[HN Gopher] Big media publishers are inundating the web with sub...
___________________________________________________________________
Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product
recommendations
Author : beavershaw
Score : 431 points
Date : 2024-02-19 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (housefresh.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (housefresh.com)
| guluarte wrote:
| Also, a lot of these publishers are used by spammers for link
| building, dont believe? just go to BHS marketplace
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| .... Barbershop Harmony Service?
|
| What is BHS marketplace?
| dazc wrote:
| Black Hat [Something]?
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is
| utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business
| with whom you have no formal business relationship. This is just
| a risk that one acknowledges when they decide to go for it. If I
| ran an eBay store, I'm totally dependent on the whims of eBay,
| and my business plan should include the risk that they can do
| anything they want--up to and including kicking me out. Same if I
| had a business that ran off of Facebook.
|
| Not taking sides here or saying anyone is right or wrong, but
| it's reality of operating on the Internet that small businesses
| probably just have to go into with both eyes open. Personally, I
| wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could
| dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making
| some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to
| sleep.
| sneak wrote:
| I agree with this, but then look at Uber: Without the
| cooperation and approval of Apple and Google via their
| respective developer programs and app stores, they wouldn't
| exist because you couldn't do notifications or location in
| webapps at the time.
|
| There are myriad examples like this of downright _giant_
| startups that would not exist if they refused to proceed just
| because Apple can veto them. Instagram is probably the largest
| example. Look what happened to Tumblr.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Depends on the size of the business. Apple/Google can screw
| over small businesses all day long, but once they start
| getting bigger there is some assumed risk on A/G's part in
| future anti trust lawsuits if they screw over companies with
| enough wealth to hurt them in court.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| These are inspite of.
|
| The moving fear is being vetoed only works for well funded
| startups. A small independent startup would have to consider
| this before betting the farm on a product that might get
| smashed by the feeling of the day Google and Apple app
| moderators have.
| withinboredom wrote:
| But should those app stores even be the sole judge of whether
| or not those apps can exist?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Uber could sell their own devices to users and drivers. The
| app is _that_ useful for millions (billions?) of people, that
| people would buy it. People used to buy separate GPS devices,
| so it's not something out of the ordinary.
| notzane wrote:
| Spotify tried this, did not go well for them. Amazon and
| Meta learned the same many years ago
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Maybe Spotify didn't put enough effort into it? And
| besides, listening to music was nothing special, people
| had portable music players for decades before Spotify.
| Uber opened up a completely different way of transport. I
| don't doubt that they would have success with their own
| device.
|
| Amazon have been extremely successful with their
| dedicated book reading device, the Kindle. So thank you
| for that example. That really shows that Uber could have
| had success with their own device, better than I can
| argue for it.
| cptaj wrote:
| This is a serious problem. Internet marketplaces are so big now
| that its really hard to even have a business without them at
| all.
|
| I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be
| regulated to insure due process between the parties. That way
| the whims of the marketplace owner can't destroy thousands of
| prosperous businesses at the push of a button.
|
| We have similar regulations for utilities. The power company
| can't kick you out on a whim. I think the same rationale
| applies here.
| sofixa wrote:
| That's exactly the thinking that led to the Digital Markets
| Act in the EU. Those marketplaces are effective monopolies or
| oligopolies in their space, so access to them needs to be
| regulated to ensure a level playing field.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| Ahh yes, the Digital Markets Act. That thing that HNers
| rail against as the uncompetitive doodlings of quaint
| groups of people who insist on speaking different
| languages, paying decent wages and self-governing in the
| face of the obvious virtues of limited government, low
| regulation, and sweet, sweet disruptive libertarianism.
| sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
| Ahh yes, another premature declaration of success by the
| EU, who haven't properly enforced ePrivacy, GDPR, or a
| host of other regulations.
|
| The EU is all talk and posturing, you can write any law
| you want but the tech companies already figured out
| compliance is optional.
| sofixa wrote:
| Apple have already started using USB-C in iPhones, have
| already announced how they'll allow apps to be installed
| on iPhones without their App Store. Google have stopped
| shoving Google Maps on Search results.
|
| Many companies, including Google, Facebook and similar,
| have changed how they do things because of the GDPR, and
| have been fined for not complying.
| sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
| The FTCs fine on Facebook from a few years ago exceeds
| the combined value of all GDPR fines levied to date.
|
| The Irish government fills its coffers with the largesse
| of tech companies that are headquartered there
| specifically to dodge taxes and regulation.
|
| Likewise, while GDPR has some initial changes in privacy
| after many months of inaction tracking levels started to
| rebound because everybody figured out nobody was going to
| enforce it.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| > The FTCs fine on Facebook from a few years ago exceeds
| the combined value of all GDPR fines levied to date.
|
| This isn't anywhere near as significant a point as you
| think.
| sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
| The fun thing about hacker news is that for all you know
| I may be directly involved in these issues and speak from
| direct first-hand, but highly confidential, knowledge.
|
| Or I'm just some moron, posting opinions with absolutely
| no basis in fact.
|
| Only I can be sure!
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| And yet either way it still would not, IMO, be as
| significant a point as you think.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| I don't see where I declared success. And I'm not even in
| the EU.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| I've argued this before; these companies have taken on a
| utility role and need utility-type regulation, i.e. an
| obligation to provide service fairly and universally, an
| ombudsman, viable oversight, physical presence, a local call
| center to provide local employment and to give back to the
| community, etc.
|
| This situation where 100% of the taxi and food delivery
| profit from every small town in the world gets siphoned off
| back to a single office in California just isn't viable. Even
| from a within-US perspective it isn't viable.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| As always expected in the HN comments: "More government
| regulation". Depending on Google for your business might not
| be ideal, but before these free online marketplaces existed,
| you would only be able to have a business and compete if you
| had the right political contacts or were born into the right
| family.
|
| Do you think a regulated online marketplace would let anybody
| set up shop like Google does? In order to be allowed a web
| domain you'd need 5 government certifications, a credit note
| for a million from the bank, membership in the local chamber
| of commerce, etc. The door would be locked and welded shut
| for everybody except those with the right contacts and
| financial backing. And those are not always the people who
| create the best businesses - as anybody on this particular
| forum should know.
|
| > destroy thousands of prosperous businesses
|
| The marketplace owner created these thousands of prosperous
| businesses to begin with. Regulators did not.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| This is a Poe, right?
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| > It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that
| is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate
| business with whom you have no formal business relationship.
|
| Right, but the "separate business" here -- in a real-world
| analogy -- is akin to a commercialised offshoot of the
| department of transport.
|
| They may not make the roads, but they decide what goes on all
| the maps, they control most of the road signs, they benefit
| from the traffic monitoring data, and if you were to open up a
| shop selling only advice on where to shop, they determine
| whether your shop can be seen behind their signs. They profit
| from how they manage this, and the only way to get better
| management is to pay for it. Everyone pays for it, so the
| advantage dissipates until you pay more for your signs.
|
| There is little to no way to do business without these people,
| short of setting up a stall at the local covered market or
| farmer's market (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Etsy) where you are
| beholden to another set of signage issues as well as the
| secondary knock-on effects of large-scale signage issues on the
| way to the market, over which you have even less influence.
|
| Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| > Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
|
| This is the key.
|
| If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or
| generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their
| donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon).
| If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've
| probably got _some_.
|
| But if you don't -- and this going to sound harsh about a
| labour of love -- then evidently other people aren't (yet!)
| willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's
| enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a
| surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a
| hobby/part-time/side-project.
|
| But for the thing to continue existing, _someone_ (maybe
| you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google
| certainly doesn 't. Google doesn't know anything about the
| unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on
| your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny
| from other websites.
|
| If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been
| keeping it on life support since... whatever your previous
| strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never
| promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful
| to them any more.
| duped wrote:
| What if eBay were the only way to sell your goods on the
| internet? Because that's what the problem is with search - if
| Google doesn't weight your page high enough in results you're
| screwed. There's no other game in town.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| eBay already acts like it still is the only place to sell
| goods on the internet. But I'd say eBay was actually better
| back when it was the only mainstream way/place to sell many
| goods on the internet.
