disadvantages and so on.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| try and use scholar.google.com to find primary literature
| about... well, anything.
|
| for example: xyz meta-analysis will return meta studies that
| summarize other studies about xyz
|
| sadly most studies are behind paywalls and only the abstract is
| visible, but just copy and paste the DOI into sci hub to get
| the full text
| topicseed wrote:
| SEOs don't write all of that for fun. They write it because it
| ranks well, because Google seems to favor this verbose blurby
| content.
|
| The second Google clearly favors shorter answers, SEOs will
| publish just that.
|
| SEOs go where the wind blows.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I recently searched "Is XYZ healthy?",_
|
| I wouldn't expect that to work any better than the other
| example someone quoted above, where a search for "nice
| restaurants" returned restaurants in Nice. Put some more
| thought into your queries. Like most tools, what you get out of
| a search engine is largely a reflection of what you put into
| it.
| rchaves wrote:
| Yes it had been getting worse, but I think there is a limit to
| "find relevant results" anyway, Google is good for objective
| answers, but for more complex stuff, there is an more and more
| answers, the web nowadays is overwhelming
|
| At some point it starts reaching personal preferences as well,
| and just tracking me like Google does is not good enough for
| those filters, not to mention privacy concerns
|
| For example, many many times it happens that I read an awesome
| article about a subject, then weeks later I try to google it back
| to show to a friend, and I simply can't find it, because there is
| a gazillion other articles about the same topic
|
| That's why I'm building a custom search engine, where you index
| whatever you want, your bookmarks, your Twitter likes, building
| your own brain's search engine
|
| Stay tuned!
| Volker_W wrote:
| > That's why I'm building a custom search engine, where you
| index whatever you want, your bookmarks, your Twitter likes,
| building your own brain's search engine
|
| Link to the Repo please?
| tptacek wrote:
| Google has never, ever produced high quality search results for
| medical questions. The jokes about this are about as stale as the
| ones about airline food.
| redisman wrote:
| Wouldn't you need general AI for actually useful medical
| questions ?
| ummonk wrote:
| I suspect these ad-ridden junk sites are optimizing more for
| Google than for Bing, as I tend to run into them more if I try to
| check Google's results instead of relying on Duck Duck Go.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Google and their shareholders are addicted to ad money.
| Personally speaking I think this is more harmful to society than
| cigarettes.
|
| I hope we normalize this and start fighting back. Ads first
| destroyed youtube, google, and I'm sure a bunch of other products
| I am not thinking about.
|
| Enough is enough, and we need to decouple morality from content
| and edge back to the anti censorship wild west mentality the
| internet championed for so long.
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| To what extent is this a supply side problem? What's the
| counterexample high quality health website that Google should
| have included?
|
| Part of the problem is surely how Google's ad model influences
| the success or failure of various kinds of websites, but a deeper
| problem seems to me how anybody qualified to share medical
| information freely would be acting against their own interest.
| pimterry wrote:
| I switched from Google to https://kagi.com recently, I've found
| them a significant improvement in search result quality so far!
|
| Right now they're free with a waiting list, but the long-term
| plan is to charge for access - I'm personally hopeful that that's
| a business model far less likely to incentivize results quality,
| without falling into this ad trap.
| cmurf wrote:
| Not news, it's been getting shitty for awhile to the point most
| of my searching uses "" to force those keywords to show up. And
| now I'm regularly getting results in which the page doesn't
| contain required keywords. Super aggravating.
| AviationAtom wrote:
| Freskis wrote:
| Can I defend Google here?
|
| What are they supposed to do? The "Internet" as an information
| resource is dead. All new topical information has moved to walled
| gardens such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Discord,
| Reddit etc, and mobile apps. The open websites such as Wikipedia,
| StackOverflow etc dominate everything else. Websites are legacy
| objects which no-one visits anymore, and they have therefore
| raced to the bottom to earn scraps of revenue. This is a
| structural problem that Google cannot fix. Google itself is
| doomed on the long-term unless it can index new relevant content.
| mybrid wrote:
| Yahoo is the same as it always was, but these days it produces
| better results than Google.
|
| Bing is okay but getting worse over time.
|
| Google image search is the worst. Bing is marginal but at least
| useful.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Then there's websites like Scribd, SlideShare, and pdf hosting
| websites which require accounts or subscriptions have hijacked
| many results. This has happened even if the original pdfs are
| still at the source.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Google have found a sweet spot where their search results are
| almost correct but still insufficient.
|
| That "near-correctness" ensures you don't lose hope of finding
| what you are looking for, so you keep reading result after
| result. And most of those sites are conveniently loaded with ads,
| sold by guess which company - Google!
|
| Eventually, pagerank cashes out, and you find what you are
| looking for. You receive a much needed endorphin kick, and you go
| on with your day. Rinse and repeat.
| hintymad wrote:
| I grew up with the amazing stories about Google engineers, and I
| wish Google will not repeat the history of companies declining
| gradually then collapsing suddenly, as it is such a revolutionary
| company not just for its product but also for its amazing
| contribution to the technology. The sad thing is that I'm seeing
| more and more cracks in this great company.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Is there some special significance to this individual? There
| doesn't seem to anything more to this than their personal
| anecdotal experience and opinion.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| Nope, just an excuse for HN big-tech shitposters to crawl out
| and post their own anecdotes and theories without any link to a
| proper research/study with concrete data.
| [deleted]
| 99_00 wrote:
| On the one hand, I'm sad that other people are realizing this
| because it means they can fix make some better before I can.
|
| On the other hand I probably don't have the ability to make
| something better so it's good that someone will come up with a
| solution I can use.
| dimgl wrote:
| I'm having issues with Google lately too. Every time I look up
| some piece of code because I want to view documentation related
| to it, all I get are these example websites that crawl open
| source pages and index them with SEO optimized queries. Something
| like hotexamples.com and garbage like that. All of the sudden
| they're #1 on Google and provide little to no value. It used to
| be all of the #1 pages were stackoverflow.com or Reddit and the
| like, which always had really good discussions on these snippets
| of code.
|
| Edit: in fact, it's gotten so bad that I've stopped using Google
| for search results and now I go directly to Reddit or Stack
| Overflow and do my searches there. Which is UNREAL. I don't mind
| it, but I can't believe how bad it's gotten.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Certainly Google Images has taken a major dip in quality. I am
| unable to find images that I could even find a few months ago,
| and the number of results is shrinking for identical queries. On
| top of that, they are rolling out an absolutely HORRIBLE
| interface for image search on mobile.
|
| Google is just in "big company" mode where the company is just so
| vast that it is nearly impossible to guarantee a consistent
| product quality. It will continue to offer good salaries and nice
| perks, but the innovation has stopped, and the company is doomed
| to inevitably slowly stagnate and fail.
| j45 wrote:
| Google is likely inclined to return higher quality ad results,
| than high quality search results.
|
| Clicking on one makes them money, the other does not.
|
| Look at the percentage of the initial search result screen that
| is devoted to ads vs organic results.
| [deleted]
| thedailymail wrote:
| "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search
| engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business
| model do not always correspond to providing quality search to
| users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top
| results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use
| Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail
| the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell
| phone while driving. This search result came up first because of
| its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an
| approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is
| clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing
| cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that
| our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of
| reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83],
| we expect that advertising funded search engines will be
| inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs
| of the consumers."
|
| The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,
| Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
| http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
| aaron695 wrote:
| tester756 wrote:
| how do you people remember the quality of Google years ago?
|
| If somebody asked me whether Google's quality was/better 10 5 3 2
| years ago then I'd have no idea despite using it daily shitton of
| times
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search
|
| I have the distinct impression that engineers haven't been
| responsible for Google Search for a long, long time, having been
| supplanted by biased activists.
| u2077 wrote:
| I've noticed they started to limit search length, my search was
| too long and they removed small words like "of" and "the. I also
| saw a message somewhere along the lines of "to show you the best
| quality results, we limited this search to two pages"
|
| Google is only good for finding stuff you already know exists.
| What ever happened to exploring the web?
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| I agree, the results are too heavily influenced by domains like
| reddit, Pinterest, Quora.
|
| The next thing I have realized, if I am looking for something
| about a topic or a person and there are current events heavily in
| the media on the person or the issue, it's almost impossible to
| get something useful or even related.
|
| Stack overflow results are sometimes replaced by less useful
| GitHub links.
|
| Then , job search results are pretty bad too , same for shopping
| items.
|
| It seems like media outlets and the big traffic domains get
| preferential treatment.
|
| And this is just for English, God knows how bad this will be in
| other languages.
| turrini wrote:
| For better search results, I always use google in verbatim mode
| coupled with this TamperMonkey script to block scrappers and
| other stuff:
|
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
| visarga wrote:
| Google, why are you slacking off search and also the Google
| Assistant? It feels like a rerun of the 2003-2010 period in
| Microsoft.
|
| Web search is getting worse, people complain, problems persist. I
| thought your mission was to organise the information and make it
| useful.
|
| And the Assistant is just as dumb as years ago, while NLP has
| been progressing leaps and bounds in the last 2-3 years. Where's
| the progress? Are you aware speech is going to dominate direct
| web search?
| 14 wrote:
| Any time I search how to repair X on my car I get 10 sites of
| places selling the part but none of the forums discussing how to
| do the repair. Back in the day it was not like this. Very sad and
| I have now learned to basically ignore the first set of results
| and scroll past them.
| emptybottle wrote:
| If you haven't switched your default search to duck duck go yet I
| highly recommend doing so.
|
| As a user of DDG for years now rarely does searching with !g give
| better results.
|
| At this point its the opposite. The DDG first page results aren't
| all ads above the fold.
| csours wrote:
| Web search is an adversarial context. Just try to list the things
| a search engine provider has to fight against, then try to define
| some criteria for each of those things that more than 50% of the
| population will agree upon.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is due to Google or that the rest of
| the web (the crappy parts at least) has figured out the algorithm
| sufficiently to degrade its performance overall?
| albertopv wrote:
| When looking for gift I go straight to Amazon. For travel
| booking.com, for info is wikipedia and so on. I basically avoid
| google as much as possible.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| It's not just about high quality search results. It is also about
| wanton manipulation of societal narratives, which ultimately is
| manipulation of elections. For example, YouTube recently started
| taking down videos of Joe Rogan's interview of Dr. Robert Malone.
| One of the concepts Malone brought up is 'mass formation
| psychosis', which has resulted in many people searching for that
| phrase. Google has a dystopian message at the top of their search
| results that suggests they are manipulating the search results or
| in the least using such messages to undermine the legitimacy of
| certain content
| (https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1477403661701689352).
| This is not how a search indexer should be operating and it is
| not the basis for open societies where you can freely exchange
| ideas on an even playing field.
| cracker_jacks wrote:
| Can someone provide some explicit search queries so we can see
| the bad examples? Lots of criticism is being doled out in that
| thread without an actual example to see for myself.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Try "best kitchen knife set" and compare it to "best kitchen
| knife set reddit"
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Just researched good/quality crafting printers yesterday. Search
| results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that offered
| obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to direct you
| to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad since those
| affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This product is
| currently not available" sites.
|
| Repeated my search on Youtube to find reviews or unboxing. Most
| video search results were basically "Youtube SEO" again - the
| most viewed/top-ranked videos did never show a single actual
| print run or even the printer available. It was mostly marketing
| websites turned into video (slowly scrolling/moving over product
| description or pictures clearly taken from the web). And of
| course, affiliate links in the description.
|
| The web has become a crappy place to research products as long as
| money can be made with those through affiliations. I wonder if
| outlawing affiliate marketing would make the world a better
| place.
|
| P.S: Whats most ridiculous about my Youtube Printer research
| experience, the best and most helpful video was a sales video
| from a home shopping TV station [0], where they actually showed
| some printing action and handling of one of the models I was
| interested in.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytMXgjCReO0
| trevex wrote:
| I unfortunately share your experiences. However in Germany
| there is a foundation called "Stiftung Warentest" [1], which
| does independent testing of products. With reviews full of
| Amazon affiliate links dominating search results, I tend to
| purchase their tests for ~3 Euros more often than ever.
|
| However this only works for popular product categories, but
| less so for specialized equipment.
|
| My impression is also that affiliate links hurt consumers in
| the long run as they reduce the selection of products in
| reviews or blogs to those the authors can earn money with. This
| however leaves out potential alternatives. More often than not
| the winner of product categories (at least those I was
| researching) of independent tests were not available from sites
| running affiliate programs. For example a consumer-grade lawn
| mower from an otherwise professional gardening company or a
| tent from a Scandinavian brand.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest
| ohashi wrote:
| I'm in a strange position here. I fundamentally agree that
| reviews for the most part are absolute steaming pile of crap
| of a space for many niches. I work in one of the worst - web
| hosting reviews. It's plagued by fake affiliate reviews
| dominating basically every search result. I've been trying
| for 10 years to run a company that did reviews differently in
| the web hosting space.
|
| Full disclosure, I have affiliate links on companies that
| have them too. But I also list companies without them and it
| has had zero bearing on any result in 10 years. In fact, when
| I launched I had to beg the CEO of the top rated company to
| create a special affiliate program for me. Why? Because he
| didn't believe in review sites and affiliates in the space.
| It took months, but I told him if he didn't create one, what
| I was trying to do would never have a chance because I'd
| never make a dollar - you're the top rated company. I want to
| do something different, but it needs to remain somewhat
| financially viable and if you don't have a program I'm dead
| before it starts.
|
| So what happened in those 10 years?
|
| Honestly, not a whole a lot. I have mediocre rankings (often
| page 2-5) on some of the most competitive terms on Google. I
| can't afford to buy the links my competitors do because they
| make 10x or more what I do pushing the highest paying
| affiliates and designing for conversion. The site has some
| traction within niche communities - especially the WordPress
| hosting space - because I also run annual performance
| benchmarks (https://wphostingbenchmarks.com) where I document
| and thoroughly test most of the meaningful players in that
| space.
|
| It makes a couple grand a month, I've disclosed the revenue
| publicly on IndieHackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/interv
| iew/reviewsignal-e1ddcc26...) and it's gone down since then.
