Just researched good/quality crafting printers yesterday. Search results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that offered obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to direct you to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This product is currently not available" sites.
Repeated my search on Youtube to find reviews or unboxing. Most video search results were basically "Youtube SEO" again - the most viewed/top-ranked videos did never show a single actual print run or even the printer available. It was mostly marketing websites turned into video (slowly scrolling/moving over product description or pictures clearly taken from the web). And of course, affiliate links in the description.
The web has become a crappy place to research products as long as money can be made with those through affiliations. I wonder if outlawing affiliate marketing would make the world a better place.
P.S: Whats most ridiculous about my Youtube Printer research experience, the best and most helpful video was a sales video from a home shopping TV station [0], where they actually showed some printing action and handling of one of the models I was interested in.
If you want to solve the problem of product research in an old-school way, Consumer Reports still exists. Their business model for almost a century has been to produce independent reviews of products, and charge for the reviews. It is also run as a non-profit. I'm honestly surprised how little I hear about them. Not that any organization is perfect, but they have been the poster child of success via paid content since the 1930s.
It also makes me think that part of the problem is not only that Google's results are getting worse, it is that much of the population goes to the internet for all problems. Whether it is googling or asking on social media... the "front-line" information on the internet is simply not reliable anymore.
Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products & services are not the best, and often times criminally bad.
As an example, I used them for moving services for a state-to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving services are merely dispatchers run by a single company, run by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating number of businesses and cutouts.
When I contacted Consumer Reports to let them know about the many tens of thousands of complaints about the companies they were ranking highest, they referred me to their attorney.
>> If you want to solve the problem of product research in an old-school way, Consumer Reports still exists. Their business model for almost a century has been to produce independent reviews of products, and charge for the reviews. It is also run as a non-profit.
> Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products & services are not the best, and often times criminally bad.
> As an example, I used them for moving services for a state-to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving services are merely dispatchers run by a single company, run by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating number of businesses and cutouts.
Honestly, "moving companies" is not a category that seems like it would be in Consumer Reports' wheelhouse, and I'm surprised they offered any recommendations in that area at all.
Also, your anecdote doesn't really support the notion that they're "pay-to-play, just that they did a bad job in some category.
Are you actually thinking of the Better Business Bureau but got it mixed up with Consumer reports? I would expect the BBB to rate moving services and I've heard that they have some kind of membership program for businesses that seems to allow better control over complaints, which is pretty close to "pay-to-play."
This is all a massive deflection. Why is CR okay to make recommendations in an "area they're not good at"? Even the most generous interpretations are more damning than your claims.
I think OP was asking whether they were confusing CR for the Better Business Bureau because moving services does not seem to be something CR would review
I don't see any evidence of this. The most likely scenario is the original complaint confused BBB (totally pay-to-play, scam) with CR.
CR doesn't review this category and a search of past CR review categories doesn't yield moving services. In general, they don't review anything regional.
Because thats a service not a product. I go to CR for reviews on what the best mattress is, moving companies is not something I would go to them for so that doesn't concern me. Its like saying AAA isn't worth the money because you didn't like the hotel they gave you a discount on.
Right except AAA's service is not providing opinions on the quality of anything, goods or services. Lying about the quality of a good or service when that is your business, potentially with kickbacks, is not really a defensible position. "It's okay because I don't expect their opinion to be good in this one area" doesn't negate CR providing that opinion.
No one can find anything where Consumer Reports has rated moving services. It's likely the grandparent confused them with BBB, which is totally pay-to-play.
And--- I appreciate Consumer Reports' accuracy, but I doubt that they are 100% accurate. There are probably recommendation sets that end up as garbage for one reason or another (incorrect weighting for my use case, statistical noise, evolution in products since survey experiences, etc).
There's also times where I have personal expertise or preferences that outweigh CR's rankings. CR rates computers, after all, and I would probably not weigh them very heavily in my choice.
As a long time CR subscriber, agree absolutely. This stuff is hard and clean data sets are nonexistent. I still recommend to my friends to subscribe to CR as independent reviews are important (and worth paying for).
In all the years I've used Consumer Reports I've never seen them rate moving services. I just jumped on their site now, and there are no reviews for moving services.
I'm not sure if Consumer Reports has ever formally reviewed moving services, though I admit I haven't been looking for this category specifically. CR's website currently doesn't have any reviews for moving services, not even with a disclaimer that the category is no longer being tested (like they do for some categories, such as steam irons: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/steam-irons.htm).
CR's freelance writers have written general advice articles on moving services, like https://www.consumerreports.org/moving/how-to-choose-a-relia..., which might be useful to some readers but certainly aren't very deep. These articles aren't the same as CR's actual reviews, which have scores and detailed ratings for each product metric.
> Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products & services are not the best, and often times criminally bad.
Agreed. As a PSA do not use the True Car services that are "included" in a membership. It's basically a free pass to sell all of the contact information CR has on you to any dealership that's paying them for leads. You will be hounded for weeks if you try to use that service. I recently found out, through a family member, that the deceptive practice still exists when they were trying to get actual dealer invoices (which CR used to provide, but no longer does). I cannot not recommend CR enough.
Not sure if it's any relation to TrueCar.com, but FWIW I used them 7(?) years ago to purchase a hard to find used car and had nothing but a good experience.
From wikipedia, I gather they've tweaked their compensation models and exec team since then, so no idea what they're like now.
Effectively, everyone is AutoTrader though, and you should never give any insurance or auto quote company a real phone number or non-spam email.
> ...and you should never give any insurance or auto quote company a real phone number or non-spam email.
That is the point. Given the reputation CR tries to uphold and their relationship and integration with True Car there is not much warning (if any) using that feature in CR will result in dumping your contact information to many dealerships and is a dark pattern one wouldn't expect from CR given the end user is paying for the service. For most non-technical folks I can't imagine this experience is positive after they've handed over their actual phone # and email.
I can't vouch for whatever the state of True Car is right now, but several years ago (more than once) I went there for information on the average selling price of new cars.
They had a nice histogram, showing the range and most common price and how far off msrp it was.
I don't know how accurate it really was, and if it was accurate, someone might have "gotten to them" in later years to inflate the statistics and preserve profit margins.
But it seemed to me really valuable information for negotiating a new car purchase. The special True Car price and "services" and all that seemed like a diversion to me.
It's like some other things on the Internet - a sensible person subsists on the free "teaser" information and never ever engages in any sort of relationship.
Apart from an indication of what a fair price is, the histogram showed relative discounts between models, and there's frequently/always ones that are being disdained by the public that are very good cars and dealers are desperate to move, versus ones that are in high demand that they won't discount.
I've been a subscriber and I am a half hearted fan of Which. IT wise their advice is complete arse: This is a consumer champion that only recommends either Apple or MS - there appears to be no other offerings. To be fair, I last read a Which review at least two years ago.
I'd describe Which as a good starter for 10, these days, but no more.
They do a decent legal angle and always have done, ie consumer rights - that's their forte for me.
> CR hasn’t completed an insightful review in ages. It isn’t even worth subscribing prior to a major purchase.
> I find independent YouTubers significantly better.
Could me extremely skeptical. "Independence" on YouTube is very cheap and easy to fake.
IMHO, YouTube is mainly useful for video of someone poking at a product, because for some reason retailers and manufacturers don't provide good enough media on product pages to get anywhere close to substituting for seeing something in person.
How would one know if Youtuber is independent? Say, I need to buy a lawnmower. How do I know which reviewers are good and which are idiots and which are paid shills? It's kinda hard to figure it on YT. If I have a specific product in mind, I can look through YT reviews of this specific one as a point of information. But if I have 100 potential lawnmowers to sort through, I won't watch every YT review for 100 products, I'd have to take a sabbatical for that. YT doesn't fill the niche.
I don't know if it's pay-to-play, but it sure feels like it. Many years ago, I had a house built, and I decided to outfit it with all the appliances, convinced I could do a better job picking out good equipment, and getting better prices. I settled on Consumer Reports' best pick: GE "Gold" appliances, and I bought them all. Within 2 years, every single one -- oven, microwave, dishwasher, refrigerator, washer, and dryer -- had problems. I will never trust CR for anything again.
I'm talking about plastic breaking, fans dying, switches failing, etc. I only HAD to replace the washer and dryer, and the mismatched, second-hand units I got were still going strong after a decade. I asked the used appliance salesman if he wanted my old ones, for free, to refurbish. He asked what brand they were. I told him. He said no. Those models were THAT bad. But CR said they were the best on the market.
> I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports is a pay-to-play service now
Do you mean to say that they receive money to issue reviews (which would be alarming)? Or do you mean to say they charge fees to access review information (which has always been the case AFAICT)?
They also pander to their customer base. You'll never hear them say a bad word about the kinds of high end but not "I own a private jet" luxury products that high middle class consumers (who are their target market) tend to own. Nobody resubscribes to media that tells them they're doing it wrong.
Haha. It gets even better, which I discovered while researching a TV that was on sale and the store said their price was the lowest on some price matching service. But when I checked the service they were the only one selling the specific model! Turns out each major chain gets their own model number for certain products like TV’s and refrigerators. Just to fuck with consumers trying to make an educated choice.
>"Just to fuck with consumers trying to make an educated choice."
No, the retailer-specific model numbers are requested or required by the retailers, who either want a slightly different featureset, or just want to avoid people doing price-matching. The manufacturers don't really like it.
Sometimes there's something to those retailer-specific models. When our child was young enough to need a car seat, we looked at the top-rated model on CR. It was rated pretty well by customers at various websites, except consistently for features X, Y, and Z, which seemed pretty significant to me. Lo and behold, we go to store A, and realize they have the "limited edition A model" which actually specifically addressed all the complaints in customer reviews about the generic model. We loved that car seat.
Sometimes those retailer-specific tweaks are kinda questionable, but sometimes, if it's the right retailer, they're actually pretty thoughtful.
This happens with a local store here called "Video Only", and they will typically stock higher end features. Example: A common Samsung Plasma could be found all over town for say, $800. The Video Only one was $900, and would drop to like $650 when it's time to move the new stuff in.
Their people will tell you all about doing that too.
The difference?
The set I got for $650 (and again, not exact, just representative numbers here) had the faster video processor and ran at 120Hz, which means the 3D capability ran at a full 60Hz for each eye, and game mode was low lag. Both very nice options, and finding them together sometimes meant buying another expensive model that comes with other fat margin, mostly useless features.
I have no doubt it's all about the price matching, but sometimes, depending on the retailer and their business model, it can be about differentiation, like actually having something better in some distinct way. The Video Only people cater to the home theatre crowd and tend to stock sets that are high technical performers at great prices.
Seeing it in the other direction, WalMart tends to have their special edition of whatever it is, and it's almost always price / performance, and or some extra pack in, or size change.
> Turns out each major chain gets their own model number for certain products like TV’s and refrigerators. Just to fuck with consumers trying to make an educated choice.
You:
> No, the retailer-specific model numbers are requested or required by the retailers, who either... or just want to avoid people doing price-matching.
I mean, I don't see the difference. both of you are in agreement it's to fuck people trying to price match. I guess the fact that the retailers insist on it makes it okay in your mind??
Meanwhile, I doubt there are any real featureset differences for most things with model numbers. There are cheap versions of clothing for Walmart, but that's ironically going the other way and trying to confuse the customer by making them think they are the same items.
I worked at a mattress retailer after college. Each retailer would have a slightly different version of the same model. So as an example one would have 2 inches of memory foam and another would have 1.75 inches of memory foam and 0.25 inches of latex foam. But otherwise it’s the same. They did it to make comparison shopping and price matching difficult. In reality I’m not sure how well it worked. Salespeople would match prices anyway to get the sale.
Joke's on them. I don't buy things that have only a single review; too easily gamed. I look for products that have a lot of positive reviews. Obscure models probably have worse support too. Unless you really know what you're looking for, something that lots of people enjoy using is generally the safest choice.
That's how they can declare "we do price match" without ever doing any price match. Surely you didn't expect the price match for a different model, did you?
Haven't consumers learned the game as well? It seems pretty obvious that if LG sells a bad microwave then I probably shouldn't trust that their other microwaves would be any good either. And why would I buy a microwave with no review over a microwave with a positive review? There's got to be at least one good microwave on their site.
Manufacturers have 100% control over their website.
They can delete reviews, they can keep the reviews and start shipping a slightly different product instead, they can ask certain customers to write positive reviews for incentives. The list goes on and on.
It's asymmetric warfare and manufacturers hold all the cards. That's why there generally are consumer protection laws, and not the other way around, e.g. protecting manufacturers from consumers (lol).
The semi-good news is that for most consumer goods like microwaves, it doesn't really matter, because they are all "good enough".
The manufacturer/seller commonly games the reviews so even new products tend to have a few glowing reviews right off the bat.
And if you use the scale that if a manufacturer produces one bad microwave that all their microwaves are bad, I suggest cooking over a fire as no manufacturer is going to meet your judgement scale.
I know I'm five-gajillion comments in, so this is like spitting in the ocean: call a local repair place (unaffiliated) and ask them what to get. The local fridge/appliance repair (group) -- any of the five of them -- will happily chat for an hour about any major appliance in your house. They'll also gossip like fishmongers about who's good at what services, etc.
In general, for very large appliances (large fridges; double-stoves; double ovens) you can just ask them to keep an eye out at the local restaurant auctions. My house came with a 48" prosumer fridge. When my fridge died I got a 10-year-old exact replica from a warehouse for 3500$, rather than 18000$. It's worked flawlessly for 8 years, now.
I just wrote a couple commments here talking about actually talking to people. It's how I still prefer to buy many things.
Reviews? Have pretty much ignored them for many things. It has been hard to see the value, frankly. There are always a lot of them, and the information quality has been high noise and dubious in many cases.
When I am able to shop in an actual store, like for appliances, I've always had great luck talking to the service techs.
I just ask them which models are coming back to the store, and or for a recommendation.
My last washer, dryer, dishwasher and stove were all purchased this way and have ran for a long time now. Needed a new element for my dryer and stove a while back and both were available, easy to install.
And that's the last question: Service. What's available and can I get parts, etc...?
Another failure mode can be testing the wrong things. Companies will make products to do well in tests or otherwise appeal to consumers even if that makes their product actually worse. For example maybe tyres would only be tested in a straight line (rather than when cornering) or when unworn (so allowing shallow grooves to allow for a thinner wall and shorter life).
I recently came across a YouTube channel where a guy does various thorough-seeming tests of a medium range of brands for a bunch of product categories (think spanners and scissors and suchlike) and he’ll talk quickly and provide lots of numbers but when you think a little more, it seems that there isn’t much reason for the test results to correlate with a good product (eg maybe if your Phillips head cams out it is because that is what it’s meant to do and not because it’s bad)
Consumer Reports is my first stop whenever I look to purchase some non trivial item. I typically use the top five from their recommended list to quickly narrow down my initial result set. Then I'll cross reference with Wirecutter to see if they are in agreement (usually are). If I'm down to one or two choices at that point I'll try to find some unbiased reviews on YouTube. Not a perfect system, but I find it works pretty well compared to just going right to a Google search result.
I usually just search the topic plus "reddit." The advice from a subreddit on something will usually be reliable.
Then other times I take a chance on Amazon, like the ~$700 Viribus mountain e-bike I got a few months ago. E-bike enthusiasts seem to say that price range is universally junk, but it's been treating me great on trails and the road. Oddly can't find anyone else talking about it online but the Amazon reviews were good.
Mountain biker here. If I may hate on your decision here for a second.
The reason nobody is talking about the bike you got, is because it is simply so bad, nobody who rides remotely seriously as a hobby or otherwise would even consider it as part of the category of mountain bikes.
I know you probably have fun riding it around on some dirt or gravel or something - but really, it's not a mountain bike.
Disclaimer - I'm not even that wild a rider at all.
I would have those breaks burned out in less than one decent, and probably tear the drivetrain apart on my first or second climb (tripple front derailleur? really?)
The geometry is whack and the tires are trash. That thing that looks like a front fork, is not. I would blow that up first day too, without a doubt.
I don't think you appreciate the world of difference between something like this, and even a cheap 2.5k ebike. (Yes that is cheap. You have the dollar store equivalent of an ebike.)
You should have saved your money and gotten a nice second hand kona hard tail or something, rather than buying and rewarding chineesium scrapheap contenders.
You're probably familiar with laptops and such to some degree.
This is the equivalent of someone buying the top reviewed amazon promoted laptop, sorted by cheapest, with some kinda piece of shit 1152×648 screen, 4gb ddr2 ram, 2.xGhz celeron processor, and telling people it's a gaming pc because it says gaming on the box. Then commenting how you find it odd nobody in the gaming space is talking about it :)
Harsh I know but... that's life. Sorry. I hope you enjoy riding and upgrade your bike soon. I just wish that such a e-waste disaster wasn't your stepping stone.
You can understand I didn't want to spend thousands to start out a hobby I wasn't even sure I'd get into. If it lasts me a year that's good enough. My next step would be doing my own build.
I have no illusion that it's the best bike in the world, but it certainly works for my combination of roads and bike trails. I wouldn't put it on some crazy steep obstacle course or huge jumps but I wasn't looking to do any of that anyway.
But what's the big deal about a triple front deraileur?
Parent underappreciates that the difference between (nothing) and (anything) is infinite, and the difference between (less good) and (better) is finite.
To me it just sounds like the PC gamers who insist that anyone who wants to 'game' needs an RTX 3070 at a minimum. They have unrealistic ideas of what the person actually wants to do. Someone who's spending a small amount on mountain bikes isn't going hard downhill.
I really don't think any analogies to PCs and games works. This is more like taking an underpowered car on the freeway. Yeah it's going to be able to get up to speed but without the acceleration that's really needed. And I don't know that I would have known better when I'd first gotten my license without being told. We don't know that someone wouldn't take this bike on well-maintained trails a few times and then decide to "graduate" to jumping over roots and rocks or w/e.
Not to mention not knowing how well the electric part is done, especially the battery. I'd be ok taking my $200 commuter on some light trail because I'm mechanically inclined and I've got the measure of it. I have no idea about how to assess the electricals but given the cost-cutting, bad workmanship, and bad design I can see in the rest of the bike's build, I'd be really concerned about that.
I do understand. That's why I recommend the second hand hardtail kona for the same price (or cheaper).
> If it lasts me a year that's good enough
I don't like this attitude because it is wasteful. That's another thing I was taking issue with. Worse because it's an ebike. If it was just some aluminum it wouldn't be nearly as bad, but still kinda bad.
> But what's the big deal about a triple front deraileur?
More moving parts, super unreliable, always low quality.
Modern mtbs use a 1x11 or 1x12 drivetrain (no front derailleur at all, never mind 3x).
> Modern mtbs use a 1x11 or 1x12 drivetrain (no front derailleur at all, never mind 3x).
... which creates much more chain wear from chain crossing ...
> More moving parts, super unreliable, always low quality.
I have a 35 year old Shimano Deore XT front derailleur. I raced the bike hard in the 80s during "the prehistory of UK mountain bike racing". I then rode it for another 8 years, doing several multi-thousand mile tours on it (before the name "gravel bike" had come along). Then I used it as a city commuter for another 5 years.
The derailleur has never failed me, has always been reliable and is built better than most contemporary equivalents.
The fad for 1x setups illuminates some of the pros, but because it's largely a fad, fails to shine a similar light on the cons. For crazy downhill racing, 1x is an obvious choice. For ultra-distance events, long distance off-road touring and general gravel duty, the choice is not quite so obvious.
I set my cyclocross up with a triple front and a touring rear. The cycle shop questioned me on why I did it. I explained that the last mile was also 600 foot climb. The super fit kid working there was like "that hill is easy, I do that on my speed gears". I said "yea but look at me". He said "true". then proceeded to say he couldn't install it because shimano wouldn't recommend it (too many tooth delta). But he'd adjust it if I put it on my self. So I did. Basically it's a road front with a MTB small, and a mtb cassette in the back.
It's got 5k miles on it and works fine. Just needs little tweaks every once and a while and you can't do full crosses like Big Big. But it goes as fast and as torquey as you could please (or can buy).
These things work pretty well. Just learn to tweak em or get them tuned up.
> The derailleur has never failed me, has always been reliable and is built better than most contemporary equivalents.
Why are you comparing your name brand derailleur from a reputable company (from a time when there was basically only x3) that you say is still better than contemporaries, with the absolute worst of those contemporaries, as a way to somehow imply this particularly bad contemporary is worthwhile?
Wild train of thought.
Interesting how you assert 1x setups as a fad for mountain bikes, and then go on to talk about how it's not a clear choice for... long distance touring? Gravel biking? What are you talking about lol
> then go on to talk about how it's not a clear choice for... long distance touring
I guess you've not ridden the Great Divide? Long distance mountain bike touring. You could do it on a gravel bike, but it would be much more comfortable on a mountain bike.
Gravel biking ... mountain biking ... the difference is mostly in the eye (or saddle) of the beholder.
Right, that confirms it. I'm sorry but you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
> I guess you've not ridden the Great Divide? Long distance mountain bike touring.
That is the most easy going barely off road biking on earth. Thousands of miles of fire and access roads, with a few miles of zero difficulty single track.
> You could do it on a gravel bike, but it would be much more comfortable on a mountain bike.
"A mountain bike". The overwhelming majority of mountain bikes are unsuitable for this. You wouldn't use any of the most popular types: trail, downhill, enduro.
Gravel biking and mountain biking are world's apart.
The closest thing to gravel biking or other long distance off road biking in mountain biking is cross country - but even then xc is _way_ more demanding than gravel. You can't ride gravel bikes on xc routes. Gravel biking is not a form of mountain biking. There does not need to be any elevation change of any kind to gravel bike. There are no features on a gravel trail.
Anyway, sure, a hard tail xc bike is probably the best bike for that trip just due to the comfort of the larger tires. I bet you'd actually be just as happy with a fatty gravel bike though.
You know, I just went and searched to see what people ride on that trail to confirm my suspicion about big tire gravel bikes. Would you look at that - I'm right. Hard tail xc / gravel bikes with fat tires.
Additionally, the vast majority of them are running 1x front chainrings.
Surprise surprise, I know what I'm talking about, and the people that seriously ride the trail you're trying to use to one up me made the same choices I recommend. What a "fad".
> Why are you comparing your name brand derailleur from a reputable company (from a time when there was basically only x3) that you say is still better than contemporaries, with the absolute worst of those contemporaries, as a way to somehow imply this particularly bad contemporary is worthwhile?
Because the GGP -- you? -- didn't specify "the absolute worst of those contemporaries" but just complained about how "front triples" -- which implies all front triples -- "suck". So the GP quite reasonably showed that they don't.
I mean, if you want to be that literal about it I guess I can't fault you. I would expect someone to scope the conversation appropriately. The tripple I'm talking about is in the context of tripples on brand new 600 dollar e-mountain bikes. They will all be trash.
Is that a fairer statement, or would you like to just say I'm once again moving the goalposts by clarifying?
> Is that a fairer statement, or would you like to just say I'm once again moving the goalposts by clarifying?
No it isn't and yes I would: Now you're trying to move the conversational goalposts by calling your moving of the goalposts "clarifying".
This conversation simply never was about your snobbish True Mountain-Biking Scotsman perspective, and no amount of your attempts at obfuscation will make it have been so.
I considered secondhand, but a used battery has a good chance of being bad or on the way out, and a good new battery is expensive.
I doubt this bike is going to be ewaste soon though. I know a few people I might give it to who might use it. And I drive old cars into the ground instead of buying new so far, so I think I have a good track record on waste.
Even if I wanted to just throw it out, the battery and frame are recyclable.
Front triple is a way to extend the range of gearing without spending much. It's also used to dishonestly claim "21 speeds" since a lot of those are in the overlap; the standard is to be explicit, e.g. 3x7.
In other words it's a sign that the bike is built to a price, and maybe to a list of features and not actually to a quality standard.
Not necessarily bad (I'd trust any 3x Shimano drivetrain assuming it's installed correctly) but it's a sign to watch out.
You're being mean. It's clear that this bike wouldn't work for you, but it apparently does work for your parent. Stop trying to convince people they shouldn't enjoy things.
To go with your analogy, if someone bought the laptop you're describing and was having fun playing games, can't we see that as a good thing? We don't have to get them hooked on more powerful more expensive options.
I’m not so sure. The problem of BSOs… bike-shaped objects, a.k.a. low-quality bicycles, has been a problem for a long time. I rode a BSO for a long time before I knew better.
Sometimes you don’t understand what those things are until later. Sometimes the shape is weird and you don’t know how poorly you’re treating your body until you switch to a reasonable bike (and oh, random pains go away). Often the parts are substandard or nonstandard… some part wears down and then you can’t easily repair the bicycle.
It’s hard to trust comments from random consumers because I see so many bicyclists out there which very obviously lack the knowledge, skill, or will to set up or ride their bicycle reasonably. I see people on the road with horribly maladjusted seats, or people who ride a geared bicycle but have no clue which gear they should be in.
With a low-quality bicycle, a bad setup, or poor technique, you end up putting more strain on your body. It’s not necessary to go to more expensive options but you should take some care in choosing & setting up your bicycle.
The other real problem with cheap bad bikes is quality control matters on a device that (here in Europe) you might effectively be trusting your life to. As a poor student I had a BSO a year for three years, until I could afford a better object. The first died in traffic when the derailleur came out of the frame, leaving a burred hole behind, and a bus honking at me as it just managed to avoid squishing me. The second died when the pedals sheered off the crankshaft when I pushed down hard going up a hill. The third one died when I went over a large pot-hole in the cycle lane, bending the forks in the process. Absolutely none of these things should be able to happen. That they did is, of course, testament to the false economy (and great danger) of BSOs. In the States I understand that they're likely to be viewed as toys, but in Western Europe they're overwhelmingly likely to be used as transportation by those with little money, in busy, city centre traffic. There's a reason Dutch bikes have a reputation for quality, weigh a ton, last forever, and we surprisingly expensive.
The difference is that the laptop breaking won't leave the user stranded and potentially eating dirt. I don't know what GGP means by the trails they're riding but I've looked at the homepage[1] and I wouldn't trust the bike on technical terrain. There's a very real safety issue.
GP could have been gentler, but they're right to say it's not a mountain bike, and shouldn't be ridden like one.
And that sucks. The things we buy should be fit for the advertised purpose. Mountain biking should be more accessible and there should be trails that GGP can ride on a safe budget bike without requiring that much fitness.
By trails I mostly mean maintained dirt trails found in state/national parks, but I have hit some good bumps/holes in this thing. I got a suspension seatpost and I hardly feel bumps at all anymore.
Can you show me an example of technical terrain where this line would be drawn?
It's pretty rocky and you can carry a ton of speed in some parts. It will definitely eat up cheaper bikes if you aren't careful.
If you want to find more examples of why cheaper bikes struggle to handle that type of stuff, I'd look up "walmart bikes vs mtb trail" or something along those lines on youtube. Lots of videos and they are usually somewhat entertaining. That said, your bike looks better than those and if you respect its limits, then it should be okay. The trails you describe sound fine for that type of bike, just be careful on hard bumps and stuff.
I explicitly recommended something more capable and long lasting for the same price, so I really don't know why you're claiming I want them to do something unrealistic.
The whole point for me was that I wasn't fit enough for a normal bicycle and didn't have the motivation to work up to it. With the ebike it feels like I can go anywhere I want and still get some cardio exercise doing it. If they're recommending an expensive non-ebike, that's just silly.
As an avid cyclist too, I think the biggest misunderstanding is you mentionned "trail", which you are probably confusing with "non paved path". That Bike Shaped Object mentionned up there would totally be destroyed in a few hours of riding any challenging trail at a decent speed. The fork would bend and lockup itself, the brake pads would be dead before reaching the bottom of the hill.
Another problem with buying such a lowend bike online is they are very often badly assembled. You might find quickly that it becomes noisy because some parts were installed without enough grease, or components may become nearly impossible to remove because of oxydation when it will become time to replace them, and it may just be unsafe because something hasn't been torqued to spec. I once had a thorough look at these kind of bikes and a sticker on the fork clearly stated it was not really rated to be used off road. Thanksfully the CE norms have been done so that bicycles do not explode on potholes filled roads so even a bike not made for off-road is made to survive common abuses on and off the pavement.
My biggest issue with these kind of cheap e-bikes with stupid barely functionnal gimmicks such as (badly) suspended fork and chinese low end electric system is they often turn very quickly to the landfill because something end up being non functionnal and the owner do not know how to fix it himself and which component to replace wit. So to the eyes of many what you really bought appears to be waste (or soon to be) which would have been better replaced by something that might last better. Take the same bike, replace the suspended fork with a steel rigid fork and remove the electronics and you have a bike that can be ridden for years with decent maintenance. But how many people will do that instead of sending it to the landfill and replacing it with the same shit when it gets to this point?
Having said that the good thing with cycling is you don't have to have the newest more expensive bike to enjoy riding and as long as you do it within the capabilities of the bike. And suprisingly a bike can be operated for long while being in a very bad state as long as speed is kept low, squeaking and grinding his way to your destination.
> "trail", which you are probably confusing with "non paved path"
This terminology difference might be meaningful in biking circles, but the places I go are designated as "trails" both colloquially and often by various governments.
> Take the same bike, replace the suspended fork with a steel rigid fork and remove the electronics and you have a bike that can be ridden for years with decent maintenance.
Wouldn't it be too heavy as a normal bike? From what I understand, ebike frames work out cheaper because they don't have to care about not making them heavy.
Well terminology is important depending on who you are talking to. Some governments may call that trail but riding down a black track at Whistler or Champery is different than just riding along on a non technically challenging gravel road/path. Besides, trail bike is a term used by the bicycle industry for a category of bikes that are much more capable than a cross-country mountain bike on challenging terrain and downhills while not being as much extreme as a Downhill bike with double crown forks which are pigs uphill.
As for your other question it really depends on the kind of e-bike.
Well integrated e-bike from bigger companies have the engine in the bottom bracket area so you can't remove that and the battery is usually so integrated inside the frame. Most cheap e-bike like yours, if it is the same as the one I see on the viribus website, are regular cheap alu frame on which they have strapped a battery on the standard 2 bolts usually dedicated for the water bottle holder cage and the engine is on the rear wheel. So the frame is pretty standard in that regard. Remove the battery and swap the rear wheel for a regular rear wheel and you have a conventional very entry level hardtail.
I made a good and realistic recommendation for the price range, that would leave OP well off in the long run.
I understand that you could say the ebike part is a hard requirement but, well, I don't think someone who knows so little about mountain biking or biking at all is in a position to make that kind of hard requirement in an informed way.
I also understand that you could read this as really pompous, but please consider what someone saying otherwise amounts to:
"I NEED an ebike mtb, but I also know nothing about mtbs or ebikes"
Suggesting a normal bike to me is not good or realistic at all. Electric is a hard requirement because the whole point is that I don't have the time or motivation to build up to riding steep hills and long distances without power. I can do that right away now, and it's rewarding enough that I keep doing it and getting exercise. I also wanted something suitable for dirt and bumpy terrain, so, a mountain bike style made the most sense.
I used to ride a road bike occasionally but the difficulty turned me off. If I'm stuck with an unpowered bike I just won't ride.
The problem is that “mountain bike” means two things. To an MTB rider, it’s a vehicle optimized for mountain riding where the top priority is rider’s safety.
To everyone else, it’s a category of vehicles capable of off-pavement riding on trails. They should be referred to off-pavement bikes.
Mountain bikes are like SUVs. Only a small % of people take either off road or in any way challenge their capabilities.
But the same can be said for most bikes. Very few folks actually run the tour de france or any other competitive race. People get all excited by capabilities or let those who do know and use those features influence their buying.