|
| eBay now sells promoted rankings. Funny when a vendor selling
| 1 product has it listed at several different prices, so you
| can save some money by finding the lowest priced one in their
| "other listings" that they don't promote.
|
| eBay sells Google ads on its pages. (sad seller noises).
|
| and eBay is one of the biggest ad buyers on Google.
| paulddraper wrote:
| How many businesses are utterly dependent on AWS?
| stevage wrote:
| As customers - which is different.
| johng wrote:
| AWS has competition. I can run on 1000 other hosting
| providers and the users of the site won't be able to tell the
| difference.
|
| I can rank on every search engine except Google and it would
| still kill my business. They own 90% of all the traffic.
|
| Your analogy isn't valid.
| codexon wrote:
| It is very risky but making your own website and having it be
| easily found should be the way the internet is supposed to
| work.
|
| One shouldn't have to make a youtube channel, constantly tweet,
| and manage a facebook group when a single website should have
| sufficed.
| reddalo wrote:
| I miss that old Internet. Nowadays it's all social shit.
| johng wrote:
| Almost any site on the internet is going to depend on Google.
| It's too big and too important. They have a monopoly, I'm
| amazed it hasn't been broken up yet.
| akira2501 wrote:
| These companies enjoy special legal protections that shield
| them from the liabilities of their actions which they say are
| absolutely required for them to exist.
|
| Perhaps those protections should now be rescinded and they
| should be held liable for their conduct.
| circusfly wrote:
| "I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could
| dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X
| making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be
| able to sleep. "
|
| If we compare to a small business on a highway and a company
| decides to move the highway so far away from them as to
| diminish their customer base effectively driving them out of
| business; this can't happen, since roads are governed as public
| resources. This is what the Internet needs.
| Groxx wrote:
| Roads do in fact change, and traffic patterns and access
| costs change with them. Lots of small towns are intimately
| familiar with this, booming or busting because of a new major
| road nearby.
|
| They change more slowly than internet traffic and are less
| globally impacting than a gigacorp's shuffling though, of
| course.
| rightbyte wrote:
| This article is really interesting. So, essentially each of the
| "top publishers" are some sort of SEO ring with different
| websites, linking each other I guess, or at least writing the
| same thing, to make Google's scraper believe it is high quality
| content? Or something similar.
|
| I don't understand the details really, but I have suspected
| something similar a long time.
| beavershaw wrote:
| Yeah here's a very detailed report on what's been going on
| written by a friend of mine.
|
| https://detailed.com/google-control/
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, there's no SEO ring or anything like that.
|
| The top publishers are just genuinely the sites that people
| click on and link to the most. There's no objective definition
| of "high quality content", there are just the links that people
| click or don't click when presented with search results.
|
| Google puts the links people click the most at the top. And
| people tend to click on results from sites they recognize,
| because the internet is filled with a ton of crap, and
| publications whose names you recognize are at least usually
| indicative of some kind of minimal level of quality.
|
| That's all that's going on.
| KTibow wrote:
| It's worth noting it's not just "people preferring well known
| sites" it's "Google preferring well known sites as part of
| EEAT"
| jacurtis wrote:
| You are explaining one component of SEO, which is click-
| through rate. Google will A/B test certain sites one spot
| higher or one spot lower to see if click-thru rate is
| positively affected. So if SiteA gets 80% of clicks while in
| spot #2, but SiteB gets 84% of clicks while in spot 2, then
| SiteB moves up to spot #2. The cycle continues as sites move
| up and down a few spots for fine tuning.
|
| However click-through rate is only one component of SEO. The
| biggest and most significant component of SEO is backlinks,
| which are ranked by quantity and quality of the link. So if
| google trusts SiteA a lot and SiteA links to SiteB, then
| google starts to trust SiteB. If other trusted sites also
| link to SiteB then the domain reputation grows for that site.
| Then there is the same ranking on a per-page basis as well.
| So if one page in particular is very well-linked to, then
| Google starts to link that page higher and higher for
| relevant results. This is the largest and most significant
| aspect of SEO. The click-through rate is a fine-tuning
| algorithm once you get to the top, but it alone isn't going
| to help. Google will never test SiteA with SiteZZZZZZZ on
| page 12.
| jacurtis wrote:
| Basically yes. I used to write regularly for a large finance
| site. You've read articles from this site, they show up on HN
| regularly and its one of the top 100 sites in the world and
| bounces around in place among the top 3 finance sites.
|
| Anyway, point is when I wrote for them, we had a list of places
| we could link to and places we couldn't. A lot of them where
| other sister sites the parent company owned. If we needed a
| source we first had to try to find it there. If it wasn't
| available there then there were another list of sites we were
| allowed to link to, which was basically top 100 sites.
|
| Then there were sites we were NEVER allowed to link to. I
| remember one of those sites was Reddit. But there were many
| others. Then anything that fell in the middle was something we
| linked to if it was critical for the article, otherwise we
| wouldn't link at all.
|
| So yes, its basically an SEO circle jerk at the top. Which is
| why you see the same 100 sites in all search results.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I think there was plenty of junk in the "small sites" world when
| it came to affiliates that deserved algorithmic modification, but
| Google absolutely took a sledgehammer to that side of the
| industry killing small players over the last six months. Now the
| big content sites that invest in search-volume-heavy terms are
| feasting on the traffic (and affiliate payouts).
|
| But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google
| is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again,
| hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and
| build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce
| filtering they already show on a lot of terms).
|
| I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't
| either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to
| monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had.
|
| The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the
| SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions
| and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty_
|
| FWIW I read this level of certainty as "I am privy to specific
| information pertaining to it and in fact I'm one of the people
| in charge of making sure it happens"
| sharkweek wrote:
| To be clear, I have never nor will I ever likely work at
| Google or any of its competitors. I _have_ spent an ungodly
| amount of time building (and breaking) affiliate sites /
| information sites / et al as side projects.
|
| Haven't done it in a few years (having kids has sucked my
| energy for side projects pretty dry), but at one point had
| like ~15 sites in my portfolio that I used to experiment
| with.
|
| Death, taxes, and an algo update fucking with a site's
| traffic at Google's whim.
| codexon wrote:
| Google has always preferred top domains for a very long
| time, allowing them to abuse the rankings for years.
|
| One relevant example I can remember, OVH is the top result
| for servers in Japan yet they don't have any in Japan.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240219200935/https://www.goog
| l...
|
| This has been going on for many years now. And they never
| get punished unless there's a huge uproar about it on
| ycombinator like with expertsexchange.
| dazc wrote:
| Certainty can also come from experience of previous actions
| when such exploits become commonplace.
| codexon wrote:
| Google has been killing all but the most widely known domains for
| a very long time. I've mentioned this repeatedly on ycombinator
| multiple times, but only people who have made their own website
| 15 years ago and tried to grow it know what I mean.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675
|
| My recommendation is to start moving to some other closed
| platform that is not part of Google search like Facebook,
| Twitter, Youtube (yes I know Google owns it but its still not
| part of the search ecosystem).
|
| Tying your entire business to how high you rank on Google search
| is always going to eventually end up in disaster like this.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead
| because of how horrible google results are.
|
| On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are
| almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for.
|
| Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask
| jeeves at it's worst.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing_
|
| I've been _thrilled_ with Kagi. It's the first time in over a
| decade that searching became fun again.
|
| The Quick Answer feature (Kagi's LLM) filters through SEO
| better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher
| quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches,
| it's cheap to try out (both for experience and if you
| actually notice the search limit).