|
| The data I'm providing is almost surely the most transparent
| data tracking the industry and maybe the least biased (the
| reviews work by analyzing Twitter sentiment at scale -
| everything publicly documented in terms of ranking algorithm
| and published comments).
|
| But outside little bubbles in communities that care, nobody
| noticed. Google doesn't care. Google happily ranks affiliate
| sites spending six figures buying links off apache.org and
| other open source projects (look at those sponsor lists on a
| lot of open source projects - hosting/gambling is a bad
| sign).
|
| I got excited when my work fighting against .ORG registry
| price increases and sale at ICANN
| (https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2019/06/24/the-case-for-
| regula...) got a lot of press, even getting cited by the
| California AG in his letter which effectively killed it. I
| got backlinks from a lot of large news sites and traffic. I
| honestly saw no meaningful improvement in rankings or
| traffic.
|
| So I'm stuck, I keep the sites running - part time - mostly
| between other projects. I've moved back heavily into
| consulting and other projects because being an honest
| affiliate - I can't compete. Providing honest, transparent
| data and presenting it with the goal of informing versus
| pushing sales is a terrible business model. The majority of
| people simply don't care. A lot of 'in-the-know' folks read
| and get informed by my work. They advise their clients using
| it, and I never see any financial benefit from it. The
| broader world, especially Google, doesn't know or care.
|
| Is the root problem affiliate links? It certainly skews
| incentives and pushes manipulation. If we removed them, what
| fills the void? Ads? Sponsored content? Something else? I
| don't think the problem goes away - there is so much money in
| some of these industries and the stakes are so high.
| Companies and people will take advantage of it one way or
| another.
|
| How do we identify honest / good content from the garbage
| seems to be the bigger question. After 10 years, I'm don't
| have an answer and I'm certainly not being noticed.
| edbloom wrote:
| This is a perfect example of how fundamentally flawed
| modern SEO is. @ohashi has been producing the best hosting
| reviews in the WordPress ecosystem since forever. It seems
| like at some point in the past decade on page quality
| signals have been completely drowned out by backlink
| signals that can be easily amplified by bigger content
| producers and a resurgence in cheap on page SEO tricks.
|
| Sorry Kevin I don't know what the answer is, but I'd
| thought I'd just say a huge thanks for the great work you
| do year after year. It might be VERY niche but perhaps some
| sort of annual premium membership for professionals in the
| WP ecosytem might be something that _might_ work? I 'd
| certainly be happy to support your work on an ongoing basis
| with access to niche "members only" performance reports on
| things like WooCommerce benchmarking tests etc.
| thih9 wrote:
| Rtings seems a similar project; some of their test results
| are free, some are paid. They have a wide set of comparison
| tools, they test for a lot of features and they document
| their testing procedures well; it's a really nice change from
| SEO spam articles.
|
| I recommend their tests of headphones [1], I especially like
| how they measure breatability [2]. They also have a page
| about printers [3].
|
| [1]: https://www.rtings.com/headphones
|
| [2]:
| https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/breathability
|
| [3]: https://www.rtings.com/printer
| cortesoft wrote:
| The US has Consumer Reports, which is similar I think... but
| yeah, only works for major product categories.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| There's also the NYT WireCutter which tried to do a good
| job isolating it away as an independent review source that
| you can trust.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Bought a pair of audio-technica headphones based on their
| review. Sound quality was as described but it was so
| uncomfortable I returned it 5 minutes after picking it
| up. It was described as comfortable for long wear but it
| had a hard band with little padding and was uncomfortable
| for any duration.
| short12 wrote:
| That fell to complete shit a while back. They are not
| wrong but I would ignore their rankings and focus on the
| review aspects
| ghaff wrote:
| I find Wirecutter and Consumer Reports are pretty
| reasonable for product categories where I just want a
| reasonable choice and don't necessarily have deep
| knowledge and preferences myself. And, yes, it's worth
| reading _why_ they picked something. But if I were buying
| an interchangeable lens camera or a computer I might read
| their recommendation but I 'd look elsewhere also. For a
| sprayer for a hose? I'm sure their recommendation is
| fine.
| hnov wrote:
| Some of the WireCutter's picks were fairly terrible,
| which makes sense: testing diverse categories of products
| is too expensive for affiliate links to cover. I've
| gifted dashcams on their recommendation that shot
| beautiful QHD but had MTBF measured in single digit
| months. The TP-Link C7 Archer was kind of a turd and
| within a stone's throw of a decent router price-wise.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| I've written extensively about this recently, but these
| days with $300+ "gaming" routers using crappy sweatshop
| software on whatever Atheros router SoC, many users would
| be much better served with legit SMB routing / switching
| / wifi systems that are available for around the same
| price.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I didn't know what good Wifi until I switched to using
| some TP-Link Omada equipment.
|
| If you run your own controller, you can set up a small
| network (router, PoE switch, and AP) for less than $300.
| Hardware controller is ~$90. A controller isn't strictly
| necessary, but I don't recommend doing a standalone
| setup.
|
| Downside? It's business class equipment and you need some
| idea what you're doing. It's not plug-n-play. Also, it's
| layer 2 only. If you want mDNS across vlans, you'll need
| to run a reflector. (Not difficult. It's built into
| avahi.)
| bentcorner wrote:
| I switched to Unifi access points and a wired router and
| switch and am much happier with the result.
|
| The consolidation of router, switch and access point
| means you can't upgrade individual parts. It's the modern
| equivalent of the TV-VCR combo and most consumers don't
| realize they actually can be separated.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I've always found anything tagged as "gaming" to be lower
| quality and more expensive than the business machines.
|
| ====
|
| This message sent from a Thinkpad business machine that I
| use for gaming (and ML, theoretically).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean this is a known thing in general; the best kitchen
| supply stuff you can buy is often stuff intended for
| commercial use, because it quite literally goes through
| the wringer with near-constant usage over long periods of
| time.
|
| The problem is finding a place that sells commercial
| things to individual buyers. That, and sometimes what a
| commercial kitchen needs is vastly oversized for a
| regular house; you're probably going to set off your
| residential fire alarm very often with a massive
| commercial range designed for woks, for example, unless
| you also upgrade the ventilation, etc.
| m0lecules wrote:
| To be fair, MTBF is not something you can measure in a
| reasonable time for these kinds of review sites. Far
| better for this kind of thing is niche-specific youtube
| channels.
|
| But in any case, what you're asking for here is a
| prediction of your future satisfaction with a product.
| It's a non-trivial problem even for the most innocuous
| purchases.
|
| Will I like Lysol or Clorox wipes more? Who knows, and
| the reviews aren't going to beat first-hand experience in
| any circumstances.
| macintux wrote:
| > The TP-Link C7 Archer was kind of a turd and within a
| stone's throw of a decent router price-wise.
|
| Can attest. I finally ditched mine, got tired of it
| falling over multiple times each week.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Maybe you got a lemon I've been using mine for a while
| now. Not as nice as my old one with customer firmware but
| still consistent.
| sumoboy wrote:
| wirecutter's picks are definitely bad, more like products
| to avoid.
| Sunspark wrote:
| The C7 is a good router if you put OpenWRT on it.
| greggman3 wrote:
| My experience with NYT product reviews is pretty awful. I
| wish I could be more concrete. Tried to look in my
| history but I could have sworn at least one article was
| just effectively, "top 10 most popular on Amazon", with
| quotes from user reviews. Maybe I'm getting my sites
| mixed up.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I'm a subscriber to consumer reports, but as it put Tesla
| Model 3, the most successful car in the past few years on
| the back as the least reliable, I feel that I can't trust
| its results to be 100% independent reviews. I don't have a
| Tesla, but if something grows so fast where people pay a
| significant amount for it, it can't be that bad.
| aix1 wrote:
| I don't know anything about how reliable or not Model 3
| is, but surely reliability != popularity?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It's the growth that's staggering. What I read is that
| older car companies changed the rating to include small
| software bugs in the entertainment system. As Tesla has
| much more non-essential features, these while these small
| bugs are not that important for the end user, can bring
| the ratings down vs other cars that don't even offer the
| feature.
| awslattery wrote:
| Rtings is my go-to for most things. Been satisfied with
| several purchases researched there.
| mcguire wrote:
| For kitchen tools, there's America's Test Kitchen reviews
| (from Cooking magazine, IIRC). It's a limited segment but
| high quality.
|
| On the other hand, it has the same problem as Consumer
| Reports: they only test and review a single model which
| will probably be out of production before you need one. On
| the third hand, if one manufacturer consistently gets good
| reviews (OXO Goodgrips, for example)...
| emsy wrote:
| I have used their tests in the past and I've never regretted
| a purchase influenced by their tests.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| I was always fascinated by the idea of "field testers"
| testing products in their daily lives and writing a short
| review about their experience. A cook would write about a
| chef knife, a post officer about comfortable all-weather
| boots, a craftsman about a tool etc.
|
| The biggest problem would be how to incentivize such people,
| but gamification and some monetary rewards from the community
| could probably solve this.
| tucosan wrote:
| Sadly, Stiftung Warentest often doesn't have the expertise to
| properly test many products. I often notice the shortcomings
| in product tests for products that I know and use.
|
| I was reminded of this with their last test of 3d printers.
| Their test results where far from what everyone with
| experience in the field would consider accurate.
| mschild wrote:
| For some products, I agree, but realistically its about as
| good as it gets unless you do thorough research on a given
| product and are actually able to find a somewhat unbiased
| review.
|
| Take washing machines for example. How do you know which
| ones are good and which ones are not? Public reviews from
| any website tend to only be a good indicator if there a
| lots of bad ones. I have 0 faith in the average consumer to
| accurately rate a product. Overwhelmingly negative reviews
| will clearly show a deficiency but positive ones are
| unfortunately more and more a gamble.
|
| Stiftung Warentest isn't perfect, but they do, on most
| occasions, put in a high amount of effort to test products
| to the best of their abilities without any personal
| opinions. I don't know of a single other
| person/organization/website where that is the case.
| petra wrote:
| Most washing machines offer quit similar features. The
| key difference is reliability.
|
| Testing for reliability is expensive, so most likely
| Stiftung Warentest and similar companies don't do that.
| brnt wrote:
| I base those sorts of purchases on duration of warranty.
| Recently bought a dryer, and apart from a brand that cost
| significantly more, they all came with 2 year warranties.
| One reasonably priced machine had 4, so I picked that
| one.
| pooper wrote:
| Counterexample: Korean auto manufacturers Hyundai and Kia
| offer longer warranties than Japanese manufacturers Honda
| and Toyota because that's the only way people will buy
| Korean cars.
| 14 wrote:
| My brand new LG turbowasher model lasted 3 months before
| one morning sounded like a hammer smashing something. I
| ran to the machine and a support bracket inside had
| broken. It took 2 months for them to replace it I was not
| impressed. It has since lasted 3 more years no issues but
| I doubt I would go with LG in the future since it was a
| horrible customer service experience getting my first one
| repairs under warranty. Had they helped me better after
| it breaking I may have said it was just a fluke and still
| recommended them.
| onli wrote:
| No, that's exactly what they do test and test well. Their
| model mostly breaks down for computer technology and
| peripherals in that space. When testing a mouse they
| would test how often it can click before breaking down,
| and that's only slight hyperbole. Might be a bit better
| now in that area than back then when I read their tests
| regularly.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I bought their test of basmati rice and these monsters
| had an intern court the broken vs. whole rice grains in a
| 500g package.
|
| I assume they only counted a sample of the the 500g, but
| it's funnier to imagine otherwise.
| nkrisc wrote:
| As long as their methodology is clear you can at least
| judge their results for yourself and whether you consider
| them meaningful, even if it wasn't perhaps as good as an
| expert could have done.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| They are OK, but I remember when they decided a Nokia phone
| was better than an iPhone.
|
| Tests usually have subjective criteria that determine the
| ranking.
| frabcus wrote:
| Which? https://www.which.co.uk/ is great, based in the UK,
| not very expensive to join for a month to look up one
| product.
| amelius wrote:
| > which does independent testing of products
|
| Can we have some independent testing of web search engines?
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Yep; a huge portion of Google results, especially for spicy
| searches like "best ______ 2021" are just lists of affiliate
| links to top 10 selling items on Amazon from made-up brand
| names that are rotated once a product receives a few bad
| reviews.
|
| It's really hard to find legit review sites; at least
| Wirecutter seems to actually test things, but sites like
| SeriousEats, OutdoorGearLab, Carryology, DCRainMaker,
| SoundOnSound, Adventure Journal, Magnetic Magazine, The Loam
| Wolf, etc that are quite niche / domain-specific are where I go
| for actual trustworthy reviews.
|
| I agree that Google seems to be dominated by clickbait ad-
| riddled BS SEO sites now more than ever, and I can't help but
| think that Google is allowing this to happen because it pays
| the bills. I've posted about this before, but at the end of the
| day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more
| than that. The difference to me is that I'm willing to reward
| actual reviews and effort with rev share if I decide to buy
| something reviewed, but I'm super unimpressed with all the
| irrelevant ads we still get in 2021 despite having so much
| personalization data about users.
|
| Another thing that advertisers don't seem to understand
| somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB
| ad and bought it, the chances that I'm also interested in
| buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are
| drastically reduced. They seem to be totally missing this
| signal, showing me ads for some category of thing I already
| purchased for a very long time after I don't need any more
| suggestions.
|
| Lastly, I would literally pay per month for an Amazon search
| that filters out all the fake brands. If I search for "webcam",
| there are half a dozen brands I want to see, yet instead I'm
| forced to sift through piles of junk that I would never even
| consider purchasing to find what I'm looking for. I've heard
| that Amazon knows this is a thing but chooses not to fix it due
| to some psychological allure of sifting through the junk to
| find the nuggets of gold. In the worst cases, I have to use
| Google to find stuff on Amazon because their own search is so
| horrendous, with the categories being an absolute joke.
| greggman3 wrote:
| > I can't help but think that Google is allowing this to
| happen because it pays the bills
|
| Google is not that short sighted. They know that if people
| stop trusting it to give good results then they'll lose their
| market.
|
| I suspect the problem is just harder than it seems.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| And just at this moment, we have hordes of affiliate
| marketers working 24/7 updating their "articles" to say "best
| _______ 2022".