This is simply untrue. For the standard of bike that someone who knows bikes would call a mountain bike - they are ridden on trails regularly. People are not spending 3k+ on a really inefficient and slow bike to ride around their cities and neighborhoods.
You presumably are not actually knowledgeable about mountain bikes and riding them?
"No true mountain biker would ever call this a mountain bike"... yet go in any sporting goods store, anything with fat tires and or a suspension, upright handlebars, thumb shifters, it's likely labeled a mountain bike and would probably disintegrate on a downhill or cross trail. It's still a mountain bike to 95% of people.
And yes, I used to cross trail several times a year in MO and mtb park (duthie hill) downhill (stevens) when I moved to Seattle, then watched several people get massive concussions and stayed with snowboarding.
If a thing becomes mainstream it gets diluted. The top 1% definition of a thing is not the thing exclusively.
Pal, come _on_. Read my initial comment, and any other comment thereafter. I was very clear and explicit that I was giving this criticism from the perspective of not "anybody" but rather someone who actively mountain bikes.
You're still not understanding. Those bikes you were talking about - while they may be marketed as 'mountain bikes' (a term anybody can use for anything) - are not fit for the purpose of mountain biking (a set of well establish sports and related types of riding).
You have now moved on to confusing the way marketers lie in their descriptions of bikes in order to sell to the ignorant, with the actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein.
> The top 1% definition of a thing is not the thing exclusively.
Everybody who mountain bikes (more than once har har har) does so on an actual mountain bike. It's not the 1%. It's more like the 99%. People don't repeatedly take these wallmart bikes down trails. Nobody survives that setup long enough to make it in to the group you can by any good standard call mountain bikers.
Go to your local trail that isn't some fireroad or featureless single track, and tell me how many people you see on shit bikes like this.
You know, I'd normally agree with you about this diluted point as it relates to many other things, but I can't here. For example - car racing is not just formula 1 or other top tier engineering categories. The vast majority of car racing is amateur and hobby stuff in comparatively low or very low spec vehicles. The difference is that you can "technically" compete with a formula one car on a racetrack in a 1997 nissan micra with 40hp. The micra can cruise around the track basically indefinitely, stopping only for fuel - and complete the race days after the f1 car. A road is a road.
This is not the case with mountain biking. All non mountain bikes basically explode on contact with mountains. It's self selecting such that people who continue to mountain bike past the first outing or two, must do so on a purpose built good quality bike.
It is in this distinction, that you are missing the point.
It's unacceptable to me that when I have _clearly_ been talking in the context of real mountain biking, you are now deciding, it seems, to take the totally walked back, side stepped, and frankly revisionist approach of only now saying "well technically these bikes are labeled mountain bikes so I'm right". Nuh uh.
> I was very clear and explicit that I was giving this criticism from the perspective of not "anybody" but rather someone who actively mountain bikes
Yeah, and everybody else was pretty clear and explicit that that perspective is irrelevant to, like, 95% of people.
Edited to add:
> You have now moved on to confusing the way marketers lie in their descriptions of bikes in order to sell to the ignorant, with the actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein.
That's not the problem. The problem is that you started out by confusing the "actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein" with this discussion, which was an ordinary amateur consumer talking about ordinary amateur consumer products and reviews thereof, and every time someone tried to steer the discussion back to the topic at hand, you've gotten more and more snitty-snotty about your irrelevant No True Mountain-Biking Scotsman perspective.
Tell me, when you learned to drive an automobile, was it on a $55k BMW?
It's okay to buy something cheap with the understanding that its a stepping-stone to something else. After all, if the hobby doesn't "take" and you move on to a different hobby, at least you haven't wasted too much money.
> This is the equivalent of someone buying the top reviewed amazon promoted laptop, sorted by cheapest, with some kinda piece of shit 1152×648 screen, 4gb ddr2 ram, 2.xGhz celeron processor, and telling people it's a gaming pc because it says gaming on the box.
But if the buyer of this laptop was happy with the games he was playing on this laptop, why are you getting bent out of shape? Sure, he can't run the latest AAA game in HD, but it's clear that it is working for him.
Now I actually get this attitude from gamers often because I have a 1st-gen i7 (from 2011) with no SSDs but a modern video card (GTX 660ti), running Linux of all things.
I say I use it for work and gaming, and the response I get from gamers is very similar to yours - that my "gaming" machine is trash; I should throw everything out (maybe keep the video card) and get a new machine.
The thing is, it works for me - I play mostly Starcraft 2 and have played Far Cry [2/3/4/5] on it. Those are demanding AAA games. It works for me.
Same with OP - his bike works for him, and you are recommending a different product as an alternative, which frankly is a stupid thing to do (Harsh, I know, but someone had to say it).
You'd understand if you ever needed a lawnmower and someone recommended a pair of scissors as a replacement for a lawnmower.
No, but for mountain biking I started with an entry level hardtail cannondale that if it was given to someone today, 15 years later, would still be a fun and safe bike to take down your average mtb trails. (Roughly the same cost as this person's bike, new.)
The analogy is bad though. Learning to operate something in the category of cars is not analogous to starting what you believe to be mountain biking.
More apt, would be to ask me about starting a subset of driving as a hobby - like rally driving.
"If you were going to start rally driving would you start with a 200k race spec subaru, or a 1.5k ali express golf cart car with the word rally written on it?"
I would answer, as I did - neither. I'd get something second hand and more appropriate at the same price point.
> It's okay to buy something cheap with the understanding that its a stepping-stone to something else.
If you are ok with 1) rewarding the scam artists that make these 2) contributing to a culture of low quality throwaway goods and 3) using unsafe and inappropriate tools for the job - go ahead.
> You'd understand if you ever needed a lawnmower and someone recommended a pair of scissors as a replacement for a lawnmower.
Again, no. It would be like if someone offered me a dollar store lawnmower that would break in x mins, or a scythe. You might get farther initially with this piece of shit lawnmower, but I'll get all the way with the scythe. And I'll be fitter. And it will last a lifetime.
> Same with OP - his bike works for him, and you are recommending a different product as an alternative, which frankly is a stupid thing to do (Harsh, I know, but someone had to say it).
I bet you wouldn't give this advice about your own hobbies.
>> You'd understand if you ever needed a lawnmower and someone recommended a pair of scissors as a replacement for a lawnmower.
>
> Again, no. It would be like if someone offered me a lawnmower that would break in 10 mins, or a scythe. You might get farther initially with this piece of shit lawnmower, but I'll get all the way with the scythe.
Firstly, OP said it lasted a year, not 10m. We aren't comparing something that lasts for 10m with something that lasts a lifetime, we are comparing something that lasted for a year with something that lasted longer (not a lifetime).
Secondly, does it matter if it is possible to get further with the expensive tool if you're not going that far in the first place? If the cheap tool lasts long enough to never require replacement because it isn't used for the entire distance that the expensive tool would be used for, why bother?
Thirdly, a scythe is not a replacement for a lawnmower that lasts 10m. If you're mowing a green at the golf course, a lawnmower that lasts 10m beats out a scythe that lasts a lifetime.
Fourthly, pros in a field generally don't give out the crap advice you're giving out (I have an impressive list of hobbies, which put me in contact at various times with pros from different fields). The only time I've seen the advice you give is when it's given by newbies in a particular field. They don't know any better, because they have not been in the field long enough to notice that its only a minority of first-time purchasers who will go on to want the best. The majority of people entering a new hobby don't stick with it.
> I bet you wouldn't give this advice about your own hobbies.
You'd lose that bet, because I give it all the time. Here's the advice I gave out, and how it turned out.
(To a nephew, wanting to learn guitar, at start of pandemic) "Why a $500 Yamaha? Buy a $50 guitar if you've never laid hands on one before." He only lost $50 before realising that it was not as easy as he'd thought. He would have lost even less had he simply accepted one of my old guitars.
(Acquaintance who wanted to learn to weld): "Don't get a $1000 welder; why not take some classes first to see if it's something you want to do?" After three lessons he decided that woodworking is more practical. Saved $1000 dollars there.
(To my brother-in-law thinking about getting into DIY, four years ago): "Don't get a top-of-range set of tools: Buy a cheap set and then replace the tools as they break with expensive tools." He's not yet replaced any tool in the cheap tool set, because he found that he didn't really enjoy fixing his own stuff. Good thing he didn't spend $1000s on tools.
If you were to stop and think about it you'd realise that the majority of first-time buyers in any hobby field aren't going to stick with it long enough to make the more expensive option worthwhile. If you were in the hobby for any length of time (i.e. not a newcomer) it'd be obvious as you see people join and then leave. The fact that you haven't seen this tells me that you're still quite new to it. Or maybe you just don't have that many hobbies.
In fact I still give this same advice wrt all of my hobbies: pay entry-level money to participate before paying pro money in case you don't want to continue with it.
My hobbies include playing music, painting/drawing/sketching, auto repair, metal-working and wood-working, household DIY (plumbing, plastering, etc), gardening, writing (fiction), electronics (including embedded software), basket-weaving, sewing, cooking ... and a few more that I forget.
In every single one of those hobbies I meet new people who started with the expensive stuff that would last a lifetime, but they only needed it to the last the 3 weeks it took them to decide that they do not like it. Most hobbies are abandoned before even the cheapest kit breaks.
> Fourthly, pros in a field generally don't give out the crap advice you're giving out (I have an impressive list of hobbies, which put me in contact at various times with pros from different fields). The only time I've seen the advice you give is when it's given by newbies in a particular field. They don't know any better, because they have not been in the field long enough to notice that its only a minority of first-time purchasers who will go on to want the best. The majority of people entering a new hobby don't stick with it.
Gotta heavily disagree with you on this point. Not about the sticking to a hobby, you're spot on about that, but about the advice given being "crap".
If you walked into an an actual bike shop and asked them if a $700 hardtail e-bike was a good first choice, they would tell you something like: "oh, that's far too cheap for a hardtail e-bike.. they must've cheaped out heavily somewhere to get it at that price point and trust me, you don't want to be on it when you find out what they cheaped out on. If you want an entry level hardtail e-bike, you'll probably need to spend x dollars more or you can spend about the same for a non-e mountain bike that is a decent entry level one. Just depends on what you are looking to try. If that's too much, second hand is probably your best bet."
Granted, the advice would be different if you already bought it. They would simply warn you that it's probably not strong at all and to be careful taking it on any trails.
> pay entry-level money to participate before paying pro money in case you don't want to continue with it.
Great advise. I fully agree. The thing is, entry level hardtail e-bikes typically go for much higher than $700. Ask anyone into biking about this and they will be concerned about the integrity of the bike at the price point for that style of bike. E-bikes are expensive. You are looking at entry level mountain bikes at that price point, not entry level mountain e-bikes.
A year for a bike is a dogshit lifespan. You can get decades out of decent bikes. The comparisons is reasonable, given you twisted the conversation to pivot around lawnmowers.
I see the rest of your comment is nothing but accusing me of giving bad advice, followed by examples of exactly the same kind of advice I gave or would give, mixed with a dose of bragging about being in touch with pro... welders, cooks, gardeners and other normal jobs that everyone has contacts in. Except basket weavers. I'll give you that one.
Way to totally miss the mark.
If you drop the basket weaving and gardening, and add mountain biking, machining, and lockpicking - we're about the same on being over-hobbied individuals.
I know someone who dumped 8K on a gaming rig to play Minecraft and 2d games. At the other end, some people will spend too much money just to play “entry level” and have no idea what they actually have or need to be successful (not just video games and computers!).
I’m still rocking my aluminum hardtail Trek I bought in college 25 years ago with the (gasp) three front derailleurs and the Rockshox Judy front fork. I had no idea that the tech had changed that much since I don’t ride seriously any more.
>This is the equivalent of someone buying the top reviewed amazon promoted laptop, sorted by cheapest, with some kinda piece of shit 1152×648 screen, 4gb ddr2 ram, 2.xGhz celeron processor, and telling people it's a gaming pc because it says gaming on the box. Then commenting how you find it odd nobody in the gaming space is talking about it :)
It seems far more like its someone buying that cheap laptop, primarily using it to surf the web and play solitaire (or FPSes from 2001) and talk about how great it is. And it is great for what they're doing. Who needs 8 cores and 32 gigs of RAM? The answer is some subset of people between "everyone" and "no one".
eh, you can buy a great hardtails for 800-1.2k, even less if buying second hand. the main thing to point out is that at $700 including all the electronic add ons the components will be worse and trail rideability/durability will suffer significantly compared to even a low end mtb at the same price range. I've let friends use my nice bike while I ride my crap "general purpose" bike and it works on easier trails... (probably) safe enough on those trails, but still wouldn't recommend it.
FWIW I also got an E-bike in that price range and it began to seriously degrade after a year or so of daily use. It was great for that first year, though. If I were to get another E-bike, I'd move up to the mid-tier price range.
What started to degrade specifically? Did you try a new battery?
This was my first ebike, so I wanted to test the waters with something cheap. If it starts falling apart, I'll probably build a custom one or two and spend more money since ebike riding's been working great for me to get consistent exercise and go on trails more conveniently.
I started losing battery life and motor torque (though maybe this is related to the battery -- this is not my area of expertise). Hills that I used to be able to cruise up without much effort started to require real work to assist the motor. Battery life degraded to around 50% of the initial capacity.
I think your strategy is totally valid, and I do that with most power tools in my shop. Buy the cheap one, and when it breaks, make a call on how to upgrade.
For me, I actually side-graded to a Onewheel electric skateboard (https://onewheel.com/) at the very beginning of the pandemic.
As a commuter vehicle, it's less practical than an e-bike. You can't carry as much (limited to a backpack), and it's almost certainly an order of magnitude more dangerous (but more fun!). The biggest downside for me us the inability to take my dog with me (I used to tow him in one of those bike trailers for kids). But all of these don't really apply in WFH pandemic times.
On the other hand, being able to pick up and carry the Onewheel opens up a lot more commute options that aren't as easy on an e-bike. In particular, pairing it with public transit is powerful. It's difficult or impossible to load a bike into crowded light rail car, but trivial to fit in with a Onewheel.
Where I live in Seattle, I can Onewheel 1.5 miles to the nearest light rail station in SoDo, take the train 7 miles north to Greenlake, and then Onewheel another 1 mile to my friend's house. The whole trip takes 40 minutes. It's 30 minutes by car.
I also go grocery shopping with it. In the store, I just stow it in the bottom shelf of the cart. This makes grocery shopping super frictionless, because I don't have to lock up a bike or anything. I just don't get more than 2 bags of groceries at a time. Grocery shopping is so frictionless for me now, that is not a big deal. It's a 5 minute ride (1 mile) to the store, I'm in and out in 10 minutes, and then back home in 5 more.
The only times I drive anymore are when I'm not traveling alone or when it's raining heavily (I am fine to Onewheel in the typical light Seattle rail).
It's really revolutionized mobility for me, much more than the e-bike ever did.
> Buy the cheap one, and when it breaks, make a call on how to upgrade.
I believe popularized by Adam Savage of Mythbusters, if I'm remembering where it hit internet-widespread from.
But an excellent point, because people don't realize the % of things they're not going to use regularly. Or the fact that it usually takes (time for the cheapest version to break) to figure out if you're going to use it frequently.
(Also, side note: absolutely no professional review site has any incentive to remind you that cheaper, used, or previous model gear exists or is viable)
Adam has definitely advocated that approach. Not that I'm some kind of authority, but I strongly second it.
Early in life, my uncle Ray suggested doing that and showed off an impressive collection of tools. And he was that fix it uncle that had a big influence on me as a kid. We tore into basically everything and I never saw him without some book or other close by. One thing he liked to do was stock the car trunk in addition to the shop stuff. Road tools get lost, loaned out, abused, whatever it may take to deal with a scenario on the road. To that end, I've put some of those cheaper high count sets that come in the fold up containers. Perfect for the trunk.
And a diverse collection is really the other side benefit. Gives a person a lot of options. Most of the time they all see light use except for a few. Going expensive limits the collection unnecessarily and that limits what one can do, or might attempt to do, again unnecessarily.
The value from having a broad set of stuff generally exceeds the replacements that will come along the way. And that's mostly true, even when there are periods of inactivity. Others may benefit. Doesn't hurt to lend a tool, or a hand to help someone else get through a project.
And frankly, as people gain experience, learning where tool limits are tends to cut back on the wear and tear on even cheapo tools. It all tends to add right up.
The other strategy I would suggest is scoring tools every year at yard / garage sale time. Estates are often great for this too.
Sometimes I will see a collection and just bulk buy if I can. Over time I've lost some while moving and that was a great way to stock back up and have a lot of options for not very many dollars.
The only variation I would suggest is to avoid very rock bottom stuff, like dollar store, or that crap in the hardware store promo bin. Some of those might not even survive the first use! But, it can be hard to tell too, YMMV.
In my shop, the only thing I regret buying the super-cheap model of is a bandsaw. It's just so crappy as to not even be particularly useful for doing bandsaw-type work. But I have so many other cheap tools going strong, the strategy is definitely paying off in aggregate.
Low torque? Curious what makes a crappy bandsaw crappy.
And yup! That was the math: (cost of cheap things) * (total number of things) - (cost to rebuy) * (% of things you end up rebuying) << (cost of mid-range things) * (total number of things)
Aw man. I just signed up for the $59/yr magazine + online access. I believe the bulk of what you're saying, and that CR's methodology has value. That said the following was also part of my experience on consumerreports.com -
In the bottom footer, I click on "Ad Choices". I'm presented with a list of advertisers in a TrustArc-branded dialog. To opt out of being retargeted by consumerreports.com, there are checkboxes for three vendors: Microsoft, LiveRamp Inc. and Google Advertising Products. For seven other vendors, there's no checkbox, just instructions to visit the website: Amazon Advertising, Bidtellect Inc, Comscore B.V, Facebook, Google Inc, Kibo Commerce, and Twitter.
Also in the footer (maybe only for California residents such as myself?) there is a "Do Not Sell My Personal Information" link. It opens a OneTrust-branded dialog with the option to disable "Share My Information with Third Parties on Digital". It also declares that "If you are a Print or All-Access Member and receive Consumer Reports magazine or Consumer Reports on Health through the mail, we may share your name and mailing address for direct mail purposes with selected companies offering products or services that we believe will be of interest to you." I followed a link to a separate page, which required me to copy-paste in my just-received membership number, to opt out of this.
I wish CR did -more- reviews in each category. I know it's next to impossible to thoroughly review every single product in the world, but I would pay 10x the subscription fee if I could reliably go there and find all the current models available in the different categories.
I've got two problems with Consumer Reports reviews.
1. They aren't often comprehensive enough in their product lineup to be valuable. Obviously a hard problem to solve on product categories like consumer electronics where the product choices can count in the hundreds.
2. They aren't often including the latest and greatest in their reviews either, so I'm quite often not confident I'm getting the best bang for my buck going with their reviews.
Yeah I sing the praises of Consumer Reports all the time. I think I pay $10 annually for a subscription and every time I buy or recommend something I check with them and so far have not been let down. Their reviews almost always include objective measurements and durability testing, it’s really surprising how people miss them among more modern options.
What more can Google even do about the onslaught of ever-evolving SEO spam besides hardcode some arbitrary "winners", which would have its own set of problems? It seems like a very hard problem.
But that is the point - it is Google's problem, not ours. They don't have the best info anymore, so use someone else. There are other search engines. If Google wants us back, it is their problem to improve.
I’m guessing OP meant it’s a hard problem in general, not just for Google.
Also, the statement that Goggle doesn’t have the best information anymore seems objectively false. We can wish there were other players doing it better, but that doesn’t make it true. I’m open to the idea that Google is just riding their wave, but I’ve yet to see proof. I just see the search industry at large shedding quality results.
I think Google could step up its ranking game w/ ML eliminating a lot of bad patterns, but I'm not sure they have the will to do it, or are afraid of the consequences (every travel blogger selling an ebook will go apeshit about it for instance).
The fundamental problem is that the interests of Google do not align with the interests of it's users.
Google is not interested in serving us the "best" search results possible, they are interested in serving us their customers ads. In other words, Google search results are crap, because Google wants them to be crap.
That's far too simplistic. Google must also compete or they lose their free users followed by their paying users (ad buyers). I also think it's a multifaceted challenge that failing some genuine ingenuity won't really get solved.
Like I said though, maybe they are just riding their wave (dominance) at this point, but then I'd expect to see better results from a scrappy competitor already or soon. Here's hoping, but even as a discerning user, I haven't yet.
I'm confident that even if Google doesn't solve it, for whatever reason, someone else will eventually. In the meantime, results continue to degrade and the desire / reward to fix it will increase.
> Google must also compete or they lose their free users followed by their paying users (ad buyers).
I have no idea if that's even possible. The number of people who (a) Google pays to be the default engine for and (b) aren't even aware there are other engines is huge. If the various google search domains went offline, the number of people who wouldn't even be able to find facebook is probably a double-digit percent, let alone those who cannot figure out to fail over to bing, ddg, yahoo, whatever.
There are more than enough users aware of search to support a fledgling competitor that managed to deliver higher quality results.
That competitor simply doesn’t exist yet, and I think that’s because no one has figured out how to beat Google at search (which is why I think real ingenuity is required).
Google with its hundreds of billions in revenue should be able to solve the problem, right?
Not when compared to the trillions of dollars of e commerce revenue that is the reward for getting to the top of Google results - even if you don't deserve it.
Total ecommerce in 2021 was around 5 trillion dollars. That's revenue, and split across all players.
Somehow I think Google with the ability to devote billions to solving the problem has more resources to throw at it than any ecommerce company. Except for possibly Amazon.
Seconding this. As recently perhaps as 7 or 8 years ago, I used to shake my head sympathetically at how antiquated their business model seemed, and wondered when they'd finally close up shop. Fast forward to today, with bots, review bribery, astroturfed "buying guides", and paid content even at quality outlets like NYTimes Wirecutter, CR is now my most trusted source on purchasing anything over $100, or a product that could be crucial to my health.
> paid content even at quality outlets like NYTimes Wirecutter
Evidence for this? Is it just for stuff specifically tagged as paid content, or is there any evidence that their standard reviews might be tainted by money?
They claim the reviewers go in neutral, but I'm sorry, I just don't trust it. Thr fact that they only test a subset of products in a given competitive space alone makes this too tainted for my liking. (CR also doesn't hit every company in a space, but at least they're not incentivized to pick the ones that pay them.)
For now I've been using the NYT wirecutter folks. They do a good job posting their methodology and you can usually dig much further for what problems they found.
Whenever I visit them I get the opposite of Gell-Mann amnesia syndrome and remember how terrible their recommendations are on products I am familiar with.
I had to scroll through a whole lot to get to the part that mentions wirecutter - the only one they really mentioned was webcams, with anecdotes about how that particular webcam they recommend isn't very good. Not much talk about why the methodology is wrong.
However I do find the webcam recommendation article wirecutter did to be of worse quality than the others they had. Its a very room dependent item. Its certainly easy to look at that review having played with other webcams and say hey I think their methodology sucks.
But I recently bought a new toaster oven - I had already had a kitchenaid one that got fine reviews on most sites, but I found it to be really inconsistant. The wirecutter site had photos of the uneven toasting of the same model I had, in the exact same way that mine was. They also showed photos of their recommended toasters. I picked up their recommended one. It toasts exactly as they recommended. So its not a total loss.
I don't trust consumer reports any longer. they have amazon affiliate links. I suspect the current CEO is selling them out, bit by bit. Also, their current web format makes it hard to find recommendations on used cars.
You can buy most any product at Amazon, so the affiliate links are not an incentive for CR to rank one product better than the competitor they would otherwise also link to.
Plus Amazon affiliate links are standardized and automated to such a degree that’s there’s no chance they would manually penalize or reward CR for editorial content.
CR has biases, and they leak out in various ways. When I was doing detailed car-shopping in the 1990s, I noticed that drivetrains in American-badged cars would show significant problems while Japanese-badged cars with the same drivetrains from the same supplier would be ranked consistently higher (e.g. Isuzu vs Chevy light trucks, Mazda vs Ford sedans).
I just learned that you can get the yearbook including all tests from the previous year for like 10€, the other big testing magazine Ökotest (focused on environmental impact) offers this too.
I unfortunately share your experiences. However in Germany there is a foundation called “Stiftung Warentest” [1], which does independent testing of products. With reviews full of Amazon affiliate links dominating search results, I tend to purchase their tests for ~3 Euros more often than ever.
However this only works for popular product categories, but less so for specialized equipment.
My impression is also
that affiliate links hurt consumers in the long run as they reduce the selection of products in reviews or blogs to those the authors can earn money with. This however leaves out potential alternatives. More often than not the winner of product categories (at least those I was researching) of independent tests were not available from
sites running affiliate programs.
For example a consumer-grade lawn mower from an otherwise professional gardening company or a tent from a Scandinavian brand.
Sadly, Stiftung Warentest often doesn't have the expertise to properly test many products.
I often notice the shortcomings in product tests for products that I know and use.
I was reminded of this with their last test of 3d printers.
Their test results where far from what everyone with experience in the field would consider accurate.
For some products, I agree, but realistically its about as good as it gets unless you do thorough research on a given product and are actually able to find a somewhat unbiased review.
Take washing machines for example. How do you know which ones are good and which ones are not? Public reviews from any website tend to only be a good indicator if there a lots of bad ones. I have 0 faith in the average consumer to accurately rate a product. Overwhelmingly negative reviews will clearly show a deficiency but positive ones are unfortunately more and more a gamble.
Stiftung Warentest isn't perfect, but they do, on most occasions, put in a high amount of effort to test products to the best of their abilities without any personal opinions. I don't know of a single other person/organization/website where that is the case.
No, that's exactly what they do test and test well. Their model mostly breaks down for computer technology and peripherals in that space. When testing a mouse they would test how often it can click before breaking down, and that's only slight hyperbole. Might be a bit better now in that area than back then when I read their tests regularly.
My brand new LG turbowasher model lasted 3 months before one morning sounded like a hammer smashing something. I ran to the machine and a support bracket inside had broken. It took 2 months for them to replace it I was not impressed. It has since lasted 3 more years no issues but I doubt I would go with LG in the future since it was a horrible customer service experience getting my first one repairs under warranty. Had they helped me better after it breaking I may have said it was just a fluke and still recommended them.
I base those sorts of purchases on duration of warranty. Recently bought a dryer, and apart from a brand that cost significantly more, they all came with 2 year warranties. One reasonably priced machine had 4, so I picked that one.
Counterexample: Korean auto manufacturers Hyundai and Kia offer longer warranties than Japanese manufacturers Honda and Toyota because that’s the only way people will buy Korean cars.
Wonder if they are taking advantage of bath tub curve and 8 years is slightly costlier than 5 years to a manufacturer. In India, Toyota is selling rebadged Suzuki cars offering lower cost and more warranty.
Warranty is ridiculous. Of course it's good to have if something breaks early. But normally I want my stuff to last much longer. Our fridge broke last summer: 30 years old. It had one repair 18 years ago. Our washing machine is 22, zero repairs. I hope it still makes it while. Well, none of them were the cheapest ones. From central European factories which might no longer exist...
Some would claim these old appliances waste energy. I am not convinced. We need to heat our buildings here from September to May. Whatever a very modern appliance warms the building less the heating has to substitute. It's all energy and losses produce heat.
There is also all the energy required to churn out newer appliances that break and get recycled.
Getting one great one that will last for a few decades isn't a bad call. That's what I do personally.
And there are still ways to save, reduce energy impact. Moderation is a big one. Just be frugal and prudent with the appliances. That has a major impact and everyone could do more and capture those gains right away.
They ran 3 machines of each model 1840 times and always exactly recorded the statistics (is the 60C program really using 60C water, etc) and results to test for reliability.
As long as their methodology is clear you can at least judge their results for yourself and whether you consider them meaningful, even if it wasn’t perhaps as good as an expert could have done.
Rtings seems a similar project; some of their test results are free, some are paid. They have a wide set of comparison tools, they test for a lot of features and they document their testing procedures well; it's a really nice change from SEO spam articles.
I recommend their tests of headphones [1], I especially like how they measure breatability [2]. They also have a page about printers [3].
Finding review of tech gadgets and hardware is quite easy. Even niche products usually have dedicated communities and sites with in-depth knowledge. It's the boring everyday products and large appliances like washing machines that are really hard to evaluate sicne their reviews basically amount to affiliate spam.
For kitchen tools, there's America's Test Kitchen reviews (from Cooking magazine, IIRC). It's a limited segment but high quality.
On the other hand, it has the same problem as Consumer Reports: they only test and review a single model which will probably be out of production before you need one. On the third hand, if one manufacturer consistently gets good reviews (OXO Goodgrips, for example)...
Some of the WireCutter’s picks were fairly terrible, which makes sense: testing diverse categories of products is too expensive for affiliate links to cover. I’ve gifted dashcams on their recommendation that shot beautiful QHD but had MTBF measured in single digit months. The TP-Link C7 Archer was kind of a turd and within a stone’s throw of a decent router price-wise.
To be fair, MTBF is not something you can measure in a reasonable time for these kinds of review sites. Far better for this kind of thing is niche-specific youtube channels.
But in any case, what you're asking for here is a prediction of your future satisfaction with a product. It's a non-trivial problem even for the most innocuous purchases.
Will I like Lysol or Clorox wipes more? Who knows, and the reviews aren't going to beat first-hand experience in any circumstances.
I’ve written extensively about this recently, but these days with $300+ “gaming” routers using crappy sweatshop software on whatever Atheros router SoC, many users would be much better served with legit SMB routing / switching / wifi systems that are available for around the same price.
I mean this is a known thing in general; the best kitchen supply stuff you can buy is often stuff intended for commercial use, because it quite literally goes through the wringer with near-constant usage over long periods of time.
The problem is finding a place that sells commercial things to individual buyers. That, and sometimes what a commercial kitchen needs is vastly oversized for a regular house; you're probably going to set off your residential fire alarm very often with a massive commercial range designed for woks, for example, unless you also upgrade the ventilation, etc.
I switched to Unifi access points and a wired router and switch and am much happier with the result.
The consolidation of router, switch and access point means you can't upgrade individual parts. It's the modern equivalent of the TV-VCR combo and most consumers don't realize they actually can be separated.
I didn’t know what good Wifi until I switched to using some TP-Link Omada equipment.
If you run your own controller, you can set up a small network (router, PoE switch, and AP) for less than $300. Hardware controller is ~$90. A controller isn’t strictly necessary, but I don’t recommend doing a standalone setup.
Downside? It’s business class equipment and you need some idea what you’re doing. It’s not plug-n-play. Also, it’s layer 2 only. If you want mDNS across vlans, you’ll need to run a reflector. (Not difficult. It’s built into avahi.)
I'd love to read what you've written. So far, my research into commercial Access points hasn't really been that fruitful. I refuse any cloud based management interface. For the router, I use mikrotik which has been great but I returned the access points from them that I tried. In the end, my access points are Asus home routers because they were the best I found.
I've got the A7, which I believe is the same thing except it has some sort of ability to enable Alexa control for something or other.
Mine has worked great. The only issues I've seen are (1) the traffic stats don't count IPv6 traffic, and (2) there is something odd that sometimes goes on when a connection ends that can result in packets from the LAN side showing up on the WAN side without the LAN-side IP address being replaced with the WAN-side IP address.
The first is a bit of annoyance, and the second as far as I saw didn't actually cause any problems.
My experience with NYT product reviews is pretty awful. I wish I could be more concrete. Tried to look in my history but I could have sworn at least one article was just effectively, "top 10 most popular on Amazon", with quotes from user reviews. Maybe I'm getting my sites mixed up.
