[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Google useless for shopping / product reviews?
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Ask HN: Google useless for shopping / product reviews?
Whether searching for best dog scissors or hot sauces, I get a
front page full of SEO'ed fake top 10 lists with affiliate links.
I can include site: to search a specific reviewer or Reddit, but
that basically turns google into a local search. Has the time of
google for product reviews now past? Is there a replacement that
downranks these terrible SEO'ed fake recommendations?
Author : blobbers
Score : 18 points
Date : 2022-12-26 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Reviews in general are not reliable. I have been paid about a
| dozen times/offered the item for free to write a positive Amazon
| review about some product.
| SanchoPanda wrote:
| Do you mind sharing how much?
| FranklinMaillot wrote:
| I've been experimenting with https://kagi.com/.
|
| For technical questions, they prioritize official documentation
| and SO. They don't serve you all those copy-pasta blogs that
| plague Google results.
|
| For product reviews, they prioritize reddit and other forums by
| default. It's still far from perfect, but at least they're
| trying.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Can we stop pretending that Reddit isn't astroturfed to death? If
| you think you're reading authentic discussions about products,
| then you must love amazon comment section.
| bsuvc wrote:
| Yes, it's about as useless as relying on Amazon reviews.
|
| Affiliate marketing and SEO optimization have pretty much
| destroyed the usefulness of searching for product reviews.
|
| I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm searching.
| It's the only way to read what real, mostly-unincentivized people
| think about something.
|
| I wish Google had a way to "downvote" results. Sure they would
| have to mitigate artificial manipulation, but what they have
| currently doesn't work well.
| lawlorino wrote:
| > I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm
| searching. It's the only way to read what real, mostly-
| unincentivized people think about something
|
| I wish this was true, but I think companies are fairly wise to
| this now. It wouldnt take much effort to add fake positive
| comments about a brand or product. The technical word for it is
| "astroturfing" [0].
|
| In my opinion there is no good unbiased source for consumer
| product reviews, maybe Which? in the Uk would be an exception
| though I'm not too familiar with it.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
| piaste wrote:
| At least on reddit it's a little easier to spot astroturfing,
| compared to Amazon reviews or Quora or other single-purpose
| sites. Just click on the profile of the user who wrote three
| paragraphs extolling the virtues of Brand(r) razors. Does it
| look like a man with a varied set of interests, or did it
| just spam reposts of funny memes for karma in large subs?
|
| I'm sure astroturfers will soon adopt text generation en
| masse to create human-looking profiles and add credibility to
| their recommendations, but I don't believe that's standard
| yet.
| dantyti wrote:
| This is not always that easy to notice, as some accounts
| will have huge gaps between promotional posts. A (very well
| known) company I briefly worked at had an entire department
| dedicated to 'web reputation management' - every employee
| there had dozens if not hundreds of aged reddit (and any
| other forum/site you can imagine) accounts registered from
| different locations (proxies) and using unique browser
| agents. They spent non-insignificant amounts of time (my
| impression was 10-20%) creating new accounts, karma whoring
| and posting/commenting on front page subs, until someone
| monitoring their target subreddits discovered anything even
| remotely related to the product they were promoting or the
| company itself.
|
| A complete side note: the way these reputation managers
| aligned themselves almost perfectly with the company's
| official statements/position was what made me disillusioned
| with SpaceX and Musk in general, since I saw exactly the
| same things happening there
| imissfirefox wrote:
| This is where "real life" is helpful. Ask other people who use
| these things which one they like. People at the dog park,
| salespeople at well-curated pet stores for the dog scissors and
| other people who like hot sauce or gourmet cooking stores for the
| same. Coworkers, friends of friends, etc. If you don't interact
| with others for whatever reason, look on large retailer sites for
| reviews - and read the bad ones. Sometimes a common problem with
| the product will be commented on a few times. Well
| known/established brands can be a guide (vs no name garbage from
| amazon/china).
|
| Search engines are pretty useless these days - any answer I'm
| looking for regarding anything is not found and instead I get
| AI/bot pulling non-answers/keyword driven paragraphs into a click
| seeking website.
|
| At some point what could have been a great tool was taken over by
| capitalism and adtech. It's a shame.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Yes, Google is just SPAM now. Kinda like Amazon.
|
| In Germany, there is test.de which is funded by its subscribers.
| They tend to do pretty objective reviews (but in German).
| OhNoNotAgain_99 wrote:
| [dead]
| samhuk wrote:
| Reddit or (a very small number of) youtubers are pretty much the
| only sources of truthful and good-faith product reviews. Almost
| all of my recent purchases are due to recommendations by hobbyist
| subreddits like r/mechanicalkeyboards, r/photography, r/bifl,
| etc.
|
| Google automated ranking, using totally random pagerank algos,
| which was their downfall. Reddit and youtube, in general, rely on
| crowdsourced ranking, which is harder to game (not impossible).
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Try Youtube. There are affiliate links there too but not as much.
| blobbers wrote:
| Yep! These days we just trust influencers... at least they've
| got some skin in the game (as in their reputation).
| bmitc wrote:
| With Google, I often struggle to even find the official
| manufacturer's website.
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(page generated 2022-12-26 23:01 UTC)