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I would be very surprised if there wasn't a Wordpress or
| similar plugin to automate this.
| coliveira wrote:
| > They seem to be totally missing this signal
|
| Ok, but how would they know that you already bought the
| product? As advanced as ads are, they still don't have the
| Amazon confirmation telling them you already completed the
| purchase.
| tagawa wrote:
| Google partners with at least one major credit card
| company[1] so their ad network should be aware of purchases
| if a particular payment system were used. I expect this is
| far more widespread than we realise (unfortunately) but
| using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers would
| harm revenue, so they remain visible.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45368040
| gruez wrote:
| >but using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers
| would harm revenue, so they remain visible.
|
| that doesn't make any sense. By that logic they wouldn't
| want to do targeting at all, because targeting by
| definition reduces the amount of people you can show ads
| to.
| coliveira wrote:
| I imagine that Google does in fact use credit card data,
| but there is no way to tell if you already bought
| everything you want.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > the chances that I'm also interested in buying a similar
| thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced
|
| This is a comment sentiment (I've already bought a fridge!
| Don't need another!) and it is a bit of a failure mode. But,
| I think value on advertising around recent purchases to
| people is super high. A recent purchase, although often
| wrong, is one of the best signals you can get. So much
| purchasing happens in clusters (setting up a space, picking
| up a hobby, etc) that a specific person is in buying mode for
| a specific topic is crazy valuable. And there's splash damage
| on the wrong ads. Maybe you don't buy a second rice cooker,
| but the ad reminds you to get a toaster.
| Retric wrote:
| Not just that, the odds some one will return a product are
| non trivial.
| enduroman wrote:
| Dcrainmaker has been "pay for play" for at least the past 10
| years. He's very thorough, but not altruistic. There was a
| guy on Slowtwich that shared a conversation with him that was
| enlightening to that fact.
| jeromecornet wrote:
| Can you share a link to this ?
| jwagenet wrote:
| Someone has to pay the bills. I don't think receiving money
| to do a review is inherently wrong, there are just too many
| products to afford to review, but having a rigorous process
| to eliminate or expose bias is important. However, it does
| suck looking for reviews of a product which is not a main
| player in the market or category.
| mad182 wrote:
| Not surprising. It's incomparably quicker and more profitable
| to list a few top selling products with affiliate links and a
| bunch of relevant keywords, than to spend significant time
| and money actually researching and comparing these products
| in a meaningful way.
| fault1 wrote:
| > Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more
| than that
|
| This also seems to be what Amazon is also devolving into.
| Amazon ads is the fastest growing part of amazon!
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Yes. Just searched for "cholimex soy sauce". 80% of the
| search results page was covered by an ad for mayonnaise...
| cwilkes wrote:
| I never had problems with fake products on Amazon until I
| looked for a usb thumb drive for the Arlo camera base
| station.
|
| There's a dramatic difference in price for 1T sizes. Some at
| $30. Others at $150. I couldn't understand it.
|
| One of the 0 star reviews said it was actually a 32Gb drive
| that somehow fools the OS to think it is bigger. Not sure how
| that happens but it steered me away from any of the cheaper
| options as I don't need a headache.
| tomcam wrote:
| > trying to be more than that
|
| Citation needed ;)
| riazrizvi wrote:
| It's a policy problem, there's no easy fix.
|
| Design a system of rules to rank content. Watch as highly
| incentivized participants work harder than everyone else to
| game the system to their advantage.
|
| "But I can see these results are obviously bad, surely
| something can be done?". Leads to System-Amendment#5796 =
| _Gather user feedback to alter results_. Leads to highly
| incentivized users gaming the feedback system.
| stefan_ wrote:
| This sounds more like a Google curse - the inability to do
| something extraordinarily simple because it can't be
| sufficiently automated.
|
| Like there is no reason to have a site like
| "https://gitmemory.cn/" in the index, ever. It is pure and
| utter spam. Ban the domain.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| In the meantime, check out the uBlackList extension to
| block individual sites from Google's (and a few other
| sites') results
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I wonder if we just would disallow affiliate links in
| general. I.e. you can still create your own webshop, take
| orders and forward to someone else (similar to dropshipping)
| but basically outlaw the process of collecting
| money/commission just for a single placement of links. Or at
| least, force those sites to correctly mark themselves as
| "Advertising".
| riazrizvi wrote:
| A second order policy problem is to design good policy to
| make good policy makers. Meaning that it's hard for a
| public company entity to codify company policy so that
| their people in charge of search results are not at all
| susceptible themselves to sliding in an advantage here or
| there to assist some group that they become financially
| enmeshed with.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The people doing actual, good reviews/guides also use
| affiliate links. Getting rid of affiliate links to get rid
| of the bad actors gets rid of people trying to do it right.
| The bad actors will have another path in within a month
| while the person who was run out of their honest business
| is left hanging.
| creato wrote:
| I think affiliate links are positive for Amazon, because
| they crowdsource aggressive sales and marketing, but are
| negative for Google (and everyone else). I think if
| Google could somehow ban affiliate links, they would.
| jsemrau wrote:
| I ran into the same problem when building finclout's feedback
| loop. In my opinion, there is no way around keyword matching
| for search. As a result SEO is unlikely to be preventable.
| However, if the feedback can be collected at scale and is
| actually incentivised (i.e., did this link solve your problem
| ? ) this might actually work.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This assumes the rules are black and white and there's no
| concept of bad faith.
|
| A system could very well have rules/guidelines and then have
| humans review & monitor the system and user-submitted
| complaints for any abuse, and harshly penalize such abuse
| with a temporary or permanent ban.
|
| It could end up in a situation where it's technically
| possible to gain a slight advantage by gaming the system but
| no participant will risk a complete ban and the system ends
| up working well for everyone.
| zinekeller wrote:
| I _would_ want that, but that puts Google (and other
| companies) in the legal position of a _publisher_ , which
| means that they're liable for "a bad thing".
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Most websites and platforms moderate for abuse and aren't
| classified as publishers, I don't see why this would be
| any different here.
| [deleted]
| zinekeller wrote:
| I can't remember the precise reason, but if I remember
| correctly the reason is that because the poster is the
| originator in most sites including YouTube, while in
| Google's case it curates links instead without input from
| the general public. This is also the reason why Wikipedia
| still only officially operates in the US: the relatively
| freer publication rules as opposed to UK or Brazil for
| example shields them from a lot of lawsuits.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| There exists no distinction between "publishers" and
| "platforms" as far as Section 230 protections from online
| liability goes. It's entirely decided by who produced the
| content: users are responsible for content that they
| upload, the sites hosting user-generated content are not.
| It doesn't matter if the site selectively promotes, or
| otherwise acts as a "publisher", so long as it's the
| user's content.
|
| https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230
| zinekeller wrote:
| Ah yes, US laws are the only laws applicable to Google.
|
| I should have prefaced that with "outside the United
| States": notably UK moves the bar to the middle, which
| will put Google in legal jeopardy (and libel cases!)
| there.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| Same experience here. Researching high-quality products on
| Google is very frustrating:
|
| - Results 1-3 are ads
|
| - Results 3-5 are blogs that get sponsored
|
| - Results 5-10 are full of astroturfed user reviews
|
| Finding trustworthy and consistent information is so hard that
| I mostly rely on Reddit for product research. There is a
| subreddit for literally every product category, and posting a
| request with your requirements takes much less time than
| cutting through all the noise on Google.
|
| To make this whole mess a better experience, I'm now working on
| my own startup that tries to solve these issues.
| hw wrote:
| In the end search is about relevancy. Trustworthiness of a
| blog or article is hard to discern by machines. The blogs
| likely rank high because of relevancy as well as clicks.
| Sponsored doesnt always mean that the reviews are biased.
| Reviews on reddit aren't exactly trustworthy too - there are
| always going to be competing arguments and reviews for a
| product, you just have to use your own judgment which plays
| into your personality, risk tolerance etc.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Indeed but as to the linked thread's point, it's an
| opportunity for a startup to come in. A startup which could
| tackle the quality problem not just relevancy.
| h3mb3 wrote:
| YouTube's latest brilliant "innovation" to hide the dislike
| count made this problem so much worse too. When e.g. trying to
| make a purchase decision, you can't quickly skim through a
| bunch of search results any longer. Instead you are forced to
| sit through so much bad content that you could've previously
| avoided. Maybe that was their real motivation too - to boost
| some watchtime metrics.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Even before that, I hate hate HATE how they don't have a way
| to say "don't ever display this channel in search results".
| So much spam.
| thelittleone wrote:
| I've also noticed something similar when researching mobile
| phones. Device pages that are clearly automatically created
| with poor and often nonsensical sentences and repition created
| by some script. And ranking top of Google. Similarly on YouTube
| videos that are collection of still images with robot voice
| reading clearly copy texts with almost zero original content.
| Again ranking near the top for a topic.
| xxs wrote:
| The only reviews I respect nowadays are... tear downs. No
| innards, no fun. Unfortunately printers would be proper hard to
| tear down on a review.
| holoduke wrote:
| One thing what helps me getting better results is adding the
| keyword 'forum'. Usually still have okayish results. Forums are
| nowadays the only source information not spoiled by SEO etc
| aix1 wrote:
| That's a good tip. I too do this quite a lot; forums can be
| quite noisy but also a great source of first-hand
| experiences.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| Beat me to it
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Google used to have a great discussion search mode that only
| showed forum results. I miss it dearly.
| fnord77 wrote:
| > The web has become a crappy place to research products
|
| I'd say most people's interface to the web has become crappy.
| Beta-7 wrote:
| I've also had the same problem. For a while i could get good
| recommendations/reviews by adding "reddit" to the query as i
| could find good information there, however i think that the
| sites have caught up on that and now i only get 1-2 results
| from reddit.com and then the rest are other sites that
| reference reddit so they are in the results.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| At the risk of any SEO-blogspam people reading this and
| adjusting their tactics, you can filter by domain, eg.
|
| product name review site:reddit.com
| throwitawayfam wrote:
| The problem with using Reddit specifically is that you
| can't filter by date anymore. Reddit has poisoned their
| results to show old posts with new dates on Google.
| noizejoy wrote:
| As long as only a few people use a successful white hat
| trick, that trick isn't generally worthwhile for the darker
| hats to combat.
|
| So the problem isn't so much that blog spam people will
| read your comment, but that many ordinary readers will
| start using the trick, and thus make it worthwhile for the
| dark hats to address.
|
| So the unfortunate side effect of kindness in information
| sharing is that it decreases the value of that information.
|
| Therefore, I don't think there's a practical way out of
| endless arms races between $good and $evil
| Beta-7 wrote:
| Great tip, thanks. Funny how much i used to do google dorks
| (that got introduce to me in a college course), but
| overtime i completely forgot about them.
|
| About the risk though: it's happened already. Remember the
| "to find any book free online just do "filetype:pdf book-
| name"" tips that were popular online a while ago? Now it's
| all just PDFs on public google drives with tons of book
| names and a single link leading to some sketchy site.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| I find myself appending the word "forum" to a large percentage
| of my google queries these days, to avoid the dynamic you
| mentioned. This essentially filters the results for
| real/original content of other people that were looking for the
| same information as me.
| ranit wrote:
| > Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly
| resulted in "This product is currently not available" sites.
|
| This should not be considered "especially sad" in my view. It
| would be worse if these links worked, thus generating
| additional revenue for these "web players" (pun intended).
| ashtonkem wrote:
| This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching
| for "best intro <power tool>" yields a bunch of low quality SEO
| that's just pulled from Amazon.
|
| I think the interesting question is this: why is this
| happening? There's always been a battle between Google and SEO
| black hats, but I can't remember the last time it got this bad.
| Is Google just temporarily losing, or have they lost the will
| to fix this at all?
| megablast wrote:
| Consumers laments the effect of consumers consuming too much
| stuff.
|
| Maybe buying more useless stuff isn't the solution???
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This is far worse in a place like india. It's pretty much
| impossible to find anything technical or product related that's
| localized. The only non blogspam source often is <vomit/>
| quora.
|
| For example. Most construction happening in india now uses
| something called M-Sand. I actually CANNOT find what the hell
| it is except from some company websites or random YouTubers
| blabbering non engineering garbage about it.
| ummonk wrote:
| What is there to know about it? Looks like it's just sand
| that's produced by crushing stones in an industrial process,
| rather than relying on rivers to do it for you. It's probably
| used as an aggregate for concrete.
|
| Edit: a quick search on Google Scholar brings up papers like
| http://www.kresttechnology.com/krest-academic-
| projects/krest...
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Could be due to the difficulty of getting sand in the
| region. I watched this fascinating Vice documentary about
| illegal sand mining in the region. I had no idea it was
| such a big deal.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/4av9jm/illegal-sand-
| mining-i...
| zo1 wrote:
| Honestly disappointed at the documentary but curious
| about the topic. They kept repeating the exact same thing
| over and over and over again, dripping little bits of
| info.
| otherotherchris wrote:
| You've probably already google-fu'ed this, but its ~4mm
| crushed granite used as a concrete-sand substitute where
| granite/gneiss sand isn't available.
|
| Most construction materials businesses sell locally by word
| of mouth, and if they paid for a website at all it's old and
| still using http. So Google drops them.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In photography I have struggled to choose products, often I
| have to rely on my experience (e.g. it takes six months to
| discover that your Epson EcoTank printer makes prints that fade
| in six months) and specialized forums (DPReviews) You might
| find lightfastness rankings for some printers at
|
| http://wilhelm-research.com/
|
| _if_ somebody paid them to do the research otherwise you might
| have rely on heuristic 'pigment based inks are relatively
| lightfast' and that at least one other person who does similar
| work, has similar skills, and uses similar method gets good
| results. That still doesn't help with problems like '90% of
| instances of this Sigma lens seem to be pretty good but 10%
| have defective autofocus'.
|
| I find online reviews are close to worthless because there are
| so many people who don't know how to use gear or have
| unrealistic expectations. At Best Buy I saw a review of a
| printer where somebody showed pictures of prints they made
| where they printed on the wrong side of photo paper and blamed
| the printer, for instance.
| a-dub wrote:
| yeah, had this experience myself while purchasing holiday
| gifts. amusingly, it made me pine for the days when you could
| walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you
| a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.
|
| it's funny because internet shopping became popular in the face
| of salespeople becoming corrupt under commission and
| performance schemes, now a big part of the commerce related
| internet is worse for pretty much the same reasons.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Rose colored glasses. Workers in stores were the original
| "affiliate marketers", in a lot of stores (especially
| electronic ones) workers were/are being paid to push the most
| expensive products.
|
| Then when you try to pay, you get upsold warranties.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Guessing Migrine's? Probably easier to search FL-41
| glasses.
|
| I like my axon brand, very helpful.
| taffronaut wrote:
| Actually it would make more sense for them to push the
| highest margin products. This could quite often be lower
| cost or in-house brands since prestige brands can dictate
| lower margins to the retailer.
|
| Agree sales guys pushing warranties is a real pain but I'm
| almost nostalgic for it compared to dodging Prime sign-up
| every time and other online anti-patterns.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a
| shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few
| questions and pick the right stuff for you.
|
| I still remember being in Best Buy and hearing the
| salespeople scamming less knowledgeable customers about how
| much computer they need or how important expensive cables
| are. I don't think there was ever a time when you could trust
| electronics store salespeople to sell you "the right stuff
| for you".