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Same, I finally gave up and tried it after Google just
| stopped being remotely useful, and DDG is just a reskinned
| bing. A week on Kagi and I signed up for an annual plan,
| and never looked back.
| reddalo wrote:
| The main problem with Kagi is that it's a paid service with
| no free tier.
|
| I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense --
| but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very
| few people who would pay for a search engine.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that 's also a big problem for their growth_
|
| I agree, but it's a good early filter for conversion. The
| difference in quality, for me and everyone I've gifted a
| month to, is stark enough to make paying for search for
| the first time worth it. Given the absolute cost (for the
| cheapest tier, paid annually, less than $50) it's a
| psychological hurdle more than a financial one for most
| Americans.
|
| Also, drawing those eyeballs from the ad-driven engines
| has a disproportionate effect on their marginal ad prices
| (in the long run). So if you need a sense of vengeance to
| get you over the hill, there you go.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > a big problem for their growth
|
| But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or
| just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable
| business, then it's a feature of their business model.
| reddalo wrote:
| No I'm sorry. I don't mean "growth" as in infinite and
| unsustainable growth like VC-founded startups. I mean
| "growth" as in adopting a bigger market share.
| eszed wrote:
| But, again, do they need to? It seems to me like "market
| share" is a metric relevant to companies pursuing VC-
| founded, unicorn lottery-ticket scale. If they generate
| enough revenue to pay competive wages, cover their
| operating costs, and make a reasonable (real-world, not
| VC-world) return on investment, they're a gosh-darn
| _success_. It 's only within tech, where valuations and
| evaluations sailed off into ZIRP-ified bizarro-world,
| that people think of that as a failure of ambition or
| execution. I think it's time to re-assess our mental
| models.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _do they need to?_
|
| I don't know what Kagi's minimum sustainable size might
| be, but it's probably bigger than what it is now.
| Particularly if they want to stay competitive with LLMs.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > But, again, do they need to?
|
| Why not? There are tens of millions of people who
| need/want a high quality search engine and can pay for
| it. Kagi deserves to be successful for having made a
| better search engine than Google. And their success can
| inspire other entrepreneurs to start delivering quality
| information products, so that maybe we can get out of
| this ad/scam fuelled quagmire once and for all.
|
| Good products and ideas should be successful, that's
| progress.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That is a complete non-sequitur from the question of if
| Kagi will die if it doesn't grow.
|
| This is orthogonal to questions of morality and justice.
| lolinder wrote:
| > that's also a big problem for their growth.
|
| Frankly, I see this as a good thing. Maybe someone else
| will come along and solve the universal-search-engine-
| that-stays-good problem, but Kagi's best hope at being
| useful for me into the future is for them to stay where
| they are: tiny and used only by a small cohort of
| extremely savvy and skeptical geeks that aren't worth the
| effort to SEO-jack.
|
| They just need to be sustainable--growing large would
| actually be counterproductive.
| swatcoder wrote:
| If they can keep is sustainable and profitable without
| eat-the-world "growth", that's not a bad thing.
|
| There are few consumer products that have held up against
| the competing demands of billions users in thousands of
| different markets and cultures. I'd say there's maybe
| even been none.
|
| The kind of "growth" you're talking about is a bad but
| understandable habit among founders and cold financiers,
| but it's not a requisite part of running a business and
| generally runs counter to having a good product that
| serves a specific need well.
| OJFord wrote:
| > I know very few people who would pay for a search
| engine.
|
| It's actually maybe ChatGPT et al. that have done most to
| warm me up to the idea. I've tried Plus for a few months,
| basically using it like better search. I don't think I'll
| stick with it mainly because it's a pretty steep cost
| (enough that I want to go back to not having it for a bit
| at least, see how much of a problem it really is) - but
| it does make me wonder if perhaps Kagi can get me a lot
| of the way for half the price (the non-LLM tier).
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Oddly as a Kagi user, it does have a fault.
|
| It actually sucks at finding the low cost product.
|
| Want the cheapest esp32 c3... google is a better place to
| start. I can quickly find the "price to beat" and go deeper
| elsewhere.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| I use an LLM for 80% of my queries now. Fighting Google isn't
| worthwhile, unless I need a trusted source.
| stevage wrote:
| What do you use?
| bkandel wrote:
| I use the Azure GPT-4 offering. It's not always 100%
| correct, but for technical questions in areas I'm not
| very familiar with, it's close enough. I can get much
| more done in a given amount of time than I would have
| been able to reading docs and SO.
|
| I know lots of people will point to examples where it's
| wrong, but I'd suggest trying it out yourself. If you're
| not intentionally trying to trip it up, it really works
| quite well.
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| How do you know when your LLM is bullshitting you
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| You don't, but at least you have one answer you need to
| verify vs 100 listings of random garbage to wade through.
| evilduck wrote:
| How do you know when a Google result is bullshitting you,
| or if their pre-LLM AI summaries of results were
| bullshitting you?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Google search has become worthless for me. _
|
| Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the
| thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which
| was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official
| dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the
| phone, not the thickest.
|
| And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the
| top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something
| I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked
| through the other results lower on the page and nada, no
| correct answer.
|
| So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking
| for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man
| is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put
| your weed in there.
|
| Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test,
| but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but
| the easiest context searches where it works because it knows
| a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so
| it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not
| related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.
| Solvency wrote:
| This is honestly a terrible example even if it is
| completely valid. You can't even get Google to find the
| most basic possible content about, say, oranges, without it
| being some SEO ad-infested fandom.com page about fruit, let
| alone product specifications.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> This is honestly a terrible example_
|
| I know, I'm not saying it was scientific, I was just
| sharing an anecdotal mainstream search query which I
| though was very relevant today for me and maybe others as
| well and also not super difficult for Google.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was
| looking for at the top. And man is that phone a tick boy in
| that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
|
| And the most annoying thing is, your phone will not. sit.
| flat. on a table, because the damn camera will always be
| unbalanced in height, which makes it an excellent
| attraction for feline companions. Tap on it and it wiggles.
| Tap harder, it wiggles more, and eventually the phone will
| fall to the floor, your feline will look at you with big
| round eyes and ask for f...ing treats.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I went today to a carrier showroom where they have the
| Pixel 8 on display to mess around with, and I though the
| reviewers were exaggerating, but that damn visor is
| nearly as thick as the phone itself. It almost doubles in
| height of the phone at that spot. The Pixel 7a next to it
| had a much much thinner visor despite sharing a similar
| design.
|
| What the hell did Google put in that thing, lenses from
| the Hubble space telescope? It's not like they have a
| 100x zoom lens in that thing or a camera sensor so large
| it makes a Hasselblad wet itself. And that's before we
| get to the visible PCB screw heads poking through the
| OLED panel. On a phone that costs 600+ Euros.
|
| I feel like Google is at least 5 years behind the
| competition when it comes to HW and industrial design. Or
| they just culturally as a company don't give a shit about
| HW, thinking their SW is gonna be the main selling point
| and the HW is treated like some last minute _" who cares,
| just ship it, it's gonna sell anyway"_ afterthought.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's still the only real option, all of the Chinese
| brands lock their bootloaders, and so does Samsung.
| gotbeans wrote:
| I second this. The quality of google search has reached a
| point that's only good to search things that can't be bought.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| ... and uncontroversial.
|
| Searches for "coronavirus" seem to be hard-coded, or
| interfered with. I get pages and pages of Covid-19 results,
| but that's not what I searched for. I even get a wikipedia
| link to its covid-19 page, but no wikipedia link to its
| coronavirus page within the first several pages of results.
| plumeria wrote:
| Something as basic as: "2,5 cm to mm" won't show up the unit
| conversion widget if it's not formatted as "2.5 cm to mm", at
| least for me. WolframAlpha also fails at this query. However,
| ChatGPT understands it and gives the right answer.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I use Bing, too. People are suprised when I recommend it, but
| for most general searches, it's quite a bit better.
| yazzku wrote:
| In general, I find the same is true for all mainstream search
| engines, including DDG and Bing. You can't even search for
| things to buy anymore, ironically; it'll just dump you into
| Amazon or some "top 10" shitpost on CNN fake news or Forbes,
| much like the trash pit of websites shown in the header image
| of this article. Like others, I also find myself searching on
| Reddit or HN directly. What the point of a search engine is
| at that point, I don't know.
| aniftythrifrty wrote:
| I am a small business owner who started their site and SEO and
| within three months I was beating multi-million dollar
| competition on the most important keyword google search terms
| for our market and industry. I did this with no budget, no
| adspend, just basic SEO and good keyword research. It's totally
| possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google,
| even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| Same. Numerous 1st page top results, and even snippets.
| Honestly no idea how... I do know SEO basics, but didn't know
| I knew them well enough for this. Within a year I had the
| first result for a very, very popular search term. Granted it
| was a lot of hard work (18 hour days, sometimes).
| Solvency wrote:
| You spent 18 hours a day on SEO? Doing _what_??