I believe you're thinking of The Strategist, which is through New York Magazine. That's basically their thing, to summarize Amazon reviews for you and filter through a product category based on that. I also don't really see much of the value in it, but I suppose I can see how someone might.
Bought a pair of audio-technica headphones based on their review. Sound quality was as described but it was so uncomfortable I returned it 5 minutes after picking it up. It was described as comfortable for long wear but it had a hard band with little padding and was uncomfortable for any duration.
Comfort is a pretty subjective thing. Your experience, while valid, is merely a single data point and it would be quite premature to disregard the review or even the whole outlet based on it.
I find Wirecutter and Consumer Reports are pretty reasonable for product categories where I just want a reasonable choice and don't necessarily have deep knowledge and preferences myself. And, yes, it's worth reading why they picked something. But if I were buying an interchangeable lens camera or a computer I might read their recommendation but I'd look elsewhere also. For a sprayer for a hose? I'm sure their recommendation is fine.
I’m a subscriber to consumer reports, but as it put Tesla Model 3, the most successful car in the past few years on the back as the least reliable, I feel that I can’t trust its results to be 100% independent reviews. I don’t have a Tesla, but if something grows so fast where people pay a significant amount for it, it can’t be that bad.
Are you thinking of the Model Y? CR gives the Model 3 average reliability, and gives it the highest overall score in the electric car $45-55k category. The only other car with average reliability in the category is the BMW i3. The Ford Mustang Mach-E and Polestar 2 get the next tier down for reliability, and then the Model Y brings up the rear getting the bottom tier reliability score.
In the electric cars over $75k category, everything except the Audi E-Tron gets the tier between worse and average, including the Tesla Models S and X. The Audi gets the bottom tier.
This article talks about why the Teslas other than the Model 3 get low reliability ratings [1]:
> Commonly reported issues from Model Y owners included defective sensors that had to be replaced, problems with heat pumps, air conditioning, body panels that didn’t line up and water leaks in the trunk due to missing seals, according to Fisher. Owners also reported a variety of electrical and hardware issues with the higher-priced, and less-popular, Model S sedan and Model X falcon-wing SUV.
> Older models typically fare better in reliability, as companies tend to make tweaks and redesigns to solve known problems, while sticking with the same parts and suppliers.
> But Tesla deviates from this approach, Fisher explained. “At almost random times during the year Tesla will switch major components, suppliers or sensors and other units. The more you change, the greater the chances you’re going to have some problems.”
Ford recalled almost all their mach-e cars build until first half of 2021 with unglued roof, so that there was two different risks to roof fly away.
As of december 2021 they still didn't fix the keys. Software glitch
and a security recall of seatbelt issues.
And yet, it is more reliable compares to tesla lol :)
It’s the growth that’s staggering. What I read is that older car companies changed the rating to include small software bugs in the entertainment system. As Tesla has much more non-essential features, these while these small bugs are not that important for the end user, can bring the ratings down vs other cars that don’t even offer the feature.
Tesla got it's fair share of issues, but they fix them and detect them fast. They adamant about security. Only Tesla and Volvo got their own testing facilities.
Last recall of backup camera is actually a positive call. On a very small group of cars they got this issue. They called it a defect and recalled an entire batch ( 500k cars) to fix a potential issue.
Yeah, I was also frustrated. Tesla always been in the top. And boom, suddenly it stoped been there. I don't believe in reincarnation.
All my peers who owns tesla are the most happy customers every, including me. For 2 years owning Model Y I asked for service twice. Once i damaged the car, they came to my backyard, I found it super convenient.
Second time I request a retrofit a speaker from a newer models and hardware + work cost me $100 usd. Engineers did all the job at my home while i was working. I only clicked from the App open the car . Oh well, consumer report doesn't count this things that makes consumers happy.
Consumer reports also doesn't count that after two years of ownership i received tons of new features and my car still feels fresh. I can put here a huge list. Since I bought the car :
- my range improved
- winter regenerative brakes improved
- automatic blindspot cameras after turn
- improved climate control, especially automatic seat heat
- more music/video sources
- dramatically improved autopilot
- view cameras from phone
- updated for free hardware for temperature measurements during one of the
unrelated visits
- improved charging time ( faster)
- charging network doubled
- automatically synced profiles to my second tesla
- better charging scheduling, that works well with my local electricity provider incentives, saved me ~600 usd already
- far better navigation included way points
- better security when backing up ( sound)
- improved auto wipers, that become 100% reliable( more a fix)
- i don't include tons of fun stuff like games, easter eggs etc...
This are only improvements that are useful to me. The actual list is waay bigger.
Oh well... someone paid this journalists to portrait it in a bad way. But that basically shows how vulnerable is the system. You pay 10-20 journalists and boom, you got your marketshare of people who trust to some bs like consumer reports.
I'm in a strange position here. I fundamentally agree that reviews for the most part are absolute steaming pile of crap of a space for many niches. I work in one of the worst - web hosting reviews. It's plagued by fake affiliate reviews dominating basically every search result. I've been trying for 10 years to run a company that did reviews differently in the web hosting space.
Full disclosure, I have affiliate links on companies that have them too. But I also list companies without them and it has had zero bearing on any result in 10 years. In fact, when I launched I had to beg the CEO of the top rated company to create a special affiliate program for me. Why? Because he didn't believe in review sites and affiliates in the space. It took months, but I told him if he didn't create one, what I was trying to do would never have a chance because I'd never make a dollar - you're the top rated company. I want to do something different, but it needs to remain somewhat financially viable and if you don't have a program I'm dead before it starts.
So what happened in those 10 years?
Honestly, not a whole a lot. I have mediocre rankings (often page 2-5) on some of the most competitive terms on Google. I can't afford to buy the links my competitors do because they make 10x or more what I do pushing the highest paying affiliates and designing for conversion. The site has some traction within niche communities - especially the WordPress hosting space - because I also run annual performance benchmarks (https://wphostingbenchmarks.com) where I document and thoroughly test most of the meaningful players in that space.
The data I'm providing is almost surely the most transparent data tracking the industry and maybe the least biased (the reviews work by analyzing Twitter sentiment at scale - everything publicly documented in terms of ranking algorithm and published comments).
But outside little bubbles in communities that care, nobody noticed. Google doesn't care. Google happily ranks affiliate sites spending six figures buying links off apache.org and other open source projects (look at those sponsor lists on a lot of open source projects - hosting/gambling is a bad sign).
I got excited when my work fighting against .ORG registry price increases and sale at ICANN (https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2019/06/24/the-case-for-regula...) got a lot of press, even getting cited by the California AG in his letter which effectively killed it. I got backlinks from a lot of large news sites and traffic. I honestly saw no meaningful improvement in rankings or traffic.
So I'm stuck, I keep the sites running - part time - mostly between other projects. I've moved back heavily into consulting and other projects because being an honest affiliate - I can't compete. Providing honest, transparent data and presenting it with the goal of informing versus pushing sales is a terrible business model. The majority of people simply don't care. A lot of 'in-the-know' folks read and get informed by my work. They advise their clients using it, and I never see any financial benefit from it. The broader world, especially Google, doesn't know or care.
Is the root problem affiliate links? It certainly skews incentives and pushes manipulation. If we removed them, what fills the void? Ads? Sponsored content? Something else? I don't think the problem goes away - there is so much money in some of these industries and the stakes are so high. Companies and people will take advantage of it one way or another.
How do we identify honest / good content from the garbage seems to be the bigger question. After 10 years, I'm don't have an answer and I'm certainly not being noticed.
This is a perfect example of how fundamentally flawed modern SEO is. @ohashi has been producing the best hosting reviews in the WordPress ecosystem since forever. It seems like at some point in the past decade on page quality signals have been completely drowned out by backlink signals that can be easily amplified by bigger content producers and a resurgence in cheap on page SEO tricks.
Sorry Kevin I don't know what the answer is, but I'd thought I'd just say a huge thanks for the great work you do year after year. It might be VERY niche but perhaps some sort of annual premium membership for professionals in the WP ecosytem might be something that might work? I'd certainly be happy to support your work on an ongoing basis with access to niche "members only" performance reports on things like WooCommerce benchmarking tests etc.
It really does help motivate me to hear people get value from my work, because it definitely isn't financially motivated at this point.
I appreciate the offer of premium members only payments. I want my data to be public, I like open sourcing my contributions when possible. I think transparency and openness are the key to better reviews. So I've not ever approached that route. I've also avoided taking any sponsored money from web hosting for any sort of advertising because of even the potential conflict of interest (many have offered to sponsor those benchmarks).
There might be something in the works to help it financially this year, nothing really concrete, but I'm exploring some new options. Ultimately though, I'd rather it wither and die than just doing what every shitty affiliate ruining the space has done.
Answer, if you want to make money is play Google's game. Go get some VC funding to buy ads. Google with put the ads on their front page which will boost your search results. Eventually you'll figure out you dont even need a good product, you win with a mediocre product and a lot of SEO/ad spend.
Break Google up. Course that will never happen as politicians like the power Google has over the internet in the hands of a US company.
The whole reason I built what I did was because after a decade in the web hosting world, I still couldn't name a review site that was worth referring anyone to.
I wanted to build something different and meaningful. I did. It just hasn't mattered in a broad context.
If making money was the goal, I'd put whomever wants to pay me $300/sale first and pimp them out as the best company in the universe. Fuck that. I hoped that I could make a reasonable amount (at least enough to keep it going and maybe scale it a bit) and create a more honest review space.
Winning in this case isn't defined by money earned, you're advocating a race to the bottom I wanted to avoid. Google needs a shakeup and so does search as a whole.
I am honestly having a hard time articulating why I don't like the idea of people donating their money to me for what I do. I will try, maybe I am irrational?
There is so much money being passed around in web hosting review space, by companies to affiliates. I still make thousands per month off these affiliate deals. If my site were to rank at the top of search engines, I would be plenty compensated. Having individuals sponsor the work and it continuing to languish is a position I'm not really a fan of. A single sale commission can range from a few dollars to high hundreds or occasionally a thousand+. I can't imagine enough people wanting to donate a meaningful amount that would change that equation. I'd personally feel bad for every Patreon sponsor putting in 5,10,20 dollars because I might feel like I'm not doing enough with it. If those people just sent one person who ended up purchasing via a link on my site, it would likely outweigh most donations, it would also spread the reach to places I likely can't get to.
That's just what is running through my head, I don't know if that makes any sense.
Is your business model capable of sustaining a paywall of the most useful value, by eliding the information? Your affiliate links still point to your review effort, but the actual top ranking information is behind the paywall.
Make it a variation on the "businesses pay for business-class stuff, amateurs get the free stuff" model.
For the top say, 20% ranks, it is behind a paywall. People will know which vendors are members of the set of the top 20%, but not their ordinal collection. The bottom 80% members of the set's ordinal collection is displayed. If I'm looking for a site to store Grandma's cat pictures, the bottom 80% is probably good enough.
You could also tilt the paywall so free only reveals who NOT to do business with, and who ranks at the bare minimum acceptability.
You can have the paywall only enforce an embargo, instead of all historical results. Say some period beyond which the businesses that can afford to pay you will not care for the results, like a year or whatever.
You can have a "free hour(s)" once a review cycle just before when you publish where the in-the-know crowd can get the results for the newest review cycle, tied to a YouTube livestream, where you do a monetized Q&A.
There are lots more variations to ponder, but I can't help but think there must be more useful ways to slice and dice the valuation of the information here, and monetize in tranches like finance and entertainment do, instead of all in one go.
I guess the problem is two fold, could I charge some people a premium for premium information? Absolutely, yes.
Does hiding some information behind a paywall fit with my goal of a better review landscape in the web hosting industry? Sadly, no.
Sure, I would come out financially ahead, but the industry basically wouldn't be any different. I'm not going to rank any better or have my information spread more effectively behind a paywall. The number of folks impacted would also surely go down as many wouldn't pay.
If the goal is simply profit maximization at this point, there are definitely avenues to explore like what you've suggested. That's boring to me honestly, unless it can have impact to along with it. I do appreciate your thoughts on the matter and suggestions.
Personally, if it gets to that point I'd rather sell it off and move on to working on something else. Most of us are software developers and entrepreneurs. I'd rather build something more interesting and with more potential. I can make money doing consulting work any day, after 10 years, the allure of simply trying to profit maximize on what I built by introducing barriers doesn't appeal. That might be part of the reason it hasn't been as successful as it maybe could have been. I suppose that's the hill I may die on - open, honest, transparent review data for everyone.
Aha, that makes it much more clear. You likely can achieve your aim with more marketing, along the lines of setting narrative in the industry.
You already have an objective measure to flog, build a "council" or "board" around it, with the "Platinum" members being the providers who were most consistently in the top three ranks in all the past reviews. Get some good writers who can whip up some clickbaity articles that would find placement for some fun.
"You're getting cheated out of bandwidth if you don't use these web hosting providers!"
"Most Web hosting providers don't want to let you know this secret council!"
Make it tongue in cheek, self-parodying maybe to the clickbait industry.
Intermix with and reference to some more serious PR to avenues where industry people are likely to read it, where you lay out your concerns of improving the industry and the benefits to them. Make the report red-orange-green-easy to at-a-glance interpret for non-technical management for good-enough outcomes, then analyze the results into a historical trend for the aggregate industry's progress.
Honey versus vinegar, basically.
Your consulting expertise on designing projects to make it easy to transition between providers, and a calculator to compute when to pull the trigger to perform the transition would probably more than pay the bills.
Maybe the marketing hasn't been great. But nobody seems to care. The status quo benefits the companies that get the most marketing, why invest in trying to change the rules that benefit them?
I tried some more expose type stuff, revealing spam networks operated by hosting companies, publishing pay to play attempts, exposing fake reviews and even getting one CEO on record supporting astroturfing. Despite how outrageous this behavior is, it never gets much attention. That last company I'm talking about tends to be on all those affiliate garbage sites you will see and has popped up in the past few years (https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2018/07/22/hostinger-review-0-...). I make sure to let as many people know as possible anytime I see the brand. But their marketing/astroturfing campaign certainly dwarfs anything I can do. And most people don't care. The publishers take the money, the company takes the customers and funnels more money into deceiving poor customers via affiliates and search. The only loser is customers as a whole, who have little voice or power in the equation at any level.
In little bubble communities, I do have some traction and recognition. People may know, but they tend to be echo small chambers. Sure, some people flow in and get recommendations. But the majority of people, it's just who ranks at the top of search results. They don't invest in doing deeper research. They want to see 'X is the best product' and move on.
That's another problem, nuance. Is there a best web hosting provider? Not even close. Even with a very specific use-case, it's extremely rare to say, yes, this is the best company. I've been tracking 10 years of data and no company comes close to perfect reputation. The extreme top just crack into 80% range in terms of positive sentiment. The generally pretty good are in the 70's. That means 20-30% of people are having bad experiences with the best companies.
I've publish the review data with ranks based simply on statistical numbers, but I don't do ranking for performance benchmarks. I also encourage that it's one data point, simply being in the fastest tier or having the highest consumer opinion doesn't mean it's the best. There could be other factors which matter.
For example, Pantheon is the perfect company for has a great reputation but I wouldn't recommend it to most people to consider. First, they specialize in WordPress and Drupal. So if you're not on those platforms, it's not relevant. Even if you do, they are very opinionated hosting. If you have a development team and want strict Git workflows where code moves up and data moves down, they are fabulous. If you're a semi technical person who mostly does marketing, it's probably a terrible fit because you don't want to learn Git, have to push every change through testing, staging and then production to make progress. But their hosting in my tests were fast. They have great consumer reviews. For the people who it makes sense for, they love it. And I would recommend it to probably less than 10% of people who meet the basic criteria of using WP/Drupal for the reason stated above.
As far as consulting experience goes, I actually end up consulting more for the people who build sites. After running the largest benchmarks for WordPress for ~8 years now, people have brought me on to help test new WordPress products or scale existing sites. That's more interesting and rewarding honestly seeing direct results, being compensated to help them achieve goals. My compensation overall is okay, it's just not coming from reviews these days.
I was always fascinated by the idea of "field testers" testing products in their daily lives and writing a short review about their experience. A cook would write about a chef knife, a post officer about comfortable all-weather boots, a craftsman about a tool etc.
The biggest problem would be how to incentivize such people, but gamification and some monetary rewards from the community could probably solve this.
A big part of the best wire cutter reviews are the “why you should trust me” introduction. Some of their reviewers really know their stuff, others obviously less so. You can calibrate your expectations accordingly.
Just one data point, but I've had a hard time trusting then since reading a headphones section they had in the physical magazine quite a few years back. The number one rated headphone was the Bose QC3. Great noise cancellation and comfort, sure... But certainly not better audio quality than so many other products in that price range. All rock / metal sounded so muddy I had to return my pair within a few weeks.
Yep; a huge portion of Google results, especially for spicy searches like “best ______ 2021” are just lists of affiliate links to top 10 selling items on Amazon from made-up brand names that are rotated once a product receives a few bad reviews.
It’s really hard to find legit review sites; at least Wirecutter seems to actually test things, but sites like SeriousEats, OutdoorGearLab, Carryology, DCRainMaker, SoundOnSound, Adventure Journal, Magnetic Magazine, The Loam Wolf, etc that are quite niche / domain-specific are where I go for actual trustworthy reviews.
I agree that Google seems to be dominated by clickbait ad-riddled BS SEO sites now more than ever, and I can’t help but think that Google is allowing this to happen because it pays the bills. I’ve posted about this before, but at the end of the day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than that. The difference to me is that I’m willing to reward actual reviews and effort with rev share if I decide to buy something reviewed, but I’m super unimpressed with all the irrelevant ads we still get in 2021 despite having so much personalization data about users.
Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced. They seem to be totally missing this signal, showing me ads for some category of thing I already purchased for a very long time after I don’t need any more suggestions.
Lastly, I would literally pay per month for an Amazon search that filters out all the fake brands. If I search for “webcam”, there are half a dozen brands I want to see, yet instead I’m forced to sift through piles of junk that I would never even consider purchasing to find what I’m looking for. I’ve heard that Amazon knows this is a thing but chooses not to fix it due to some psychological allure of sifting through the junk to find the nuggets of gold. In the worst cases, I have to use Google to find stuff on Amazon because their own search is so horrendous, with the categories being an absolute joke.
> but at the end of the day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than that.
Looked at Netflix clicked on a movie that I though may be interesting, it was overdubbed in English since it was a Korean movie. I watched maybe 5 minutes of it then exited. Go to YouTube and suddenly Korean videos are being suggested.
At a car dealership with my sister she asked me to be there for support when she leased a car. At home same day hours later YouTube again it is plastered with "how to buy a car" videos. I hadn't been looking for a car, never searched for anything like that in the previous days ever.
You could do a test. Get someone to take your (locked) smartphone into a well-known dealership for something you aren't ordinarily interested in. Blind test, you don't know where they took the phone. Google tracks the physical location of your phone (don't know if it's possible to completely opt out of that)... trivial to match that to "dealership X" given that Google Maps already knows about those. If in the blind test you can tell your friend where they took the phone based on increased ad activity, then there's proof.
A day after I started using an Android device: I cycled to work, and my phone gives an alert and asks me to rate X. WTF? Oh right, I cycled by X on the way. I immediately turned off what I could; no more popups like that but do I really think Google doesn't track my location any more?
I've had my professional-subscription Wall Street Journal app run a full page ad for frozen jamaican hot beef patties (so good...) that I bought a box of at costco earlier that morning. Pretty amusing, just given how off-brand that is for ads that run on WSJ.
Went to a doctor over issues with my feet. Got spammed with ads covering various health issues. Patient data tends to be protected in most countries, no one should have access to when I visit what doctor and I find it insane that Google gets away with using that protected information to sell ads.
Fair guess would be that you leaked that information somewhere along the way - putting the address into google maps, pulling up the dr office phone number on google proper etc.
I have an Android phone, so I wasn't surprised that Googles spyware managed to get that information, I was surprised that they are allowed to collect and use medical information about me without ending on the wrong end of various related data protection laws.
There are no healthcare privacy laws the the USA that apply to Google. Indeed, "medical information" is not generally protected. HIPAA only prevents "healthcare providers and healthcare businesses" from providing that information without your consent. If you disclose or leak medical information to other companies, they are not required to maintain confidentiality and can sell or use that information perfectly legally.
The problem is that no one is bothering to give you an alternative because they can't make money out of it.
Let's say I want to do a '10 best bikes for under $1,000' article. How am I going to do that well without actually going out and buying 10 bikes and being prepared to make hardly anything in return?
That kind of article is trash anyway, they should limit it to 3 or 5 bikes not 10. Many best "auto" reviews simply have a category so they dont piss off any one auto manufacture.
Even if you look for the top 10 trucks, they will end up showing all the major brands, because they will break it down for: 4x4, extended cab, full size, mid size, ...
Lists are mostly garbage because you dont care about the top 25, you really only need to know the best item and the next best at a certain budget
If Google deindexed the spam, that effort might actually be worth it for a bike shop to do an honest comparison. But so long as you’re just going to get buried by SEO spam, why bother?
While that would improve things I still think it's rather unlikely that a bike shop would be willing to give anything but a great rating for the bikes the are selling. And if they are their suppliers might not like it. There's still a dependency.
At the end of the day being shortsighted doesnt matter. They are a publicly traded company that pays their top employees in options. If the problem of spam becomes too difficult they will focus on milking the cow until it dies just like every other massive company that came before it.
> the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced
This is a comment sentiment (I’ve already bought a fridge! Don’t need another!) and it is a bit of a failure mode. But, I think value on advertising around recent purchases to people is super high. A recent purchase, although often wrong, is one of the best signals you can get. So much purchasing happens in clusters (setting up a space, picking up a hobby, etc) that a specific person is in buying mode for a specific topic is crazy valuable. And there’s splash damage on the wrong ads. Maybe you don’t buy a second rice cooker, but the ad reminds you to get a toaster.
Good point. I bought a wireless router, didn't like it, got another one a month later. I imagine the odds you'll buy a wireless router in the next month if you bought one in the last month are way higher than almost any other signal you could find.
> Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced.
This is a ten-year old talking point. Why people continue to insist on this falsehood is beyond me. Do you think these advertisers are stupid?
-> buy refrigerator. gets lost during transport / is damaged / “oh, I wanted the 550T, not 505T” / “works great, let’s also replace the one in the beach house” / etc.
You have to remember that these possibilities are competing with other ads that have extremely low rates of success.
>> Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced.
> This is a ten-year old talking point. Why people continue to insist on this [...] is beyond me.
Because it continues to happen.
> falsehood
The only falsehood here is your claim that this is a falsehood.
Dcrainmaker has been "pay for play" for at least the past 10 years. He's very thorough, but not altruistic. There was a guy on Slowtwich that shared a conversation with him that was enlightening to that fact.
Someone has to pay the bills. I don’t think receiving money to do a review is inherently wrong, there are just too many products to afford to review, but having a rigorous process to eliminate or expose bias is important. However, it does suck looking for reviews of a product which is not a main player in the market or category.
I agree. He uses statements like "this was a test unit and I'm sending it back at the end. I will purchase one with my own money" to make it seem like he wasn't compensated. Be really needs to start it off saying he was, but not with the unit.
I never had problems with fake products on Amazon until I looked for a usb thumb drive for the Arlo camera base station.
There’s a dramatic difference in price for 1T sizes. Some at $30. Others at $150. I couldn’t understand it.
One of the 0 star reviews said it was actually a 32Gb drive that somehow fools the OS to think it is bigger. Not sure how that happens but it steered me away from any of the cheaper options as I don’t need a headache.
SoundOnSound is great, especially since they still host their entire review history. They tend to show up in my top Google results, when searching for older audio equipment at least. For things like mixers and audio interfaces, they've tested quite a few things.
I frequently dream of building a search engine that for this very reason penalizes any type of advertisement. This problem goes way beyond product searches. Every time I look up a how-to for pretty much anything, programming, video games, fixing house stuff, all search results that aren't user provided like Stackoverflow or Reddit, it's always stuffed with useless info that anyone having the problem already knows about ant that's clearly just there for SEO or to create more space for ads. Non-verbatim example from yesterday: search: "Outer Wilds Echoes of the Eye underground lake stuck bell" result: "Echoes of the Eye is the first DLC for Outer Wilds...blah...find artifact to enter the dream world...blah". The top, ideal answer should be a single sentence and maybe a screenshot.
Of course disincentivizing ads would never fly at google and an ad-free search engine would have a hard time being economically viable.
If you would literally pay for an amazon filter, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy from dedicated shops?
Initially because I hate monopoly but also because looking for something decent on amazon is a major PITA I avoid amazon for nearly everything. If I need a computer, I buy direct to the vendor or to a computer shop. If I need new bicycle parts I go to an online bikeshop, if I want a new sampler groovebox, I go to a store selling home studio gears. Well this isn't totally true as I now favor second hand stuff but the reality is Amazon is not very effective at offering you the best things, and not even at the best price. Most online shops nowadays offer shipping time on par with what you get on Amazon.
In then end I don't see any good incentive to use Amazon. Some people will say centralized market place but if searching a decent product takes much more time than finding a good specialized store and getting decent product quickly you haven't really gained anything. Single account for all your shopping? Many shops offer buying without creating an account. Others will allow you to seamlessly create the account at ordering time and password managers make it easy to manage multiple accounts.
Dedicated shops don't help themselves by having a convoluted check-out process that nearly always involves creating an account, figuring out whether ticking the box or not ticking the box will unleash an avalanche of marketing emails, then entering your payment details via some obscure 3rd party payment system, etc.
Nearly all of them allows Paypal/Google/Apple pay among other. This is definitely not what I would call obscure 3rd party. Figuring out wether ticking or not ticking the box usually involve knowing how to read. And as I said many of them allow for guest access without any account creation.
Snark aside, making the correct check/uncheck often still results in spam emails anyway, such asking for feedback or once a year sales promo. I’ve noticed the majority of independent online retailers do this. I guess it works or they wouldn’t, just like physical spam mail.
Not surprising. It's incomparably quicker and more profitable to list a few top selling products with affiliate links and a bunch of relevant keywords, than to spend significant time and money actually researching and comparing these products in a meaningful way.
Ok, but how would they know that you already bought the product? As advanced as ads are, they still don't have the Amazon confirmation telling them you already completed the purchase.
Google partners with at least one major credit card company[1] so their ad network should be aware of purchases if a particular payment system were used. I expect this is far more widespread than we realise (unfortunately) but using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers would harm revenue, so they remain visible.
>but using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers would harm revenue, so they remain visible.
that doesn't make any sense. By that logic they wouldn't want to do targeting at all, because targeting by definition reduces the amount of people you can show ads to.
Is there some aggregation of these domain-specific review sites anywhere?
Wirecutter has been pretty hit-and-miss for me recently. I have found my best product recommendations through a bunch of random blogs who have some particular expertise.
Isn’t the obvious solution to include the age (or the number of sales) of a product into its rating? This way they can’t just rotate the product/brand names.
Just researched good/quality crafting printers yesterday. Search results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that offered obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to direct you to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This product is currently not available" site.
I am going to remind people that this happens because that's the internet (and world) we designed. If you aren't a coder and you want to earn a living online, blogging is a way to do that and Amazon links are a way to make it pay.
People use AdBlock and don't want to leave tips, support Patreon etc for a blog. Good jobs are hard to find. Telling someone "Get a real job" is often not a viable solution for various reasons.
If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.
I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that's the actual root cause of this stuff and you won't fix it if you don't address those issues.
I've tried for years to take the high road, to not have ads or Amazon links on my sites, etc. The result is starvation and intractable poverty and everyone telling me to get a real job. (I tried. They didn't hire me and continue to cyber stalk me and steal my ideas.)
Anyway, I know all replies to this comment will boil down to "Quit your bitching. No one gives one damn if you die on the streets of starvation and we are so bored with hearing about your whiny problems." Rest assured, I am not leaving this comment with any expectation whatsoever that it will in any way help me.
But maybe after I die on the streets someone will pause and think "Maybe she had a point. Maybe we designed a shitty system with bad incentives and we are getting exactly the crap we pay people to give us."
Because the "high road" where someone tries to add value and respect the fact that you folks don't want ads or affiliate links etc literally doesn't pay to the point of it will keep you underfed and either homeless or underhoused and then your poverty will be a new excuse to have no respect for your observations that "Hey, people, the system you designed is broken and this is why and how."
Well, there are at least two separate, though not unrelated, problems:
1. Good jobs are hard to find, so some people try to make a living instead by influencing what other people buy, in exchange for kickbacks from the sellers.
2. The sellers offering the largest kickbacks are never the sellers offering the best value for money, because if they are, a reseller can buy the products from them, charge a higher price, and spend some of the markup on kickbacks to product shills. This results in a systematic bias toward overpriced junk in heavily advertised products.
3. While some knowledgeable people do still take the time to share their knowledge and unbiased judgments, which is for example mostly how Wikipedia is written, Google and other search engines are increasingly directing search traffic to the product shills instead.
I agree with you that, given problem #1 and problem #3, problem #2 is sort of inevitable, and all three problems tend to mutually reinforce each other. But I think we could reduce either problem #1 or problem #3 by an order of magnitude without significantly reducing the other one. In particular, we might not be able to completely solve the SERP quality problem without solving the jobs problem, but I think we could improve it enormously just by writing a better search engine, which is an easier problem than fixing the entire economy.
I'm sorry to hear you're back on the streets, and I hope your situation improves before you die. I'm glad you're not dead yet because I often find your comments insightful. Happy new year!
I'm not back on the streets yet. I moved a few weeks ago. I have been told this is a temporary solution and I live in fear, as I have for several months now, of ending up back on the streets and dying there.
I don't see surviving that a second time, for reasons I don't care to dig around in.
Crap... I have enjoyed reading you here. We have a borked up system where someone who has a keen mind and something to say ends up struggling. Not sure what to say here other than I hate it.
Making sure we have the basics available to people should be a top priority. And yeah, some would take advantage. I've reached the point, due to many people I know struggling, where I basically don't care. Let them.
The net good out of all that would be worth it, and maybe, just maybe a little less money is made, or efficiency or whatever crazy metric being looked at isn't peak optimized... Again, just don't care.
Given all we have and the smarts, tech, info available, we should not be facing this crap too many of us are.
That's all, just venting a little and I sure hope your situation can improve.
Happy Holidays and all that. You are one of the good people, and it shows.
We need to solve the housing supply issues in the US. (I don't know where you live, I just don't feel qualified to speak to issues in other countries. I've studied them for mine.)
That's off topic for this discussion, but deeply intertwined with why so many people are so desperate for money and throwing in the towel on ethics in favor of asking themselves "Does it pay enough?"
As for Wikipedia itself, I stopped contributing a few years ago, since I did not have the energy and the time needed to fight the systemic bias that the editors had (and have) on a variety of topics.
Also, 2021 was probably the first year in which I did not donate to Wikipedia.