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I was recently in a Best Buy and overheard an employee
| explain the difference between a Pixel 6 and a 6 Pro as,
| "EVERYTHING is better". I had personally just compared the
| two side-by-side and concluded that the pro's only material
| differences were more RAM, worse build quality due to the
| curved screen edges, and the addition of a telephoto
| camera.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| My favorite line was some salesperson saying "you wouldn't
| want to connect a $2k tv with a cheap cable!". It certainly
| made me laugh.
| zo1 wrote:
| We kid and joke about expensive cables, but we're at a
| point where it's become true. It's hit or miss buying USB
| cables. For fast-charging as an example (double-trouble if
| you don't have a quality or compatible charger to pair it
| with). Likewise for USB transfer rates (e.g. for the Oculus
| Quest that I was _not_ planning on testing with 10
| different 5m USB cables to see which worked).
|
| Same goes for the connectors. All the IEEE and ISO
| standards out there in the world and the damn USB plugs
| stick out half the time (nevermind the Chinese-made ones I
| had that were 1.5x the normal length). In other instances
| 3.5mm jacks don't stay in or something or other becomes
| loose. And trying to find reviews or info about this
| online, or filtering it out to some level on purchase sites
| like Amazon is... _tiring_.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| At least that was better than Fry's or Home Depot, where
| salespeople actively walk away when they see you
| approaching, and have zero knowledge of what is even
| carried by the place they work. After a while I figured out
| that it's better to just look myself on the shelves and
| endcaps vs trying to ask anything of the sales drones.
| Kinda like a physical Amazon. I'm sad that they're out of
| business now, and with no more MicroCenter left in the Bay
| Area, the choices are now basically Amazon, eBay, or small
| online shops (if Central Computer and Halted, now closed as
| they sold to Excess Solutions @ 1555 S, 7th St. San Jose,
| CA 95112 don't have what I'm after).
| tomc1985 wrote:
| The folks at Frys (particularly in hardware) were a useful
| resource (and good source of shop talk) all the way up
| until Fry's faded into irrelevance. They helped me sort
| through a good number of hardware-related issues
| throwanem wrote:
| Micro Center staff still are like this, and that's much
| more than anything else why I buy whatever I can from
| them before looking anywhere else. I _want_ them to stay
| in business, because otherwise I have to do my own
| research every time, and who has the time for that? -
| well, this, and also because I just delight in being
| still able to walk into one brick-and-mortar store where
| I know for sure I won 't have wasted the trip.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I've only ever overheard good quality advice at
| Microcenter.
| wetmore wrote:
| As much as I love Microcenter, even there I've had a
| salesman give me uninformed advice, throw his bar code
| sticker on the thing he told me to get, and walk away.
| throwanem wrote:
| So don't talk to that guy again. The others should be
| fine, unless your local store happens to have a lousy GM.
|
| Initially I dealt with this concern by benchmarking the
| advice I got on a topic I _do_ know a lot about. I haven
| 't worried about that in a while; at least in the Towson
| store, the quality of advice and discussion has been such
| that the next time they steer me wrong will be the first.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Ah best buy sales incentives. It reminds of the time I
| watched a salesman force the wrong case on an old lady's
| iPad, cracking the screen, and then blaming her for it.
| carlivar wrote:
| There was a time - the smaller the store the better. I
| agree big box stores were rarely good. But Radio Shack had
| excellent, helpful employees. Probably because RS vetted
| their employees carefully and paid pretty well (I know this
| from trying and failing to get a job there when I was
| around 16 years old).
| ghaff wrote:
| It wasn't really a golden era.
|
| Small local camera stores didn't carry much and were
| expensive. They tended to recommend something that they
| had in stock. Was still a pretty regular customer though
| because mail order wasn't as developed and you couldn't
| easily showroom gear locally.
|
| And Radio Shack was certainly convenient for cables etc.
| and had often knowledgable employees. But most of the
| actual stereo equipment and other gear they carried just
| wasn't very good.
| matsemann wrote:
| While not perfect, it was often good enough. Go in, see 6
| cameras in three price ranges, choose the one fitting the
| best for the price you're willing to pay, then walk home
| happy. Now there's sooo much choice, and most of us end
| up trying to find the perfect purchase.
| ghaff wrote:
| The (somewhat disputed) thesis of the paradox of choice.
|
| But I don't really disagree especially for relatively
| commodity purchases. Yes, I actually looked up a spray
| nozzle for a hose on Wirecutter. But would I have been
| perfectly fine just walking into Home Depot and grabbing
| one? Probably.
|
| That said. I'm probably better off researching thins like
| dishwashers rather than walking into a store (then or
| now) and picking one that catches my eye or that the
| salesperson recommends.
|
| But you can certainly get into analysis-paralysis with
| any number of things from travel to cameras. And you're
| often better off just shutting the analysis down at some
| point.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I worked at Radio Shack. They had an extensive training
| program that all employees went through. There were
| multiple 50-page manuals for each product category. This
| meant training in A/V equipment and how to hook up TVs
| (which splitters and switches did what, how to wire many
| different audio setups, how VCR outputs worked, telephony
| equipment, pagers and Blackberries... etc.)
|
| We had to go through all the certifications within
| something like six weeks of hire in order to be eligible
| for pay bumps and promotions. This even meant training on
| circuit components (at least knowing what they were, and
| how they were organized).
|
| Any Radio Shack clerk that wasn't completely green went
| through this training, so we all knew our stuff.
|
| One of the cool things about the job was getting to talk
| to "elder geeks" that would come in for components. One
| guy I helped had set up an old IBM 360 mainframe in his
| garage. The university he worked at didn't want it any
| more. He used it for messing around with assembly and as
| a space heater.
|
| It was still a retail job, but it was better than most
| for a tech-head like me. I would've been flipping burgers
| or selling shoes (Payless was next door), so Radio Shack
| was a better stepping stone for me. It did nothing for
| getting me into a programming career, but it was a stop-
| gap to get there.
| kragen wrote:
| As far back as the 01990s my memories of Radio Shack are:
|
| 1. The only place around where you could go to buy a
| breadboard, or a transistor, or a resistor, or a
| headphone cable connector. Component selection
| unparalleled in the places where I lived. I don't want to
| exaggerate --- they had maybe ten kinds of transistors,
| not a hundred like Fry's, but I didn't live within 1000
| km of a Fry's. And certainly not forty thousand like
| Digi-Key has today.
|
| 2. Salespeople who apparently didn't know anything but
| tried to get my phone number (!?) and, later, sell me
| cellphones. And cellphone plans. Jesus.
|
| 3. Stuff for makers getting gradually crowded out by
| worthless goods for mere consumers, stuff I could have
| bought at Best Buy or Sears if I wanted it. Things like
| TVs, VCRs, pagers, and Blackberries.
|
| I still use a store-brand Radio Shack multimeter
| sometimes, and in the 01980s a lot of my early years of
| programming were on store-brand Radio Shack computers in
| my day care and elementary schools, both TRS-80 Model III
| and the CoCo.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I worked at radio shack. We didn't have certification
| program but you are forced to learn quickly.
|
| It was less about selling and more about people walking
| in knowing what they wanted or wanting to browse around
| and once in awhile someone with a problem that you had to
| piece together components to help. It was unlike other
| electronic stores I worked. You had to understand how
| invertors worked, rc cars and sell computers while trying
| to maintain an 80% names/address recorded.
|
| You did sell. You entire got paid minimum wage or a % of
| what you earned for a two week period. 4% for name brand
| stuff 10% for store brand. My first two week period I
| sold computer after computer got highest sales in the
| district. For the next month or longer the minimum.
| Replacing the computer inventory took forever and I
| wasn't as good selling all of their other products. Great
| fun learning experience.
| megablast wrote:
| You want someone to pick gifts for your family and friends?
| datavirtue wrote:
| "it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop
| and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions
| and pick the right stuff for you."
|
| THAT is retail. The craptastic experiment we see these days,
| online and in meatspace are scams masquerading as retail. I
| miss Sears.
| 1over137 wrote:
| >it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop
| and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions
| and pick the right stuff for you.
|
| Uhhh, you can still do that, you know.
| evilduck wrote:
| For the most part, why would I trust random employees at a
| store?
|
| Knowledgable retail sales employees have completely
| vanished outside of niche "passionate enthusiast turned
| their hobby into a business". Homebrew shops, gun stores,
| marijuana dispensaries, comic and table top gaming stores,
| etc, but even many of those are plagued with the same cheap
| shit you can find on Alibaba or Amazon and a good chunk of
| the time if it's not the business owner you're dealing with
| you might as well skip asking questions. Outside of those
| niche interest stores there's often not even sales staff
| present, there are just people who stock shelves and
| operate the point of sale system but they don't even
| attempt to present themselves as knowledgable and can at
| best only point you to the right aisle of the store.
| theteapot wrote:
| > For the most part, why would I trust random employees
| at a store?
|
| Don't trust. Ask questions. If the answers seem fishy,
| take your business somewhere else.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >> If the answers seem fishy, take your business
| somewhere else.
|
| If you know enough to know whether or not the answers you
| might get are fishy, you probably already know more than
| the guy you are trying to get advice from.
| evilduck wrote:
| At this point in my life I've mostly given up asking
| employees questions. There's only "fishy" answers to be
| had in retail and there's not generally a competing store
| with more knowledgable employees. It seems like most of
| the time I can choose between bad and another brand of
| bad. Think Hobby Lobby vs. Michaels or Home Depot vs
| Lowes, Target vs. WalMart, Sams vs. Costco, Macy's vs.
| Dillards, Dicks vs. Academy Sports, a Ford dealer vs. a
| Toyota dealer, or worse they've consolidated operations
| like Bass Pro vs. Cabelas. There might be reasons to
| choose one over the other for reasons like employee
| welfare and return policies, but typically prices are all
| in line with each other and the retail staff are equally
| useless.
|
| There's only a couple of nationwide exceptions that come
| to mind like REI and Microcenter but even then people
| might have to travel prohibitive distances to have those
| options and they might as well just buy online.
|
| Small regional stores and mom n' pop operations trend
| towards having more passionate employees that might have
| an interest in the products (like a ski shop is generally
| only staffed by people who've at skied, bike shops tend
| to only be staffed by people who enjoy cycling, etc) but
| it's still pretty infrequent.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The knowledgeable RadioShack employees were probably
| canary in the coal mine for RadioShack
| injidup wrote:
| Yeah right. Two days ago I go into our local electrical
| goods store. I would like a USB-C to HDMI adaptor, I say.
| Sales guy looks around, scratches his nut. Sorry don't have
| one he says. Then he wanders off. I turn around and see one
| on the shelf. The price is double what you can get online.
| I tell him this. He shrugs and scratches his other nut and
| wanders off again. I walk out.
| evilduck wrote:
| Yeah, I went into a Home Depot store that wasn't my
| regular location a couple weeks back looking for dowel
| rods. Trying to speed up my trip I asked two different
| employees on my way to the general area of the store
| which specific aisle they would be on. Neither of them
| even knew what a dowel rod was, let alone what aisle it
| might be on, and obviously neither of them would be
| qualified to proactively try to help avoid the ones with
| knots or badly angled grain. It's not just that sales
| staff are ignorant nowadays, it's that the job itself has
| practically vanished.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| On that very topic, I saw a customer ask an employee
| manning the wood cutting station at a Home Depot if he
| could cut a dowel rod in half. The employee didn't know
| if it was possible because it was "round." I think they
| realized they can get away with just not training their
| employees.
| tsomctl wrote:
| Cutting round things in a saw can be dangerous if they
| aren't clamped correctly: they can spin. (Don't know of a
| link, this was taught to me at community college in the
| context of cutting round metal stock in a band saw.)