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| No, no. I spent 18 hour days posting on social media,
| writing articles, designing cover images, researching,
| etc. I honestly didn't do much work in regards to SEO, at
| least I don't think so. (There were a few times I knew
| something was going to be released soon, so I wrote about
| it before anyone else did.) But I do believe all of this
| contributes to SEO.
|
| But yeah, this brought my site to having every article I
| write today to be listed on page 1 (top 5 results, at the
| very least) almost within a day, numerous snippets, etc.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I wonder how easy this will continue to be in the chatgpt
| era. What takes you 18 hours can probably be generated in
| 18 seconds with enough fidelity to get traction.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Same here. I'm right up there competing with billion dollar
| companies with decades of presence and I don't know how many
| backlinks. While my small business has no backlinks from
| others and only relies on content for ranking, being entirely
| dependent on Google to be honest.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| What's the site and what keywords are you targeting?
| granzymes wrote:
| Read past the provocative title, and Google actually seems to
| be doing the right things here. They cracked down on product
| reviews that aren't actually testing the product in 2021, and
| the article says big media companies (presumably with lower
| quality review content) suffered as a result.
|
| But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best
| X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review
| Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate
| links while avoiding the new requirements.
|
| So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding
| pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the
| hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality
| metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying
| to bring attention to this issue.
|
| If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is
| reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to
| close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!
|
| --
|
| Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The
| original title was "How Google is killing independent sites
| like ours".
|
| Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great
| job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the
| authors.
| codexon wrote:
| I still believe the original title is warranted.
|
| The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or
| else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that
| they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The same issues you have with google search engine optimization
| are present in every other closed platform too. Welcome to the
| attention economy, you better learn how to go viral.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| Presented like this it really is an absolutely damning
| indictment.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I hope that paid search engines like Kagin would be used more
| frequently. Monopoles always bad.
| fatkam wrote:
| *Kagi
| ado__dev wrote:
| Finding trustworthy reviews and recommendations via Google is
| useless. The first few pages are always littered by the lowest
| quality, highest SEO-spam content, and the recommendations on
| these pages are so shallow and inauthentic that I know the person
| that wrote the article has never even looked at the product
| they're shilling. And so often these lists are literally the same
| list of 20 products slightly re-arranged.
|
| Reddit is also really hit and miss, depending on the community.
| TikTok has been ruined by TikTok Shop.
|
| Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but
| even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review,
| or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid
| promotion/free products.
|
| There surely must be a better option.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It's called "Consumer Reports" / Consumers Union.
|
| That's what it look like.
|
| The only thing that could enhance or replace it would be
| official government testing of products.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| But people need to use it.
|
| Critical internet/app browsing should be taught in school,
| like critical reading. I feel lucky to have been a nerd in
| the 2000s where people picked up this skill, but honestly I
| have no idea how kids, older folks just getting into tech and
| such are acquiring sources/skills trapped inside of Discord,
| YouTube, Facebook or whatever.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I've noticed that a large portion of reviews are literally just
| rehashing reviews on amazon. And, if I were to guess, a good
| number of them are just these review sites pumping in "top 10 x
| reviews from amazon" into chatgpt and having it write their
| review for them.
|
| > YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free
| products.
|
| The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof)
| is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically
| interacting with the product. Doesn't work for everything, but
| in a lot of cases the paid promotional reviewers aren't getting
| their hands on the product in question and instead they are
| putting up stock images and reading the marketing material.
|
| The bigger the youtuber, the harder it is to know if it's a
| paid promotional thing.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> The trick I think I 've found for this (which isn't fool
| proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually
| physically interacting with the product._
|
| IDK, there's a long tradition of shill reviewers being given
| free products "for testing" on the unspoken agreement that if
| the review is bad, they won't get more free products in the
| future.
| singron wrote:
| Yeah if they have no negative reviews, that's a bad sign. A
| particularly scrupled YouTuber I follow typically won't do
| a paid video if the product isn't good and instead does an
| unpaid tear down video. That probably limits his
| opportunities to brave marketing teams with high quality
| products, but it also makes his reviews quite valuable.
| callmelalo wrote:
| What Youtuber is that?
| sharkweek wrote:
| > Reddit is also really hit and miss
|
| It took savvy SEO folk about .3 seconds to figure out that
| Google was ranking Reddit for almost any informational query
| and start trying to game the system there too.
|
| I love using Reddit for information but be wary of any new
| Reddit thread ranking well in Google search that's only a few
| months old, in a small community, with very few other responses
| besides a strangely specific answer to the question.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Reddit is highly subjective.
|
| In shopping for flashlights, the respective subreddit
| recommends only obscure AliExpress brands. The community are
| retiree collectors who obsess over specs and cannot possibly
| use them in the field.
|
| Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are
| never a consideration in their recommendations, for example.
| What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern
| themselves with; at a certain point you can't even see
| anything outside your own beam. They shit on all "American"
| brands (but Coast _is_ shit).
|
| It's hilarious watching them drive off clueless gift-givers
| seeking advice.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >There surely must be a better option.
|
| Maybe Consumer Reports?
|
| Only complaint I hear about them is Tesla fanboys complaining
| that the cars are not getting perfect scores and that its a
| conspiracy. Not sure if there is any truth to that(probably
| not). Other than that I haven't heard much bad to say but who
| knows, they could also be compromised.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Or rtings for any categories they review.
| ado__dev wrote:
| rtings is really good and in-depth. I have used them as a
| gut check many times and they haven't let me down yet.
| ado__dev wrote:
| I did actually buy a year long subscription of CR when I
| moved into my new house a few years ago and I found their
| reviews to be generally more helpful and have bought a few
| products based on their recommendations.
| class3shock wrote:
| It depends on what you are looking for. I found looking at the
| BIFL subreddit, sites that cater more towards industry
| (McMaster Carr as an example), and companies based in Europe
| (Fjallraven as an example) can help find higher quality
| products faster (or finding items on there and then searching
| reddit/forums for "alternatives").
|
| Sometimes it just feels impossible though E.g. trying to find
| various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy
| import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for
| a low use item.
| mietek wrote:
| Do you happen to know a McMaster-Carr equivalent based in
| Europe?
| evilduck wrote:
| > trying to find various items for the kitchen that are
| better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not
| ludicrously expensive for a low use item.
|
| If you're wanting BIFL kitchen items for low use try looking
| for commercial foodservice versions. That stuff is generally
| priced between plastic throwaway versions and Williams Sonoma
| but if it's built to survive at least a month in a busy
| professional kitchen, it'll probably serve me for life.
|
| Alternatively, head over to your nearest ethnic grocers. I
| have some Asian and Mexican grocery stores near me that have
| kitchen supply sections that stock no-frills but reasonable
| quality versions of kitchen tools. My nearby standard
| American grocery stores stock much lower quality items by
| comparison.
| Solvency wrote:
| People like to shit on Nextdoor but once I embraced it as a
| homeowner it's my go-to for everything. Fuck Google/Yelp for
| reviews. It's refreshing getting local first-hand reviews and
| recommendations from neighbors about plumbers, roofers,
| electricians, solar panel experiences, tax stuff, home security
| camera questions, etc. Having a local authenticated community
| is so refreshing compared to the corporate bot infested
| internet.
| cableshaft wrote:
| There's a couple Facebook groups for residents for the city I
| live in and I've found them useful for the same reason. I
| should also start checking NextDoor more, thanks for the
| mention.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Just don't ask for realtor suggestions. Your inbox will never
| be the same again. And everyone is a realtor or related to
| the one that does the best job...