I would argue corporate shills keep some information confidential by removing specific things on Wikipedia. Arguably, they do this to protect cut-throat predators in powerful positions. Which is why these cut-throat predators have an artificially cleaner reputation at the expense of exploitable people arguably. I don't completely trust Wikipedia when it comes to information about politicians, rich people, famous celebrities, specific "philanthropists", etc. Ricky Gervais, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Graham Elwood, Lee Camp, Whitney Webb, George Carlin, Aaron Russo, and other people made me not trust Wikipedia anymore. Wikipedia comes across as another way to put information online through rose-colored glasses to some extent for protecting people in powerful positions, such as the C.I.A. intelligence agents, by making confidential things nonexistent on public websites. People can claim I went down the rabbit hole all they want. But I know that the rise of Orwellian online surveillance, creepy phone verification systems, dehumanizing censorship, brainwashing social credit scores, decreasing human rights, increasing wealth inequality, cut-throat rulers, mental health issues from not being rich during this pandemic, and younger generations being less professionally skilled than older ones are happening internationally now. I find cut-throat rulers who have lots of money are keeping most people trapped during this pandemic via vaccine passports, not letting them renounce their citizenship, online surveillance, censorship, monopolizing the internet at the expense of online anonymity, not letting them be employees without coronavirus vaccinations despite negative side effects that killed some people or worsened their health significantly, forcing people into coronavirus quarantine needlessly that makes them financially threatened when they are getting unpaid while being quarantined, etc. From what I experienced, Wikipedia has favoritism of information that benefits the ruling class only. I would rather go to other online sources for truly investigative journalists that are not shills for oligarch-owned media companies.
I genuinely agree with you. People need to eat, and live comfortably and be able to afford things like medical care, a place to live safely etc.
I also think the blanket of “all affiliates are bad” is a bit much. I love supporting people who just do a good job. SEO spam is not what I call a good job, it’s a sleazy exploitation of the average consumer.
With that said, I have purchased many things based on what I consider honest good reviews who linked to affiliate programs and I do not regret this. I wish companies (Amazon for instance, as they’re rent biggest right now) simply policed their affiliate programs better to incentive good unbiased reviews sites that Specialize in high quality, and dropped the SEO spammers
1. Skewed incentives. A company that buys "organic" product placement wants to show it in the best possible light, and increase sales. They don't need an impartial review, so the blogger has a hard time to produce one.
2. Fragility and failures. Affiliate links expire and don't get updated. Ads point at things no longer available. Ads spend an inordinate amount of resources on the viewer's machine. Targeting is inaccurate, despite incessant attempts to track and correlate users' profiles.
3. Direct payment is rarely an option! I personally would greatly appreciate an option to pay $1-2 and read an impartial review of something I'm planning to purchase. Maybe even $5-7 for expensive stuff. But there are very few places that offer this. Those that do try hard to peddle a yearly subscription. Also, it appears that I'm the minority, and the number of visitors willing to pay directly is too low to sustain the authors.
I still hope that it's Patreon and direct support by consumers what the future looks like, not corporate sponsorship and ads.
Right. We need direct payments to be an option. If someone is going to pay the reviewer, I'd rather it be me than the product manufacturer.
But I also agree that I think we're in the minority, and that most people won't do direct payments. I think this is the reason for the aggressive push for yearly subscriptions, because they know that a) it's hard to get people to pull out their wallet for each transaction, and b) it's hard to get people to come back to spend money in future transactions.
As much as I want a general micropayments system, I know that even I will spend more cognitive effort than I should when deciding something like "will this article be worth 10 cents to me?" The difference between $0 and even $0.01 is emotionally very large.
> As much as I want a general micropayments system, I know that even I will spend more cognitive effort than I should when deciding something like "will this article be worth 10 cents to me?" The difference between $0 and even $0.01 is emotionally very large.
That’s my concern as well: I like the idea in theory but al increasingly thinking the reason past attempts have failed is that it’s more of a mirage than a stable alternative. Advertising has worked better for people with no money, people who disagree about what your content is worth, people who want to see before they pay, people who say they want to see before they pay but will cheat, people who don’t want to be constantly asked to make financial decisions, people who don’t want potential surprises of their kid/roommate/etc. uses their computer, etc. That’s definitely not saying that the status quo is great but it avoids a lot of failure modes which immediately become roadblocks if you’re asking people for money.
This has real societal consequences, too: we’d be much better off if the average person got their news from the NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc. but those sites have paywalls while a lot of less principled journalism to outright propaganda is free. I really wish we had a more convincing story for how to support things like that but it’s still unclear whether we do.
>we’d be much better off if the average person got their news from the NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc.
Man I don't know about that. In some ways, yes I agree with you. But in other ways I can't.
None of the major entities produces news and commentary from the labor point of view, for example. It's hard to get them to talk about media consolidation, news for profit, and a whole pile of other issues too, and it all boils down to a couple things:
1) AD driven models favor those who can buy the products and services pitched in the ADS
2) Conflicts of interest abound! The massive media consolidation we saw after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 really did a number on one of the basic dynamics we depend on, and that is many owners, many models, competition all tended to work as checks and balances. A small, indie house could run a labor story, or talk about Net Neutrality without having a conflict rooted in a big corporation not wanting to publish news and commentary that would impact it's bottom line in a negative way. Just one example.
Today, we've got investigative journalism relegated to niche players who are doing good, often quite expensive work that isn't being seen due to suppression and a misinformation problem that is not easy or cheap to solve.
Your point isn't invalid. I am saying it's more complicated than that.
I don’t disagree that there’s a lot to improve. I was just thinking from the very minimal perspective of how often they knowingly run outright propaganda. None have a perfect track record (Iraq & Judith Miller come to mind) but then I look at the outright fabrications people share on Facebook and that stuff is always free.
This is an easy way to get depressed wondering whether we can successfully navigate a global news environment.
Those sites run propaganda :( Access journalism, Iraq as you mention, Russiagate... There are other examples not hard to find.
Kind of a mess really. When I was a kid, we had some class segments on news bias, and actually had to find and identify news and commentary, differentiate fact from opinion, and find pieces written from various points of view: labor, big business, left, right, etc... My own kids did not see any education of that kind. I did it.
I suppose another angle might be clarity. There is a lot of low clarity "news" being put out there. Fact and opinion are not clearly, nor easily, differentiated. That's a problem, and a major feeder to Uncle Liberty posting on FB...
I do feel competing with FB would be effective given some entity somewhere can get funded in a way that allows for a labor and or not pro-war point of view, and that's just as an example. Any meaningful differentiation that can contrast with the majors might work.
On the upside, global is actually a benefit! One thing people can, and I suggest they actually do, is get news from abroad. There does remain some of the older dynamic between nations and their various news services. It's possible to get a diverse take on the US that way, and it's what I do personally.
> I am going to remind people that this happens because that's the internet (and world) we designed.
we didn't design that - they did. I used the Internet in the 90s on my 56k modem and it was mostly ad-free. Stuff was still free, but mostly because people created content out of curiosity and because it was their hobby (yes, I had a website and was using frames and image maps heavily) or university sponsored (IRC, NNTP, Mailinglists). I paid 5$/month for a shell account, later shared the cost for a dedicated server with a couple of friends (we had a traffic limit of 50GB/month) to offer content and services to other people - expecting nothing in return.
Then companies realized how much money was in, and suddenly all good, federated and free services were overrun by spam (mostly NNTP). To this day, companies like FB, Insta, Google etc. try to lure as many content-creators to users their "free" sites, while they actually pay with their data or the data of your content consumers - while the data is used to steal attention to show you ads for stuff you don't need. The amount of GDPR violations by those Megacorps is immense as they very well know that presenting a "reject all tracking" button as demanded by the GDPR ruins their business model (less than 10% actually agree to being tracked when presenting them the choice).
My solution to all this is easy: Ban all advertising on the internet, or, at least advocate to as many people as possible to use adblockers. Only when ads are gone, will people spend money on products such as FB and Youtube, and only then can there be actually competition - because right now, you can't compete with "free" services with any other model than using ads+tracking yourself.
> People use AdBlock and don't want to leave tips, support Patreon etc for a blog. Good jobs are hard to find. Telling someone "Get a real job" is often not a viable solution for various reasons.
> If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.
Even if no one used ad blockers and tips were commonplace, we'd still have these problems with crap SEO and affiliate links. It's like with technology products: they say "if you aren't paying for it, you're the product not the customer," but even if you are paying for it you can still be the product (e.g. your TV manufacturer putting ads in your expensive TV's menus).
Ultimately the problem is greed and the ridiculous degree of tolerance of it, unchecked by any cultural expectation of quality or virtue.
I'm not going to say "quit your whining" but rather, maybe this isn't "the world we built", maybe it's "the way the world is". I know I've been guilty of thinking the later when I should think the former but really don't know what we'd change. Do you really think the internet would have flourished if it was pay per view (or similar solution)?
I remember using online services in the 80s where they charged by the minute. CompuServe, GEnie, and even just my ISP when I first got internet in the 90s. Data of 1 but I know that gave me a "use it as little as possible" mindset.
Further, if some groups set out to charge and some other groups offered "free with ads" I'm pretty confident "free with ads" would win (see Radio, TV, Podcasts as other examples of "free with ads"). So, short of outlawing free (which would likely never happen), I don't see how we'd have not gotten where we are at the moment.
That isn't to say we can't do better now but I'm less confident we could have conscientiously directed ourselves to better. I think natural forces got us her and will take people experiencing better to get them to switch better.
To put it another way, without tasting the "free with ads" kinda sucks, few would be willing to fork over $ for better.
I personally do not like paywalls. I had Google ads. I discontinued them.
For a long list of reasons, I want my writing to be freely available. I got my very first Amazon payout of like $16 or something a few months ago. I also got an email reminder that I am legally required to very prominently display information telling people I have Amazon links on my site.
I took the links down and thought about updating my sites to comply with the requirement and so far haven't, in part because I suspect the $16 was from some local asshole unqualified for his job (the job I applied for) buying ugly bike racks and plopping them down in bad locations all over my lovely downtown area like little piles of manure as a daily reminder of how corrupt these people are, how much they have shafted me for no real damn reason other than pathos on their part and they are ruining the town I hope to improve.
I was unable to readily find (affiliate) links to bike racks I would like to see in this town and I'm angry at what is being done to this town by these immoral, incompetent cretins and it causes me to think that I might actively encourage their shit behavior ruining this town because I'm so desperate for money that $16 on that day meant I could afford a fucking coffee which put an end to my splitting headache.
I do not wish to make the world and town I live in a worse place because I'm so desperate for money and I think taking the Amazon solution potentially pushes me in that direction.
Anyway, I don't know how to fix this. I try to tell people what it looks like from where I sit because I know HN has a lot of coders, etc and they aren't daily exposed to the reality that "If you choose to not be a sell out, you go hungry." basically.
I just want my life to work. I don't actually want to make what sounds like "political" commentary to other people. If my life worked, I would likely be all "Meh. Not my problem. I don't want to fight with these fools and trying to point this out is not worth the drama. Moving on."
But it does impact me. It impacts me to the point where I literally fear for my life due to my intractable poverty and sometimes I feel compelled to comment, though I don't really expect it to help me. Maybe after I am beyond help, people will stop wondering what's in it for DoreenMichele and think "She had a point. Let's find a solution that incorporates these observations."
This is possibly rambly at this point. I'm posting it anyway and then will try to stay out of this conversation.
> If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.
The problem is that the sane alternative, where people can get fed while selling quality a-la-carte content directly to the reader, doesn't really exist. If one or more review sites would work to develop a good reputation, I'd be happy to spend a one-shot $3 or $5 on their (for example) wireless earbud reviews. But this thing basically doesn't exist (or at least I can't find it, because of all the aforementioned shit-quality search engine results). Someone upthread mentioned a German site that does this, but then someone replied saying their expertise is limited and their reviews in many product categories aren't that great. Then we have things like Consumer Reports in the US, but I've found the quality of their reviews to have declined over the past decade or so; I've read some of their free content for product categories where I'm already knowledgeable, and I've disagreed heartily with enough of their findings to be skeptical of them.
When it comes to news and opinion pieces, I'd be fine paying on a per-article basis, but we have no established micropayments system, and I'm not paying $10-$20/mo for each of the 50 sites that come up in various news aggregators I read and have paywalls. There are a few sites and YouTube channels that I read/watch nearly daily, so I subscribe to their Patreon or periodically drop money in their donations bin. But the majority of the content I consume comes from various sources, from a list that changes nearly daily.
> Maybe we designed a shitty system with bad incentives
Who is the "we" here, though? I would love to change this, but I feel pretty powerless to do so. At least not without making it my life's work, with a very high chance of failing at it regardless.
Let people know that you are willing to pay for good writing online without a paywall.
Support Patreon or similar. Leave tips.
One of my first big successes on HN got 60k pageviews and made me not one thin dime. No one left a tip. No one supported my Patreon.
I have been writing for years because I am seriously medically handicapped but educated. Writing is something I can do.
People don't want to hire me for resume work or other freelance writing. I'm a woman and former homemaker and most successful business people are men. They rarely want to talk to me about my work or how to succeed. Most often, if men try to talk to me, they are hoping for a romantic connection and from my end the experience boils down "All you horrible people are watching me starve but you think I will sleep with you??? Seriously?!!!!"
Leave tips (or support Patreon or similar). Tell people you leave tips on sites with good writing. Promote the various means people can accept cash for their online writing.
I don't know what else to tell you. But saying you can't make a difference because you are a nobody is part of the problem.
You don't have to save the world. Just buy a writer lunch or a cup of coffee, so to speak. Spread the word.
A while back, I put a little in my budget for small projects. Some are software, others are writing, whatever.
It's not much, but I know very well it all adds up, and maybe a little positive energy plays out for you too.
What I did was quit buying my coffee. :D
And that worked out!! I have a little percolator, which I love when camping or something. That thing makes the best damn coffee. For the quickie at home, this is corny, but I got an Aeropress and it also makes a fantastic and kind of fun cup of coffee.
> Let people know that you are willing to pay for good writing online without a paywall.
Or easier, adhere to the GDPR (at least in the EU) and provide a "reject all non-essential" button as demanded right next to "accept all" without any dark patterns, and their ad-business plummet and you have to demand payment for the service to be sustainable. So my point is, the whole thing can be fixed if Megacorps would abide by the law, and law enforcement would also not take >5 years to act on violation lawsuits (see noyb's lawsuits against FB which are going on 8 years and even date prior to the GDPR).
I've been fooling you--kinda for years, but I'm hellbanned. I'll post this anyway.
In all honesty, I haven't found a writer, or journalist, I'm giving any money to besides a few honest non-profits. (And yes it's hard to find a honest 501c3.)
I feel you should put the affiliate links on your writing. It's not selling out. It's selling out when you have good income, security, and a home.
I don't have any problems with average people putting up affiliate links, or ads.
It's the wealthy boys who can never get enough monetary praise I have a problem with.
>If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.
People don't/can't pay for things anymore because trillions of dollars have been siphoned out of the holdings of the middle and working classes over the past 50 years. If not for piracy and subscription services, the music and film industries would have collapsed years ago. If you made people pay for the things they used to, they... wouldn't. Because they can't.
For my entire life I've tried to become a programmer, went as far as studying CS for three years, never managed to get a diploma as I ran into some financial and health issues... you mention
> I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that's the actual root cause of this stuff and you won't fix it if you don't address those issues.
I think the real issue, is, the world is much bigger than the first world countries. I would love to have a diploma, to get a "real" job as a programmer for some random company, to add that "value" to the internet, to design useful software for actual people, etc. etc. But I was born in Eastern Europe..
I tried freelancing a few times through gac, rac, and scriptlance which later got "globalized" (all acquired and killed by freelancer.com, yay capitalism).. and I just can't compete with indians on that site, way too many of them, somehow quoting 5% of the price promising double or triple of what I can do somehow...
So I tried looking for that "Real" job, except I was born ugly as hell with broken teeth, so nobody would even take me seriously. Even one of my professors in uni told me once: "See.. if you could do less drugs and study more, I bet you could get an A, it's a B- for now..".. I never even tried drugs, but apparently I'm so ugly half my profs thought I was drugged. As far as I can tell, It's just nepotism right and left, people only hiring other pretty-looking-people-alike for both normal and startup-like jobs where I come from. Zero chance for me.
So on the brink of giving up on everything, I took a construction job for 6 months, which allowed me to save enough money for a plane ticked and my first month of rent in UK. Now I'm a Reach Truck driver in a warehouse.. making >triple the salary I could make as a programmer in my home country, but slowly destroying my back and knees every d day.
Funnily enough, I've met quite a few programmers, lawyers, accountants, pharmacists and even a surgeon through my warehouse jobs in the last two years. Quite smart people, a few broken teeth here and there, a couple disfigured faces, husbands, kids, sick family, plenty stuff...
The internet is just bullshit, just like most of this society. Making money, jobs, starvation, HA! I don't even know what I'm trying anymore or why I still keep reading on this site.
Sorry for the rambling, your message just resonated somehow for me so I felt I should say something. Good luck to you!
I'm sorry the world treated you the way it did. We've set up a quite harshly unforgiving environment that in many ways impoverishes our souls in similar ways the harsh elements of the physical world impoverished our bodies before the rise of civilization.
If you have studied that much CS, then you likely have fulfilled many of the ACM recommended curricula [1] for at least an associates degree if not more. If that is true, then you have some options. Do not discount your dual fluency in English and your mother tongue. There is no shame in taking a good small-scale Internet business idea implemented in the Anglosphere and reproducing it in your mother tongue. There are numerous tiny ideas mentioned in comments here on HN that bring in modest sums, but fill a niche unlikely to have already been implemented in your home country. If it is enough to pay for a laptop upgrade once every 3-5 years, and maybe some beer money, then that's as good a start as any.
Bonus points if you find a Net-based business opportunity that also leverages your current UK geographic location.
Lift weights, eat right, sleep enough, and take good care of your body in the meantime, those warehouse jobs are no joke, and you are ahead of the pack by already recognizing that. If I was single, living alone, young, and working a warehouse job while working on my coding, then I'd abandon all real estate-oriented shelter, stealth vandwell, and digital nomad between free WiFi hotspots for my connection to free-tier cloud resources (CLI and tmux for the win on high-latency, low-bandwidth connections); rent-to-wage ratios are completely insane in developed nations' urban, suburban and exurban areas.
Stay out of the rentier trap. Trying to rent a room cost me a few years of unnecessary toil when I started out that contributed nothing towards my advancement, when for all practical purposes, I lived out of my car with the hours I was spending at a part-time job, on campus classrooms, labs, and libraries, napping in my car, and about every other day crashing back in my rented room that really was more a storage shed than used as an apartment. If I had a stealth van and student gym membership back then, then I would have been better off, but I was too stupidly proud to do that ("gasp, I'll be homeless!" was a complete red herring).
You can raise funds for a software project as a pseudonymous founder these days, if you can explain your ideas clearly or can put together an MVP. That might help with the "other people judging by appearance" problem.
After reading your comment, I visited your page and glanced around. Am I right in interpreting your specialty is coming up with how to turn a better phrase (writing)?
If so, then that's a very underappreciated domain at this time (much to our detriment, but that's for a different discussion). Not just in tech, but everywhere. The entire field has been aggressively monetized to near extinction; whatever writing doesn't directly impact revenue/profits, gets dumped onto line workers. And the results show.
The quality of writing and lucid ideas found in advertisements and landing pages is markedly higher than from say, in a somewhat-technical presentation to managers-of-managers. I've sat through more than a few quite underwhelming presentations that violated some of the most basic principles of presenting ("don't mumble hoping the slide will carry the presentation", "don't read the slide word-for-word", etc.).
There is a dearth of assistance for coaches to help improve those kinds of "writing". And a huge number of aspiring, gung-ho FAANG employees who are wondering why management won't listen to them. There's a gap to be filled here, and people with the disposable income to pay for outcomes.
Leverage your non-technical sphere as a strength (I liked your pull request journey, it is true that coders don't normally perceive and accommodate skill stratifications in our docs, a byproduct of the monetization of writing that killed too many technical writing/librarian positions in our industry). Perhaps look into positioning the writing assistance you offer to technical staff as a way to communicate to non-technical managers, where you help translate the technical concepts that have to be broken down to you due to your non-technical background, into ideas the managers readily grasp. It would help if you retained a lot of the corporate-speak that Rands in Repose sometimes writes about that you doubtless saw in your Aflac stint, and knew when to judiciously use it.
Maybe investigate some offer like helping coders write emails to managers. If that gains traction, offer small-medium-large presentation improvement coaching, based upon the length of the presentation (15, 30, 60 minutes). Where shorter lengths increase in cost. Then if that gains traction, offer coaching linked to an annual performance goal of "improve communicating with managers".
I agree with you. I think Google works very well. People expect to go on Google, pay nothing, and get good information. So industries have arisen that do just that. I find it amazing that I can type obscure questions into Google and get content custom crafted to answer my question.
Often the answers are not the best. What can I expect? I paid nothing for them! When I want good information, I pay for it.
Even if you use patreon, people get greedy and eventually will sell out and put up reviews of stuff for affiliate links, free products for reviews, etc.
You can't even search for GitHub issues anymore. You'll get some mirrored site that has the discussion, and from that webpage, you can't even get a direct link back to GitHub.
Github issue clones and StackOverflow clones pretty much dominate most of my programming related search results these days.
Unfortunately DDG isn't much better.
It takes a lot of effort to finesse a search query such that I can get a good result, like a link to documentation or a personal website where someone wrote something up (which is often more thoughtful than what Medium and Dev.to offer).
At this point google is a shortcut to documentation. I look for the first link that looks like a readthedocs page. You could even short-circuit this and bookmark the documentation for the tool you want. It's going "backwards" in a sense but learning to read a manual well can be quicker than letting google think for you.
This surprises me because it's a major problem for me, particularly for GitHub. I end up doing this for clones that don't even link back to the orginal:
1. Search for something
2. See the cloned issue but no results for the original
3. Copy some unique-looking text from the clone
4. Search the repo directly for that text
It's awful. Seems to be a very recent problem? Maybe the last few months?
It might be a function of your programming niche, but is it possible that you just didn't realize you were looking at a clone? These sites are everywhere.
It's a portion of the content that's cloned: the question and subsequent answers or discussion. The styling is usually totally different, even the page structure is different, to the point that I don't realize I'm looking at a clone unless I recognize the copy from a specific github or stackoverflow page that I had looked at previously in my search session.
I run https://github-wiki-see.page. Please read the about page link at the bottom or visit https://github-wiki-see.page for an explanation. I put it up after realizing my GitHub wiki contributions weren't available via Google.
GitHub blocks https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi-reveng/wiki/Languages and many other wikis from being indexed. In the case of the page you linked, GitHub serves the content with "X-Robots-Tag: none". The content of that page currently does not exist in Google at all. You can see the robot blocking header by looking at the Network tab in Chrome while loading the page in incognito mode or equivalent in other browsers.
As for having no link to GitHub, my service provides a huge button at the top and a direct URL to the original content. Please use those controls at the top to get to the content on GitHub. I do not selectively redirect to not trip cloaking detection or automatically redirect which risks the indexing helper being classified as a redirect in search engines.
If you have any other questions or suggestions, please let me know.
GitHub Wiki Search Engine Enablement (GHWSEE) allows non-indexed GitHub Wikis to be indexed by search engines.
This site will be decommissioned to redirect old links once the block is lifted or GitHub produces some other solution to index GitHub Wikis in harmony with their SEO concerns.
I do not see any wrongdoing from github-wiki-see.page here. They don't even amke money from it. Quite contrary, I do think that this is a useful project.
Hah, yeah I don't make any money from it. I think I'm like currently $300 in the hole from experiments and queries with it until I had settled on the current ramen architecture.
That might be fixable, if people want to expend the effort. Wiki pages are almost certainly copyrightable, so the owners could send DMCA takedown notices to github-wiki-see.page. If they're not responsive, send the DMCA notices to Google, which should be required to delist them. Unfortunately you have to do it on a URL-by-URL basis, and you can only send notices for pages you actually own copyright for, so it would mean a big coordinated effort to get them brought down.
I just don't understand why Google themselves allows this and doesn't rank these sorts of sites lower. They're clearly garbage sites with low utility.
Please read my explanation at http://github-wiki-see.page/ and observe why it exists. I believe it to be a site with extremely high utility.
It has already recently convinced/defrosted GitHub to gradually change their policy to not let GitHub wiki pages be indexed since 2012. For at least 9 years, people were writing content into GitHub and not realizing it wasn't indexed at all.
I'm happy to answer any questions or suggestions you have.
I also do not host the content at all. That said, people have submitted outdated content requests if they move off GitHub Wikis to Google and they are honored.
Google puts substantial effort into identifying copycat content. The main way they do that is to see which site had the content first.
Unfortunately with smaller sites, it could be a few days till their search bot finds the content, and often the copycat sites have agressive scrapers so appear to have the content first.
From googles point of view, the copycat is the original, and the original is the copycat.
There are also some kinds of copycat content which users actually prefer. For example, sites which bypass paywalls, sites which quote other sites, sites that display decrapified content from another site, etc.
FWIW, GitHub seems to be letting some Wikis be indexed on a test basis and I am very happy to see they are outranking GHWSEE. That said, with the current guessed criteria, there are still many publicly editable wikis with many stars and publically un-editable wikis on repos with few stars but useful information out there that aren't being indexed.
yeah, had this experience myself while purchasing holiday gifts. amusingly, it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.
it's funny because internet shopping became popular in the face of salespeople becoming corrupt under commission and performance schemes, now a big part of the commerce related internet is worse for pretty much the same reasons.
> it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.
I still remember being in Best Buy and hearing the salespeople scamming less knowledgeable customers about how much computer they need or how important expensive cables are. I don't think there was ever a time when you could trust electronics store salespeople to sell you "the right stuff for you".
There was a time - the smaller the store the better. I agree big box stores were rarely good. But Radio Shack had excellent, helpful employees. Probably because RS vetted their employees carefully and paid pretty well (I know this from trying and failing to get a job there when I was around 16 years old).
I worked at Radio Shack. They had an extensive training program that all employees went through. There were multiple 50-page manuals for each product category. This meant training in A/V equipment and how to hook up TVs (which splitters and switches did what, how to wire many different audio setups, how VCR outputs worked, telephony equipment, pagers and Blackberries... etc.)
We had to go through all the certifications within something like six weeks of hire in order to be eligible for pay bumps and promotions. This even meant training on circuit components (at least knowing what they were, and how they were organized).
Any Radio Shack clerk that wasn't completely green went through this training, so we all knew our stuff.
One of the cool things about the job was getting to talk to "elder geeks" that would come in for components. One guy I helped had set up an old IBM 360 mainframe in his garage. The university he worked at didn't want it any more. He used it for messing around with assembly and as a space heater.
It was still a retail job, but it was better than most for a tech-head like me. I would've been flipping burgers or selling shoes (Payless was next door), so Radio Shack was a better stepping stone for me. It did nothing for getting me into a programming career, but it was a stop-gap to get there.
I worked at radio shack. We didn't have certification program but you are forced to learn quickly.
It was less about selling and more about people walking in knowing what they wanted or wanting to browse around and once in awhile someone with a problem that you had to piece together components to help. It was unlike other electronic stores I worked. You had to understand how invertors worked, rc cars and sell computers while trying to maintain an 80% names/address recorded.
You did sell. You entire got paid minimum wage or a % of what you earned for a two week period. 4% for name brand stuff 10% for store brand. My first two week period I sold computer after computer got highest sales in the district. For the next month or longer the minimum. Replacing the computer inventory took forever and I wasn't as good selling all of their other products. Great fun learning experience.
As far back as the 01990s my memories of Radio Shack are:
1. The only place around where you could go to buy a breadboard, or a transistor, or a resistor, or a headphone cable connector. Component selection unparalleled in the places where I lived. I don't want to exaggerate --- they had maybe ten kinds of transistors, not a hundred like Fry's, but I didn't live within 1000 km of a Fry's. And certainly not forty thousand like Digi-Key has today.
2. Salespeople who apparently didn't know anything but tried to get my phone number (!?) and, later, sell me cellphones. And cellphone plans. Jesus.
3. Stuff for makers getting gradually crowded out by worthless goods for mere consumers, stuff I could have bought at Best Buy or Sears if I wanted it. Things like TVs, VCRs, pagers, and Blackberries.
I still use a store-brand Radio Shack multimeter sometimes, and in the 01980s a lot of my early years of programming were on store-brand Radio Shack computers in my day care and elementary schools, both TRS-80 Model III and the CoCo.
See this LongNow article [1]. While I love the sentiment behind it, it creates an implicit fixed-length field which I think is not optimistic enough.
I'd rather make software handle an unsigned long long as a year: I want our optimism to extend beyond the presumed heat death of our universe, and into, if not finding a multiverse, creating it.
Thank you for the correction. We currently think heat death is around 10^3247 years, so we're back to Lisp bignum to express years. Might be a corollary to Greenspun's tenth rule: any sufficiently optimistic date package contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of Common Lisp bignum?
Small local camera stores didn't carry much and were expensive. They tended to recommend something that they had in stock. Was still a pretty regular customer though because mail order wasn't as developed and you couldn't easily showroom gear locally.
And Radio Shack was certainly convenient for cables etc. and had often knowledgable employees. But most of the actual stereo equipment and other gear they carried just wasn't very good.
While not perfect, it was often good enough. Go in, see 6 cameras in three price ranges, choose the one fitting the best for the price you're willing to pay, then walk home happy. Now there's sooo much choice, and most of us end up trying to find the perfect purchase.
> Now there's sooo much choice, and most of us end up trying to find the perfect purchase.
The challenge I have now in most product categories is filtering out the sewage-offerings from the genuine values. I don't mind lots of choice if presented with an adequate McMaster-Carr type information-oriented UI (as opposed to the ad-friendly UI's we suffer through these days). I mind when most of the choices are dumpster fire quality, and I have no way to filter them out.
The (somewhat disputed) thesis of the paradox of choice.
But I don't really disagree especially for relatively commodity purchases. Yes, I actually looked up a spray nozzle for a hose on Wirecutter. But would I have been perfectly fine just walking into Home Depot and grabbing one? Probably.
That said. I'm probably better off researching thins like dishwashers rather than walking into a store (then or now) and picking one that catches my eye or that the salesperson recommends.
But you can certainly get into analysis-paralysis with any number of things from travel to cameras. And you're often better off just shutting the analysis down at some point.
Ah best buy sales incentives. It reminds of the time I watched a salesman force the wrong case on an old lady's iPad, cracking the screen, and then blaming her for it.
The folks at Frys (particularly in hardware) were a useful resource (and good source of shop talk) all the way up until Fry's faded into irrelevance. They helped me sort through a good number of hardware-related issues
Micro Center staff still are like this, and that's much more than anything else why I buy whatever I can from them before looking anywhere else. I want them to stay in business, because otherwise I have to do my own research every time, and who has the time for that? - well, this, and also because I just delight in being still able to walk into one brick-and-mortar store where I know for sure I won't have wasted the trip.
We kid and joke about expensive cables, but we're at a point where it's become true. It's hit or miss buying USB cables. For fast-charging as an example (double-trouble if you don't have a quality or compatible charger to pair it with). Likewise for USB transfer rates (e.g. for the Oculus Quest that I was not planning on testing with 10 different 5m USB cables to see which worked).
Same goes for the connectors. All the IEEE and ISO standards out there in the world and the damn USB plugs stick out half the time (nevermind the Chinese-made ones I had that were 1.5x the normal length). In other instances 3.5mm jacks don't stay in or something or other becomes loose. And trying to find reviews or info about this online, or filtering it out to some level on purchase sites like Amazon is...tiring.
At least that was better than Fry’s or Home Depot, where salespeople actively walk away when they see you approaching, and have zero knowledge of what is even carried by the place they work. After a while I figured out that it’s better to just look myself on the shelves and endcaps vs trying to ask anything of the sales drones. Kinda like a physical Amazon. I’m sad that they’re out of business now, and with no more MicroCenter left in the Bay Area, the choices are now basically Amazon, eBay, or small online shops (if Central Computer and Halted, now closed as they sold to Excess Solutions @ 1555 S, 7th St. San Jose, CA 95112 don’t have what I’m after).