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, yeah? Train the staff on how to clamp correctly?
|
| I would expect all cuts to be fully clamped in a store.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of
| stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous
| knowledge/experience. It's possible that there are just
| less people with that experience, that also want to work
| at a store like Home Depot.
| evilduck wrote:
| In that specific situation there's likely training
| because operating a saw can be dangerous and incurs
| liability, not because Home Depot wants to impart
| knowledge to customers.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of
| stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous
| knowledge/experience.
|
| I think they used to hire people with industry experience
| - i.e. semi-retired or retired plumbers, electricians,
| carpenters handymen etc and that worked pretty well
| coming of the 2008 RE meltdown and economic mess at that
| time - but now any halfway qualified tradesperson can
| make close to or more than a six figure salary - so
| working at HD for $15/hr doesn't seem all that attractive
| anymore.
|
| I don't even try to ask the employees any actual
| 'technical' questions - I am happy if they can just point
| me to the correct aisle to find what I need these days.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The good news is that there isn't enough volume to justify
| the corruption of the salesperson, so he is often more
| honest nowadays.
|
| The bad news is that physical stores simply do not carry
| any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is irrelevant.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > The bad news is that physical stores simply do not
| carry any diversity nowadays
|
| They never did, you just didn't realize they didn't
| before the internet exposed you to the options.
| evilduck wrote:
| I think there's lots of factors going on here too.
| Products were less often considered disposable two or
| three generations ago. A manufacturer wouldn't offer 6
| versions of nearly the same thing to capture all price
| points. Things used to be predominantly manufactured by
| hand, which also meant they were inspectable and
| repairable by hand. Manufacturing businesses typically
| kept less products on the market for longer periods
| (model numbers have become quarterly iterations or
| specific to a retailer). There's now 50 options that
| appear identical for nearly every product when previously
| there might have been 5. It all contributes to it being
| difficult for staff to meaningfully "know" what's being
| sold even if they wanted to, and businesses aren't going
| to spend that time and money training employees on a
| product they won't be selling in a month.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Microcenter blows Amazon out of the water. Selection is
| rediculous.
| cortesoft wrote:
| There are exceptions, but most people don't live near a
| store that has good selection.
| a-dub wrote:
| > The bad news is that physical stores simply do not
| carry any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is
| irrelevant.
|
| yes, that is why i was shopping online.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > The bad news is that physical stores simply do not
| carry any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is
| irrelevant.
|
| Is that a "nowadays" thing though? At least in my
| location, the reason a lot of us flocked to the online
| option was the diversity of options available. Physical
| stores (for understandable reasons) stocked only the few
| top-selling options, knew about a few other options
| enough to say "no we haven't got that", and anything else
| would get a blank stare and a "is that a company's name?"
|
| If you had put effort into your search and optimized the
| selection for your specific needs, you were much more
| likely to find the product online - the physical stores
| often forced you into a choice between different
| suboptimal products.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| With all this lamentation about electronics stores of years
| past, nothing will compare to the malicious incompetence of
| car dealerships and service departments. Their business
| model these days is "if we all keep behaving badly
| together, consumers will have no choice but to accept our
| lies, markups, and chicanery". The dealer groups paying
| politicians through campaign contributions to allow them to
| block manufacturer-direct sales (look up how you can't buy
| a Tesla in Michigan, home of The Motor City, for example)
| is just the cherry on top.
| ejb999 wrote:
| Buying a new car is one of my absolutely least favorite
| things to do - even worse then doing my taxes. I will
| avoid it at all costs.
|
| Current vehicle is coming up on 10 years old, hoping to
| get another 10 out of it - not because I can't afford a
| new one (I can), but because I feel like I have to take a
| shower every time I walk out of a car dealer.
| amelius wrote:
| Salespeople nowadays are basically recruited from the same
| pool as Uber Eats delivery people. They don't care about
| what they sell, they just want to make it to the end of the
| month.
| chana_masala wrote:
| Yeah but it is not a good experience, except for a few
| types of products. I needed a car jump starter so I tried
| going to AutoZone instead of Amazon. The only one AutoZone
| had was 3x what I could find on Amazon.
| asciimov wrote:
| Most auto parts stores are terrible places these days
| with low quality parts at high prices, and staff that are
| just competent enough to check out your items.
|
| It used to be (20-25 years ago) you could go in tell them
| what you were doing and they could tell you which brands
| to avoid, what other parts you might need, and any
| secrets that might help you get the job done faster or
| without having to remove quite as much stuff. These days,
| the people they hire are so incompetent if you asked them
| for Headlight Fluid they would take you over to the
| fluids aisle to look for it.
| leeoniya wrote:
| thats why i always buy my headlight fluid on amazon
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Headlight-Hilarious-Automobile-
| Hyster...
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've had great success with the Gooloo jump starter. It
| has saved me from grief many times, most recently when I
| left the headlights on.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| The Noco ones are decent, but the Clore Automotive Jump-
| N-Carry is the only thing approaching a BIFL (buy it for
| life) quality jump starter that I'm aware of. User-
| replaceable sealed lead acid battery like a quality UPS
| (which if you're looking, grab an Eaton 5PX off eBay for
| a couple hundred bucks shipped...my 3 have outlasted half
| a dozen consumer APC junk units).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Lead acid batteries self-destruct after they've been left
| to discharge. Not something you want to keep in a trunk
| or store at home unplugged. The lithium jump starters
| have much more dependable passive storage life.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Online shopping is a major threat to small mom & pop shops.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Arguably, small mom & pop shops already started dying in
| large numbers when big box stores started taking over,
| and online shopping is continuing the small shop's march
| to extinction. Globalization of commerce has only added
| to the margin pressures. Add a global pandemic for good
| measure, and it's been a brutal few decades for small
| shops in increasingly many parts of the world.
| cheese_van wrote:
| > it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a
| shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few
| questions and pick the right stuff for you.
|
| When you use Google you are walking into their shop. That
| salesperson is very knowlegeable, but about you.
| addaon wrote:
| At least in the past (haven't checked in years), the Amazon
| affiliate program rewarded the affiliate for the next purchase
| made (within a pretty long time window) after clicking an
| affiliate link, even if it's not of the product linked; so
| there's no downside to sending you to an arbitrary,
| unavailable, irrelevant product as long as you're clicking on
| links when you're in a shopping mode and likely to make a
| purchase soon.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| 24 hours, any purchases made, and it's still a thing. Though
| rates are much lower nowadays than they were 3+ years ago.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Also because YouTube removed downvotes, it becomes basically
| useless for searching product reviews.
| freeqaz wrote:
| In the USA, Consumer Reports exists to help deal with this.
| It's a yearly fee to subscribe, but it's as unbiased of reviews
| as you can get!
| mthoms wrote:
| Pro tip: You can often get free access to Consumer Reports
| paywalled website with a library membership.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Right, but the majority of folks on here squeal when consumer
| reports or wirecutter want to be paid for their
| recommendations. Buying the devices, comparing them, etc all
| cost money, and refusing to pay inevitably leads to the state
| we're in...
|
| I don't have a solution for this; I just think we're in the
| exact state we would expect.
| freeqaz wrote:
| I don't mind paying for my subscription, just like I don't
| mind donating to Firefox and Signal. But I get that I'm
| probably in the minority for that. I try to put my money
| where my mouth is, and not the other way around!
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _Just researched good /quality crafting printers yesterday.
| Search results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that
| offered obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to
| direct you to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad
| since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This
| product is currently not available" site._
|
| I am going to remind people that this happens because that's
| the internet (and world) we designed. If you aren't a coder and
| you want to earn a living online, blogging is a way to do that
| and Amazon links are a way to make it pay.
|
| People use AdBlock and don't want to leave tips, support
| Patreon etc for a blog. Good jobs are hard to find. Telling
| someone "Get a real job" is often not a viable solution for
| various reasons.
|
| If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about
| the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De
| facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing
| an internet where those people can hijack your search results
| to try to eat gets you this.
|
| I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that's
| the actual root cause of this stuff and you won't fix it if you
| don't address those issues.
|
| I've tried for years to take the high road, to not have ads or
| Amazon links on my sites, etc. The result is starvation and
| intractable poverty and everyone telling me to get a real job.
| (I tried. They didn't hire me and continue to cyber stalk me
| and steal my ideas.)
|
| Anyway, I know all replies to this comment will boil down to
| "Quit your bitching. No one gives one damn if you die on the
| streets of starvation and we are so bored with hearing about
| your whiny problems." Rest assured, I am not leaving this
| comment with any expectation whatsoever that it will in any way
| help me.
|
| But maybe after I die on the streets someone will pause and
| think "Maybe she had a point. Maybe we designed a shitty system
| with bad incentives and we are getting exactly the crap we pay
| people to give us."
|
| Because the "high road" where someone tries to add value and
| respect the fact that you folks don't want ads or affiliate
| links etc literally doesn't pay to the point of it will keep
| you underfed and either homeless or underhoused and then your
| poverty will be a new excuse to have no respect for your
| observations that "Hey, people, the system you designed is
| broken and this is why and how."
| nine_k wrote:
| Three problems here.
|
| 1. Skewed incentives. A company that buys "organic" product
| placement wants to show it in the best possible light, and
| increase sales. They don't need an impartial review, so the
| blogger has a hard time to produce one.
|
| 2. Fragility and failures. Affiliate links expire and don't
| get updated. Ads point at things no longer available. Ads
| spend an inordinate amount of resources on the viewer's
| machine. Targeting is inaccurate, despite incessant attempts
| to track and correlate users' profiles.
|
| 3. Direct payment is rarely an option! I personally would
| greatly appreciate an option to pay $1-2 and read an
| impartial review of something I'm planning to purchase. Maybe
| even $5-7 for expensive stuff. But there are very few places
| that offer this. Those that do try hard to peddle a yearly
| subscription. Also, it appears that I'm the minority, and the
| number of visitors willing to pay directly is too low to
| sustain the authors.
|
| I still hope that it's Patreon and direct support by
| consumers what the future looks like, not corporate
| sponsorship and ads.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right. We need direct payments to be an option. If someone
| is going to pay the reviewer, I'd rather it be me than the
| product manufacturer.
|
| But I also agree that I think we're in the minority, and
| that most people won't do direct payments. I think this is
| the reason for the aggressive push for yearly
| subscriptions, because they know that a) it's hard to get
| people to pull out their wallet for each transaction, and
| b) it's hard to get people to _come back_ to spend money in
| future transactions.
|
| As much as I want a general micropayments system, I know
| that even I will spend more cognitive effort than I should
| when deciding something like "will this article be worth 10
| cents to me?" The difference between $0 and even $0.01 is
| emotionally very large.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _If you want a better internet, you might stop and think
| about the fact that it is built by people and people need to
| eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then
| designing an internet where those people can hijack your
| search results to try to eat gets you this._
|
| The problem is that the sane alternative, where people can
| get fed while selling quality a-la-carte content directly to
| the reader, doesn't really exist. If one or more review sites
| would work to develop a good reputation, I'd be happy to
| spend a one-shot $3 or $5 on their (for example) wireless
| earbud reviews. But this thing basically doesn't exist (or at
| least I can't find it, because of all the aforementioned
| shit-quality search engine results). Someone upthread
| mentioned a German site that does this, but then someone
| replied saying their expertise is limited and their reviews
| in many product categories aren't that great. Then we have
| things like Consumer Reports in the US, but I've found the
| quality of their reviews to have declined over the past
| decade or so; I've read some of their free content for
| product categories where I'm already knowledgeable, and I've
| disagreed heartily with enough of their findings to be
| skeptical of them.
|
| When it comes to news and opinion pieces, I'd be fine paying
| on a per-article basis, but we have no established
| micropayments system, and I'm not paying $10-$20/mo for each
| of the 50 sites that come up in various news aggregators I
| read and have paywalls. There are a few sites and YouTube
| channels that I read/watch nearly daily, so I subscribe to
| their Patreon or periodically drop money in their donations
| bin. But the majority of the content I consume comes from
| various sources, from a list that changes nearly daily.
|
| > _Maybe we designed a shitty system with bad incentives_
|
| Who is the "we" here, though? I would love to change this,
| but I feel pretty powerless to do so. At least not without
| making it my life's work, with a very high chance of failing
| at it regardless.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Let people know that you are willing to pay for good
| writing online without a paywall.
|
| Support Patreon or similar. Leave tips.
|
| One of my first big successes on HN got 60k pageviews and
| made me not one thin dime. No one left a tip. No one
| supported my Patreon.
|
| I have been writing for years because I am seriously
| medically handicapped but educated. Writing is something I
| can do.
|
| People don't want to hire me for resume work or other
| freelance writing. I'm a woman and former homemaker and
| most successful business people are men. They rarely want
| to talk to me about my work or how to succeed. Most often,
| if men try to talk to me, they are hoping for a romantic
| connection and from my end the experience boils down "All
| you horrible people are watching me starve but you think I
| will _sleep_ with you??? Seriously?!!!! "
|
| Leave tips (or support Patreon or similar). Tell people you
| leave tips on sites with good writing. Promote the various
| means people can accept cash for their online writing.
|
| I don't know what else to tell you. But saying you can't
| make a difference because you are a nobody is part of the
| problem.
|
| You don't have to save the world. Just buy a writer lunch
| or a cup of coffee, so to speak. Spread the word.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > Let people know that you are willing to pay for good
| writing online without a paywall.
|
| Or easier, adhere to the GDPR (at least in the EU) and
| provide a "reject all non-essential" button as demanded
| right next to "accept all" without any dark patterns, and
| their ad-business plummet and you _have_ to demand
| payment for the service to be sustainable. So my point
| is, the whole thing can be fixed if Megacorps would abide
| by the law, and law enforcement would also not take >5
| years to act on violation lawsuits (see noyb's lawsuits
| against FB which are going on 8 years and even date prior
| to the GDPR).
| no_wizard wrote:
| I genuinely agree with you. People need to eat, and live
| comfortably and be able to afford things like medical care, a
| place to live safely etc.
|
| I also think the blanket of "all affiliates are bad" is a bit
| much. I love supporting people who just do a good job. SEO
| spam is not what I call a good job, it's a sleazy
| exploitation of the average consumer.
|
| With that said, I have purchased many things based on what I
| consider honest good reviews who linked to affiliate programs
| and I do not regret this. I wish companies (Amazon for
| instance, as they're rent biggest right now) simply policed
| their affiliate programs better to incentive good unbiased
| reviews sites that Specialize in high quality, and dropped
| the SEO spammers
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| > I am going to remind people that this happens because
| that's the internet (and world) we designed.
|
| _we_ didn 't design that - they did. I used the Internet in
| the 90s on my 56k modem and it was mostly ad-free. Stuff was
| still free, but mostly because people created content out of
| curiosity and because it was their hobby (yes, I had a
| website and was using frames and image maps heavily) or
| university sponsored (IRC, NNTP, Mailinglists). I paid
| 5$/month for a shell account, later shared the cost for a
| dedicated server with a couple of friends (we had a traffic
| limit of 50GB/month) to offer content and services to other
| people - expecting nothing in return.
|
| Then companies realized how much money was in, and suddenly
| all good, federated and free services were overrun by spam
| (mostly NNTP). To this day, companies like FB, Insta, Google
| etc. try to lure as many content-creators to users their
| "free" sites, while they actually pay with their data or the
| data of your content consumers - while the data is used to
| steal attention to show you ads for stuff you don't need. The
| amount of GDPR violations by those Megacorps is immense as
| they very well know that presenting a "reject all tracking"
| button as demanded by the GDPR ruins their business model
| (less than 10% actually agree to being tracked when
| presenting them the choice).