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Ah and there's the example of a service that's local,
| organic, home-grown, small business, crunchy, and also
| thoroughly paid-off. To complement my sibling comment that
| "local" is not the deciding factor
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It blows my mind why sellers would even need a realtor in
| hot markets. Your home will get a dozen offers in a week as
| soon as its put up for sale, you don't need to burn 5% and
| do all the bullshit ritualism like staging or aerial
| photography that people are paying for.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Knowing there's an unpaid human writing the review is about
| the only thing that matters. I guess for repair services it
| has to be local, but the real point is, if I get a
| recommendation from friends or family, I can trust that they
| aren't affiliates, because they're staking the relationship
| on their review.
|
| <https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#fatads>
|
| > in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are
| professional liars. I don't mean this to offend. I mean it as
| a job description. An advertiser's job is to convince you to
| do stuff you would not otherwise do.
| Quothling wrote:
| I know I buy sort of expensive products, but most of the things
| I've bought recently like my christiania bike all have youtube
| channels detailing their products. I think that is frankly the
| only real way for brands to advertise to people like me who'll
| maybe look at reddit threads or similar, but these days you can
| barely even trust many of those. We bought a Baby Brezza based
| on recomendations, they have a semi decent youtube with a mix
| of useful information and advertisement.
|
| A good example of the reddit bit is the robock s8 we bought.
| 95% of the reviews on reddits tell you to buy the big version
| with the huge dock... But then there was this one person in one
| thread who posted about how it was easy to just empty it
| without the station and that the station was known to rot or
| mold (not sure how you say that in english). So we bought the
| smallest s8 version we could and whoever that redditor was,
| they were absolutely right that it was so easy to maintain it
| without any of the addons. Roborock doesn't have a good youtube
| channel, they do have one, but it's really just advertisement.
|
| Anyway, I agree with you. I don't even really use google
| anymore. I switched to ecosia (it also sucks) out of spite, but
| it's been as good as google for anything except for when I want
| to do site:blabla.com in which case I'll !g. Before you
| recommend it I've used the duck before and it doesn't work for
| me. Likely because I'm Danish.
| Solvency wrote:
| Reddit is 99% schill bots. Heaven help you if you're
| researching baby products. The entire scandalous baby product
| market has commandeered Reddit with accounts like this one
| that I found just because I kept seeing the name pop up
| relentlessly hawking the same products:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/user/ErinElizabeth1187/
| encom wrote:
| 99,9% of the time, a username in the format NameNameNumber
| is a bot. The probability goes up as the value of Number
| increases.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Every review on youtube is paid placement for the most part.
| The exception is if you find a real user who will post some
| crappily shot video and never step in frame themselves, those
| are always the highest quality reviews yet its rare and below
| the fold because people do it out of their own freetime and
| goodwill and aren't trying to make a hustle out of it (which
| means accepting paid review offers).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently
| published content from the 'small web.' We gather new content,
| published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs
| and surface it in multiple ways..."
|
| https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| 15457345234 wrote:
| Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school
| partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the
| internet.
|
| The people most likely to benefit and have the time to enjoy
| small-web content are inquisitive children who don't have good
| sources of information at their disposal, i.e. the smart kids
| of dumber parents who don't have library cards. Kids who have
| infinite free time but zero chance of persuading their parents
| to pay for anything academic or 'nerdy'. There's a lot of them
| out there.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school
| partnership program if it 's to embody the true spirit of the
| internet_
|
| That "true spirit of the internet" caused the ad-based
| cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn't
| work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for
| Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free,
| no, free doesn't work.
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > But in terms of being free, no, free doesn't work.
|
| Free worked for much longer than it didn't work, and it
| will work again. There just needs to be a drastic
| adjustment in the amount of greed considered socially
| acceptable, and I can already see that pendulum swinging
| back.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Those damned greedy servers needing electricity to run.
| arp242 wrote:
| "Free" only worked when there was little to no economic
| interest in the web.
|
| So all we need to do is change our economic model, social
| norms, and human nature.
|
| Easy peasy.
| Terretta wrote:
| It didn't work because it was free, it worked because you
| had to pay something more like dollars per page you
| published to host content than like pennies per thousands
| of pages.
|
| For quite a long time, other than exceptions like
| geocities, you had to pay to publish your own content.
|
| People who had an axe to grind or a hobby to share were
| "pamphleteering" and it was great.
| jacurtis wrote:
| The reason Kagi isn't like Google is because it is paid.
|
| Contrary to popular belief: servers aren't free to run or buy
| or maintain. Software developers also don't work for charity
| therefore they require paychecks. Both of these things
| require money.
|
| So if you have to pay the bills somehow then you either get
| users to pay for it (what Kagi currently does) or you get
| someone else to pay for it so it can be free to users (what
| Google currently does).
|
| So if Kagi makes it "free" then they need to start
| advertising, which then breaks the model because their
| customers are no longer the search users, but the
| advertisers. Now motivations and incentives shift and before
| you know it, you rebuilt Google with a different name and we
| are back where we started.
|
| The point is, that the fact that it is user-funded is exactly
| why its different. If you pick up the ad model then you will
| slowly evolve (devolve?) into what all the other search
| engines already are.
| class3shock wrote:
| This isn't just product reviews. Try searching any question and
| more than likely multiple results on the first page will be
| "articles" with some title like "So you want to know about x?"
| and the same sort of, generic, possibly algorithm generated,
| useless content. I wish there was an extension where you could
| add to a communal blacklist of result url's to start trying to
| put a dent in the huge number of garbage results Google spits
| out.
| lolinder wrote:
| Between the rise of fake "30 best X" articles that this discusses
| and the widely-documented problem of fake reviews on places like
| Amazon, I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand
| loyalty again. Picking based on brands I trust rarely gets me the
| "best value" item and certainly doesn't get me the absolute
| global maximum "best overall", but it's turned into the only
| reliable way to choose something in a finite amount of time that
| I will reliably not be disappointed with.
|
| There's obviously always the risk that just because a brand was
| good a year ago doesn't mean it's still good, but I've found that
| the rate of decline of most good brands is substantially lower
| than the SEO-spurred rate of decline of the quality of internet
| publications that purport to provide unbiased reviews.
| Swizec wrote:
| > I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand
| loyalty again
|
| You're making me realize I too have been doing this for a while
| now. At least when satisficing instead of maximizing ... and
| honestly I'm less and less interested in maximizing.
|
| These days when making a purchase I go to a friend group who
| knows their thing (podcaster friends when looking for a
| microphone, for example), ask what brand they use, then I go to
| that brand's website and buy the highest-line product that I
| can afford. There's little to no google searching involved and
| next to zero awareness of any ads.
|
| Ask a friend in the know and buy that. Done.
|
| If there are no friends in the know, I ask anyone who uses a
| thing that solves my problem "Hey do you like your <thing>?
| What do you like about it?". If they say yes, I go buy that.
| Life is too short to spend in the quagmire of ecommerce and
| friends.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Amazon always shows me the best household brands, classics
| like FINDYURT and ZUKESEYAKAMERICAUSA. They list classic
| product models like 'Kitchen Knife 8" Chef Kitchen 9" For
| Cutting For Vegetables for Fruits For Meats Pro Knife Shank
| With Accessories Blade Kitchen Knife.' <3
| elmer007 wrote:
| Reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube videos, possibly
| of all time:
|
| https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?si=QHThBTZs3bvz5oFP
| overstay8930 wrote:
| Yup, it's why I shop at Costco. They do a good job of making
| sure everything on the shelf is actually decent, so I don't
| have to google "<product> reddit" in store.
| riedel wrote:
| Brand loyalty also goes for review sites itself. Sure I find
| myselfnsometimes getting frustrated if I look into a new
| product category (like best CD Ripping drive as of 2024 until I
| find the related forum post ). But I typically I rather first
| skim through the URL to see some sites I remember
| (notebookcheck, tomshardware, Chinagadgets.de, or whatever )
| that I am loyal to until I get disappointed. This works because
| they are testing different products and I am kind of loyal. How
| loyal can I ever be to a site that only sells air purifier
| tests. How many times in my life do I need this test? I agree
| in this case it is even easier to be more loyal to brand
| because they probably sell more things than just air purifiers.
| vdaea wrote:
| I searched for "Best Air Purifier for Pets" and I clicked on the
| first reddit result
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
|
| That post is 4 months old but someone posted this just 7 days ago
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
|
| Goes to show how little you can trust reddit comments these days,
| particularly for good google keywords
|
| This is mentioned in TFA:
|
| >Somehow the user has been banned from Reddit, but their comment
| is still at the top of the thread -- we wonder how many other
| comments this user has published across different subreddits.