Odd, I’ve never had much trouble at Home Depot or Lowe’s getting an employee to help me find something. Usually they at least know where things are even if they couldn’t tell you how to use or install said item.
As much as I love Microcenter, even there I've had a salesman give me uninformed advice, throw his bar code sticker on the thing he told me to get, and walk away.
So don't talk to that guy again. The others should be fine, unless your local store happens to have a lousy GM.
Initially I dealt with this concern by benchmarking the advice I got on a topic I do know a lot about. I haven't worried about that in a while; at least in the Towson store, the quality of advice and discussion has been such that the next time they steer me wrong will be the first.
I was recently in a Best Buy and overheard an employee explain the difference between a Pixel 6 and a 6 Pro as, "EVERYTHING is better". I had personally just compared the two side-by-side and concluded that the pro's only material differences were more RAM, worse build quality due to the curved screen edges, and the addition of a telephoto camera.
Rose colored glasses. Workers in stores were the original "affiliate marketers", in a lot of stores (especially electronic ones) workers were/are being paid to push the most expensive products.
Then when you try to pay, you get upsold warranties.
Actually it would make more sense for them to push the highest margin products. This could quite often be lower cost or in-house brands since prestige brands can dictate lower margins to the retailer.
Agree sales guys pushing warranties is a real pain but I'm almost nostalgic for it compared to dodging Prime sign-up every time and other online anti-patterns.
>it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.
With all this lamentation about electronics stores of years past, nothing will compare to the malicious incompetence of car dealerships and service departments. Their business model these days is “if we all keep behaving badly together, consumers will have no choice but to accept our lies, markups, and chicanery”. The dealer groups paying politicians through campaign contributions to allow them to block manufacturer-direct sales (look up how you can’t buy a Tesla in Michigan, home of The Motor City, for example) is just the cherry on top.
Buying a new car is one of my absolutely least favorite things to do - even worse then doing my taxes. I will avoid it at all costs.
Current vehicle is coming up on 10 years old, hoping to get another 10 out of it - not because I can't afford a new one (I can), but because I feel like I have to take a shower every time I walk out of a car dealer.
LOL, I spent a number of years working with some very adept sales people. I was in a supporting role, but learned a ton.
For a while, I was buying cars for people because they hated it. I would save them a ton, and get a nice spiff for each one.
What I did was work through their whole process and then work them, usually getting out of there at invoice plus a few percent. Average deal took 4 to 6 hours. And the work would involve a dry run purchase somewhere other than where the target buy would happen. Sometimes a second one just find where the pivot points are and what it takes to swing them in buyers favor.
Started the whole thing on a new Expedition purchase in the '00s. It worked well, the MSRP was something like $45K, and I got the rig for $32K and some change. Not all the deals were that dramatic. Depended on the target car and time of year, but there was always mid to high 4 figures that could come out of the deal.
I've never purchased a new car for myself since. And I quit doing it for others a few years in.
The whole thing is generally terrible. While it was a sort of sport, fine! Game on. But it got soul draining very quickly.
Many dealers have responded with a hard line, "no bullshit" kind of approach, being willing to push people away and just take the ones who will pay and appreciate a smooth transaction. And those people will just pay more and just don't generally care.
And no judgement. That's worth... about mid to high 4 figures apparently.
Right now? No way. Sellers have all the advantages, and even better used car deals are crazy due to the shortages and the impact all that has on car pricing.
Could not imagine attempting it again today. Would be a mess, and probably would get told to pound sand. Look at the Ford dealers putting the squeeze on people who pre-ordered the EV F150! Pay an extra $30k right now, or continue to wait for it... Brutal.
> Buying a new car is one of my absolutely least favorite things to do
It's still annoying, but do it online and have your own financing.
Most dealerships are stupid, but a couple have figured out that if they offer a reasonable price online they can move cars with very little touch.
Having your own financing prevents idiocy from when you walk into the dealership to sign the paperwork. Unless the dealer has something special, you're never going to do better than your own financing.
Do be aware, buying a car right now is simply totally apeshit. Until the supply and demand equilibrate, things are going to be weird.
Yeah right. Two days ago I go into our local electrical goods store. I would like a USB-C to HDMI adaptor, I say. Sales guy looks around, scratches his nut. Sorry don't have one he says. Then he wanders off. I turn around and see one on the shelf. The price is double what you can get online. I tell him this. He shrugs and scratches his other nut and wanders off again. I walk out.
Yeah, I went into a Home Depot store that wasn't my regular location a couple weeks back looking for dowel rods. Trying to speed up my trip I asked two different employees on my way to the general area of the store which specific aisle they would be on. Neither of them even knew what a dowel rod was, let alone what aisle it might be on, and obviously neither of them would be qualified to proactively try to help avoid the ones with knots or badly angled grain. It's not just that sales staff are ignorant nowadays, it's that the job itself has practically vanished.
On that very topic, I saw a customer ask an employee manning the wood cutting station at a Home Depot if he could cut a dowel rod in half. The employee didn't know if it was possible because it was "round." I think they realized they can get away with just not training their employees.
Cutting round things in a saw can be dangerous if they aren't clamped correctly: they can spin. (Don't know of a link, this was taught to me at community college in the context of cutting round metal stock in a band saw.)
Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous knowledge/experience. It's possible that there are just less people with that experience, that also want to work at a store like Home Depot.
>>Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous knowledge/experience.
I think they used to hire people with industry experience - i.e. semi-retired or retired plumbers, electricians, carpenters handymen etc and that worked pretty well coming of the 2008 RE meltdown and economic mess at that time - but now any halfway qualified tradesperson can make close to or more than a six figure salary - so working at HD for $15/hr doesn't seem all that attractive anymore.
I don't even try to ask the employees any actual 'technical' questions - I am happy if they can just point me to the correct aisle to find what I need these days.
In that specific situation there’s likely training because operating a saw can be dangerous and incurs liability, not because Home Depot wants to impart knowledge to customers.
With Home Depot/Lowes the employee (or you) can look up on the item on the web site and it will show you the row/bay its located in. Dont be surprised when you see staff know even less about where things are located.
> The bad news is that physical stores simply do not carry any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is irrelevant.
Is that a "nowadays" thing though? At least in my location, the reason a lot of us flocked to the online option was the diversity of options available. Physical stores (for understandable reasons) stocked only the few top-selling options, knew about a few other options enough to say "no we haven't got that", and anything else would get a blank stare and a "is that a company's name?"
If you had put effort into your search and optimized the selection for your specific needs, you were much more likely to find the product online - the physical stores often forced you into a choice between different suboptimal products.
I think there’s lots of factors going on here too. Products were less often considered disposable two or three generations ago. A manufacturer wouldn’t offer 6 versions of nearly the same thing to capture all price points. Things used to be predominantly manufactured by hand, which also meant they were inspectable and repairable by hand. Manufacturing businesses typically kept less products on the market for longer periods (model numbers have become quarterly iterations or specific to a retailer). There’s now 50 options that appear identical for nearly every product when previously there might have been 5. It all contributes to it being difficult for staff to meaningfully “know” what’s being sold even if they wanted to, and businesses aren’t going to spend that time and money training employees on a product they won’t be selling in a month.
Salespeople nowadays are basically recruited from the same pool as Uber Eats delivery people. They don't care about what they sell, they just want to make it to the end of the month.
For the most part, why would I trust random employees at a store?
Knowledgable retail sales employees have completely vanished outside of niche "passionate enthusiast turned their hobby into a business". Homebrew shops, gun stores, marijuana dispensaries, comic and table top gaming stores, etc, but even many of those are plagued with the same cheap shit you can find on Alibaba or Amazon and a good chunk of the time if it's not the business owner you're dealing with you might as well skip asking questions. Outside of those niche interest stores there's often not even sales staff present, there are just people who stock shelves and operate the point of sale system but they don't even attempt to present themselves as knowledgable and can at best only point you to the right aisle of the store.
At this point in my life I've mostly given up asking employees questions. There's only "fishy" answers to be had in retail and there's not generally a competing store with more knowledgable employees. It seems like most of the time I can choose between bad and another brand of bad. Think Hobby Lobby vs. Michaels or Home Depot vs Lowes, Target vs. WalMart, Sams vs. Costco, Macy's vs. Dillards, Dicks vs. Academy Sports, a Ford dealer vs. a Toyota dealer, or worse they've consolidated operations like Bass Pro vs. Cabelas. There might be reasons to choose one over the other for reasons like employee welfare and return policies, but typically prices are all in line with each other and the retail staff are equally useless.
There's only a couple of nationwide exceptions that come to mind like REI and Microcenter but even then people might have to travel prohibitive distances to have those options and they might as well just buy online.
Small regional stores and mom n' pop operations trend towards having more passionate employees that might have an interest in the products (like a ski shop is generally only staffed by people who've at skied, bike shops tend to only be staffed by people who enjoy cycling, etc) but it's still pretty infrequent.
>> If the answers seem fishy, take your business somewhere else.
If you know enough to know whether or not the answers you might get are fishy, you probably already know more than the guy you are trying to get advice from.
Arguably, small mom & pop shops already started dying in large numbers when big box stores started taking over, and online shopping is continuing the small shop’s march to extinction. Globalization of commerce has only added to the margin pressures. Add a global pandemic for good measure, and it’s been a brutal few decades for small shops in increasingly many parts of the world.
Yeah but it is not a good experience, except for a few types of products. I needed a car jump starter so I tried going to AutoZone instead of Amazon. The only one AutoZone had was 3x what I could find on Amazon.
Most auto parts stores are terrible places these days with low quality parts at high prices, and staff that are just competent enough to check out your items.
It used to be (20-25 years ago) you could go in tell them what you were doing and they could tell you which brands to avoid, what other parts you might need, and any secrets that might help you get the job done faster or without having to remove quite as much stuff. These days, the people they hire are so incompetent if you asked them for Headlight Fluid they would take you over to the fluids aisle to look for it.
The Noco ones are decent, but the Clore Automotive Jump-N-Carry is the only thing approaching a BIFL (buy it for life) quality jump starter that I’m aware of. User-replaceable sealed lead acid battery like a quality UPS (which if you’re looking, grab an Eaton 5PX off eBay for a couple hundred bucks shipped…my 3 have outlasted half a dozen consumer APC junk units).
Lead acid batteries self-destruct after they've been left to discharge. Not something you want to keep in a trunk or store at home unplugged. The lithium jump starters have much more dependable passive storage life.
> it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.
When you use Google you are walking into their shop. That salesperson is very knowlegeable, but about you.
"it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you."
THAT is retail. The craptastic experiment we see these days, online and in meatspace are scams masquerading as retail. I miss Sears.
The challenge has been to monetize that experience. I wonder if either an explicit membership model to access advice or a sales advice Uber service that rates both sales person and customer to assist with improving sales transaction communication, can be one part of a solution to preserve the immediacy of brick and mortar. I doubt it; there is likely more value to identifying those items that consumers will buy without waiting for delivery, more emergency-type purchases, marking them up to the limit, abandoning all other products to online ordering, and optimize brick and mortar floor space to cater exclusively to those need-right-now purchases.
And even that might not last long. Warehouse demand is exploding across the world right now. We're in the midst of a massive commerce transformation where there are a lot of giants racing to establish JIT delivery footprints in the most high-margin MSA's containing 80% of every nation's population. It won't be long before we're in a Stephenson'ian Snow Crash-esque world where we're getting an ML-computed 80% of goods everyone orders within 30 minutes, 15% of goods in 4 hours, 4% of goods in a day, and the remaining 1% in five days.
Once that happens, I would be surprised to see supermarkets or even small groceries outside of very niche segments like ethnic and farmer's markets, or hyper niche high-end shops like butchers specializing in rare quality cuts, exist in brick and mortar form, unless you go to where 20% of the population lives in low-density areas not served by these logistical nets.
Same experience here. Researching high-quality products on Google is very frustrating:
- Results 1-3 are ads
- Results 3-5 are blogs that get sponsored
- Results 5-10 are full of astroturfed user reviews
Finding trustworthy and consistent information is so hard that I mostly rely on Reddit for product research. There is a subreddit for literally every product category, and posting a request with your requirements takes much less time than cutting through all the noise on Google.
To make this whole mess a better experience, I'm now working on my own startup that tries to solve these issues.
In the end search is about relevancy. Trustworthiness of a blog or article is hard to discern by machines. The blogs likely rank high because of relevancy as well as clicks. Sponsored doesnt always mean that the reviews are biased. Reviews on reddit aren’t exactly trustworthy too - there are always going to be competing arguments and reviews for a product, you just have to use your own judgment which plays into your personality, risk tolerance etc.
Indeed but as to the linked thread's point, it's an opportunity for a startup to come in. A startup which could tackle the quality problem not just relevancy.
YouTube's latest brilliant "innovation" to hide the dislike count made this problem so much worse too. When e.g. trying to make a purchase decision, you can't quickly skim through a bunch of search results any longer. Instead you are forced to sit through so much bad content that you could've previously avoided. Maybe that was their real motivation too – to boost some watchtime metrics.
B-b-b-b-b-but I've been told that some people don't look at likes/dislikes and that makes it ok! Oh well, I'm sure some product manager got their raise for removing such a useless feature
I am in the exact same quagmire trying to research water softeners and drinking water (RO) systems. I am having to pull fragments of information from many different sites / videos and having to discard large amounts of contradictory and misleading information.
At this point, I’ve had to resort to reading scientific papers on how some of these technologies work (and how some don’t work) just to avoid the bad information. Unfortunately, the more I research the farther I get from making a purchase. This is not where I want to be, however, since the water in my area is very hard and everything gets scaled up all the time. I’m looking to purchase an espresso machine to get into the hobby but I’m not going to drop the money in expensive equipment until I can get access to water which will not damage it in short order.
I had a project take me into an unfamiliar knowledge space. Up until... 2018? I could have relied on Google to find the meaningful information.
The reason people accepted Google was that it dramatically lowered information acquisition costs through the Internet. That benefit doesn't seem as common now. Back to webrings.
I bought my home water filter based on a Consumer Reports recommendation. I feel that's still a reliable source. I think you can sign up for online access for a month to do all your research.
I also really like the Wirecutter but I know not everyone here agrees with me.
Wirecutter advice seems dubiously linked to how much they can get paid by their "winners". It's not all bad advice, it often seems quite good, but it has the same corruption as top SEO blogs.
You guys had a bad time trying to search things that are at least a little complicated and obscure. I had the same experience trying to find a basic brownie recipe last week.
Recipes have somehow become one of the absolute worst parts of the internet. Google results are consistently dominated by websites that will require scrolling past multiple screens of narrative and increasingly some clicks to see the actual recipe. And when you start looking, you quickly discover that most of the time these websites are just repeating recipes from well known sources like The Joy of Cooking, or worse they have made changes that it's not clear they ever actually tested.
Same for my experience buying a furnace. Science journal articles were my best source of information, because I worried the manufacturers and installers would be biased.
I'm not sure how this could be otherwise. Who's going to pay for someone to stay current on such things and publish an easy to understand summary?
Most people’s experience with HVAC specialists comes from dealing with the technicians who install and service these systems in our homes. It turns out there’s an entire subfield of mechanical engineering dedicated to inventing, designing, and improving HVAC systems.
Wherever there are engineers, there are academics who do engineering research. They have journals of their own to publish this research.
As to the question of reviews, I’m not sure any articles actually review specific furnace models. The point of reading the papers is to educate yourself on the principles behind the technology so you can read manufacturer’s technical specifications and avoid the non-technical marketing language.
Yeah, I didn't get specific furnace models out of the articles. I was trying to decide between single-stage, two-stage, and many-stage designs. It turns out that the installers' claims about efficiency are bogus. Once you realize that you need the same number of BTUs regardless about how they're distributed, it's obvious. It's true that it might be more pleasant to have a little heat and a low fan constantly, rather than a blast periodically. In my opinion that's not worth the difference in upfront cost, increased maintenance cost, and reduced reliability.
If you are reading papers on water softeners you might already know everything this video contains. For me it was a good intro to the topic of good water for making coffee: https://youtu.be/jfElZfrmlRs
Thanks for this! James Hoffmann is how I got into the hobby. I binge watched all of his videos, including this one. But then I forgot a lot of the useful information he gives here, only remembering his frustration at the complexity of the problem. Upon second viewing I think there is some good stuff for me here.
I had been following Jim Shulman’s research which Hoffmann mentions in this video. It’s very dry and technical though and doesn’t provide much in the way of actionable advice on what equipment to purchase, instead recommending bottled water which I absolutely refuse to use (my household is already addicted to bottled water and I’m trying to break that addiction).
Ha! I was searching for the same (water softening systems) for Mexico... the amount of signal to noise ratio is so small in google, that it's mostly unusable.
Design a system of rules to rank content. Watch as highly incentivized participants work harder than everyone else to game the system to their advantage.
"But I can see these results are obviously bad, surely something can be done?". Leads to System-Amendment#5796 = Gather user feedback to alter results. Leads to highly incentivized users gaming the feedback system.
I swear there's an opportunity for an enterprising startup to create a search engine that leverages a friends/family/contacts network for consensus domain credibility, and scrubs "non-credible" domains from all results.
Would here possible go PG route and do those thing that do not scale. Meaning building very curated list and doing intedexing and searching against that eg searches for programmers(stackoverflow, github and official documentation).
This assumes the rules are black and white and there's no concept of bad faith.
A system could very well have rules/guidelines and then have humans review & monitor the system and user-submitted complaints for any abuse, and harshly penalize such abuse with a temporary or permanent ban.
It could end up in a situation where it's technically possible to gain a slight advantage by gaming the system but no participant will risk a complete ban and the system ends up working well for everyone.
I can't remember the precise reason, but if I remember correctly the reason is that because the poster is the originator in most sites including YouTube, while in Google's case it curates links instead without input from the general public. This is also the reason why Wikipedia still only officially operates in the US: the relatively freer publication rules as opposed to UK or Brazil for example shields them from a lot of lawsuits.
There exists no distinction between "publishers" and "platforms" as far as Section 230 protections from online liability goes. It's entirely decided by who produced the content: users are responsible for content that they upload, the sites hosting user-generated content are not. It doesn't matter if the site selectively promotes, or otherwise acts as a "publisher", so long as it's the user's content.
Ah yes, US laws are the only laws applicable to Google.
I should have prefaced that with "outside the United States": notably UK moves the bar to the middle, which will put Google in legal jeopardy (and libel cases!) there.
I wonder if we just would disallow affiliate links in general. I.e. you can still create your own webshop, take orders and forward to someone else (similar to dropshipping) but basically outlaw the process of collecting money/commission just for a single placement of links. Or at least, force those sites to correctly mark themselves as "Advertising".
The people doing actual, good reviews/guides also use affiliate links. Getting rid of affiliate links to get rid of the bad actors gets rid of people trying to do it right. The bad actors will have another path in within a month while the person who was run out of their honest business is left hanging.
I think affiliate links are positive for Amazon, because they crowdsource aggressive sales and marketing, but are negative for Google (and everyone else). I think if Google could somehow ban affiliate links, they would.
A second order policy problem is to design good policy to make good policy makers. Meaning that it's hard for a public company entity to codify company policy so that their people in charge of search results are not at all susceptible themselves to sliding in an advantage here or there to assist some group that they become financially enmeshed with.
I ran into the same problem when building finclout's feedback loop. In my opinion, there is no way around keyword matching for search. As a result SEO is unlikely to be preventable. However, if the feedback can be collected at scale and is actually incentivised (i.e., did this link solve your problem ? ) this might actually work.
I've also had the same problem. For a while i could get good recommendations/reviews by adding "reddit" to the query as i could find good information there, however i think that the sites have caught up on that and now i only get 1-2 results from reddit.com and then the rest are other sites that reference reddit so they are in the results.
As long as only a few people use a successful white hat trick, that trick isn’t generally worthwhile for the darker hats to combat.
So the problem isn’t so much that blog spam people will read your comment, but that many ordinary readers will start using the trick, and thus make it worthwhile for the dark hats to address.
So the unfortunate side effect of kindness in information sharing is that it decreases the value of that information.
Therefore, I don’t think there’s a practical way out of endless arms races between $good and $evil
The problem with using Reddit specifically is that you can't filter by date anymore. Reddit has poisoned their results to show old posts with new dates on Google.
Huh, I wonder, can I download reddit? Like, all the text posts, ignoring images. I wonder how big of a db that is and how hard would it be to crawl it myself. It can't be more than a few gb of data. I mean, at this point there is a lot of information there that is just begging to be leveraged.
Great tip, thanks. Funny how much i used to do google dorks (that got introduce to me in a college course), but overtime i completely forgot about them.
About the risk though: it's happened already. Remember the "to find any book free online just do "filetype:pdf book-name"" tips that were popular online a while ago? Now it's all just PDFs on public google drives with tons of book names and a single link leading to some sketchy site.
One thing what helps me getting better results is adding the keyword 'forum'. Usually still have okayish results.
Forums are nowadays the only source information not spoiled by SEO etc
I always just append the word "Reddit" to any review type searches, it's been tremendously helpful. The peer reviews on Reddit are top notch, give it a go and I bet you'll be pleased.
I'm just amazed by how many people do this. I always do this too since it seems hard to find quality content just by searching on Google. I try to search HN too sometimes like this but the crowd and topics here a lot more narrow.
This is far worse in a place like india. It’s pretty much impossible to find anything technical or product related that’s localized. The only non blogspam source often is <vomit/> quora.
For example. Most construction happening in india now uses something called M-Sand. I actually CANNOT find what the hell it is except from some company websites or random YouTubers blabbering non engineering garbage about it.
You've probably already google-fu'ed this, but its ~4mm crushed granite used as a concrete-sand substitute where granite/gneiss sand isn't available.
Most construction materials businesses sell locally by word of mouth, and if they paid for a website at all it's old and still using http. So Google drops them.
What is there to know about it? Looks like it's just sand that's produced by crushing stones in an industrial process, rather than relying on rivers to do it for you. It's probably used as an aggregate for concrete.
Could be due to the difficulty of getting sand in the region. I watched this fascinating Vice documentary about illegal sand mining in the region. I had no idea it was such a big deal.
It was really fascinating watching the Grand Tour Vietnam special on Amazon, you could see all this sand mining happening in the Mekong river, though no one commented on it.
Honestly disappointed at the documentary but curious about the topic. They kept repeating the exact same thing over and over and over again, dripping little bits of info.
I don’t blame google for this. The web is dead. Facebook and Twitter and Discord took over individual passion publishing, to the point that interesting people are forced to do hideous shit like post 30 post Twitter threads to make a point.
Even in the tech space, while exceptions like Stackoverflow targeted google as an UI, lots of content is buried in unindexed GitHub issues, etc.
At least in the past (haven't checked in years), the Amazon affiliate program rewarded the affiliate for the next purchase made (within a pretty long time window) after clicking an affiliate link, even if it's not of the product linked; so there's no downside to sending you to an arbitrary, unavailable, irrelevant product as long as you're clicking on links when you're in a shopping mode and likely to make a purchase soon.
> Repeated my search on Youtube to find reviews or unboxing. Most video search results were basically "Youtube SEO" again - the most viewed/top-ranked videos did never show a single actual print run or even the printer available. It was mostly marketing websites turned into video (slowly scrolling/moving over product description or pictures clearly taken from the web). And of course, affiliate links in the description.
This. The web would be a much better place if Netizens didn't continue to monetize garbage like MKBHD, Unbox Therapy and others that provide absolutely no value in "reviews". They're all just shills for product placement at this point. And yet these paid for commercials rack up millions of views and get pushed to the top of YouTube results whether they're of value or not. YouTube doesn't want new creators - instead they've invested in a few that push the content they want based on the advertising dollars that are rolling in. Google isn't search comparative to the early days of the web. Now it's garbage results driven by SEO hackers. A world without Google would be a much better place IMO.
In photography I have struggled to choose products, often I have to rely on my experience (e.g. it takes six months to discover that your Epson EcoTank printer makes prints that fade in six months) and specialized forums (DPReviews) You might find lightfastness rankings for some printers at
if somebody paid them to do the research otherwise you might have rely on heuristic 'pigment based inks are relatively lightfast' and that at least one other person who does similar work, has similar skills, and uses similar method gets good results. That still doesn't help with problems like '90% of instances of this Sigma lens seem to be pretty good but 10% have defective autofocus'.
I find online reviews are close to worthless because there are so many people who don't know how to use gear or have unrealistic expectations. At Best Buy I saw a review of a printer where somebody showed pictures of prints they made where they printed on the wrong side of photo paper and blamed the printer, for instance.
I find myself appending the word "forum" to a large percentage of my google queries these days, to avoid the dynamic you mentioned. This essentially filters the results for real/original content of other people that were looking for the same information as me.
Sorry but what do you expect apart from blogs and review sites? Like what’s the magical result here?
I feel like the fallacy here is assuming that the problem is that Google isn’t finding the good websites. There’s also a simple explanation that the content simply doesn’t exist.
This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro <power tool>“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon.
I think the interesting question is this: why is this happening? There’s always been a battle between Google and SEO black hats, but I can’t remember the last time it got this bad. Is Google just temporarily losing, or have they lost the will to fix this at all?
I've given up using Google or any search engine for that matter when it comes to tools purchasing decisions (other product categories too, for that matter). First use, I buy from Hazard Fright. If it gets janky on first use or wears out with enough use, I search in the forums where the trades hang out in discussing what they use, wince while reaching into my wallet, and pay for a built-for-business grade tool. There are a few YouTube channels I refer to as well (examples are Project Farm and Mike Festiva) for tools and consumables recommendations.
I always observe what tools trades carry when they work on my properties, and chat with them over the drinks and snacks I offer them, on what they like and don't like. That figures heavily into my decisions.
Google's main purpose these days for me is non-mainstream, far niche searches. I've taken to looking into deploying my own ArchiveBox to just store my own curated search results that I like. When I initially noticed the SEO spam around 20 years ago, I began to prepare for it by manually saving into text files the page links off of search results that I used, and that has helped me a lot. Ironically, I'm building my own personal Yahoo Directory. I don't see any solution on the horizon to SEO pollution getting better, so I want to scale up my solution.
> This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro <power tool>“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon.
> Most video search results were basically "Youtube SEO" again
And the removal of the "Dislike" count so that you too can avoid non-informative content i.e. unbox spam, just furthers how shit this situation is getting.
Giving Google more data about yourself will help. Improve relevance and Google revenues.
Online advertising will make Google better and that will make you and the world better, too. Therefore, always support online advertising in every way you can.
Look for the helpful crafting printer ads (after you purchase a crafting printer).
> Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This product is currently not available" sites.
This should not be considered "especially sad" in my view. It would be worse if these links worked, thus generating additional revenue for these "web players" (pun intended).
The problem is, they do. Once I clicked the link, all my purchases in the next 24h will be credited to the affiliate. They are incentivised not to remove content about products that are no longer manufactured.
Right, but the majority of folks on here squeal when consumer reports or wirecutter want to be paid for their recommendations. Buying the devices, comparing them, etc all cost money, and refusing to pay inevitably leads to the state we're in...
I don't have a solution for this; I just think we're in the exact state we would expect.
I don't mind paying for my subscription, just like I don't mind donating to Firefox and Signal. But I get that I'm probably in the minority for that. I try to put my money where my mouth is, and not the other way around!
Consumer reports vehicle recommendations and sales process is just an affiliate scam like wire cutter. Same with Costco's vehicle sales program now. I think they use the same back end. That basically is an affiliate program. They give your contact info to tons of dealers who call you with prices higher than what they have on their lots listed.
Do a google image search for a strawberry. See how long it takes you to find actual pictures of strawberries that arn't from ecom sites and/or stock photos. I ran into this problem because I wanted to train an AI to recognize a strawberry.
Also note, probably none of these are actual strawberries. they are probably fake plastic representations for sales
I've found that searching for a subreddit related to whatever hobby is a fine way to go. People are showing off their creations & results and chatting about recommendations for equipment & techniques.
The "front door" of the Web has become the gift shop. It's time to find another way in :-)
Seibel doesn't seem to understand how affiliate ads work either, Google doesn't make money from them. Google would be better off just applying a ranking penalty for any page that has numerous Amazon affiliate links. 99% of dedicated affiliate sites are trash
Or at least allow us to block them in the search settings, but Google shows zero interest in doing so. Just as they do not want to have a flag "do not show paywalled content" which is often asked for.
I've also noticed something similar when researching mobile phones. Device pages that are clearly automatically created with poor and often nonsensical sentences and repition created by some script. And ranking top of Google. Similarly on YouTube videos that are collection of still images with robot voice reading clearly copy texts with almost zero original content. Again ranking near the top for a topic.
I'm just imagining this rule meaning the only printer you can buy is the one from Office Space. Beating the crap out of a machine counts as tearing it down, right?
This is something I have a problem with as well. Search results typically include the first five results being paid ads.
Everything else for the first couple pages are typically review sites that are not really reviews.
YouTube isn’t much better.
I’m trying to addresss this in my own way by making long term product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people and companies did the same thing.
> I’m trying to addresss this in my own way by making long term product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people and companies did the same thing.
When I do product research I generally search for whatever the enthusiast community lives and usually there are guides there. Blogs are exactly as you describe, either built in ads or useless.
For common items it's kinda difficult, but still possible! (Printers had a pretty active subreddit/community for example.)
yup, I was compiling a wish list and searched for a list of good programming books and ran into the same issue. any website that promises a "list" like "top 10 programming books" is usually affiliate spam, with poor recommendations and grammatical errors
That's true. At least YT is still better than generic WWW search when you are looking for some specific model or some DIY technique. It's still harder to make a SEO-optimized video than a webpage.
I have Brother printer, full can of paint and sensor saying that is empty, I cannot do anything with it, and that is just one in long list of issues I had with printer...
It's not just Google---the World Wide Web itself is rapidly becoming a defunct protocol, the culmination of a decades-long shift in the Internet's center of mass away from browsers and towards centralized and commercialized apps---from personal web pages to LinkedIn/GitHub/Twitter handles, from the ubiquitous WordPress blogs to YouTube videos and Medium posts, and from forums to Tweets and subreddits.
The useful information on the Web is now concentrated in a few places---Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, etc. When I want reasonable search results, I search there instead of the Web as a whole. (And even many of these services are in the late stages of the Silicon Valley life cycle---desperate monetization and engagement-increasing gimmicks---with uncertain futures.)
Wikipedia, bless its heart, lurches on as a cathedral to early Web's dream of information democratization. It stands as a wonder of the ancient world: incomplete, built from technology few now understand, and reflecting values and priorities that no longer quite align with contemporary culture. But it persists thanks to its inertia and the undeniable sense of awe it invokes even today.
Now you’re just being dramatic. I’d review the whole comment and de-dramatize it.
Yes the web has changed and most Forums are dead, but it doesn’t mean change is not possible. Blogs are still a thing, even if you get to them through Twitter.
The issue stems from Google rewarding junk and people wanting to monetize their content. Couple the two and you have lengthy BS lost in ads, while short clean content is lost on page 59 – but it’s there.
Maybe it's just me and my English comprehension, but way too often I am left thinking comments on HN have become a sport of dramatization and usage of thesaurus
Back in the day I both edited Wikipedia and helped maintain a MediaWiki installation. I found learning wiki markup (and the subtleties of the template engine in particular) quite challenging on the frontend, and the backend was even worse.
The inaccessibility of the software is (was?) widely acknowledged as a significant barrier to new contributors by the project itself. I didn’t think this was especially dramatic or controversial.
Agreed; Slack search is next to useless for me as well.