|
| My solution to all this is easy: Ban all advertising on the
| internet, or, at least advocate to as many people as possible
| to use adblockers. Only when ads are gone, will people spend
| money on products such as FB and Youtube, and only then can
| there be actually competition - because right now, you can't
| compete with "free" services with any other model than using
| ads+tracking yourself.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I'm not going to say "quit your whining" but rather, maybe
| this isn't "the world we built", maybe it's "the way the
| world is". I know I've been guilty of thinking the later when
| I should think the former but really don't know what we'd
| change. Do you really think the internet would have
| flourished if it was pay per view (or similar solution)?
|
| I remember using online services in the 80s where they
| charged by the minute. CompuServe, GEnie, and even just my
| ISP when I first got internet in the 90s. Data of 1 but I
| know that gave me a "use it as little as possible" mindset.
|
| Further, if some groups set out to charge and some other
| groups offered "free with ads" I'm pretty confident "free
| with ads" would win (see Radio, TV, Podcasts as other
| examples of "free with ads"). So, short of outlawing free
| (which would likely never happen), I don't see how we'd have
| not gotten where we are at the moment.
|
| That isn't to say we can't do better now but I'm less
| confident we could have conscientiously directed ourselves to
| better. I think natural forces got us her and will take
| people experiencing better to get them to switch better.
|
| To put it another way, without tasting the "free with ads"
| kinda sucks, few would be willing to fork over $ for better.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I personally do not like paywalls. I had Google ads. I
| discontinued them.
|
| For a long list of reasons, I want my writing to be freely
| available. I got my very first Amazon payout of like $16 or
| something a few months ago. I also got an email reminder
| that I am legally required to very prominently display
| information telling people I have Amazon links on my site.
|
| I took the links down and thought about updating my sites
| to comply with the requirement and so far haven't, in part
| because I suspect the $16 was from some local asshole
| unqualified for his job (the job I applied for) buying ugly
| bike racks and plopping them down in bad locations all over
| my lovely downtown area like little piles of manure as a
| daily reminder of how corrupt these people are, how much
| they have shafted me for no real damn reason other than
| pathos on their part and they are ruining the town I hope
| to improve.
|
| I was unable to readily find links to bike racks I would
| like to see in this town and I'm angry at what is being
| done to this town by these immoral, incompetent cretins and
| it causes me to think that I might actively encourage their
| shit behavior ruining this town because I'm so desperate
| for money that $16 on that day meant I could afford a
| fucking coffee which put an end to my splitting headache.
|
| I do not wish to make the world and town I live in a worse
| place because I'm so desperate for money and I think taking
| the Amazon solution potentially pushes me in that
| direction.
|
| Anyway, I don't know how to fix this. I try to tell people
| what it looks like from where I sit because I know HN has a
| lot of coders, etc and they aren't daily exposed to the
| reality that "If you choose to not be a sell out, you go
| hungry." basically.
|
| I just want my life to work. I don't actually want to make
| what sounds like "political" commentary to other people. If
| my life worked, I would likely be all "Meh. Not my problem.
| I don't want to fight with these fools and trying to point
| this out is not worth the drama. Moving on."
|
| But it does impact me. It impacts me to the point where I
| literally fear for my life due to my intractable poverty
| and sometimes I feel compelled to comment, though I don't
| really expect it to help me. Maybe after I am beyond help,
| people will stop wondering what's in it for DoreenMichele
| and think "She had a point. Let's find a solution that
| incorporates these observations."
|
| This is possibly rambly at this point. I'm posting it
| anyway and then will try to stay out of this conversation.
| kragen wrote:
| Well, there are at least two separate, though not unrelated,
| problems:
|
| 1. Good jobs are hard to find, so some people try to make a
| living instead by influencing what other people buy, in
| exchange for kickbacks from the sellers.
|
| 2. The sellers offering the largest kickbacks are never the
| sellers offering the best value for money, because if they
| are, a reseller can buy the products from them, charge a
| higher price, and spend some of the markup on kickbacks to
| product shills. This results in a systematic bias toward
| overpriced junk in heavily advertised products.
|
| 3. While some knowledgeable people do still take the time to
| share their knowledge and unbiased judgments, which is for
| example mostly how Wikipedia is written, Google and other
| search engines are increasingly directing search traffic to
| the product shills instead.
|
| I agree with you that, given problem #1 and problem #3,
| problem #2 is sort of inevitable, and all three problems tend
| to mutually reinforce each other. But I think we could reduce
| either problem #1 or problem #3 by an order of magnitude
| without significantly reducing the other one. In particular,
| we might not be able to _completely_ solve the SERP quality
| problem without solving the jobs problem, but I think we
| could improve it enormously just by writing a better search
| engine, which is an easier problem than fixing the entire
| economy.
|
| I'm sorry to hear you're back on the streets, and I hope your
| situation improves before you die. I'm glad you're not dead
| yet because I often find your comments insightful. Happy new
| year!
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I'm not back on the streets _yet._ I moved a few weeks ago.
| I have been told this is a _temporary_ solution and I live
| in fear, as I have for several months now, of ending up
| back on the streets and dying there.
|
| I don't see surviving that a second time, for reasons I
| don't care to dig around in.
| kragen wrote:
| I understand. Condolences. I'm at least a few months away
| from that.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| We need to solve the housing supply issues in the US. (I
| don't know where you live, I just don't feel qualified to
| speak to issues in other countries. I've studied them for
| mine.)
|
| That's off topic for this discussion, but deeply
| intertwined with why so many people are so desperate for
| money and throwing in the towel on ethics in favor of
| asking themselves "Does it pay enough?"
| codingdave wrote:
| If you want to solve the problem of product research in an old-
| school way, Consumer Reports still exists. Their business model
| for almost a century has been to produce independent reviews of
| products, and charge for the reviews. It is also run as a non-
| profit. I'm honestly surprised how little I hear about them.
| Not that any organization is perfect, but they have been the
| poster child of success via paid content since the 1930s.
|
| It also makes me think that part of the problem is not only
| that Google's results are getting worse, it is that much of the
| population goes to the internet for all problems. Whether it is
| googling or asking on social media... the "front-line"
| information on the internet is simply not reliable anymore.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I don't trust consumer reports any longer. they have amazon
| affiliate links. I suspect the current CEO is selling them
| out, bit by bit. Also, their current web format makes it hard
| to find recommendations on used cars.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| You can buy most any product at Amazon, so the affiliate
| links are not an incentive for CR to rank one product
| better than the competitor they would otherwise also link
| to.
|
| Plus Amazon affiliate links are standardized and automated
| to such a degree that's there's no chance they would
| manually penalize or reward CR for editorial content.
| andrewf wrote:
| Aw man. I just signed up for the $59/yr magazine + online
| access. I believe the bulk of what you're saying, and that
| CR's methodology has value. That said the following was also
| part of my experience on consumerreports.com -
|
| In the bottom footer, I click on "Ad Choices". I'm presented
| with a list of advertisers in a TrustArc-branded dialog. To
| opt out of being retargeted by consumerreports.com, there are
| checkboxes for three vendors: Microsoft, LiveRamp Inc. and
| Google Advertising Products. For seven other vendors, there's
| no checkbox, just instructions to visit the website: Amazon
| Advertising, Bidtellect Inc, Comscore B.V, Facebook, Google
| Inc, Kibo Commerce, and Twitter.
|
| Also in the footer (maybe only for California residents such
| as myself?) there is a "Do Not Sell My Personal Information"
| link. It opens a OneTrust-branded dialog with the option to
| disable "Share My Information with Third Parties on Digital".
| It also declares that "If you are a Print or All-Access
| Member and receive Consumer Reports magazine or Consumer
| Reports on Health through the mail, we may share your name
| and mailing address for direct mail purposes with selected
| companies offering products or services that we believe will
| be of interest to you." I followed a link to a separate page,
| which required me to copy-paste in my just-received
| membership number, to opt out of this.
| evilduck wrote:
| CR today: "After extensive review, LG Microwave model
| AX7J3498-2 is best avoided"
|
| LG tomorrow: "Announcing LG Microwave model G8A867FL2-B!
| Also, model AX7J3498-2 will no longer be available"
|
| Consumers two days from now: "Well, there are no bad reviews
| for model G8A867FL2-B when I look it up, I guess it's ok to
| buy"
|
| I like the idea of Consumer Reports or in depth reviewing but
| manufacturers have learned to game it too.
| KB wrote:
| Consumer Reports is my first stop whenever I look to purchase
| some non trivial item. I typically use the top five from
| their recommended list to quickly narrow down my initial
| result set. Then I'll cross reference with Wirecutter to see
| if they are in agreement (usually are). If I'm down to one or
| two choices at that point I'll try to find some unbiased
| reviews on YouTube. Not a perfect system, but I find it works
| pretty well compared to just going right to a Google search
| result.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I usually just search the topic plus "reddit." The advice
| from a subreddit on something will usually be reliable.
|
| Then other times I take a chance on Amazon, like the ~$700
| Viribus mountain e-bike I got a few months ago. E-bike
| enthusiasts seem to say that price range is universally
| junk, but it's been treating me great on trails and the
| road. Oddly can't find anyone else talking about it online
| but the Amazon reviews were good.
| jerkstate wrote:
| Yeah I sing the praises of Consumer Reports all the time. I
| think I pay $10 annually for a subscription and every time I
| buy or recommend something I check with them and so far have
| not been let down. Their reviews almost always include
| objective measurements and durability testing, it's really
| surprising how people miss them among more modern options.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| It's $10/month or $39/year
| jimmaswell wrote:
| What more can Google even do about the onslaught of ever-
| evolving SEO spam besides hardcode some arbitrary "winners",
| which would have its own set of problems? It seems like a
| very hard problem.
| codingdave wrote:
| But that is the point - it is Google's problem, not ours.
| They don't have the best info anymore, so use someone else.
| There are other search engines. If Google wants us back, it
| is their problem to improve.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports
| is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products
| & services are not the best, and often times criminally bad.
|
| As an example, I used them for moving services for a state-
| to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving
| services are merely dispatchers run by a single company, run
| by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating number
| of businesses and cutouts.
|
| When I contacted Consumer Reports to let them know about the
| many tens of thousands of complaints about the companies they
| were ranking highest, they referred me to their attorney.
| unkeptbarista wrote:
| In all the years I've used Consumer Reports I've never seen
| them rate moving services. I just jumped on their site now,
| and there are no reviews for moving services.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> If you want to solve the problem of product research in
| an old-school way, Consumer Reports still exists. Their
| business model for almost a century has been to produce
| independent reviews of products, and charge for the
| reviews. It is also run as a non-profit.
|
| > Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer
| Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst
| products & services are not the best, and often times
| criminally bad.
|
| > As an example, I used them for moving services for a
| state-to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving
| services are merely dispatchers run by a single company,
| run by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating
| number of businesses and cutouts.
|
| Honestly, "moving companies" is not a category that seems
| like it would be in Consumer Reports' wheelhouse, and I'm
| surprised they offered any recommendations in that area at
| all.
|
| Also, your anecdote doesn't really support the notion that
| they're "pay-to-play, just that they did a bad job in some
| category.
| stanmancan wrote:
| I wish CR did -more- reviews in each category. I know it's
| next to impossible to thoroughly review every single product
| in the world, but I would pay 10x the subscription fee if I
| could reliably go there and find all the current models
| available in the different categories.
| 88913527 wrote:
| You can't even search for GitHub issues anymore. You'll get
| some mirrored site that has the discussion, and from that
| webpage, you can't even get a direct link back to GitHub.
| ljm wrote:
| Github issue clones and StackOverflow clones pretty much
| dominate most of my programming related search results these
| days.
|
| Unfortunately DDG isn't much better.
|
| It takes a lot of effort to finesse a search query such that
| I can get a good result, like a link to documentation or a
| personal website where someone wrote something up (which is
| often more thoughtful than what Medium and Dev.to offer).
| Volker_W wrote:
| I have never seen a Github issue clone or StackOverflow
| clone in my life.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Yeah, I also noticed that for "tiptoi wiki" Google ranks
|
| https://github-wiki-see.page/m/entropia/tip-toi-
| reveng/wiki/...
|
| higher than the actual GitHub wiki that all of the content
| was copied from
|
| https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi-reveng/wiki/Languages
|
| BTW, building my own interactive book was a great thing to do
| over Christmas.
| kelnos wrote:
| That might be fixable, if people want to expend the effort.
| Wiki pages are almost certainly copyrightable, so the
| owners could send DMCA takedown notices to github-wiki-
| see.page. If they're not responsive, send the DMCA notices
| to Google, which should be required to delist them.
| Unfortunately you have to do it on a URL-by-URL basis, and
| you can only send notices for pages you actually own
| copyright for, so it would mean a big coordinated effort to
| get them brought down.
|
| I just don't understand why Google themselves allows this
| and doesn't rank these sorts of sites lower. They're
| clearly garbage sites with low utility.
| crazysim wrote:
| I also do not host the content at all. That said, people
| have submitted outdated content requests if they move off
| GitHub Wikis to Google and they are honored.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Google puts substantial effort into identifying copycat
| content. The main way they do that is to see which site
| had the content first.
|
| Unfortunately with smaller sites, it could be a few days
| till their search bot finds the content, and often the
| copycat sites have agressive scrapers so appear to have
| the content first.
|
| From googles point of view, the copycat is the original,
| and the original is the copycat.
|
| There are also some kinds of copycat content which users
| actually prefer. For example, sites which bypass
| paywalls, sites which quote other sites, sites that
| display decrapified content from another site, etc.
| crazysim wrote:
| In the case of http://github-wiki-see.page/, the original
| isn't even on Google! That's why my copycat wins.
|
| FWIW, GitHub seems to be letting some Wikis be indexed on
| a test basis and I am very happy to see they are
| outranking GHWSEE. That said, with the current guessed
| criteria, there are still many publicly editable wikis
| with many stars and publically un-editale wikis on repos
| with few stars but useful information out there that
| aren't being indexed.