|
| This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually
| approved the comment.
| duped wrote:
| If you wanted to make a search algorithm that displayed high
| quality results, you'd blacklist or downweight the big publishers
| because you know they're going to be dishonest.
|
| But when Google is also making money with their ad platform on
| those publishers' websites I don't think they'd ever do that.
| evilmusic wrote:
| ^ this is it ^
| crazygringo wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Google, but rather everything to do
| with brand-name journalism and what people click on.
|
| This article is criticizing Google for showing reviews and guides
| to consumer products from _well-known publications_ that it
| argues are increasingly low-quality, instead of surfacing high-
| quality independent reviews from less popular sites.
|
| But this has nothing to do with Google. Google's search quality
| metrics are pretty simple -- Google is trying to list results in
| roughly the order of probability that people will click on them.
| Google is trying to get you to the information you're looking for
| the fastest.
|
| And the reality is that, if I'm looking for air purifiers, I am
| absolutely going to click on the links to well-known publications
| like Wirecutter, or Better Homes & Gardens, or Apartment Therapy
| -- or a forum like Reddit. I'm far less likely to click on some
| smaller site I've never heard of, because I trust it less. So
| Google is giving me what I want.
|
| And the idea that Google should somehow instead be analyzing the
| content of each product review site to try to determine whether
| the reviewers are actually independently testing the items or
| not, that it should be making some kind of determination of
| "real" quality separate from whether people click on it -- this
| seems both impossible and misguided.
|
| I _don 't want_ Google to be trying to pick which niche
| independent sites are high-quality or low-quality. I just want
| Google to avoid actual spam, and otherwise give me the results
| that lots of people link to and lots of people click on --
| PageRank and all that -- which is, of course, going to be
| publications and sites with brand recognition.
|
| Google isn't killing small, independent sites. It's people --
| users, consumers, _people like me_ -- who generally aren 't
| interested in small, independent sites because there's no
| reliable signal to determine which ones are good or trustworthy.
|
| If I'm looking for an air purifier, I don't have time to waste to
| look through 20 small, independent reviewers and try to figure
| out which ones are shills and which minority actually know what
| they're talking about. No -- I'm going to go to the major review
| sites, see which models keep popping up, check Reddit for some
| confirmation and Amazon for some sales rank figures, and make the
| purchase and get on with my day. Which sucks for small,
| independent review sites. But they're just in a tough business.
| And Google has nothing to do with that.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The article points out numerous examples where a site like
| people.com is ranking for pet air purifiers, with zero evidence
| that they actually tested the products in question.
|
| This tweet thread goes into more detail
| https://x.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1717291171473727719?s=20
| reddalo wrote:
| Oh my god, does Twitter now redirect to X for some users?
|
| I've seen more and more links that start with x.com, but my
| browser still redirects me back to twitter.com
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| The Stupid burns slowly, but it burns like white
| phosphorus, through everything.
| _a9 wrote:
| Using the 'share/copy link' button has been pointing to
| x.com since they did the whole x.com change but afaik going
| to x.com will redirect to twitter.com. No clue what they're
| on about using one domain but redirecting to the other.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yes but it's unreasonable to expect Google to figure out
| whether people.com is actually testing the products it
| reviews or not.
|
| All Google can figure out is whether people click on links to
| people.com when they search for air purifiers (they do), and
| whether the page in question is outright spam or has its
| content stolen from another site (it's not).
|
| The idea that Google should be trying to independently figure
| out some level of objective "content quality" doesn't make
| any sense to me. It's fine that it builds a knowledge base up
| out of objective facts to show in cards and whatnot, but I
| don't want Google trying to decide which _review_ sites are
| more trustworthy -- I just want it to show me the review
| sites that other people are clicking on and linking to. For
| Google to insert "editorial control" over its search results
| would be an abuse of its power, to me.
|
| When I search Google, I want popular results to come up --
| the "democratically elected" results, in effect, from
| PageRank and clickthrough rates. I don't want Google trying
| to make assessments of the accuracy of content when it comes
| to _opinion_ , and review sites are nothing but _opinion_.
| ec109685 wrote:
| A site that is excellent at SEO spam isn't the same as a
| "democratically elected" result.
|
| The list of sites for that term are utter crap,
| recommending the purifiers paying the top commission. Why
| would you want Google to perpetuate that ranking just
| because other users are getting duped to click on them?
| crazygringo wrote:
| What "SEO spam" you talking about? I'm searching for "air
| purifier" right now and my results are:
|
| 1) "The Best Air Purifier - The New York Times" (makes
| sense)
|
| 2-4) Links to "air purifier" category on Amazon, Home
| Depot, and Best Buy (makes sense)
|
| Then a "discussions and forums" section with a couple of
| links to Reddit (makes sense)
|
| Then a Google buying guide full of common Q&A about air
| purifiers (interesting), a list of shopping links to
| popular air purifier models (makes sense), and YouTube
| review videos (makes sense), all interspersed with some
| more top stores, brands, and review sites (Costco,
| Blueair, Levoit, Consumer Reports, Better Homes & Gardens
| -- all totally fine).
|
| All of this seems perfectly reasonable and, indeed,
| exactly what I'm looking for. I have zero complaints. I
| can't find any SEO spam whatsoever. Literally all of this
| in the first couple of pages seems entirely legit.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The example from the article was "pet air purifier", with
| fortune.com leading the ranking.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| Your way of browsing the web isn't what most users do. Most
| users click on the first link. Many of them don't know what
| reference websites are. A Spanish woman in her 20s has no idea
| what the wirecutter is.
| crazygringo wrote:
| First of all, users are more sophisticated than you think.
| And why you're bringing nationalities into this, I have no
| idea. And obviously Google isn't going to be surfacing
| English content like Wirecutter in Spain -- it will surface
| well-known publications in Spain.
|
| But secondly, even if you _were_ right, it wouldn 't matter.
| Users who click on the first link for everything don't change
| the relative clickthrough rates. The people who actively
| choose which links to click on would still be the ones
| influencing the ranking. Google is smart enough to control
| for clickthrough rates by their listing in results and
| knowing how far the user has scrolled.
| codexon wrote:
| I've had the opportunity to analyze click behavior for some
| pages, and there's a huge bias for people to click things
| at the top.
|
| Let's say for example 90% of users are unsophisticated and
| 10% are sophisticated. Even if the #2 link is preferred
| 100% of the time by sophisticated users, you're still going
| to see 90% of people clicking the first link.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But in your example, Google would almost immediately
| learn that sophisticated users click on the current #2
| link, and then make that the #1 link for everyone. It's
| really easy to do statistically. The bias for the top
| link gets removed, that's always the first step.
|
| Unsophisticated users are not negatively affecting the
| quality of results.
| codexon wrote:
| How exactly do you know that people are clicking on the
| #2 link because they are "sophisticated" and not because
| they simply prefer #2 for personal reasons?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| It was always hard to compete for generic keywords like "air
| purifiers". Wirecutter or whatever with its ton of backlinks
| would win unless you're doing really shady SEO.
|
| What's been lost is the niche side of independent sites. You
| used to be able to write a review about Air Purifier Model
| 5643563453 and you would rank on the first page for any
| searches for it if nobody else wrote a review about it.
|
| Now you just won't get that traction and will get generic corp
| results or at best, independent reviews on social media
| platforms.
|
| Google at least used to include a sprinkling of different
| _types_ of results, a store, a wiki, a forum, a review site, a
| blog... Now you can do a search and get 10 results from the
| same .com for the brand name.
| stevage wrote:
| I think there will be tons of signals google could use to rank
| up a high quality independent site like this one. They just
| choose not to.
| crazygringo wrote:
| First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there
| that can't be gamed?
|
| And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't
| click on it because they don't recognize the name of the
| site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they
| don't want to click on? What if users are so overwhelmed by
| the number of sites and figuring out whether or not they're
| trustworthy, that they just want to stick to publications
| they recognize?
| codexon wrote:
| People clicking on known brands most of the time now is a
| behavior that was reinforced by google.
|
| I used to find good high quality results from domains other
| than the big brands through Google, now it is never the
| case. Now that smaller domains haven't been getting that
| search engine traffic, people wanting to make a sustainable
| business being a content creator have moved to other
| platforms for a long time now.