However, what is meant here is that content in Discord isn't reachable via search engines such as Google. Whole communities are invisible to traditional search indexing and only reachable through either a special client or an API, both of which require an account and empower gatekeepers.
Wikipedia is also suffering under the issues of "moderation." The original web was based on the idea of "throw your crap up, if people like it they do if not they don't." Evaluation both the content and the credibility of content on the net was up to the viewer. Adding moderators apart from the original authors and viewers, especially when those moderators are at an integration level (be it wikipedia, twitter, google, etc) is in direct opposition to that original ethos.
Actually, Wikipedia has similar issues to Google SEO spam, in the sense you now have people who pay marketing firms for articles to be written on themselves/their company. These articles, unsurprisingly, often infringe core policies like maintaining a neutral point of view.
With respect, I don't think the problem is as bad as you suggest. Some pretty awful articles have survived deletion processes so long as they are on a notable topic.
It's interesting how some Wikipedia articles are carefully fact checked and other articles at the same notability level were clearly written by PR hacks. I do my part when I find the latter. I remember going back and forth with someone from Theranos who tried to insert really promotional stuff into their article years ago. Guess I got the last laugh there.
I read this quite often on HN, but my experience is quite different: English Wikipedia pages are amazing for learning about some scientific or historical thing or when I want to understand something. Even with political things it tries to describe the controversies without being too judgemental (which is really hard to balance out).
It depends heavily on the page. I can personally provide an example of the "Men's rights movement" page. I used to be heavily involved in the movement with regards to parental custody. At least a decade ago, ideological moderators began applying extremely high standards for the page. Whole sections were removed and re-written. Their argument was that "these are the rules," and while technically true, the rules are diverse and opaque. They can be applied in many ways, depending on one's ideological alignment. I encourage you to take a look at the above page, and then contrast it with "Feminism." You'll notice a distinct difference to the breadth of content, the standard for citation, and especially the tone. For example, in the second paragraph on the "Men's rights movement" introduction, moderators have added an entire paragraph of criticism. You'll see no comparable criticism on the "Feminism" page in the introduction. More recently they added a "Not to be confused with the pro-feminist Men's liberation movement" at the very tippy top of the page to try to move traffic towards a feminist friendly page. No such suggestion appears on the "Feminism" page.
I could provide endless commentary on this example, but suffice it to say, it is very difficult to look at this comparison and rationally argue no moderation bias exists. Now consider that this is just one tiny corner of the site. This is happening to millions of pages. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder, has been very vocal about its political bias. I, for one, believe him.
Even straightforward situations are frustrated by what is a broken process. There was an article for a black WWII pilot - the only black pilot from the war to be designated an ace - whose article was under constant attack by a particular user. The pilot's fifth kill originally been split between himself and another pilot, but a later investigation had awarded him full credit. In any case, the AF had honored him as an ace at some point before he died, and it was covered prominently in his obituary. Well, this user - a researcher who also worked to "debunk" myths about the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen - was adamant that the pilot did not have enough kills to be designated an ace. He cited work that had gone back to the original war-time records (before the reinvestigation). The author of this research? Him.
The article is so small, though, and on a topic unsympathetic to the largely white and male editor base, that flagrant original research doesn't register.
Thanks, I read it, and sure, with so many citatitions and edits the page gets extremely boring. Also I see some forced changes that are very clear part of the feminist propaganda: I don’t believe that false rape allegations are under 4%, as it would mean 20 real rapes for every person who just goes to the police because she can.
I had an experience a few years ago when a teenage girl was having consensual sex with me on a party in her room, but she didn’t like the sex, so she just casually told me that I have to put my clothes on fast and get out of the room (so that she can have sex with another guy), or else she goes to the police and tells them that I raped her. At that time I believed that it would be impossible to get me into prison for something I have not done, but the ease of how she said it scared me: the incentives against false reporting are clearly missing.
I can understand GP's interest in parental custody. That's an incredibly difficult issue that almost always ends in heartbreak for someone. Your claim is... different. People falsely claim to have been raped far far FAR less often than they don't report actually having been raped. If anything, the incentives should be realigned to encourage the reporting of sexual assault.
Only to find he's not notable enough for an entry. There isn't an article in a "reliable" source about him, so he doesn't exist as far as the club that now manages Wikipedia is concerned. I wasted about an hour seeing if there was something applicable I could add, but to no avail, as Google failed me.
This is hilariously pedantic. For one thing it would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Fridman and this person isn’t all that popular. If you think he deserves a page create one
Google was still useful for things that are non-marketable. But in the last year or so, I have started to realize how awfully bad has gotten even at that.
Case in point: Open source mailing list archives. For various reasons, some times I have to search for entire email threads that are available in the web interfaces of some mailing list archives. I have part of a phrase of some email, I put that into google with quotes, and it returns some results, usually with the main archive being in the first results. In the last year or so, Google has started returning no results for some phrases of emails that do exist and are available in one or more public archives.
When that started to happen, I tried Bing. And Bing returns results with links to archive. So does duckduckgo most times. But for Google, it's like if that particular email I'm searching at that moment didn't exist (for other emails in the same mailing list it works fine). It only happens occasionally, but it's getting worse. So I have started to rely on DDG and Bing more and more, because they always find what I want.
So Google is starting to fail at some of the most basic aspects of a search engine, it's not just the ordering of the search results - there are some public web pages that it won't see for whatever reason.
One thing I learned from the unreliability of Google search is that we should not rely on an external service to organize our information. No matter the service, it will change in some way, and you will lose access to some information.
Why are browsers so forgetful? Local text search is an easy problem at single-user scale.
I am working on a browser extension to automatically grab text (visible phrases) from the pages I am reading in the browser, save them to my index and implement search. I want to always be able to recall anything I see. In order to match texts I will use neural embeddings computed with a pretrained Huggingface model, fast enough even on CPU.
An alternative way to implement this would be to take screenshots every few seconds (only after recent user interaction). Then I can OCR the images and search anything that passed on the screen, in any app.
It's as if I become the Google Bot responsible with exploration and filtering of potentially useful data.
In the future I might be able to use my index for neural question answering, add a voice interface to my data.
Of course the local index could work for images too. You can grab images and embed them with CLIP to get Google Photos like semantic search.
I think web browsers are going to morph into personal internet agents, responsible with logging, searching, interfacing with external APIs and services, filtering ads, news and mail, making sure we don't accidentally leak personal information, etc. In other words AI that works for the user, locally.
"I think web browsers are going to morph into personal internet agents, responsible with logging, searching, interfacing with external APIs and services, filtering ads, news and mail, making sure we don't accidentally leak personal information"
And you think that will happen, while the browsers are still mostly add funded?
But I am with you, that this is a change, I want to see, too.
There is an extension for Firefox (Memex Go?) that attempts something very similar and succeeds to a large degree.
I think I sponsored it for a year or something by paying for it even though I didn't use it much but I must have used it to some degree because on one or more of my machines it injects interesting results from my earlier browsing when I search in DDG (or was it Google?) at least.
I'm really impressed how far they've taken this idea even as Mozilla has simultaneously been busy dismantling the extension API that made Firefox great.
Agreed. "Indexing the world's information" sounds like something that can't go wrong.
It's only in the last year of trying to index and organize information within my own company that whoever controls the index holds a _lot_ of power to index it poorly.
Well there are semantic web concepts, and there are concepts like a searchable information graph. I read a really good article on this site a few days ago laying out a pretty good architecture for searching a distributed knowledge graph.
The core problem is a disconnect between the knowledge available on the internet and search tools. Indexing is a stop gap to enable the web to be usable without solving this problem, but it is becoming untenable and was always known to be non viable, just treated as a problem for another day. The sheer amount of information online and its disorganization, as well as the misaligned incentives of search tools are beginning to make this once far away manageable problem a day to day reality for all of us, the solution requires an architectural change to the way information is stored and accessed and updated online.
Do you have any idea of what that solution might look like? The existence of a problem doesn't mean that there necessarily exists a better alternative.
I for one am grateful that some of my worst mailing list accidents (like accidentally sending a privately intended message to a mailing list, rather then an individual email address) are starting to disappear from Google’s relentless claws.
Likewise, I constantly find that google won't turn up mailing lists posts and forum posts even when I have a fragment to search for exactly.
Some investigation seemed to suggest they were hard excluding any page which hadn't changed in ~5 years.
I have to wonder if the poor behavior from google doesn't come from automatically a/b testing behavior changes against advertising revenue. Up to the point that you make users give up completely giving worse results will result in more search traffic...
>Some investigation seemed to suggest they were hard excluding any page which hadn't changed in ~5 years.
I had another hypothesis: that they exclude pages which have no backlinks from other websites, and at the same time are hard to reach from front page of the website they are on. It seems old unpopular mailing lists posts and forum posts are exactly like that.
Blacklisting non advertisable media from the index. That's news to me. Hmm.
Why? Cost savings? Missing hard dependency on marketing ops knowhow? Utter domination of non-marketing material? Forcing experienced privacy-conscious users to a different platform to reduce bad media coverage?
At this point I cannot be alone in thinking that what we are seeing is a runaway AI system?
Let me just speculate wildly here:
Seems no-ones Google is the same and how do one manage approximately 4 billion [1] a/b/c/etc experiments if not using artificial intelligence and reinforcement?
Now imagine 4 billion agents ("monkeys") who flip bits everywhere and every time one of them is unusually successful that pattern is reinforced across a part of the "population" of agents.
Every time one of them does something particularly stupid Google relies on users to report an error and swaps out that agent. (This explains why if you report an error in search it appears to magically be fixed 15 minutes later.)
Let's say this has been running since way before 2008 and 2008 just happened to be the time it got completely out of hand:
Mostly it works very well economically speaking but search quality suffers year by year and no one can do anything about it since by now so many optimizations have been applied that for a decade no single human has been able to really understand it.
The AI - using end to end optimization techniques - learns to prioritize ad-heavy sites (since thise are more likely to result in positive reinforcement in the form of juicy ad impressions or clicks) and sites that doesn't really answer the question (since that brings the user back to Google for a new chance to serve ads both in search results and on other high ranking pages.)
In the same manner the system learns to avoid easily understood clean pages without ads as that means game over for this query.
By now everyone who knows anything about it sees that it broken but nobody dares to fix it since that would result in a massive revenue loss.
I've been playing around with you.com after someone mentioned on HN. I dig the layout/quality of results. It's kind of interesting to have it feel like you're netflixing your search results by source (reddit, stack overflow, etc.) I'm still toggling back and forth on you to google because i feel like i might miss out something. Surprisingly some the results have exceeded my expectations. We'll see.
The site isn’t laggy for me on an ipad7, as for disabled js I don’t see the point anymore this is like trying to load webpages without css or html at this point.
The side scrolling is nice, but when searching some code related question it doesn't show useful results. Even the Code Complete snippets aren't displayed in a readable way, lines are too short, and the language highlight is not recognized (every script is python by default?).
Thanks for mentioning it since I'm creating a snippet search engine and wanted some competitors to compare.
It's hard to compete with Google. Back when Google started, you could fit the world wide web on a single computer. Today you can only really get started the same way Google did if you focus on an unfancy subset of the web that hasn't been react'd and wasm'd into exabytes of opacity. https://wiby.org/ does it I think by refusing to index any HTML page that has <script> tags. Websites like https://millionshort.com/ provide pretty nice results sometimes, but I don't think they actually index the web on their own; they probably use the Bing or Google API on the backend. With million short if I want bike reviews for example, I get the authentic blog posts from 2010 with amazon affiliate links to bike listings that are no longer being sold lol.
The problem is I don't think the Wiby model (rejecting JavaScript) or the MillionShort model (rejecting popularity) have done a good job capturing what we loved most about the old web and systematizing its curation. There's definitely an opportunity for someone to come along and create a focused niche alternative that's better.
One way I suppose it could be done, is if you convinced a bunch of trustworthy high status trendsetter type people to subscribe to a paid service with a browser toolbar that lets them click a button for each website they visit to say "I like this" or "I dislike this" and then use that information to train a neural network that divides seo spam from content. Mix that with classic page rank and you might have something good. I'm not sure if it'd ever appeal to a more general public audience though.
Anyone who does it is also going to want to make a deal with the archive.org to somehow get a snapshot of the old web, to recreate those original experiments. Or possibly even resurrect an old build of it. Plus Gutenberg. There's enough content from 2005 web alone and all the books published before to last anyone several lifetimes. That's actually one of Google's blind spots. They're so good at up-to-the-minute indexing of current events that sometimes if you just want to get the text to something like Seneca it's like pulling teeth.
We don't appear to have any of those pages or anything relevant indexed. We'll look into whether these lyric sites have put up some barriers to crawling. If they are big sites we won't have crawled and indexed many of their pages.
When someone need to know the weather or a sports score they usually just ask Siri or Alexa. If they want to do product research most people go to Amazon. Google search is now below 50% and still falling.
Think about it. You want to buy a coffee maker. What is the first site you go? It is probably not Google.
Amazon has a horrible review scam policy. It's okay by Amazon policy for sellers to pay people to remove their bad reviews.
Being highly rated on Amazon is so valuable, that there are whole industries on making sure your reviews are high, including all sorts of malicious review hijacking.
> What does it mean that you’re in “private beta”?
While we're in private beta, we don't feel like our vision is fully realized and ready for prime time
> How much will Kagi cost?
Kagi will be completely free during the beta-test period for all users. Once we officially launch, we plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, ...
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
Ive wanted to share this similar sentiment but I had no idea where! Google search results are terrible lately. I'm frustrated by it. Im not sure how I feel about his categories though.
I have mixed opinions on recipes. The recipes that do show up are generally not great and seem to be there because of seo. And seo is really ruining the recipes pages them selves (extra content, misleading cook times) At the same time I don't really expect google searches to be a curator of good recipes. There is to much taste involved I think. But reputable site like serious eats almost never show up in results unless I search for it.
Health is a big topic, but health has been full of snake oils salesmens forever too, so its not surprising. You should probably talk with a doctor in most cases anyway?
Going on google for anything related to illegal drug use is a pita, it just brings you too like addiction sites and other useless info ime.
I also don't think that people are creating websites anymore? Where is there supposed to be info for the search engine to crawl? All real user content is on reddit, instagram, twitter and youtube. Maybe medium sometimes. All of that is easier for people to set up but not really set up for search engine to include as a good result. Instagram and twitter are especially bad, black holes of information.
For better or for worse, I usually use google to search to search reddit, then i can at least get some better starting point and return back to google with better terms. I don't really like this because reddit is a bit of a echo chamber.
Ive also stopped trusting searches in fields Im not familiar with because I know how bad the results are in fields I am familiar with. But i don't really know where else to go.
> I don't really expect google searches to be a curator of good recipes
I don't expect Google (or any automated service) to be able to rank recipes from a culinary point of view. I absolutely expect Google to be able to detect someone's SEO life story bullshit at the top of a recipe and penalize that for ranking purposes.
And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard, the presence of ads or other marketing-style element is usually a good proxy for weeding out shitty commercial content.
> Health is a big topic, but health has been full of snake oils salesmens forever too, so its not surprising
Most countries have national health services that have no (or at the very least less) bias to sell you something. Given the amount of these is finite, a list of their domains can be manually maintained to boost their results and outrank the other garbage.
> I know how bad the results are in fields I am familiar with. But i don't really know where else to go.
Same here unfortunately and I have yet to find a solution.
SEO is not the reason recipes have life stories, the reason is that the life story part of the recipe adds copyright protection because the story is a "substantial literary expression". Recipes by themselves are not copyright-able as they are considered to be basic facts/ideas.
And Google won't penalize these sites because these sites are useful and contain useful recipes that many people want to find despite your particular annoyances you have about it. I do not want a search engine that filters out all these recipes.
Why would including a story with a recipe make a non-copyrightable recipe copyrightable?
Every recipe I can find on Google that isn't from a super-site with already strong SEO includes some sort of life anecdote. I find it hard to believe that:
1) This purported copyright trick even works, and
2) Everyone who publishes recipes online got the copyright trick memo, and
3) Everyone who publishes recipes online is interested in copyrighting their recipes as opposed to just having good ad revenue
I find it much easier to believe one of the following:
1) The life story section significantly improves SEO somehow, even if incidental. I'm not saying Google rewards life stories, but somehow there is a mechanism there that improves SEO, and people have cottoned on. Every recipe you're going find on Google has strong SEO, and hence every recipe you find has an SEO-improving life story attached to it.
2) Food bloggers include the stories for differentiation, to "build a stronger connection with their audience", and once a couple big ones started doing it, the rest followed.
Copyright law expressly does not cover recipes, because recipes are instructions on how to make a known product, and no lawmaking institution wants to criminalize Grandma copying a box recipe and giving it to her children and grandkids.
Photos and anecdotes are the common mechanisms used to make the recipe content copyrightable. Even physical cookbooks have these; they just seem longer on websites, because the format lends itself to more text-heavy presentation than a book, which normally has a full-page photo on one side and the recipe/short anecdote blurb on the other.
> A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Note that if you have secret ingredients to a recipe that you do not wish to be revealed, you should not submit your recipe for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records. See Circular 33, Works Not Protected by Copyright.
And here is the relevant court case, Publications International, Ltd. vs Meredith Corp. with the legal criteria:
> In addition, nothing in our decision today runs counter to the proposition that certain recipes may be copyrightable. There are cookbooks in which the authors lace their directions for producing dishes with musings about the spiritual nature of cooking or reminiscences they associate with the wafting odors of certain dishes in various stages of preparation. Cooking experts may include in a recipe suggestions for presentation, advice on wines to go with the meal, or hints on place settings and appropriate music. In other cases, recipes may be accompanied by tales of their historical or ethnic origin.
I suspect the "Recipe Life Story" nonsense was sparked by a highly-publicised (in SEO circles) study several years ago, which claimed the average #1 result in SERPs contained ~2000 words. This started a race to make every web page much longer than it needed to be. The obvious way to pad out a recipe is to add a phony, rambling life story to it.
Several Google updates later (and after much SEO-driven copycatting), it's difficult to crack the top 10 without ~1500 words of nonsense before the recipe.
> And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard...
I took the opposite approach in my browser extension, detecting if a recipe is on the page and cloning it to the top of the page. I suppose you could add an accumulator to see how much visible text is on the page outside the recipe on pages where recipes are present to see the distribution of signal:noise. I'd be very interested in the results of a large-scale survey like that!
The obvious success formula IMHO would be to have a file format for recipes (with a wrapper file format) and display those as search results under a "recipes search" tab. (The user picks his own tabs)
Then, like news results, the results have to be parsed and combined so that there is one main trend for mashed potatoes & gravy with creative alternatives presented in a beautiful crafted UI for the specific purpose that is cooking. One then elects to add the raisins and the cheese and stores this new combination some place private or public under a user name (possibly with pictures, the beef foo bar, soup and desert served with it) for future reference. If the raisins are a wonderful or terrible idea the rating can be merged into the mashed potato search result.
Just lately? I've had the feeling Google search results have been terrible for years now.
Someone should really build a better search engine, and preferably one that gives the user more control.
Although frankly it's baffling that Google hasn't implemented some sort of up/downvoting on search results. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing they would love.
I'm not sure the recipes are entirely google's fault. There are jerks which are mechanically generating infinity recipes and polluting the internet with them. Resulting in non-viable recipes that no one has ever made and cannot possibly work. It's not even a matter of taste, the results are mostly just nonsense.
Thats not really my issue with them. its site like all recipes is always in the top, or the same few websites always dominate results and that low quality recipes are in the top because they seem to game the system by doing that. the 1st result for me for pad thai recipes is a recipe that includes bell peppers and peanut butter.
A while ago I was doing research on guitar products.
I did what I usually do, open the first 6-7 websites in google, look at the quality of the website, and made a call which one looked the most reputable.
Only, here is the thing: All of the websites had different names. They had different domains. But, they were all very... similar. And then I started to compare them, and I came to a realization:
They are the same website, with the same content, with a different domain and slightly tweaked front-end. SEO has hit so rock-bottom, it is no longer good enough to be number one. You have to be number 1 - 10.
Similar story researching fishing equipment. Different domain. Same website. Same 10 products.
In both cases, I found a discord server and asked the enthusiasts on there for advice.
I notice this a lot - when I'm search for information on a specific topic, or discussion around a specific error message from a library, there's several sites that scrape someone else's content for the purposes of displaying ads, and google doesn't always do a great job of delisting them.
The other thing I hate is "top 10" lists or "is x healthy" articles etc made by a writer who has to churn out x number of articles a day. They end up doing no more than surface-level research on said topic, the site or blog makes money from ads or referral links, and I waste a minute in figuring out that the blog is low quality.
Online ads have had such a negative impact on the quality of web content.
For non-English content, it's similar, with auto-generated Google Translated trash content treated as more relevant than content originally written in the same language.
I used to struggle sometimes with DuckDuckGo but 90% of the time it now serves the same or better quality results.
Yep. I lookup advice on things, find links to forums and discussion threads... the next search result is a different site with all the content from the previous site ripped off and filled into a new site template with different ads. And this is discussion threads!!
once upon a time there was a discussions filter/tab on Google and it was invaluable for researching products, places and things. Google got rid of the feature a long time ago and it's all optimized for SEO spam or Ads.
Discussions and forums have also been declining, as their discoverability has decreased dramatically due to SEO spam optimizations
I notice this in car parts, 5 different websites all with the same catalogue. I think it's also how a lot of "influencers" start online stores. It's their face and brand but it's not their catalogue or inventory.
> it is no longer good enough to be number one. You have to be number 1 - 10.
I don't blame them, a lot of online store's business model hinges almost entirely on SEO, and Google can change their ranking overnight for just about any kind of arbitrary decision on ranking signals. Building in some redundancy is a smart move, but it's a pretty big red flag that the ecosystem and incentives are all twisted up.
This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1 spot means x% of market share, so a perfectly legitimate strategy is duplicate your entire hardware 5x, since now you're not 1/10th of the leading edge, you're 5/15 instead. Especially when the costs of spinning up a new instance are low, but you're going a lot via a small increase in share.
Day one of "writing a reasonable search engine" would be to kill sitespam, no? Any time you see N sites with the same or very similar content, you should assume immediately drop the rank of all but a small slice at the top. You can choose to keep the one with most trusted incoming link (regular pagerank) but also you could just trust the oldest one in your index!
For example: there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites. They just post the SO answers with their own ads. But I don't want that site. So how on earth can Google show the clone sites on top of the true StackOverflow?
You'd think they have systems in place with hundreds of thousands of canary queries and "known expected rankings" such that IF one of the fraud sites manage to trick their system, they can just swiftly patch it to restore order and bury the clone sites after page 100. But no.
Here I took a random SO post and searched for a sentence in an answer. This result is in the top 5 results (in this case the real SO result was above - but not rarely the impostor sites are above)
I think it depends on location, browser config and other things. As a another comment said, I generally get SO pages at top, but these pages with same title appear next. I thought they were different forums where there were different answers but they were just SO clones.
I just did a search for a python problem and got a stackoverflow clone on the front page. From a few different searches I found a clone with most of them. They weren't at the top, usually after 5th place. I've also seen sites that have just copied github issue posts.
Not OP, but you can replicate probably very well by just copying any sentence from an SO question and pasting it into google. You will find duplicates. If not, try find a more unique sentence in that question/answer, especially with a weird way of speaking. In my example below, the tell was that legitimate NLP re-writes of the question didn't include "and do what ever you want", so including it found lots of clones.
They are being intelligent now and using NLP to mix-up the content, but it's very much the same question or answers, or just the answers, or some variation of the two, or made to look like a forum with SO comments as forum replies, etc. Most of it is non-nonsensical if you try understand it.
That was just what I could glance from the preview and all on the first google hits page.
I 100% guarantee that if you wacked 95% of the above domains and forever banned whoever registered them legitimately from the web forever that you'd make the web a better place.
Googling "What you can do is set the FormBorderStyle property to None and do what ever you want with the form using GDI" gives me only 5 clones on the first page and 4 of them are blocked by uBlacklist. The stackoverflow result is above the clones.
Yes, it costs you $5 to run a website so just run tonnes of them and hope 1 wins. Or $500 to run a trading system, but the difference between payoffN/T and payoffN+1/T+1 is greater than 500. Assuming obviously that you have a trading system that is more or less as good as everyone else’s and N is the number of systems you’re running and T is the number of systems in the market
I've seen that sort of thing a lot too over the past decade or so. These content farms aren't new, but still surprising. I can't imagine Google likes them, and they seem trivial to prevent: just compare the contents, and only show the best/most popular/most reputable site.
I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I've come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to blame. It's just that there isn't any good quality information on the web anymore. Google does its best, but it's working with crappy data. No one wants to spend time and effort making a great website about <insert literally any topic here> unless they're in it for the money. That means Google will only ever return blogspam, affiliate websites, and SEO-optimized ecommerce websites for practically any search now. This is in contrast to the good old days when people made websites for fun and searches actually found the high quality content that was out there. These days searches don't find quality content because, on the whole, it doesn't exist.
This isn't universally true of course. There is some good content. But it's never what you're searching for; it's only good when you stumble across it, or you find a link on HN/Reddit/etc. It's just interesting rather than specifically good or useful.
To an extent Google is to blame because AdSense and DoubleClick drove the shift from people publishing what they love to people publishing for dollars, but, and this is somewhat cynical I know, I genuinely wonder if we're actually on the brink of realising the web as a publishing platform just isn't that great.
> I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I've come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to blame.
I don't know about that, at least in the realm of programming-related searches. It's ridiculously frustrating when I'm searching for a standard library function and the top 3 results are geeksforgeeks, w3schools, and tutorialspoint, while the canonical documentation for the language is only 4th or 5th in the results.
I’ve been doing this for a while, and it’s a neat trick. I noticed the same uptick in stackoverflow clones recently as some other commenters here have, and quickly blocked them too via this method.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that the blocking happens client-side, and that these spam results often end up taking up multiple results slots. This means that sometimes you will get an empty or close-to-empty Google results page.
Ideally, I’d like to be able to configure Google itself to never return me results from particular domains instead.
I disagree with the notion that good quality content just doesn't exist anymore. Quality content will always exist and more quality content exists now on the internet than ever before now that it's become more accessible to more people than ever, but Google, Facebook, and Amazon have made this content more difficult to discover because their algorithms reward gamification with profit, incentivizing the production of high-volume and low-quality but highly-optimized content.
People passionate about sharing and learning will always be driven to produce quality content, even if they don't have an audience. The issue is that Google will never discover these people because they're only interested in discovering the best marketers on the internet.
People passionate about sharing and learning will always be driven to produce quality content, even if they don't have an audience.
Those people moved to content websites like YouTube and Udemy where they can cash in on what they do. They don't make websites any more, so Google doesn't find links to them.
While cash is probably some component of it, it's a lot more difficult today to make a professional looking 'modern' website than it was 20 years ago. Conversely, it's a lot easier to make and edit a professional looking video for YouTube than it was 20 years ago. Video will win out when it's the easiest solution.
Google indexes and returns links to YouTube videos for queries now and will even point you to the relevant part if the video uses chapters.
> it's a lot more difficult today to make a professional looking 'modern' website than it was 20 years ago
STRONGLY disagree. Wordpress is plenty professional looking and modern, and makes it dead simple to find a hosting service, create a site, choose a theme, and start writing content.
From the technical end, absolutely, way easier. From the design end, definitely not. Compare Nintendo's website in 2002[0] and today. Blue's News hasn't really changed layout in a long time and it looks substantially different than a more modern style like IGN which is much more difficult to reproduce.
I can take a video with my phone and upload it to YouTube from my phone. My phone camera can work surprisingly well in poor lighting conditions. I can spend < $100 dollars and get a couple of cheap ring lights and improve the lighting massively. If I wanted to make a spoof news show, I'd just need OBS and a good webcam or a cheap DSLR now. Way easier than in 2002 where I'd need a Video Toaster and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment.
It's true that we're drowning in shit, but at the same time there has never been more useful content online. Google is just incapable of ranking it, or it doesn't suit their financial interests.
> I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I've come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to blame. It's just that there isn't any good quality information on the web anymore.
Have you tried marginalia and kagi?
If not, come back after you have tried.
Until I tried those I could have thought you were possibly right.
After testing those I am again confident it is just Google and DuckDuckGo.com who fails, which has been my position since a decade or so ago.
Yeah much of the quality content for recipes and product reviews have moved to video, and two of the most popular platforms to host it on (Instagram and TikTok) are walled gardens.
Really? I am immediately skeptical of random influencer recommendations especially on social media, its slightly better on youtube where respected creators/reviewers are transparent about sponsorships to maintain their credibility
There is good content, it just never shows up in search results. So yes, I blame Google. Their ability to ban obvious spam / copycat content is laughably bad.
It's impossible to get accurate information about travel, hotels, locations. Results are often filled with listicle crap that each copy each other and contain outdated pop content.
I've become so used to suffixing these queries with "forum" or "reddit" to get articles written by real humans.
A funny thing is that the spammers are adapting to this. I found a bunch of websites that all had "reddit" in the title a while back, because that is something people add to filter out the spam.
Companies are adapting to this too - marketers are increasingly purchasing or grooming high-rep accounts for astroturfing select subreddits related to company products
There's been a influx of "memes" that just say things like "when you buy new sunglasses from x.com" and it's just a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio making a face. My own friends repost these things on social media because they are "funny". Not only do people not see problem, they literally see ads as worthy of being reshared.
Yes, companies on Reddit have learned to use memes to promote their product organically on that site. And if a meme is particularly good, soon you have unaffiliated users happily parroting it, just like that "Hotel? T***" which I've seen mentioned so many times on that site from random users.
Or just have a memelord managing your Twitter, and soon your latest funny post will find its place all over the internet. I have never eaten at Wendy's in my life nor stepped on US soil once, yet I have seen their "memes" dozens of times.
They don't, honestly this stuff goes to the top and its been this way for a long long time. Any niche interest subreddit that has gear or products has a sidebar with some stuff that's ordained by the moderation team to be "The best X for Y" and therefore incessantly recommended in the comments and all over the subreddit. Sometimes you will even see metathreads where the users are complaining about the recommendations listed in the subreddit's official wiki or faq page.
It's both, I think. If the goal is to find high quality items survivor bias can definitely interfere with the results. The items must survive long enough to count as something you can use "for life" and it's possible, even likely, that they only survived due to low use or extraordinary care.
At reddit they decided that you should not have to option to restrict your search to a specific subreddit anymore. Why they did that? It's a terrible idea!
I had no idea others have begun resorting to this as well these days. My assumption was that I had just somehow gotten worse/impatient at researching things or that reddit was just a more reliable source these days. Thinking back, may search quality has just gotten wrose.
Seems like we need a search engine for trusted sites, something like MetaCrawler that searches more specialized search engines. There are some sites I trust for travel information. There are other sites I trust for reviews of consumer products and others for movies.
I've made a custom search in Chrome with the "r" hotkey, that searches Reddit in the past year. Sites are also starting to just fake the dates so I'm getting really old results on regular. This takes care of both:
One useful feature I use before visiting new places is sorting Google Maps reviews and photos by date. I've found Google Maps comments more accurate than TripAdvisor or Airbnb.
The problem with that is it redirects you to the Reddit search page, which isn't great. It's much better for me to use "site:reddit.com [query]" on DDG than to use the !r.
Reddit is a great place to get recommended the most expensive stuff. 99% of the time the best sellers on Amazon work great for me, but if I look at Reddit they insist only a couple very expensive brands are worth owning in any category of item. It's crazy and sometimes I even fall for it. Can't tell if it's marketing or if people very into their hobbies become obsessed with tiny differences.