| crazysim wrote:
| Please read my explanation at http://github-wiki-
| see.page/ and observe why it exists. I believe it to be a
| site with extremely high utility.
|
| It has already recently convinced/defrosted GitHub to
| gradually change their policy to not let GitHub wiki
| pages be indexed since 2012. For at least 9 years, people
| were writing content into GitHub and not realizing it
| wasn't indexed at all.
|
| I'm happy to answer any questions or suggestions you
| have.
| Volker_W wrote:
| From https://github-wiki-see.page/
|
| GitHub Wiki Search Engine Enablement (GHWSEE) allows non-
| indexed GitHub Wikis to be indexed by search engines.
|
| This site will be decommissioned to redirect old links once
| the block is lifted or GitHub produces some other solution
| to index GitHub Wikis in harmony with their SEO concerns.
|
| I do not see any wrongdoing from github-wiki-see.page here.
| They don't even amke money from it. Quite contrary, I do
| think that this is a useful project.
| crazysim wrote:
| Hah, yeah I don't make any money from it. I think I'm
| like currently $300 in the hole from experiments and
| queries with it until I've settled on the current ramen
| architecture.
| crazysim wrote:
| I run https://github-wiki-see.page. Please read the about
| page link at the bottom or visit https://github-wiki-
| see.page for an explanation. I put it up after realizing my
| GitHub wiki contributions weren't available via Google.
|
| GitHub blocks https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi-
| reveng/wiki/Languages and many other wikis from being
| indexed. In the case of the page you linked, GitHub serves
| the content with "X-Robots-Tag: none". The content of that
| page currently does not exist in Google at all. You can see
| the robot blocking header by looking at the Network tab in
| Chrome while loading the page in incognito mode or
| equivalent in other browsers.
|
| As for having no link to GitHub, my service provides a huge
| button at the top and a direct URL to the original content.
| Please use those controls at the top to get to the content
| on GitHub. I do not automatically redirect to not trip
| cloaking detection or risk the indexing helper being
| classified as a redirect in search engines.
|
| If you have any other questions or suggestions, please let
| me know.
| hinkley wrote:
| I use DDG which is backed by Bing and it's much the same.
| Product reviews and some how to questions are just a couple
| pages of SEO garbage.
|
| Google used to measure engagement to try to get feedback on the
| quality of the links, but perhaps clickbait has broken that as
| well.
| hemloc_io wrote:
| When I do product research I generally search for whatever the
| enthusiast community lives and usually there are guides there.
| Blogs are exactly as you describe, either built in ads or
| useless.
|
| For common items it's kinda difficult, but still possible!
| (Printers had a pretty active subreddit/community for example.)
| chongli wrote:
| I am in the exact same quagmire trying to research water
| softeners and drinking water (RO) systems. I am having to pull
| fragments of information from many different sites / videos and
| having to discard large amounts of contradictory and misleading
| information.
|
| At this point, I've had to resort to reading scientific papers
| on how some of these technologies work (and how some don't
| work) just to avoid the bad information. Unfortunately, the
| more I research the farther I get from making a purchase. This
| is not where I want to be, however, since the water in my area
| is very hard and everything gets scaled up all the time. I'm
| looking to purchase an espresso machine to get into the hobby
| but I'm not going to drop the money in expensive equipment
| until I can get access to water which will not damage it in
| short order.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I bought my home water filter based on a Consumer Reports
| recommendation. I feel that's still a reliable source. I
| think you can sign up for online access for a month to do all
| your research.
|
| I also really like the Wirecutter but I know not everyone
| here agrees with me.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Wirecutter advice seems dubiously linked to how much they
| can get paid by their "winners". It's not all bad advice,
| it often seems quite good, but it has the same corruption
| as top SEO blogs.
| xtracto wrote:
| Ha! I was searching for the same (water softening systems)
| for Mexico... the amount of signal to noise ratio is so small
| in google, that it's mostly unusable.
| tomrod wrote:
| It isn't just me noticing this.
|
| I had a project take me into an unfamiliar knowledge space.
| Up until... 2018? I could have relied on Google to find the
| meaningful information.
|
| The reason people accepted Google was that it dramatically
| lowered information acquisition costs through the Internet.
| That benefit doesn't seem as common now. Back to webrings.
| xapata wrote:
| Same for my experience buying a furnace. Science journal
| articles were my best source of information, because I
| worried the manufacturers and installers would be biased.
|
| I'm not sure how this could be otherwise. Who's going to pay
| for someone to stay current on such things and publish an
| easy to understand summary?
| Sunspark wrote:
| Which science journals review furnaces?
| chongli wrote:
| Most people's experience with HVAC specialists comes from
| dealing with the technicians who install and service
| these systems in our homes. It turns out there's an
| entire subfield of mechanical engineering dedicated to
| inventing, designing, and improving HVAC systems.
|
| Wherever there are engineers, there are academics who do
| engineering research. They have journals of their own to
| publish this research.
| replwoacause wrote:
| I've been there and it's a hell of a rabbit hole, one that is
| easy to lose days to. Whatever you do don't fall for the
| Berkey scam.
| DaftDank wrote:
| Check out APEC RO systems.
| Fricken wrote:
| You guys had a bad time trying to search things that are at
| least a little complicated and obscure. I had the same
| experience trying to find a basic brownie recipe last week.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Recipes have somehow become one of the absolute worst parts
| of the internet. Google results are consistently dominated
| by websites that will require scrolling past multiple
| screens of narrative and increasingly some clicks to see
| the actual recipe. And when you start looking, you quickly
| discover that most of the time these websites are just
| repeating recipes from well known sources like The Joy of
| Cooking, or worse they have made changes that it's not
| clear they ever actually tested.
| jansimonek wrote:
| If you are reading papers on water softeners you might
| already know everything this video contains. For me it was a
| good intro to the topic of good water for making coffee:
| https://youtu.be/jfElZfrmlRs
| chongli wrote:
| Thanks for this! James Hoffmann is how I got into the
| hobby. I binge watched all of his videos, including this
| one. But then I forgot a lot of the useful information he
| gives here, only remembering his frustration at the
| complexity of the problem. Upon second viewing I think
| there is some good stuff for me here.
|
| I had been following Jim Shulman's research which Hoffmann
| mentions in this video. It's very dry and technical though
| and doesn't provide much in the way of actionable advice on
| what equipment to purchase, instead recommending bottled
| water which I absolutely refuse to use (my household is
| already addicted to bottled water and I'm trying to break
| that addiction).
| nicoffeine wrote:
| Buy a Brother Color Laser printer. $250 and the ink never
| dries. I haven't thought about printing other than pressing
| "print" in 6 months.
| rejor121 wrote:
| This is something I have a problem with as well. Search results
| typically include the first five results being paid ads.
|
| Everything else for the first couple pages are typically review
| sites that are not really reviews.
|
| YouTube isn't much better.
|
| I'm trying to addresss this in my own way by making long term
| product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people and
| companies did the same thing.
| Volker_W wrote:
| > I'm trying to addresss this in my own way by making long
| term product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people
| and companies did the same thing.
|
| Link?
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Seibel doesn't seem to understand how affiliate ads work
| either, Google doesn't make money from them. Google would be
| better off just applying a ranking penalty for any page that
| has numerous Amazon affiliate links. 99% of dedicated affiliate
| sites are trash
| rtpg wrote:
| Sorry but what do you expect apart from blogs and review sites?
| Like what's the magical result here?
|
| I feel like the fallacy here is assuming that the problem is
| that Google isn't finding the good websites. There's also a
| simple explanation that the content simply doesn't exist.
| psyc wrote:
| I began to notice some time ago that Google basically disregards
| my query, and fixates on the lowest common denominator. So,
| recently I was trying to search for a particular event or quote
| or something related to some famous person. But no matter how I
| worded the query, Google ignored everything but the person's
| name, and returned only fluffy flattering results about the
| person from popular magazine sites.
|
| So I tried Bing, and the thing I was looking for was result #1.
| Like how it used to be with Google. So I switched to Bing.
|
| Now after a few weeks of that, I see that Bing does the exact
| same thing much of the time. Totally different queries + same
| general subject = identical top ten results.
|
| So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in
| 1998?
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| I've noticed this a lot as well recently. It's not as really
| the search results themselves that are bad but rather Google
| simply ignoring key words/phrases in my query.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was
| in 1998?
|
| I've tried, not quite there yet, but it's got its moments.
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
| hulitu wrote:
| Thank you. Looks sane. I'll give it a try in the next days (
| a quick search for gopher is better than i expected).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's situationally very good in some topics. Perhaps not a
| replacement for Google, but at least a complement.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| We are trying - with no-tracking principles and practices
| https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...
| ffhhj wrote:
| > Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in
| 1998?
|
| I'm creating a faster search engine for coders, using good old
| literal search, with synonyms of programing operations in
| different languages, ie. array.push in javascript, array.append
| in python, array[] in php, and so on. The database is loaded in
| memory instead of huge analytics libraries, and searching is
| performed instantly. I see no need to protect my DB, since it
| contains basic snippets, and that allows these fasts queries. I
| move between several languages and needed a super quick
| reference without all the SO clones and spam.
| nikanj wrote:
| I've noticed same. Google "amusement parks italy", get a list
| of world-famous parks (such as Central Park NY).
| pkulak wrote:
| Huh. My first result is pretty darn helpful and relevant:
|
| https://public.kulak.us/google-search.png
| mleonhard wrote:
| I get extremely relevant results from Google for "amusement
| parks italy". I use a privacy proxy (VPN) and a browser in
| privacy mode. Perhaps Google only switches into guess-what-
| you-meant mode when it can link your search to their profile
| of you?
| vmception wrote:
| the searches results aren't the same, you are fingerprinted
|
| its been this way for years now, at least in how it
| drastically alters search results for different users in the
| same country speaking the same language
| iso1210 wrote:
| ddg gives me:
|
| Amusement parks in Italy, top 5 fun parks you have to visit
|
| 20 of Italy's best amusement parks - TravelMag
|
| THE 10 BEST Water & Amusement Parks in Italy - Tripadvisor
|
| 10 Best Theme Parks in Italy - Find the best Amusement ...
|
| Family amusement in Italy: 15 excellent parks - Italy ...
|
| Gardaland | The biggest amusement park in Italy
|
| Amusement Park Emilia Romagna Italy | Mirabilandia
|
| The 5 Best Theme Parks in Italy: Italy Logue
|
| THE 10 BEST Water & Amusement Parks in Tuscany - Tripadvisor
|
| Category:Amusement parks in Italy - Wikipedia
|
| Not great, but seems reasonable. Google gives similar answers
| to be fair.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| Not quite as big of an offender, but when I was looking up
| "Nice Restaurants" with google maps fixed on my city, it
| instead started looking up Restaurants in Nice, France.
| Raed667 wrote:
| And as someone who lives in Nice, you can imagine how much
| of a pain it is to look for local venues or services when
| google thinks its an adjective.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Current location bias?
|
| There used to be a way to turn of location priority in
| advanced search.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| For me every single result was quality articles or Wikipedia
| listing amusement parks in Italy.
|
| I'm in Paris
|
| I don't click on trash sites ever. Not sure what else might
| bias your results.
|
| Try creating a new chrome profile and searching.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The problem is that Google was only good in 1998 precisely
| because it was pre-Google. Now the web is SEO'd to hell and
| actively trying to prevent you from getting good search
| results.
|
| A "new old Google" would only be good at searching the 1998
| web, and if all you want is nostalgia, http://theoldnet.com is
| right there.
| Fricken wrote:
| My experience is that Google continually improved up until
| around 2014 or so. For the last 3 or 4 years it has slowly
| been getting worse.
| mike00632 wrote:
| I spent the holidays with someone who does all their
| searches using only voice input. His eyesight is poor and
| he chooses to just say what he wants instead of putting on
| his reading glasses and typing it out. The types of things
| he was saying and the level of understanding his phone had
| if him wouldn't have been possible in 2014.
| chiph wrote:
| Agree. The web material being searched is bad at the source.
| So there's little that a search engine can do to improve it.
| As the adage says - garbage in, garbage out.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search
| engines. Google came along with a better algorithm for
| sussing out the signal if what content people found useful
| from the noise of attempts to trick the browser into
| increasing relevance signal.
|
| It's not entirely clear what the next iteration of algorithm
| should be... SEO has gotten very good at its game.
| hericium wrote:
| > The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search
| engines.
|
| But mostly with invisible meta tags, not phrases repeated
| multiple times and texts written by content creators with
| no passion towards the subject.
|
| Today's web posts remind me of ridiculous SEO-driven
| "effective product names" on multiple sites with low value
| products or fakes.
|
| SEO aside, '98 web was passionate while today's web is
| written for robots, not humans.
| tomrod wrote:
| So we need a new web.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| We need competition. A new web would be a temporary benefit
| exactly because it would have competition, until it
| doesn't.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Gemini is nice.
| mad182 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I don't think its only the google search algorithm to blame,
| this has a lot to do with the extinction of old school forums
| and blogs. These days large part of the real discussions and
| posts without financial motivation have moved to facebook,
| whatsapp groups, discord, slack and other places behind
| logins and paywalls which google can't index. What's left in
| public are mostly blogs and websites motivated by affiliate
| or ad revenue and SEO'ed to death. So there simply is much
| higher garbage to valuable content ratio in the public,
| indexable web.
| nefitty wrote:
| 95% of my Google searches are suffixed with "MDN" or
| "site:reddit.com".
|
| If I'm looking for something particularly technical I'll
| search HN. That especially helps when I feel at my wit's
| end about some general concept like "sinuses" or
| "parenting". It's more common to get my mind blown by some
| offhanded revelation dropped by an HN commenter.
| mad182 wrote:
| Same, I also often use site:reddit.com Thankfully Reddit
| is still left mostly indexable, but most of the other
| sites where discussions take place are not.
| more_corn wrote:
| Google did good work fighting against SEO over optimization
| for a long time. Then they gave up and it all went to hell. I
| stopped using them a few years ago. I found their practice of
| dropping search terms infuriating. I switched to DuckDuckGo
| which is arguably lower quality but less infuriating.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Would you be willing to pay a subscription fee to a search
| engine?