| granzymes wrote:
| It sounds like the 2021 Products Review Update _did_ help
| rank up high quality sites, but the media companies doing
| affiliate spam found a workaround with "Best of X" lists.
| evilmusic wrote:
| I agree with a lot of what you're saying regarding brand
| recognition and trust, but if that is how Google works, then
| they should stop publishing documentation + doing presentations
| + going on webinars + presenting in panels + discussing on
| Twitter how much they actually do assess the quality of the
| content and how much they do care about real product reviews.
|
| Also, putting the Wirecutter in the same bag as Apartment
| Therapy and Better Homes & Gardens is misguided... looking
| through the examples on the article, it becomes clear that the
| majority of those lifestyle magazines are just recommending
| expensive products and popular devices on Amazon.
|
| I would just go to Wirecutter and Consumer Reports.
| hx8 wrote:
| Another bad aspect is that it's becoming harder to google for
| general information without being hit with production
| recommendations. For example, if you google an ambiguous term
| like "Indoor light" the entire front page is products. There is
| no information about how indoor light impacts sleep health, or
| comparing different technologies of light bulbs, or different
| styles of lighting a room, or showing how much energy we spend on
| indoor lighting. It's literally all products, on a topic which
| has a lot of nuisances to explore.
|
| Some search terms seem to trigger "medical information",
| "scholarly journals" or "technical documentation" subroutines and
| avoid products all together.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Even Kagi is like that, since "lighting" is a product class.
|
| If I search "Indoor lighting science" on DDG almost all the
| product stuff is gone. I even get an NIH paper on lighting and
| health.
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's because your search query isn't specific enough. Google
| doesn't read your mind to figure out what about "indoor light"
| you seek. So it defaults to commerce.
| pmontra wrote:
| Web search is dead for that. When faced with a new product
| category I don't know anything about I go on YouTube and look for
| people explaining how to use those kind of products, then look
| for unboxing or reviews, finally I get a rough idea. Then I can
| search the web for the few products that seem to fit my needs and
| budget. The advantage of video is that it's (still?) easy to see
| if something is a genuine or a fabricated review. The
| disadvantage is that video takes a much longer time than text.
| frabjoused wrote:
| I wonder if Google is internally acutely aware of how rapidly its
| reputation is tanking. I just haven't seen many public
| acknowledgements of flaws in its search engine, especially in
| relation to SEO. So I'm very curious if there is some ongoing
| code-red internally about this, or if it the problem just got
| lost in one of the hidden layers of corporate fog.
| ec109685 wrote:
| It's acknowledged obliquely at the end of this tweet:
| https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1716964371916800472
| cableshaft wrote:
| Barely. With several follow-up tweets by them defending its
| bad behavior.
| jacurtis wrote:
| The reply post to that one [1] is a perfect example of what I
| see everyday on Google. You search for "Best Men's Wallet"
| and the top examples are from 1) Forbes, 2) BusinessInsider,
| 3) New York Times.
|
| These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of
| backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can
| basically create any content they want and Google will reward
| them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links
| from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate
| conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites
| have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they
| are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet
| coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the
| rest of us looking for useful content in this search category
| can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content
| by sites that honestly have no business writing about this
| stuff.
|
| [1] -
| https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Just for funsies I'd like to see what would happen if
| google downranked sites with affiliate links.
|
| I know many small honest sites (and some big ones) do
| depend on affiliate links for their actual quality reviews,
| so probably would be unfair to implement it permanently,
| but man I would like to see what the results looked like
| without money involved.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I tried to use Google to search for mattresses this way and found
| that 10/10 sites on the first page were all just affiliates of
| the mattress companies they were recommended. Even though they
| were reputable sites like the NYTimes, etc. I then appended
| "reddit" to my search and everyone in the comments essentially
| said to avoid those very brands that were the highest recommended
| from those sites.
|
| I hate that modern SEO is practically just build to create spam
| to game Google.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Google results are trash, i still find myself appending "reddit"
| to get decent answers.
|
| Just stop paying Google. Stop using their services.
|
| Our company can't even reply to gmail users that ask us questions
| (hey gmail, if your user emails us, they probably want a response
| regardless of the hoops you want everyone to jump through with
| your "anti-spam" measures).
| fatkam wrote:
| I find Yandex to give much better results than Google, but
| lately I haven't been able to solve Yandex's CAPTCHAs (the one
| where you have to click images in the right order). Pretty sure
| that I give the correct answers.
| overstay8930 wrote:
| This is the part of the analogy where everyone finds out the
| Golden Goose is actually dead and Google just started painting
| regular eggs gold and hoped nobody would notice.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| And the brief period where the Internet was a secret trick to
| get information that nobody else had, for free, is over
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I for one welcome going back to libraries as a source of
| truth. Too bad no one else will realize that happened though
| and will continue reading the propaganda rags.
| stevage wrote:
| Wow. This is super helpful. We have all noticed the
| enshittification of google search results, but this actually
| helps explain why.
| muratsu wrote:
| From a regulatory perspective, implementing the ability to remove
| certain websites from search results (similar to twitter
| mute/block) would solve the problem for everyone. Motivated
| communities can maintain their lists and share amongst
| themselves.
| codeulike wrote:
| This is a brilliant breakdown of whats been going on with review
| lists. Its been obvious for the last five years or so that
| whenever I googled 'best laser jet printer' or whatever that I
| was getting fed a load of bullshit but this really steps through
| exactly how Google and the seo crew are racing us all to the
| bottom, and to the opposite of useful info.
| White_Wolf wrote:
| I'll be the unpopular voice here (not defending g for the,imho,
| monopoly though): - Google is not killing anything and don't owe
| you traffic; - You don't get traffic because your website is less
| algorithm oriented than other sites (among a ton of other
| things).
|
| if you want to unserstand how and why certain websites rank and
| all that sort of stuff just lurk on black hat SEO forums and see
| how they game system. I don't recomment their services but it's
| worth reading about the things they take into account. From
| keywords, density, headings all the way to domain age and server
| location.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is the "don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" defense [0].
| Google isn't killing anything because Google is just an
| algorithm. Your site fares poorly not because Google wants to
| hurt you but because you don't want to waste your life catering
| to an algorithm. It's not Google's fault that that you have
| other priorities like actually helping your readers live a
| better life!
|
| While it's strictly accurate, it's not a very useful way to
| look at the world. Google _is_ killing independent sites that
| spend more time on the content than on SEO. It might be killing
| those sites in the same way that a volcanic eruption kills
| wildlife--as an unthinking, uncaring force of nature--but it 's
| still killing them.
|
| [0]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33m1s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=...
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's also a framing that ignores the fact that Google clearly
| wants to be able to filter out the garbage but can't. It's
| not bloggers' fault for that. At some point, you can either
| decide to write for people or decide to write for the
| algorithm.
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's not about Google owing anyone traffic, people are upset
| that Google can't tell the difference between inauthentic
| product recommendations and authentic ones. Google clearly
| wishes they could as well, but it doesn't scale so they don't
| solve the problem.
|
| > your website is less algorithm oriented
|
| Maybe we should refuse to accept Google's framing. It's content
| creators' job to create great content _as judged by people_.
| It's Google's job to discover that content and rank it above
| procedurally generated garbage that is devouring the internet.
| The fact that Google's results are dominated by trash isn't
| because there's a lack of good content.
| codexon wrote:
| Not everyone has the time and resources to do SEO to beat big
| media companies at this game. Buying an old domain is a prime
| example.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| One thing this made me think of is that it would be interesting
| to try and make a user curated list of these kinds of sites.
| Every once in a while, I'll come across a blog of either an
| individual or a very small organization that is, for whatever
| reason, extremely interested in a very particular product segment
| (for example: [0]), and get _way_ into the weeds on the product
| category. They are exactly the kinds of pages I would like to
| find when I'm researching a product and exactly the kinds of
| pages that searches either don't turn up at all or are are pretty
| far down the list.
|
| Having some kind of repository of these kinds of sites would be
| really useful.
|
| [0]https://gunsafereviewsguy.com/
| ec109685 wrote:
| This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI
| (i.e. sophisticated reading systems) will be able to address.
|
| If there was a human curator with infinite time, I think they
| could wade through this crap and find ten links to authoritative
| sites that would provide a much better experience. They would do
| the same type of research that this author did, see how well a
| site's recommendations correlated with other review sites (and
| vice versa to problematic sites), look at the history of reviews
| and see if they correlated to when products where shipped, look
| at the authors experience in the review space, etc, etc.
|
| This has to be a direction Google will be going in.
| Solvency wrote:
| "This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI
| will be able to address."
|
| LOL, no. Generative AI is literally taking over SEO spam and
| exponentially magnifying it. That's where the money is. And
| Google is here to make money.
| ec109685 wrote:
| GenAI as in increasingly sophisticated reasoning engines, not
| writing fake product reviews.
| cableshaft wrote:
| GenAI does what its users tell them to do. And users are
| asking it to make fake product reviews. They don't even
| need it to be about an actual product just, tell it to
| 'create a product review for a toaster oven and include
| point 1 and point 2', and then the user can pop in some
| actual product names, model numbers, or a few other facts
| where needed.