I find that's true in specialised subs, but not wider ones. Like, if you're looking for a good coffee grinder, r/coffee will only recommend the top-end stuff, but if you search in something r/AskReddit you get more 'approachable' results.
They are correct for coffee grinders though, it's almost pointless to cheap out of them, you negate all the benefits of grinding it yourself when you buy a subpar non-burr grinder that doesn't produce a consistent grain size.
Buying a blade grinder is like buying a hammer with a spongy face.
Buying a blade grinder is a waste of money, but burr grinders range from $50 to $500 and while there is a significant quality difference, it can be reasonable to buy one at the cheaper end.
You can do OK with a blade grinder. I used to have one from Target, and I would grind in two or three stages, stirring the grounds with my finger (!) in between to get more consistent grinds.
A blade grinder is fundamentally incapable of producing remotely uniform particle sizes unless you're willing to sift the result and discard a substantial portion of the coffee. Stale pre-ground coffee will usually give better results and is typically the same price as beans.
I disagree. The most common recommendation is the $150 Baratza Encore, which is about correct for price/performance on the low end. The manufacturer sells cheap replacement parts for it, which is a massive convenience. They also sell cheaper refurbished grinders occasionally. I've had mine for 5-6 years and expect it to last much longer. Better electric grinders start at hundreds of dollars more (in the U.S. market).
This just means your "one of them" I've used a $30 delonghi for 10+ years. Its fine, people consistently complement the coffee, only someone in the <1% of coffee drinkers needs a $150 grinder. Like most people are ok with brown water from a Keurig. Someone who wants a beginner recommendation absolutely doesn't need something that's $150.
Even appending “reddit” is often inadequate, as the algorithm seems to artificially limit one search result item (potentially with some children under it, but unrelated threads, 2-3 more items) per host. So it becomes necessary to use “site:www.reddit.com” to get more than a few non-sucky results.
Yesterday I heard a Joe Rogan guest mention a particular non-Rogan podcast episode. It was a discussion about science and policy by two professional, well credentialed scientists and a layperson. I Googled it, couldn't find it. Same for Bing and DDG. Turns out it had been a popular YouTube video, but they objected to the conclusions and de-platformed it, from YouTube and the big indexes.
It took maybe another dozen clicks to find it on one of the participant's own blog. And the podcast is still up and hosted by Apple. So it's something that you can find if you know about it, but not by searching on the topic. At this point, at least, the shadow ban is still soft.
Add that as a data point for Google no longer producing high quality search results.
Perhaps with all the deplatforming, delisting, and other deleterious effects, all the 'good' content is removed, while at the same time those removals are affecting their machine learning data sets. It is almost a self-imposed adversarial attack on result quality.
I think that the model is, somehow, irreparably broken. Remember that, when it started returning photos of black people in searches for "gorilla", they just stopped using it for "gorilla" searches.
My suspicion is that its been poisoned by some combination of an improperly-considered tagging process and malfeasance.
I do think it's hilarious that the one time Google doesn't drop a relevant search term in the middle of a query is for something like "black haired man." The way it treats terms, you might expect it to drop the "haired" and return pictures of black men, but no, it's almost exclusively white dudes with black hair (never mind that black and brown people also have black hair).
Rogan apparently* said that Spotify owns the rights to the JRE video, so they'll take down rehosted videos regardless of its content if they discover it. And if a video happens to be controversial by YouTube standards, it gets discovered faster and taken down faster.
> so they'll take down rehosted videos regardless of its content if they discover it
If that were true then Joe's youtube channel would have 0 posts since the time he joined spotify. It's chalk full of clips from Spotify broadcasts. I'm also fairly certain Spotify knows of Joe's YT channel considering that's where they found him and hired him away. It likely also would have been in his Spotify contract whether or not he could continue to post clips to his YT channel, or elsewhere.
> It likely also would have been in his Spotify contract whether or not he could continue to post clips to his YT channel, or elsewhere.
I think this is very likely, to allow Rogan to post short clips on his own channel for marketing purposes and keep existing content, while enforcing copyright on other channels.
I had this issue with a less controversial topic yesterday.
I was trying to explain VACnet someone and wanted to link the original talk. Youtube didn't have it anymore. 3kliksphilip covered the topic and he linked to the video. It said the video had been removed, though not why. 3kliksphilip's video helpfully said it was a GDC 2018 talk in the first sentence, so I searched google for that and found the video hosted on another site.
I don't think censorship was at play. I just think the world of mutable data is volatile and impossible to keep a 100% accurate up-to-date index.
I find it pretty egregious that tech companies in particular consider a way to fight misinformation to be to make it difficult to find. Where's the trust in people to critically assess evidence? We seem too afraid they'll pick the wrong "truth". What does that say about our lack of respect for their ability to make decisions? Will us behaving this way possibly change their minds? Stupid, irrational people have always existed and will always exist. Better to at least try to train them to critically assess what they read - which will reduce total stupidity in the world - than to block them from reading such material which only makes them think there's a conspiracy. And, what better way to make high quality allies than to have them critically assess both sides and decide to pick yours? And, maybe we might even change our own mind having had a more complete body of information to draw upon - better for everything.
Blocking access to information seems optimally bad for truth.
If limiting the spread of 'misinformation' is their intended goal, it seems like they would have a bigger impact by just toning down their algorithmic recommendations. Leave the videos up and available to search, and stop doing hyper-optimized recommendations designed to increase 'engagement'.
Of course, that would lose them advertising money, which is probably why they didn't go that route.
I think a large portion of the internet agrees with you: the problem isn't that this podcast was de-indexed; the problem is that I was able to learn about it in the first place.
No, the problem is that you're conflating a decision by google to not serve relevant results for moral and business reasona with a failure by google to do what they intend to do. They don't care if you search for far right stuff, they aren't interested in serving it to you. They are interested in serving you infromation about other stuff you're interested in.
Agreed; the former - a large corporation engaging in "too much free time on their hands" Twitter/1984-tier cancel culture - is arguably far more egregious, but par for the course for a company whose leaders, directors, and executives were brought to literal tears of anger and frustration in a post-2016 election meeting within the company. [0], [1]
It's funny, I've gone through a number of search engines. Webcrawler, altavista, lycos, yahoo, google and now duck duck go. DDG is the only one that hasn't been an abrupt switch. I would search DDG, then !g if I didn't find a tolerable result. But that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using !g altogether.
More often I want !w, !gh, !mdn, !msdn, !v, !osm or similar.
It's that which makes DDG great: instead of being one search engine to fit all, it's a portal to services with specialized information. If you're using DDG's basic search to find specific information then you're using it wrong.
> But that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using !g altogether.
Funny thing. I'm used to DuckDuckGo results being unsatisfactory and reflexively append !g when the results are bad. Recently I've been doing that more on Google.
I was the same until I started using Kagi. I was planning to force myself to use it for a while to test it out, but after two days or something I changed my default search provider and not because of politics but because of results.
It feels like going 15 years back in time - to the time when Google found what I searched for instead of mangling and/or ignoring my actual query every single time.
(Note: it seems some people consistently get better results. I'm not saying it is impossible to get good results with Google, only that I personally have given up.)
Edit: I might sound like a paid shill but I am not. I only know the Kagi founder via HN as freediver and I have not received anything, neither money nor anything else from anyone related to Kagi. (With one big exception: good search results :-)
Also with Kagi I don't have to test n different options to get ahead of dumbifier AI that keeps rewriting my queries into something that is simpler to answer :-]
For the last few years I've been trying to switch to DDG since I have already stopped using all Google services except search and maps. Until recently I was more often satisfied with Google results than DDG. Something has drastically changed in the Google's search algorithms in the last year or so and now I'm fully switched to DDG, as it gives me better results than Google, even for the basic search.
Sometimes I still try Google when I don't find useful results in the DDG but more often than not, there are no useful results in Google either.
Still, I don't know what should I do with Google maps, as I use it to find local businesses and when they are open. I don't use it for navigation at all, it's more like an address book for me. Haven't found a viable alternative yet. It's especially hard since I'm in a country that doesn't have good coverage in either Apple maps nor OSM.
Aw neat; I didn't know about that feature of DuckDuckGo. I used to have similar keywords configured in my browser ("gg", "wiki", etc), but as the years go on I've become less and less willing to invest that time every time I switch to a new computer. Now I have a reason to set DDG as my default search engine again.
Yes, but what the comments are saying is that DDG has an advantage over other searches because their bangs allow anyone to easily use another websites search function, so by using DuckDuckGo you aren’t limited to Bing and DDGs search.
The bangs make it great. The keyboard interactivity makes it awesome. Being able to search, and then use the down arrows to select a result, and then press enter to follow the result, is super awesome, and I'm surprised Google hasn't gotten that right.
I'm often critical of Google's recent product quality but how much of the blame is really on Google?
There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, everything is produced by professionals that are guided by analytics and optimisation.
The social media is searchable by it's vendor but the content there is also optimised for metrics that often don't align well with qualities like accuracy.
Only at places like HN or Reddit there's some organic content in form of commentary. HN is kind of special IMHO as its probably optimised for reach to a specific audience and pays for itself that way, therefore it can be optimised for quality through content moderation.
The web is well optimised for monetisation. Unless someone finds a way to optimize it for some other qualities, I don't think that Google or any competition can do anything about it.
> There are no longer "organic" content on the internet
There is plenty of "organic" content, probably more than ever before. But there is also 100x more junk and Google is no longer good at surfacing the right stuff. Even for something as seemingly obvious as github issues it will often prefer spammified versions of the same.
It costs almost nothing to run a crawler and host these mostly static clone pages. So yeah, if there is a $100 profit in this, someone will do it. Keep in mind there are still plenty of countries out there where the average wage is well bellow $1k. For many people, the "ad pennies" are worth it.
I've wondered this too, sometimes I land on one without ads and its a very high turnover, it's almost like there's a college course out there with the final project: "scrape and clone stackoverflow, grades will be proportional to web traffic you capture"
I don't understand why Google's engineers haven't figured out a solution to these. Other search engines, like Bing, do a better job.
It can't be that they don't see the problem themselves. I have trouble believing they're OK working on such a shoddy product or that they're told to leave it so shoddy (when they could probably work anywhere else). Maybe there is some technical challenge I'm missing.
Maybe not failing to surface, but definitely obscuring... Stack Overflow?
The fact that Google is showing these blatant scam sites that mirror questions is absolutely mind boggling to me. You'd think Google would just manually derank them for being absolute garbage. At best they're horribly mangled versions of the real site, at worst they're portals for malware infested ads.
I'm pretty sure there is less organic content in proportion today than before, first because monetization wasn't in fashion, it was less common/accessible, but also because people who make organic content are fighting with SEO focused people who monopolize attention time / steal & rewrite organic content very efficiently. Less people viewing your organic content = less motivation to spend time on it.
If only we could send all these money obsessed intermediaries & creators to an island somewhere, left to scalp & scam & plagiarize each other out.
HN is a special kind of job board to steer people towards YC companies. You can tell this is the case because they regularly post job openings at YC companies that have comments disabled on the front page. Is this form of advertising bad? I don’t think so, but it’s good to recognize that there is a transaction here.
> There are no longer "organic" content on the internet...
There are billions of people on the internet. The likelihood that this is true is miniscule. Sure, it's probably smaller than it used to be, seeing as most people not in it for some commercial reason use silos to publish instead of their own websites, but if it looks like there's no organic results anymore, it's probably because your search engine isn't ranking organic results, because the websites are out there.
> There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, everything is produced by professionals that are guided by analytics and optimisation.
Then you detect commercial content and downrank it. Ads or the aforementioned analytics should be included in ranking signals to prioritize websites without them.
And then the partner manager raises hell about how you downranked their client, and it gets escalated, two VP's enter a room, one VP leaves and the penalty is quietly removed.
Indeed. I suspect that, despite the sensibilities of the average HN’er, Google’s metrics tell them these garbage results are actually satisfying the average user more than results that alternative weightings would produce.
So do mine of course, and so do yours. Metric design is a hard, hard problem.
I've come to the conclusion that I should keep secret metrics from people so that they aren't captured by Goodhardt's law, but apart from the ethical implications, I haven't managed to implement this anywhere yet.
One metric I started to use is the amount of stuff on a webpage blocked by ublock adblocker. The higher the number displayed by the unlock icon, the worse I expect the content to be.
Google is not really fighting the political version of search results either. One visually obvious comparison is the searches for "happy black family" vs "happy white family". With such clearly politically adjusted search results, how much do you trust your search for "is the coronavirus vaccine safe?"
What is the difference for you? I get "happy family" stock photos of either all white or all black skin color for both queries. The only difference is that there are like 10x more "happy black family" hits.
I began to notice some time ago that Google basically disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common denominator. So, recently I was trying to search for a particular event or quote or something related to some famous person. But no matter how I worded the query, Google ignored everything but the person's name, and returned only fluffy flattering results about the person from popular magazine sites.
So I tried Bing, and the thing I was looking for was result #1. Like how it used to be with Google. So I switched to Bing.
Now after a few weeks of that, I see that Bing does the exact same thing much of the time. Totally different queries + same general subject = identical top ten results.
So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in 1998?
> I began to notice some time ago that Google basically disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common denominator.
Which is funny. Google beat other search engines in the early 2000 because it actually did find what people where looking for, not what the "search engine" wanted people to see.
Now it's more and more the latter, I imagine because it's more lucrative for Google to display the results advertisers pay for...
That's really the product of the lack of competition in the search space. Nothing more. Why should Google bother? It would take billions in VC for a competitor to truly threaten Google dominance on search.
Same with Youtube. Youtube straight out doesn't care anymore about search terms and will just show some results Youtube "cooked up" for the user, unbelievable...
Consider also the possibility that they do want to deliver good results but their algorithms just passed their useful limit some time ago and people can game the system faster than they can improve the system, but there's too much money on the table to ever admit this in public.
This is the answer thats getting little attention. The SEO game didnt just give us hidden keywords, there are hundreds of millions of 'sites' and blogs for all these topics that are basically crap. Google can't tell the difference anymore. the majority of the internet is now mostly hidden (except during search) spam.
I have no problems with and frequently use w3schools. I also find tons of programming content on other sites where people post code they are working on or tips. I don't know that I've ever really referenced Wikipedia for anything programming. I normally just do a Stack Exchange site search through google. I feel like this is the only area where Google search is still decent, but anything after the first page, maybe second is like literally nonsense.
Google benefits from a chaotic and spam-filled ecosystem. At this point technology and network speed are at a point that anyone could re-code a Google if all they did was ignore 99.9% of the wesites out there that are crap and that Google (and Amazon and a few other spam-benefiters) had a hand in creating or promoting.
This is why Adwords has to go. It allowed Google to weaponize the collective man-power of the world to create and regurgitate new ad-space for Google to monetize. Ad-space that didn't exist, and doesn't need to exist.
> it actually did find what people where looking for
I believe that is more a function of the web being less commercially relevant back then.
And every small and then massively growing online community goes through the same evolution:
While the community is small, commercial value is small enough, information is less tainted - and once it becomes big enough, the commercial value of that community becomes worthwhile to game.
The problem is that Google was only good in 1998 precisely because it was pre-Google. Now the web is SEO'd to hell and actively trying to prevent you from getting good search results.
A "new old Google" would only be good at searching the 1998 web, and if all you want is nostalgia, http://theoldnet.com is right there.
I don't think its only the google search algorithm to blame, this has a lot to do with the extinction of old school forums and blogs. These days large part of the real discussions and posts without financial motivation have moved to facebook, whatsapp groups, discord, slack and other places behind logins and paywalls which google can't index. What's left in public are mostly blogs and websites motivated by affiliate or ad revenue and SEO'ed to death. So there simply is much higher garbage to valuable content ratio in the public, indexable web.
95% of my Google searches are suffixed with "MDN" or "site:reddit.com".
If I'm looking for something particularly technical I'll search HN. That especially helps when I feel at my wit's end about some general concept like "sinuses" or "parenting". It's more common to get my mind blown by some offhanded revelation dropped by an HN commenter.
Same, I also often use site:reddit.com
Thankfully Reddit is still left mostly indexable, but most of the other sites where discussions take place are not.
I spent the holidays with someone who does all their searches using only voice input. His eyesight is poor and he chooses to just say what he wants instead of putting on his reading glasses and typing it out. The types of things he was saying and the level of understanding his phone had if him wouldn't have been possible in 2014.
Ironically, I specifically remember the introduction of voice search coinciding with a marked drop in search quality. This had also happened earlier with their "instant results" experiment.
Google did good work fighting against SEO over optimization for a long time. Then they gave up and it all went to hell. I stopped using them a few years ago. I found their practice of dropping search terms infuriating. I switched to DuckDuckGo which is arguably lower quality but less infuriating.
Agree. The web material being searched is bad at the source. So there's little that a search engine can do to improve it. As the adage says - garbage in, garbage out.
The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search engines. Google came along with a better algorithm for sussing out the signal if what content people found useful from the noise of attempts to trick the browser into increasing relevance signal.
It's not entirely clear what the next iteration of algorithm should be... SEO has gotten very good at its game.
The issue though is fracturing a new web likely wouldn't solve it, just introduce another fracture. Instead of the web being open and someone having their own information site content is split based on the creators preferred medium. Some people post on Reddit, some on yt, some on fb, Instagram etc. Each of the "major sites" has its own atmosphere where any subgroup can exist. In the early years each subject had its own community website, or a few of them often with overlapping members and links to each other. The purpose of the sites was strictly information and community around that subject. Their was normally a forum and then write ups / blog post, featured content and links to other sites.
I used to visit like 20 or 30 forums everyday and get great content. Then answering and getting help was a lot easier too. I had an RSS setup that pulled it all in and things were great. Somewhere around 2009 things just started to fall apart with each dominant social media or content site having their own sections for everything.
The barrier to entry for setting up a wide ranging community became far too low, along with that came the barrier to entry of bad information. I'm in several Facebook groups and subreddits concerning topics that interest me and the information is often crap. Also the same questions over and over. All the things people would complain about on the older forums is now the bulk of the content in FB groups, none of the good features are their, the format is terrible and every discussion eventually seems to turn into politics.
I suspect the change we are seeing is that Google is now using a neural network to (re-)interpret the search query.[1] Presumably that neural network also calculates some sort of neural hash for document/paragraph/sentence similarity. The upside is that it can correct more typos, intelligently drop irrelevant terms and understand the meaning of the query to some extent. But the downsite is less precision when you know exactly what you want. It sometimes even seems to ignore the quotes syntax for exact string matching. Very frustrating and very poor quality control.
[1] I bet they train these models based on unsuccessful queries as inputs (in which the user did not click any search result), and then the final search query after which the user left as desired output.
From personal experience the final search query is when the user realizes that none of the results contain useful information, or your actual keywords, and rage quits.
The user then asks someone in the office or goes and spends an hour at a university library.
I've noticed exactly this. One thing I do from time to time is try to find a song after just remembering partial lyrics. It used to work so well it felt like magic.
The last two weeks I've had two occurrences where the lyrics I remembered contained a common word which was also a brand name. It focused on that and completely ignored the rest of my query. So in both cases I added "lyrics" and now it ignored all but one word which happened to be the title of another song, no matter how I massaged the query.
I was attempting to find some historical data on the Soviet Ruble the other day, but found the task nearly impossible because Google "helpfully" considers "Russian" and "Soviet" to be synonyms, and so all the results were about the modern day Russian Ruble. I can't think of any other examples off the top of my head, but this isn't the first time I've run into this sort of problem.
That's very odd. I just typed "Soviet Ruble" into Google and every single result on the first page is about the Soviet, not modern Russian, currency[*]. This includes the box of images on the right-hand side, all of which depict USSR money.
Not really sure what to make of this.
[*] With the arguable exception of an Encyclopedia Britannica article on "ruble", which covers USSR, Soviet Union and Belarus currencies at the same time: ruble, the monetary unit of Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and Belarus (spelled rubel)...
I believe Google's algorithm will confound such experiments because it tailors search results according to user history. Which may mean that some portion of the HN crowd could see worse than average performance if they are more likely to clear cookies and/or search without a login.
I hate that they do this. Sometimes I just want neutral results. Nothing scoped to my location, to my search history or preferences I don’t even know of myself.
Especially when researching a controversial topic, and try to get new data.
I think you're right: some sort of personalisation could well be contributing to the discrepancy.
P.S. Driven by curiosity, I repeated my experiment from an incognito window and it yielded the same results. This time I looked at the results beyond page one, and at least the first few pages of results are 100% relevant.
> began to notice some time ago that Google basically disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common denominator.
Same here. I was perplexed to see undisputed leader of search engines (which nobody managed to successfully rival, no matter how many billions they threw at the problem) decline in this way.
But now I wonder: is fixating on the lowest common denominator perhaps ultimately the more profitable approach?
Compare this to Amazon. A decade ago, buying on Amazon used to be a fantastic experience; no other retailer could rival it. Now the experience is utter crap, as are many of the products. But that crap still outsells everyone else by a large margin.
Perhaps we are seeing a general shift towards a focus on volume, rather than quality.
I think this is how giants fall. The various titans of times long gone - steel, chemical companies, mines etc. were one day so mighty that it was impossible to imagine them faltering. And then they stumbled, then tripped, then eventually fell.
Google, Facebook, Amazon will probably all eventually be replaced by a plucky, energetic and hungry competitor out of nowhere, just as they exploded in the faces of the predecessors.
Even lowest common denominator has gone too far. Querying "Barcelona" gives you 100% search results for the League team above-the-fold. You must search "Barcelona, Spain" to get information on the city, which then gets you direct links to Google Maps, etc.
I also get these results and I've never spectated a sports game in my life. These aren't just customized results for different people - if Google keeps a "completely uninterested" personal score I'd have the maximum value for sports
I remember around 2010-2012 it felt really great. You could learn the keyword-fu skill and with few keyword change / reorder iterations could explore topics and find obscure things on the internet.
Now that method does not work at all. Always the same results and cannot find specific things. Around that time they started adding ML/AI and now searching with keywords is extremely unsatisfying.
the searches results aren't the same, you are fingerprinted
its been this way for years now, at least in how it drastically alters search results for different users in the same country speaking the same language
Not quite as big of an offender, but when I was looking up "Nice Restaurants" with google maps fixed on my city, it instead started looking up Restaurants in Nice, France.
I get extremely relevant results from Google for "amusement parks italy". I use a privacy proxy (VPN) and a browser in privacy mode. Perhaps Google only switches into guess-what-you-meant mode when it can link your search to their profile of you?
Digital products could have a “finished” state, which is great for users, but bad for companies.
Dropbox could’ve been a finished product in 2012. Simple and focused personal storage solution. But it can’t justify the valuation of Dropbox, the company.
Same for Evernote.
However, could Google be a "finished" product at some point (e.g., 2000)? Probably not. When google was incorporated in 1998, they indexed only 25 million web pages. As the number of web pages grows exponentially, Google as a product needs to evolve, e.g., doing a better job to fight web spams / blackhat seos... The problem is that the web evolves way faster than Google could improve their search result relevance.
> So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in 1998?
I don’t know if it works well, but there’s Neeva [1]. It started as a search engine with a paid subscription model but then switched to a freemium pricing with a premium tier that will come "soon".
I almost feel as if they have like 100k actual pages that they present (and have looked through manually) and if it's not in that group they just show you the closest one (or say "no results").
I have no knowledge or evidence, but this has indeed become my mental model for whatever Google actually does these days. I do wonder what they actually do. All those engineers, for 20 years. Surely they haven't just been scaling up BackRub! But I find it very hard to believe that they're crawling the whole web. I find it very hard to believe that PageRank is still the same PageRank that we understood in 1998. And it looks like they're managing to editorialize quite heavily, even if they're doing it via algorithm somehow. But again, I can't really discern what they're doing anymore.
So for now, I have to disagree with the "garbage in, garbage out" theory. I don't believe Google has the same goal now that they did then.
> I find it very hard to believe that PageRank is still the same PageRank that we understood in 1998.
It's not, because as good as PageRank was, it was vulnerable to being exploited by link farms, which started popping up in its wake. I do remember that by the mid 2000s, about 5% of search results were pages just spamming search keywords and hyperlinks.
Do they say "no results" anymore? It seems like Google ignores parts of your query until you get results, no matter whether they are specifically connected to your search.
I have no inside information on this, but it's based on my usage of Google recently. I believe Google seem to be guessing at people's intended search query rather than performing the query based on the actual terms.
This is probably great for most people as Google's own data shows that most people do indeed search the same things at the same time, so guessing intention (especially with relation to current affairs and the queries of others) is probably a winning strategy for giving most people what they want - even if their search terms were a bit junk.
The down side is that the ability to hone results by tweaking or rearranging ones search terms goes largely ignored. Previously one could peel away layers of results with such meddling, now it seems there will usually be some word or name in the search query which Google will be affectionate towards, and the results are unmovable from that.
> Google seem to be guessing at people's intended search query rather than performing the query based on the actual terms.
I've read that google uses "Machine Learning" for their search results which I interpret to be exactly as you say they provide a stereotyped result based on what they think you are searching for (possibly optimized either for what is inevitably clicked on or for ad revenue), instead of actually matching terms.
What this means is that search results may be more accurate in some statistical way, like more people click on the top result, but it also pumps up the number of edge cases where it guesses wrong, while simultaneously making it impossible to tell where the results went wrong because you can't understand how they were generated (compared to eg keywors search where good or bad, the reason you got a result is obvious)
> Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in 1998?
I'm creating a faster search engine for coders, using good old literal search, with synonyms of programing operations in different languages, ie. array.push in javascript, array.append in python, array[] in php, and so on. The database is loaded in memory instead of huge analytics libraries, and searching is performed instantly. I see no need to protect my DB, since it contains basic snippets, and that allows these fasts queries. I move between several languages and needed a super quick reference without all the SO clones and spam.
> So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in 1998?
Well... it's not fair!!! In 1998, most of the content was published by enthousiasts for fun, the "business web" wasn't really existing yet, and Google was a minor player, so nobody was interested in "gaming" the search engine because there was not really some money to take
Fast forward: now, the web (and apps) is a major driver for ANY business, so there's a lot to win (or lose) to game the system. So the SEO and other user-hostile strategies are widespread (and no IA or algorithm will be good enough to change that)
Solutions that could help ? Maybe:
1) meta search engine: using cross verification and ranking with different search engine might help a little bit (more different algo to game for the SEO)
2) user-validated search: allow user to rank website AFTER they checked the page to exclude bad actors. It's gamable too (like comments and Amazon rank)
3) not-for-profit web: excluding business from search engine (but informations without sell is a kind of pre-sale however)
In any way, I don't see a lot of ways to decide an un-gamable system
Blogspam and SEO folks are essentially adversaries to good ranking strategies on search engines. In 1998 there weren't many adversaries and it was mostly a technical issue. Now the game is much more complicated.
> Now after a few weeks of that, I see that Bing does the exact same thing much of the time. Totally different queries + same general subject = identical top ten results.
When I worked at Microsoft, the Bing team had an internal version employees could use where you could report if Bing's top results didn't equal Google's top results.
This was nearing a decade ago, so don't read much into it for what they do now.
This is awful when you have an error message where the text doesn't vary much, if at all, and you have a varying error code. You'll get results for all of the errors with similar error messages, but with different codes.
I've noticed this a lot as well recently. It's not as really the search results themselves that are bad but rather Google simply ignoring key words/phrases in my query.
Suppose a Google competitor emerged that produced wonderful results in every category. Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings. The wonderful results would quickly degrade, and it's unclear as to whether this new small company would have the resources to keep up.
You can unfortunately see this with DuckDuckGo: people are clearly targeting more than just Google. Python results, for example, are so infested by SEO-specialist spam that searching for standard library functions will return spam above the actual standard library documentation, particularly for more popular functions. Searching for "python datetime.now" or "python json.loads" will both return spam above documentation. This problem heavily impacts anything 'data scientist' spammers see as important as well; it's actually worse on DDG than Google.
What's frustrating is that these often seem to be a handful of domains, like 'geeksforgeeks' and 'towardsdatascience'; for a while, of course, there was also the "gitmemory" spammer who seemed to be able to push out Github results on both DDG and Google. Yet I think Google removed reporting and blacklisting domains from searches long ago, and I think DDG never had it, leaving the only option for removing them client-side scripts and extensions that work poorly. Likewise, no search engine appears to be manually blacklisting them. Yet as you point out, if one did, then the spammers would probably just move to using many domains, which would probably be worse.
Domain age & quantity/breadth of content should be taken into account in ranking.
A fresh domain that suddenly has a ton of content should be viewed with suspicion and downranked as it's likely a spammer (copying GitHub/Stackoverflow/official docs).
Legitimate sites that are starting out shouldn't be affected as they are unlikely to have a ton of content from the start.
Of course, this isn't perfect, but it should take care of the majority of spam copycat sites.
You think all the existing search engineers haven't thought of using the domain age for the signal and tried it yet? And if you did, you think SEO people wouldn't figure it out and take advantage of it? This cycle of adversarial game on this particular signal has already gone through the full cycle - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/domain-a...
And what makes you think search engines don't take quantity and breadth of content ? And, why do you think SEO won't be able to take advantage of that ?
Most people commenting and lamenting about search quality need to understand how much of search quality is an adversarial game, that neither side (search engine vs SEO people who want to manipulate the result in their favor) can win decisively forever. And generally it's not for the lack of trying the quality hasn't improved as much - it's just some areas it's more difficult to make progress due to more money spent on making it difficult for the search engines.
What I am most disappointed about Google and search engines in general isn't so much about ranking simplistic things like generic recipe or product reviews and stuff like that - most recipes for general items are all similar, and product review is inherently commercial that reviews always have been biases (short of using Consumer Reports, almost all magazine review articles are biases and influenced by manufacturers). What I am most disappointed is the lack of improvements in UI and retrieval/recall. Interactive UI that can narrow down search space iteratively and interactively so that I can describe what I want in more precise way is lacking. Where is the virtual librarian that I can talk to to narrow down what I want in a step by step way ? Instead of a single search query being the only input, why shouldn't search engine ask for clarifications and let users more precisely describe what they want ? Human languages and human brain just don't produce a single phrase to describe what we want - it takes sentences and questioning back and forth to determine what we want, and we often need more input to realize and describe what we actually want. And all search engines have failed to provide such an interface. And my bet is that whoever can crack that would beat all other search engines, since users can give better, higher quality input for the search to find.
I have to wonder just what is the justification for Google to not let users decide what sites they never want to see results from? I'm sure it can't be storage or compute limitations. This one feature alone would make so many people (me included) happier to use the engine.
SEO isn’t magic. Google decided to deprioritize Wikipedia for example which noticeably degraded results. Where major websites show up has nothing to do with SEO and simply relates to what they think is important.
Somehow humans are very good at telling apart SEO crap from legitimate content even without understanding the content or the language itself - SEO crap has some common elements such as ads, affiliate links, a certain page layout, etc.
I remember using an open-source ML model (trained on Buzzfeed article titles) to detect YouTube clickbait based on titles and it worked brilliantly, and that was just downloading some code on GitHub and running it as-is. I'm sure the same could be applied to search results and you could achieve much better quality if you actually put some effort into it.
I very much doubt this is some kind of hard problem as opposed to Google just giving up because their business model doesn't actually incentivize good search results.
This isn't a new problem and I'm pretty sure Google has countermeasures for that, and even if they didn't, it doesn't look like an unsolvable problem - automation can help but having a "report" feature on the search results page or literally paying real people (using real browsers) to review results can work and is virtually bulletproof.
It is all about incentives isn’t it? Google gave all the power to these SEO websites by making it difficult to get your content listed as a search result on the first page.
Google could start incentivizing high quality unique content and websites from domain experts, but they have decided they can’t make as much money off of independent publishers as they can from marketing/content farms.