| [deleted]
| groone wrote:
| I remember around 2010-2012 it felt really great. You could
| learn the keyword-fu skill and with few keyword change /
| reorder iterations could explore topics and find obscure things
| on the internet. Now that method does not work at all. Always
| the same results and cannot find specific things. Around that
| time they started adding ML/AI and now searching with keywords
| is extremely unsatisfying.
| hwers wrote:
| I almost feel as if they have like 100k actual pages that they
| present (and have looked through manually) and if it's not in
| that group they just show you the closest one (or say "no
| results").
| psyc wrote:
| I have no knowledge or evidence, but this has indeed become
| my mental model for whatever Google actually does these days.
| I do wonder what they actually do. All those engineers, for
| 20 years. Surely they haven't just been scaling up BackRub!
| But I find it very hard to believe that they're crawling the
| whole web. I find it very hard to believe that PageRank is
| still the same PageRank that we understood in 1998. And it
| looks like they're managing to editorialize quite heavily,
| even if they're doing it via algorithm somehow. But again, I
| can't really discern what they're doing anymore.
|
| So for now, I have to disagree with the "garbage in, garbage
| out" theory. I don't believe Google has the same goal now
| that they did then.
| jbay808 wrote:
| > I find it very hard to believe that PageRank is still the
| same PageRank that we understood in 1998.
|
| It's not, because as good as PageRank was, it was
| vulnerable to being exploited by link farms, which started
| popping up in its wake. I do remember that by the mid
| 2000s, about 5% of search results were pages just spamming
| search keywords and hyperlinks.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Do they say "no results" anymore? It seems like Google
| ignores parts of your query until you get results, no matter
| whether they are specifically connected to your search.
| ckastner wrote:
| > _began to notice some time ago that Google basically
| disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common
| denominator._
|
| Same here. I was perplexed to see undisputed leader of search
| engines (which nobody managed to successfully rival, no matter
| how many billions they threw at the problem) decline in this
| way.
|
| But now I wonder: is fixating on the lowest common denominator
| perhaps ultimately the more profitable approach?
|
| Compare this to Amazon. A decade ago, buying on Amazon used to
| be a fantastic experience; no other retailer could rival it.
| Now the experience is utter crap, as are many of the products.
| But that crap still outsells everyone else by a large margin.
|
| Perhaps we are seeing a general shift towards a focus on
| volume, rather than quality.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I think this is how giants fall. The various titans of times
| long gone - steel, chemical companies, mines etc. were one
| day so mighty that it was impossible to imagine them
| faltering. And then they stumbled, then tripped, then
| eventually fell.
|
| Google, Facebook, Amazon will probably all eventually be
| replaced by a plucky, energetic and hungry competitor out of
| nowhere, just as they exploded in the faces of the
| predecessors.
| wenbin wrote:
| Digital products could have a "finished" state, which is great
| for users, but bad for companies.
|
| Dropbox could've been a finished product in 2012. Simple and
| focused personal storage solution. But it can't justify the
| valuation of Dropbox, the company.
|
| Same for Evernote.
|
| However, could Google be a "finished" product at some point
| (e.g., 2000)? Probably not. When google was incorporated in
| 1998, they indexed only 25 million web pages. As the number of
| web pages grows exponentially, Google as a product needs to
| evolve, e.g., doing a better job to fight web spams / blackhat
| seos... The problem is that the web evolves way faster than
| Google could improve their search result relevance.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was
| in 1998?
|
| I don't know if it works well, but there's Neeva [1]. It
| started as a search engine with a paid subscription model but
| then switched to a freemium pricing with a premium tier that
| will come "soon".
|
| [1] https://neeva.com/
| com2kid wrote:
| > Now after a few weeks of that, I see that Bing does the exact
| same thing much of the time. Totally different queries + same
| general subject = identical top ten results.
|
| When I worked at Microsoft, the Bing team had an internal
| version employees could use where you could report if Bing's
| top results didn't equal Google's top results.
|
| This was nearing a decade ago, so don't read much into it for
| what they do now.
| sb057 wrote:
| I was attempting to find some historical data on the Soviet
| Ruble the other day, but found the task nearly impossible
| because Google "helpfully" considers "Russian" and "Soviet" to
| be synonyms, and so all the results were about the modern day
| Russian Ruble. I can't think of any other examples off the top
| of my head, but this isn't the first time I've run into this
| sort of problem.
| Digory wrote:
| That's probably not a bad substitution for the average
| person, but a bad one for a precise vocabulary.
|
| I get the feeling though, that the need to compensate for
| mobile misspelling means a dumbing down of precise
| vocabulary.
| aix1 wrote:
| That's very odd. I just typed "Soviet Ruble" into Google and
| every single result on the first page is about the Soviet,
| not modern Russian, currency[*]. This includes the box of
| images on the right-hand side, all of which depict USSR
| money.
|
| Not really sure what to make of this.
|
| [*] With the arguable exception of an Encyclopedia Britannica
| article on "ruble", which covers USSR, Soviet Union and
| Belarus currencies at the same time: _ruble, the monetary
| unit of Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and Belarus
| (spelled rubel)..._
| twofornone wrote:
| I believe Google's algorithm will confound such experiments
| because it tailors search results according to user
| history. Which may mean that some portion of the HN crowd
| could see worse than average performance if they are more
| likely to clear cookies and/or search without a login.
| quitit wrote:
| I have no inside information on this, but it's based on my
| usage of Google recently. I believe Google seem to be guessing
| at people's intended search query rather than performing the
| query based on the actual terms.
|
| This is probably great for most people as Google's own data
| shows that most people do indeed search the same things at the
| same time, so guessing intention (especially with relation to
| current affairs and the queries of others) is probably a
| winning strategy for giving most people what they want - even
| if their search terms were a bit junk.
|
| The down side is that the ability to hone results by tweaking
| or rearranging ones search terms goes largely ignored.
| Previously one could peel away layers of results with such
| meddling, now it seems there will usually be some word or name
| in the search query which Google will be affectionate towards,
| and the results are unmovable from that.
| version_five wrote:
| > Google seem to be guessing at people's intended search
| query rather than performing the query based on the actual
| terms.
|
| I've read that google uses "Machine Learning" for their
| search results which I interpret to be exactly as you say
| they provide a stereotyped result based on what they think
| you are searching for (possibly optimized either for what is
| inevitably clicked on or for ad revenue), instead of actually
| matching terms.
|
| What this means is that search results may be more accurate
| in some statistical way, like more people click on the top
| result, but it also pumps up the number of edge cases where
| it guesses wrong, while simultaneously making it impossible
| to tell where the results went wrong because you can't
| understand how they were generated (compared to eg keywors
| search where good or bad, the reason you got a result is
| obvious)
| momenti wrote:
| I suspect the change we are seeing is that Google is now using
| a neural network to (re-)interpret the search query.[1]
| Presumably that neural network also calculates some sort of
| neural hash for document/paragraph/sentence similarity. The
| upside is that it can correct more typos, intelligently drop
| irrelevant terms and understand the meaning of the query to
| some extent. But the downsite is less precision when you know
| exactly what you want. It sometimes even seems to ignore the
| quotes syntax for exact string matching. Very frustrating and
| very poor quality control.
|
| [1] I bet they train these models based on unsuccessful queries
| as inputs (in which the user did not click any search result),
| and then the final search query after which the user left as
| desired output.
| otherotherchris wrote:
| From personal experience the final search query is when the
| user realizes that none of the results contain useful
| information, or your actual keywords, and rage quits.
|
| The user then asks someone in the office or goes and spends
| an hour at a university library.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > I began to notice some time ago that Google basically
| disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common
| denominator.
|
| Which is funny. Google beat other search engines in the early
| 2000 because it actually did find what people where looking
| for, not what the "search engine" wanted people to see.
|
| Now it's more and more the latter, I imagine because it's more
| lucrative for Google to display the results advertisers pay
| for...
|
| That's really the product of the lack of competition in the
| search space. Nothing more. Why should Google bother? It would
| take billions in VC for a competitor to truly threaten Google
| dominance on search.
|
| Same with Youtube. Youtube straight out doesn't care anymore
| about search terms and will just show some results Youtube
| "cooked up" for the user, unbelievable...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Consider also the possibility that they do want to deliver
| good results but their algorithms just passed their useful
| limit some time ago and people can game the system faster
| than they can improve the system, but there's too much money
| on the table to ever admit this in public.
| heartbeats wrote:
| Surely they could just have a system to filter out bad
| sites?
|
| For example, if I want information about some programming
| stuff, I only really want
|
| * Wikipedia * StackExchange * MDN * cpp-reference *
| whatever official docs
|
| There's absolutely no need to have * geeksforgeeks *
| w3schools * cyberciti.biz * random wordpress blogs
|
| This takes all of 5 minutes to code, you could even have a
| userscript for it.
| zo1 wrote:
| Google benefits from a chaotic and spam-filled ecosystem.
| At this point technology and network speed are at a point
| that anyone could re-code a Google if all they did was
| ignore 99.9% of the wesites out there that are crap and
| that _Google_ (and Amazon and a few other spam-
| benefiters) had a hand in creating or promoting.
|
| This is why Adwords has to go. It allowed Google to
| weaponize the collective man-power of the world to create
| and regurgitate new ad-space for Google to monetize. Ad-
| space that didn't exist, and doesn't need to exist.
| OvidNaso wrote:
| This is the answer thats getting little attention. The SEO
| game didnt just give us hidden keywords, there are hundreds
| of millions of 'sites' and blogs for all these topics that
| are basically crap. Google can't tell the difference
| anymore. the majority of the internet is now mostly hidden
| (except during search) spam.
| planb wrote:
| But I can tell the difference within a blink of an eye.
| There must be a way to train a ML model on ,,crappy
| seo"...
| kreeben wrote:
| This is Google, after all. Their interns could do that
| over a weekend. But then again, perhaps they don't have
| their sharpest working on search. They surely don't have
| their sharpest working on that silly, silly thing they
| call the YT algorithm. To much to do in the ads team,
| perhaps.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > it actually did find what people where looking for
|
| I believe that is more a function of the web being less
| commercially relevant back then.
|
| And every small and then massively growing online community
| goes through the same evolution:
|
| While the community is small, commercial value is small
| enough, information is less tainted - and once it becomes big
| enough, the commercial value of that community becomes
| worthwhile to game.
| Agentlien wrote:
| I've noticed exactly this. One thing I do from time to time is
| try to find a song after just remembering partial lyrics. It
| used to work so well it felt like magic.
|
| The last two weeks I've had two occurrences where the lyrics I
| remembered contained a common word which was also a brand name.
| It focused on that and completely ignored the rest of my query.
| So in both cases I added "lyrics" and now it ignored all but
| one word which happened to be the title of another song, no
| matter how I massaged the query.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Blogspam and SEO folks are essentially adversaries to good
| ranking strategies on search engines. In 1998 there weren't
| many adversaries and it was mostly a technical issue. Now the
| game is much more complicated.
| 88913527 wrote:
| Even lowest common denominator has gone too far. Querying
| "Barcelona" gives you 100% search results for the League team
| above-the-fold. You must search "Barcelona, Spain" to get
| information on the city, which then gets you direct links to
| Google Maps, etc.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I also get these results and I've never spectated a sports
| game in my life. These aren't just customized results for
| different people - if Google keeps a "completely
| uninterested" personal score I'd have the maximum value for
| sports
| [deleted]
| greatpostman wrote:
| Yeah their entity resolution algorithms are really annoying.
| Half my searches come up with some random movie on IMDb
| rickdeveloper wrote:
| I actually created "my own search engine" because of this:
| notrashsearch.github.io.
|
| It uses Google search tech under the hood (which I've found
| superior to other search engines), but filters results with a
| white list. It's only ~100 sites long & very focussed on STEM,
| but the results are surprisingly good.
|
| If anyone has suggestions for site to add, please let me know!
| paulcole wrote:
| It feels like I'm the only one who gets consistently excellent
| results from Google search (and it feels like they've gotten
| better for me over time)? Maybe it's because most of my searches
| are basic and lowest common denominator? I just don't need
| obscure information most of the time and when I do it's honestly
| still not that hard to find it.
| bin_bash wrote:
| What are people's impressions of Neeva? I just registered and a
| few searches seem equivalent to Google but it's a lot faster and
| cleaner.
| techload wrote:
| Not available in my region, Brazil.
| sefrost wrote:
| I'm in Canada, signed up and it said it's not available in my
| region.
| yborg wrote:
| The whole point is to not be equivalent to Google since Google
| is an ad revenue engine now, not a search engine.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I'm telling you my experience not their goals. The searches
| seemed nearly exactly the same. I didn't see any sites that
| didn't appear on the other in first glance.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| Google is no longer a search engine. It's a propaganda tool
| funded by ads and run under the guise of providing results to
| search queries.
| tome wrote:
| All search engines lack a feature that would make them hugely
| more useful: disambiguation. Suppose I search a common name "John
| Doe". I should next be presented with a disambiguation page
| allowing me to select whether I meant "John Doe who was President
| of Calexico 1905-1909", "John Doe who won the World Series with
| the Greensocks 1975" or "John Doe professor of Spanish
| Technicalities at Idaho Institute of Science". It shouldn't be my
| job to disambiguate my query. The search engine knows much more
| about the total search space than I do!
| colordrops wrote:
| I vaguely recall google doing this long in the past. Probably
| just confusing it with Wikipedia though.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Not just search. I subscribed to a print news paper.
|
| I enjoy reading the news again. Good mix of local, financial,
| entertainment, international, human interest.
|
| I'm exposed to things outside my bubble and I often like them.
|
| The print edition excludes a lot ofnlow quality content because
| its limited space.
| zelon88 wrote:
| You mean to tell me that when you use Google design paradigms, to
| implement Google promoted "best practices" in a way that scores
| highly on Googles own test suite and build it on Google promoted
| Javascript-by-the-pound libraries and then strap it with Google
| analytics and ads, promote it with Google ads, and then host it
| on Google cloud platform that you're actually building a dirtier,
| shittier web?
|
| Well paint me surprised.
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