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| Can anyone tell where this screenshot comes from?
|
| https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-p...
| SushiHippie wrote:
| https://ahrefs.com/serp-checker
| bluish29 wrote:
| > What do BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science, and
| Better Homes & Gardens have in common?
|
| They are all in my ublacklist personal block list. That was
| before going full time with Kagi where I blocked most of them
| too.
| Veuxdo wrote:
| At this point it you are searching for the "best" anything on
| Google, that's on you.
| jdpedrie wrote:
| Is there a list anywhere of trustworthy sites for product
| reviews? The article mentioned Tech Gear Lab, and though I
| haven't heard of House Fresh, that seems reasonable? Consumer
| Reports of course, but are there others?
| rahidz wrote:
| It feels like sometime in the past decade, Google search results
| went from "Here's what most people click on" to "Here's the most
| trusted sources, handpicked by Google".
|
| WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN,
| BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which
| makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your
| users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon
| something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe
| "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article
| that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks
| Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's
| and not risk any controversy.
|
| And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized
| "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump
| out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though
| we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate
| links. We're 'trusted', after all."
| nostromo wrote:
| Yes, exactly -- Google is the new Yahoo.
|
| It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great
| results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least
| interesting results for everything using a small army of human
| and AI reviewers.
|
| Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no
| appreciable reason.
|
| The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more
| relevant than their organic search results -- because they
| actually care about the ad experience.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Seeing PopSci mentioned here stings, but they're right. I loved
| that magazine as a kid.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Well. They do affiliate and bigger Gorillas do affiliate. But
| they claim to do a more honest review. Well. Air cleaner.
|
| I do my review here without any affiliate link: Most DIY filters
| outclass commercial available filters:
| https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html
|
| https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY...
| Animats wrote:
| Does someone have a browser add-on with a site blacklist for
| Google search results? Google won't let you do that in the Chrome
| store any more, but you can still do it for Firefox.
| 15kingben wrote:
| Do I have this right?
|
| 1. Google is overrun by low quality product reviews and
| comparisons
|
| 2. Google starts to weight highly sites with manual testing
|
| 3. All those sites shamelessly lie and say they have manual
| testing -> back to 1
|
| Isn't this a problem that Pagerank is supposed to solve? Auditing
| content for quality is basically an intractable problem to scale
| evilotto wrote:
| This isn't really about google search results. The underlying
| playbook is the same one that has been used by vulture
| capitalists for quite some time now. Find a company with some
| value, buy it, extract the value into cash for the hedge fund,
| screw the employees and the public, move on to the next target.
| Look at what Alden Global has been doing to newspapers for years,
| and more recently Greyhound bus terminals. Gordon Gecko was a
| character in a movie, but based on all-too-real people and
| behaviors.
| kccqzy wrote:
| This is a genuinely difficult problem to solve. The article title
| is "How Google is killing independent sites like ours" but then
| (1) I have never heard of HouseFresh and I have no reason to
| trust them for their reviews; (2) even if the site was highly
| ranked on Google, I still wouldn't necessarily trust the brand
| because you know SEO and ranking manipulations exist and I cannot
| be assured that HouseFresh isn't just a site that hired some high
| powered SEO consultant. It all boils down to reputation:
| reputation of the manufacturer and reputation of the reviewer.
| But humans can't realistically remember the reputation of all the
| manufacturers and product reviewers online, so we naturally
| gravitate towards well-known brands and big media publishers.
| api wrote:
| The long predicted LLM spam apocalypse is upon us. All open
| systems and forums will be rendered unusable, including probably
| eventually e-mail. The future is closed enclaves, private forums,
| and managed platforms that verify identity.
|
| It was kind of inevitable that some tech would eventually do
| this, even if it was as unsophisticated as click farms and
| content mills. If adding information is free and there is no
| gate, it gets trashed by spam. It's a classic tragedy of the
| commons.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I don't really have any large scale answers other than to just
| aggregate my own recommendations at starterpax.com and refer
| friends and family to that for various hobbies / categories.
| Techbrunch wrote:
| Is there a ublock origin list that can be used to filter those
| websites ?
| buro9 wrote:
| I run a forum platform, and the best recommendations for anything
| are within the small communities.
|
| It doesn't really matter what the community is for, only last
| week on a cycling forum someone asked for "What's the best alarm
| clock?"... two days of discussion later, and everyone has aligned
| on "Buy one of the Braun alarm clocks" with the only debate left
| about which particular model was best (it turns out, 3 models
| cover everyone, and all are still better than anything else). If
| you went to Google and asked the same question
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+...
| you get a lot of "Best alarm clock" list (with the year
| meantioned)... but few to none recommend a Braun alarm clock.
|
| You can repeat this for virtually anything... the small
| communities won't have an instant answer unless someone already
| asked it, but will produce a better answer every time, and I
| agree with the article that what has happened to Google isn't
| great, the incentives have all aligned to produce the worst
| content, by some of the most trusted sources, and to have that
| ranked high regardless of whether it helps answer anyone's
| question.
| cush wrote:
| I know when I need an air purifier, I look to Rolling Stone
| Magazine for an honest, accurate review
| dkbrk wrote:
| This is an entirely predictable consequence of Goodhart's Law [0]
| and Google ought to have known better.
|
| I can believe that Google was genuinely trying to help their
| users by providing more useful search results, yet, due to
| Goodhart's law they have in fact accomplished the opposite. As a
| concrete example, previously references to "lab testing" actually
| meant something, but Google turned its immense power on that and
| similar keywords and destroyed their information content.
|
| It is irresponsible of Google to naively act in ignorance of the
| entirely predictable consequences of their actions. Yes,
| Goodhart's law is counterintuitive, but it's been a well-known
| principle for decades and Google ought to realize that they are
| powerful enough it applies to any action they take and take that
| into account when making decisions.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| cush wrote:
| Google spent at least a decade incentivizing spam while they
| dominated up the search market, tearing any semblance of humanity
| and authenticity from the web. By the time Reddit realized what
| they had, LLMs had scraped them dry, then tragically and
| ironically, their plan to lock LLMs out of their API backfired
| and users deleted half of Reddit's content. There's so much value
| in the Small Web right now - microblogs, IndieWeb, etc., but it's
| just so hard to find these kinds of sites if you don't know what
| you're looking for
| userbinator wrote:
| My strategy is not to use search engines for product
| recommendations, but to go to the online shops directly, look for
| the 1-star and 2-star reviews, and read them carefully. Once
| narrowed down to a few products, I then research them
| specifically to find out the details.
|
| For the example of air purifiers, look on Ali if you don't want
| to DIY one with a box fan and HEPA filter. They're all going to
| be made by some Chinese OEM anyway, so you'll cut out some
| middlemen and reduce the price, and at least those listings often
| have far more technical information, and the reviews can have
| detailed pictures from buyers of the products' internals.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Looks like these "reviews" never happened.
|
| But even reviews that you might see on YouTube are usually not
| reviews. They are demos. Unboxing a product and demonstrating
| that a product indeed does what the box says is not a true
| review.
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