I read a blog post mentioning how Google artificially boosted Wikipedia in search results years ago. So movement up or down is a result manipulation on their part.
> Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings.
An algorithm could punish things inherent to SEO optimized sites (ads and tracking). Removing the ability to passively generate money without providing useful content is the key.
Of the top of my head, a system like the following would be a pretty good start:
Scale of 0 to 100 (closer to 100 being higher up on the results).
You are penalized for the following:
- subtract 10 points for any ad, using ublock origin's list as a good starting point (this stacks, it's 10 points off for each link)
- subtract 100 points for google tag manager
- subtract 100 points for the facebook like button
- ... etc for each of the major tracking scripts
This would obviously need to be updated as ad-tech evolves, but it would cut out 90% of the current SEO spam.
Can google do this? No, they have a conflict of interest around placing ads. Somebody else, however, can absolutely do this.
> Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings.
The Google competitor will have a human nuke their entire domain or business (based on a manual index of banned products/brands) from the search results forever, or have by default a bias against ad-filled websites which would remove any commercial incentive for those websites to exist in the first place.
That kind of manual intervention doesn't scale though. The only way it can work is to have community-curated lists of bad domains, similar to adblock lists, that users can upload to personalize their search result.
Somehow a distributed community of unpaid volunteers manages to keep the entire advertising industry (where billions are at stake) at bay by curating adblock lists. I'm sure a company can achieve the same. It will never be 100% perfect, but it will surely be better than what we have now.
But yes, supporting community-supplied adblock-style lists would be a start, and Google isn't even doing that.
I wonder if there's a project like sponsorblock, for google search instead of youtube. Basically a centralized community-driven database that blacklists certain urls (timestamps for yt) based on submission & vote. It would be much less of a clear cut than youtube's case, though.
I personally just append `wiki` or `reddit` to queries. Crappy but kinda works.
It doesn't have to be community based. The search engine could be paid and employ actual people to sift through the garbage and vet domains/brands/etc before they are added to the index.
The problem with Google is that their business model is to show you ads (either on their own website or third-party websites embedding Google ads/analytics) and not to provide you quality search results, therefore they have no incentive to combat even the most obvious SEO spam (see Pinterest & image search for an example).
That was the original Yahoo business model. It doesn't scale. You can't hire enough human beings to curate the entire web, and if you try to automate it, then the SEO spammers can game the automation.
You can enforce penalties (bans for the entire brand/domain/etc) to deter gaming the system, which should take some pressure off the humans which can then focus on the top issues reported by end-users.
It won't be perfect, but at least Pinterest wouldn't be polluting image search for years for example.
This will block sites like OutdoorGearLab which has great content and trustworthy reviews. I think doing a check on the copy on the SEO website and comparing it to other websites might do the trick though.
I wasn't talking about domain-specific search engines. I was trying to say that if we had multiple competing search engines, with different ranking algorithms, then gaming the algorithm would be less effective.
The efficacy of SEO is largely dependent on a search monoculture. They only need to optimize for one set of unknown rules, and that's something that is relatively easy to do well with simple machine learning tools.
Real competition in search is probably the best way of reigning in the SEO sector.
What if the search index was much more manually curated? For example, say that you could create a custom search index relevant to your field of expertise, and that other users would rank their results to let the engine know which indices are actually good and for which types of queries. You could still game it, but probably not with traditional SEO techniques.
> What if the search index was much more manually curated?
Google would need to not have a monopoly if they wanted to do that. Otherwise, they would be accused of anti-competitive practices (since their policies would be aligned with their policies in other services, they would rarely ban themselves).
One of the problems here is the effective monoculture.
If there were multiple search engines in use with different ranking algorithms and different search strategies, then "SEO" would be difficult to impossible to achieve because optimising would one search engine would likely be a pessimisation for the others.
We don't just need one competitor, we need many. And they can't just be copycats, they need to do their own thing, and that might well make the cost:benefit of SEO unviable.
i remember a time when teacher would say form a line, and there would be a chaos of who was getting there first.
This was met with a second instruction, the first five people in line, move to the back of the line, and last five in line move to the front.
it became a trial and error, with the usual kids jostling for position now wanting to be, at the back of the line, then in the middle of the line, hunting for the condition that creates pole position.
the idea that it was the personalities and the value sets, not the position on the line, that triggered the condition, seemingly was too abstract to be deduced. keep in mind this was grade 2.
so may the browser filter the first to the nth SEO spammers in the query results be sent somewhere away from the front of the line until a match for query terms occurs.
Let's be honest, with rare exception, compelling & relevant content is no longer on the web. It's found on chats where people can be candid, like Signal & Telegram. To some degree it's on twitter where you can curate trusted publishers, and other social media. There are exceptions e.g. Substack, but most of the web content is seo clickbait.
The author ignores the more pernicious problem : ML fairness. Google is editorializing results by up-ranking positions it prefers. Check the results on any controversial topic like race, politics, abortion, covid treatments, etc.
The problem is that 95% of consumers believe google represents the truth.
Just go back to first principles before the internet and make sure you trust the publishers, sources & references. Also don't ignore your own observations. There's a PR campaign fighting your own critical thinking abilities.
> The author ignores the more pernicious problem : ML fairness. Google is editorializing results by up-ranking positions it prefers. Check the results on any controversial topic like race, politics, abortion, covid treatments, etc.
Not the OP but I think he might be referencing this study from Columbia where they found that the “Featured” articles were mostly left-leaning: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300683
The cause of this is debatable though - be it editorialisation, unconscious bias on behalf of people working on the algorithms or some common qualities to the websites that lean a certain way politically.
No, it's overt--I wish I could find this for you, but I saw a tweet from an apparently reputable source, it was a Google engineer saying "I'm so proud of the work our team has done to make it more difficult to find misinformation using Google". Naturally, "misinformation" means whatever the G-engineers want it to mean.
I'm not necessarily saying I don't believe you--obviously you'd know more about working there than I would. But can you explain to me why in 2010 if I googled "evidence the moon landing was faked" I got a huge list of conspiracy sites, and now if I Google the same query I only receive articles and websites alleging the exact opposite of what I searched?
I currently work for Youtube. We identify conspiracy-seeking queries, and then boost results from authoritative sources. Don't see why we wouldn't also be doing this on Google. Maybe people don't bother searching for things when the results suck (or maybe they just use alternative means of searching)?
The point of those groups is that they are closed. Similar to how "Secret" Facebook groups became the late 00s equivalent of invite-only PHPBB forums (think what.cd). If you're part of whatever political or ideological movement is en vogue, you're free to candidly speak on whatever public platform you choose. If you aren't... You end up inviting a few like-minded friends to a Signal group to share your real thoughts and ask questions. They, in turn, invite a few more people. After a few months, you find yourself in a full-blown community; one where you can get all kinds of useful information.
But those communities aren't interested in advertising their existence.
Google is pretty bad at handling specific technical queries, and I'm pretty sure it's because their internal metrics don't account for the possibility that a query might have no useful results, or have only one result which requires some iteration on the search terms to find.
What happens is, if you search for something that's specific enough that there are few results or no results, it will either ignore keywords, assume that you meant to put a space inside a multi-word identifier, or spellcheck-correct something that wasn't actually misspelled. This produces convincing-looking decoy results, and you have to look closely (or click through) to find out that it's wasting your time, them rerun the same query in verbatim mode or with more quotes.
So then you've forced it to verbatim mode, and reached a query which, let's say, has one StackOverflow thread which you've already read and which failed to answer the question. Then your search results will be a couple pages of StackOverflow scraper sites. I never want to visit a StackOverflow scraper site. They should be easy to detect. Why aren't those domains being blocked properly?
I'd love to know why Google has started ignoring quoted terms and treating them like normal words in a query. I put it in quotes because I wanted that exact phrase, not something that sounds similar. If that exact phrase doesn't exist, tell me.
I have repeated this comment before and it's wild speculation but I try to answer. For me google's results were good up to 2016 then the results started to become worse and power user features like bolean operators and keywords ("site:", "domain:", etc.) started to get ignored.
I map this decline to the exit (with some sex scandals mixed in) of Ranking VP Amit Singhal and the start of John Giannandrea leading R&D. From what I understand from the grapevine Singhal was uber conservative about how anything AI would scale in the ranking algos whereas Giannandrea was pretty much a 'let's AI all the things' kind of guy.
This aligns with the start of forced 'natural language' queries. After this roll out you now have to second guess how AI expects a query in order to get half decent results out of google.
As an example, in the early 2000's you could just type:
"phacoemulsification+resonant"
Nowadays the expectation from googles AI is to query along the lines of:
"What is the frequency of the ultrasonic driver in phacoemulsification?"
(BTW the first query still gives me a correct answer in ddg.)
In addition to the AI galore, google dropped all the power-user feature keywords (as in they are still there but we will politely ignore them when convenient),
Also from forum discussion the GOOG employees feedback was always that the bolean opearators were underused (probably only a few millions of users?!) so it got removed "but you can use quotes", because it is so much more convenient.
Google search has been slowly adding just too much friction. Now I just use ddg and get decent results 85% of time with zero friction/frustration.
For my use cases the only scenario where google's AI shines is in 'Google Shopping' product/price search, for everything else it truly feels like the right tech for the wrong problem.
I switched from Google to https://kagi.com recently, I've found them a significant improvement in search result quality so far!
Right now they're free with a waiting list, but the long-term plan is to charge for access - I'm personally hopeful that that's a business model far less likely to incentivize results quality, without falling into this ad trap.
Has anybody else noticed a decline in Wikipedia's placement on many Google search results?
More often than not I want Wikipedia as my first result, both as a cross-reference for anything else I click on and as an index for other useful or interesting links. They were consistently in the top 5 results for anything that actually had a Wiki page for years, but now I have to pull the top few pages or even write `$query wiki` to get Google to reliably bring Wikipedia up.
If you know you are trying to search Wikipedia, go to chrome://settings/searchEngines and add a search engine with keyword 'w' and query URL 'http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php?search=%s&langu...'. Then you can type 'w whatever' to search Wikipedia for 'whatever'. Firefox has similar feature called "Add a keyword for this search".
I wonder if the world needs a stackoverflow for products/travel/restaurant/recipies etc. Something with a reputation system that works pretty well in SO - i.e. if you are constantly ask stupid answers or given stupid/marketing answers, you get downvoted and at some point lose your ability to vote. Problem is of course, the majority decides what is "stupid", and to my experience going over Amazon Reviews, the majority seems not to get the idea.
Unfortunately SO doesn't allow questions a la "Which is the best printer for doing X" :(
Given the helpful replies on things here in these threads by HN people, I think the problem could simply be fixed by using HN karma as a reputation system for such a site. We would have a community of supersmart and helpful people
with access to lot of specialists in their field. And 3-6 months later, when marketing affiliates are catching up, HN would have its "eternal september" moment and HN would no longer be the place it is now, with upscale and kind questions and answers...
Ten years ago I complained on a random forum about Google's seeming refusal to give me information about running Skyrim under Linux with the Wine emulator. I tried various search combinations and all I could easily get was information about wine manufacturers and locations in the Skyrim world. Didn't matter if I used "emulation" or "wine emulator" or similar terms, even in quotes, or if I used the '+' character, or otherwise tried to harness Google's literal search functions.
Was I searching wrong? Didn't seem so to me at the time, but I don't remember the exact queries. Those in the forum thread thought I just didn't know how to use a search engine. I still think it was Google telling me what it thought I really wanted, instead of what I was literally asking for.
I still see results that don't include words that I search for in quotes, often.
I found that it confuses subject with object: do you want A for B or B for A. It's all the same. Maybe Google doesn't really use neural nets in ranking, or they are a joke.
Desktop web search is trending down, voice and mobile interfaces up. They should be focusing hard on direct question answering based on retrieved web pages. A recent paper by Deep Mind shows how it can be done, not that it matters, they won't jump on it. Web search should be just as smart as Codex, adapting and combining knowledge for the user.
>And as long as Google is in the business of both search and advertising, that will not change.
This has always been the case and general sentiment hasn't always been that search was bad. The only way they wouldn't be in search and advertising is if they charged for search, because ads pay for it. They know it is in their best interest to keep search results good so that people will keep using them and see ads. They seem to be losing the battle right now against SEO and marketing firms.
It's time for a(nother) revolution with search engines.
The web is, more than ever, filled with affiliate links, retarded ads, and crappy sites that exist for the sole purpose of redirecting traffic.
Most of us browse less 2% of the web. I miss Archie and Veronica. I'm probably complaining too much and totally out there, but I miss discovering insane intellectuals, incredibly unique and valuable content, rebellious nerds, everyday. (Yes, I'm asking a lot).
There's many brilliant people writing high quality content online, but's too diluted, hidden, forgotten, invisible, lost. Sometimes browsing feels like changing channels on a tv. I feel trapped in a rotten loop. I need a search engine that will rock my world. Show me the real stuff - I know it's there. Rant over.
Google sucks completely for me (I use DDG as my main search engine but that only sucks slightly less). It's all spam and I can't find anything. In particular, I used to be able to find useful blog articles on any programming problem I had. Now it's either SO or nothing, whereas I'm sure the articles exist somewhere.
I saw kagi.com mentioned on an article here and tried it out, and so far it's been much better than Google. It gives me reddit results, which are very useful because it's just people posting their reviews/solutions, and it gives me small site results, which are usually helpful. If I have to pay for it, I will, because the free option is just useless now.
I was wondering for a while if SEO has gotten so good, or its Google that's gone to this - and I have a feeling that it's the latter.
Search for COVID rules for entry to moldova - for me and my friends the official website was like page 10 of search. Search for various government services, and most of the time top result is some scam.
This is inexcusable - is is to hard to prioritise official government websites? They could hire two dudes per country to index them all by hand and they'd be done in a couple weeks.
I used to manage hnprofile.com which utilized a patent I wrote to target this exact problem. Effectively, Google optimizes for ads (as pointed out) and optimizes to ensure you have to click multiple links. In reality, we want to answer peoples question(s) right off the bat, i.e. no ads.
I think the only way to make profit off of it is by targeting corporations, where their revenue comes from maximizing productivity. I think it's possible to create a paid service ($5/month) for good search, but you'd still likely have to target companies.
> Also, how can a search category be SEO’d into ruin? Isn’t search engine optimization supposed to produce “better results”? Doesn’t Google exclusively control the results it displays…
This seems almost willfully naive. Why would SEO produce better results for the searcher? It’s optimizing rankings for sites who want to appear higher up in the results. Of course SEO is going to degrade the results. Of course every site on the planet is going to try to game Google search and appear higher in the list.
Yes there are conflict of interest issues between serving high quality search results and making money serving ads in those results, and yes Google is consciously allowing some of this to happen. BUT - this was inevitable. Any popular search engine is going to be gamed by the entire rest of the world, and the scale is too large for Google to control it. Michael might not be aware that, despite the conflicts of interest, Google really does spend considerable amounts of time fighting against search-degrading SEO?
SEO is so annoying, I recently searched "Is XYZ healthy?", then just some blogs/lifestyle magazines/whatever showed up, just written in an absolutely verbose manner. I would have expected Yes/No, not 4 paragraphs introduction, some about the advantages, some about the disadvantages and so on.
I wouldn't expect that to work any better than the other example someone quoted above, where a search for "nice restaurants" returned restaurants in Nice. Put some more thought into your queries. Like most tools, what you get out of a search engine is largely a reflection of what you put into it.
How shocking. An advertising company who uses search as a venue for advertising does not produce the highest quality of search results for those who search.
Stop thinking of google/alphabet/insertnewbrandnamehere as a search company. They attempted to make money from the search engine in the 1990s when they couldn't find customers willing to pay for that technology and the company chose to make money from ads. Your company is defined by how you make money, not by user perception or press releases. Google is an ad company because they make money off of advertising. Goodies they give you that leads to better targeting of advertising for them is merely good ad business, stop thinking it's for any other purpose.
Back to the old days. Instead of search, curation.
I have the same problem for years. I simply can’t find the best library / package out there. Neither on Google nor on Github, npm, Duck and co. Therefore I’ve started to build my own personal search engine powered by bookmarks and tags. The irony is that I use Gmail as a bookmarking and tagging provider where search works just perfect.
In addition I subscribe to lots of newsletters, so an inbox search gives the industry pulse + my personal faves.
Outside my expertise / domain I rely on friends. Want a new technical jacket for winter? I ask my friends who do winter sports for ages. In reverse, I give them advice for the web.
And I don’t mind. This is how we went back to ‘personal’ computing.
>I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either. I’m wondering if this isn’t really a tech problem but the influence of some suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases.
This seems like a pretty irresponsible and ridiculous thing to say. "I think X product is shit, and I'm fairly sure that the engineers working on X would agree and blame product managers" sounds like a valid thing to say if you were at reddit, or dropbox - where it's both true and Seibel should know about it (since he's in a position to know how rubbish they are), but to speculate about one of your competitors in this way is a little... self serving.
Google search actually really reassures me, because Seibel is right, there aren't really any direct network effects, if it got bad I'd move. In fact I did move. I started using duckduckgo when I could, but any time I search for technical issues (something that's likely to result in stackoverflow results or similar) I go back to google. Why? It works.
Agreed. I am really surprised that people aren't calling this out more. It is an example of terrible reasoning to go from "google search is bad" to "it must be bad on purpose so they can sell us stuff" without any actual evidence.
Google search results are actually horrible. My partner and me were searcbing today for the annual budged of public media in Poland. A couple of years ago the top result would have been the correct answer. Today we only got crap and gave up after 5 pages (sear result pages) clicking through ad infested links.
Two days ago I searched for a mission description of a game because my partner was talking to me and I only got half of the mission description. Top results were sites which copy headlines from forums and display tons of advertisements. This made me furious and I wouldn't be surprised if Google is by design ranking search results from certain categories based on advertisement real estate. The more Google-ads the more prominent the search result.
I make Pichai responsible for all the spam. He is, in my opinion, actually an idiot who doesn't understand that his strategy will be the downfall of Google as THE search engine. I really miss Page and Brin and their "Don't Be Evil" culture.
One point about all the "Top X lists" and general blogspam that Google returns - I had once created a website that I was trying to get listed on these sites. I emailed a few of them to get my site listed and they transparently and directly offered to list my site for relatively small amounts of money. It was literally an exchange of 100 dollars for listing my site at number 1 and I got to write the description that went on their website.
My point here is to add that in addition to the Google results being bad (they are listicles and blogspam rather than the answers you want) they are also corrupt in that people can just pay the owners of the spam sites to get the listings they want. This is a tax on the users by giving them indirect and bad results and also a tax on creators by forcing them to pay third parties to get their websites to rank in the appropriate Google searches or work on SEO voodoo to rank themselves.
> Also, how can a search category be SEO’d into ruin? Isn’t search engine optimization supposed to produce “better results”?
No, SEO is supposed to get your particular website higher up in the rankings, regardless of whether or not the results are better for users.
"SEO" is just a nice marketing term for "figure out how the search engine works and trick it into listing your site higher". It's learning what metrics a search engine prioritizes, and then playing to those metrics.
Since the incentives are currently stacked against the user, we might need something similar to AdBlock for search results with a community managed blacklist.
I personally use uBlacklist [1] to black useless sites like Pinterest or wikihow to appear in my search results.
Something I have noticed lately is that when searching for technical information I often get result near the top of my search that are crappy skins of StackOverflow, usually with many more ads. Has anyone else noticed this too?
Yes, I have definitely experienced this too. I also sometimes get results from websites that seem to be reskins of github (usually issues and pull requests).
Google is best for searching Russian sites automatically (and very poorly) translated to my language that hijack history.back(). I'm getting those a lot lately.
The comments seem to regularly reference the poor quality of content on crafting and other activities due to SEO spam and affiliate marketing. However I wonder if the root cause is a dearth of useful content which is also not trying to sell you something.
Anecdotally the only "interesting" content I find while searching is either from the old internet or medium. I suspect that many content makers have moved on due to lack of audience.
Can someone provide some explicit search queries so we can see the bad examples? Lots of criticism is being doled out in that thread without an actual example to see for myself.
Agree that the reddit is more relevant to me because it has multiple perspectives in a discussion format, but I don't see any particularly bad links with the first search. The first one just has more conventional review sites like GoodHousekeeping and Forbes.
2) It does not appear the person writing the review actually purchased any of the knives. The article is an assembly of quotes from Chefs. While Chefs do have domain knowledge, and probably sometimes have good opinions, theres no way to tell if any are sponsored by different knife brands. It's not a REVIEW comparing the actual products, its somebody who googled chef knife quotes and cut/paste a page together. The review itself does NOTHING to actually compare the products to each other.
>As a desktop manufacturer Dell as an international company has established itself very well in this competitive market of digital gadgets. Check out best Dell desktop computers for specific requirements and beginner’s guide. In this 21st century, a computer has become a very necessary product to everybody’s day to day life.
This is what Google thinks is a front-page relevant search result.
I admit I'm somewhat pre-inclined to defend Google here a bit. That said:
I wonder how much of this is an issue of the incentives for producing different kinds of content, as opposed to just an issue of what Google chooses to optimize for.
I.e., yeah, lots of searches turn up mostly listicle bullshit. But is that because higher quality content is more difficult to monetize (e.g., people that are inclined to click on listicles are more likely to click on ads?), and therefore less likely to be produced in the first place, and even if produced, its authors are less likely to put in money/effort into SEOing it?
At the initial stages of the internet we sere building quality content without even thinking to “monetize” - just sharing things we were passionate about.
Until people pretend to monetize it will never work like that again.
I've noticed this too. In fact, some of their results are pretty close to worthless. Last week I posted a link here to a demo I made for creating and using "blobs" with PouchDB. I titled it "PouchDB/CouchDB Save/Update/Load Image Blob Demo".
After I posted it I monitored my web logs for a bit and watched both Google and DuckDuckGo hit the page.
3 days later I did a search for "PouchDB Image Blob Demo" on both Google and DuckDuckGo.
Google had almost nothing at all for that search and my page wasn't on any of the results they offered. DuckDuckGo had my post at #1 for that search.
What are they supposed to do? The "Internet" as an information resource is dead. All new topical information has moved to walled gardens such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Reddit etc, and mobile apps. The open websites such as Wikipedia, StackOverflow etc dominate everything else. Websites are legacy objects which no-one visits anymore, and they have therefore raced to the bottom to earn scraps of revenue. This is a structural problem that Google cannot fix. Google itself is doomed on the long-term unless it can index new relevant content.
Then there's websites like Scribd, SlideShare, and pdf hosting websites which require accounts or subscriptions have hijacked many results. This has happened even if the original pdfs are still at the source.
I wish there was a hackable search engine where you could e.g. write a python script that moves all websites down that have ads or appear in some list.
I would advise against Googling anything medical. Outside of terrible SEO results, WebMD telling you you are going to die, the ads linger around forever.
I remember Googling something I had read about or saw on TV out of curiosity. I got ads about help for said disease I don't have for at least a month...
With all due respect to Michael but has he not used Google in the past years? This has been an issue since at least 2016. SEO won.
Maybe some googlers can answer this but i assume that Singhal was very conservative against AI for ranking. But when he left Giannandrea started rolling out the "natural language" queries with "let me just ignore your query because we know better" algorithms, also slowly removed operators/keywords used by power users. And well SEO really have gotten better so it all piles up.
It's not just those categories that are producing low quality SERPs, almost any niche you can imagine is being assaulted using weaponized SEO because content marketing has become the competitive advantage of many organisations and part of the default toolkit of any site team.
Is it weaponized SEO, though? Because I have been adding "wikipedia" recently to many of my searches. Google has penalized Wikipedia in search results significantly (at least for me). I'm not sure what's the logic behind especially that 1. Wikipedia is trustworthy and ad-free and 2. I click mostly Wikipedia, so from a MLearning perspective I should be getting more wikipedia results.
Honestly, I think a good search engine would hardcode the first two results to be the official website for "thing" and the wikipedia page for "thing" if they exist. Then it can list out the organic results. Just that change would make search 10X better than it currently is.
I found out today that one of my reddit comments (along with many random others) had been scrapped out and automatically put back together (together with those many random other that is) on a blogspot page. I stumbled upon that page today as I was googling for a very specific topic, it went something like this: that SERP looks really interesting, nice! => this page looks like spam => this page is spam => damn, that bunch of text is really mine.
Google have found a sweet spot where their search results are almost correct but still insufficient.
That "near-correctness" ensures you don't lose hope of finding what you are looking for, so you keep reading result after result. And most of those sites are conveniently loaded with ads, sold by guess which company - Google!
Eventually, pagerank cashes out, and you find what you are looking for. You receive a much needed endorphin kick, and you go on with your day. Rinse and repeat.
I would bet a large amount of money this is the correct answer.
It certainly is the approach facebook has taken with their marketplace place search engine, where the signal to noise is just barely high enough to keep the audience and there is absolutely no tooling exposed (verbose search etc) to increase the signal rate.
Just today I googled "torch normalize -1 1" and it said "zero documents matches your query". Insane stuff. (Censorship with crazy high false positives? Incompetence?) I went to duckduckgo and immediately found a useful answer.
Note that that will only normalize to (-inf, 1]. Tweaking the formula on that page You want (v - vmin) / (vmax - vmin + eps) with vmin and vmax produced along th dimensions you care normalizing against.
Um, just in case you don't realize, "-1" selects pages that don't include "1". You just asked Google for pages that both include and don't include "1", and that's the empty set. I'm not aware of any way to search for negative numbers.
This is really a UI problem. Google should probably use the context in this query to infer that you didn't literally want to exclude "1" from your results. However, half the comments here are complaining about Google not taking their queries extremely literally. This problem is a good demonstration of why inferring user intent can be useful and taking user input literally all the time is not actually a great idea.
Part of the degradation was when they got rid of URLs. I had a really good bullshit detector function in my head. The URL would go into it, and an intuition would pop out that it was a bullshit link. Now I can't do that.
Google seems to value recency over quality - a huge shame, given that the quality content has moved off the open web into walled gardens. If you elevate recently, you get churnalism, blogspam, and vacuous GPT3 bot content.
Has anyone noticed that we can't click past page 10 on many search queries? Isn't Google being misleading when it claims it found 2 million results, but it won't show past result 100?
I've noticed the same thing and given it some thought recently.
I think a structural shift has occured. A decade+ ago people made sites about their hobby's and interests, they were amateur experts on subjects and because they enjoyed what they wrote about they tended to build up extensive knowledge bases on their subjects, effectively their sites let you learn a subject rather than just trying to give you quick direct answers which might actually not be right for you, their sites let you understand what you really needed.
I think the thing that changed, is those people or their newer versions moved to youtube instead. People make videos instead of articles and what's left on google is the seo'ified crap that lacks the deep knowledge and context the original sites had.
Of course google owns youtube so it likely doesn't care, but yes google search is now a lesser product and I'm not actually sure google can do anything about it.
My two big beefs with the Google search results right now are these:
1) looks like low-quality linkfarms (like Taboola and that other one) have a big comeback, under the guise of higher-quality content, but Google doesn't give a fuck anymore since 2013 or so when they kept twiddling their algorithm to reduce all the SEO shit;
2) Google started using those low-quality linkfarms and listicles as sources for its "authoritative" onebox answers to your queries ("featured snippets", or "knowledge graph", or how they call it). You look for answers, you get those things front and center as if they are "the" answer. Don't look further. The so-called "deep web" seems no longer to be a thing.
Well, there's also this little problem that for some queries you can easily get a first page of results with one or two organic results and the rest being ads, but that's peanuts compared to the first two.
My first web job was building websites for a rinky-dink SEO company. My boss had zero qualms churning out trash content while trying to game the system. How can Google fight an infinite sea of these operations? I'm not sure who's to blame at this point.
Like many HN users, I assume, my method for finding useful info online has always been to find a forum. You can't monetize a forum post without it being ignored or discouraged by the community so until that changes forums will always provide the most consistently helpful content on the net.
Obviously these companies are making enough money off the segment of the population that does not behave this way to make it worth their while. My question is how big is this segment and will it slowly dissolve as older generations pass and more grow up with the internet? Or will there always be enough people susceptible to this spam that the internet will never get better?
One important metric is precision for the first result or "P@1" which was something Google originally excelled at.
I was working at a search vendor where I had the chance to debrief high-level defectors from Google and Bing and found that they (like us, with our patent search) struggled to get P@1 above 70%. They saw personalization as a way forward but also told us that personalization at both of those vendors was limited to a few cheap tricks and their were structural reasons why neither vendor would do it in a deep way.
The trouble is that you can at best make an informed guess about what somebody searching for "testing" wants. You ultimately have to get them into a dialogue which might be "I gotta search for 'nondestructive testing'" or could be based on some diversity ranking so that 'covid testing', 'software testing', 'psychological testing', etc. are represented in the top few results.
Right - this was called result diversity. But in markets like the US, where avg revenue per user is high, polarization is also high and there is some belief that big software companies have a role in changing societal wrongthink, you get these types of results. For this type of a query, I'd think P@1 would be 0% for some 30+% of the society.
Perhaps that'll be readjusted in a year, when covid is not top of mind for a majority of the users.
For a mass market product the emotional response that people have to the results is pretty important.
It doesn't seem crazy to me that people are seeking out COVID-19 testing now. On the other hand I don't have any question in my mind about where I would go for COVID-19 testing because both Cornell and Cayuga Medical Center run testing sites that are well oiled machines. I am entitled to use one for free because I am staff, students are required to get testing once a week. If I am getting a medical procedures done I am required to get tested by CMC. For people in Tompkins County there is very much a "right answer".
Is testing, particularly personal interested in testing really politicized? My wife was required to get tested once a week when she was helping out at a nursing home and she found that pretty annoying. If somebody wants to get tested personally though what could be wrong with that?
That makes it a social network optimized for engagement.
Someone posted a link to you.com in another sub thread. The results for the same query over there is what I'd expect.
I'm thinking that living in a deep blue geo is what's coloring my experience. Perhaps others can post what they see from an incognito browser.
Ultimately this is where big data analysis should be used. Log incognito results from a geo-diverse set of IPs to understand (a) the ranking model (b) the consequences of the model.
I was amazed to search for "social media behavioral sink" and has Google turn up a recent comment on HN I wrote.
One cheap personalization trick that works is to raise the rank of links that you click on preferentially. It drives SEO and other people concerned with their rank up the wall because they see it changing and can only speculate about what other people see.
Someone could make a fortune launching a search engine running Google's algorithms circa 2010!
Actually, thinking about it, Google has always been fighting low quality results from spammers and SEO. I remember 2017-2019 there were multiple topics that you just couldn't research on Google because the SEO blog spam was so overwhelming.
I can confirm that recipes are a mixed bag, but some team at Google is working hard to try and make them good, it is just a really difficult fight. It doesn't help that the number of recipe sites keeps exploding.
Oh by the way, if you want good recipes, just pay for a Cook's Illustrated subscription. There. Done. Sadly NYT Cooking has started adding some really low quality recipes that honestly no one should be making.
For the last 6 months or so, I started maintaining bookmarks because of frustration with the search results. Occasionally, a useful search result is found on 2 or 3rd page.
I also installed https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/ recently to block some annoying sites from results such as geeksforgeek polluting C++ related searches. I am uncertain if this is inevitable because I am increasing interested in higher-quality content, while most content on popular (SEO optimized?) sites is definitely not the best.
I am still happy with Google Scholar results, though I have no benchmark to compare against. ReserachGate?
I noticed this too over the past couple of years. Google, Alphabet, and its shareholders don't care because they are still making so much money. I truly think it's by design to further ruin the state of the internet, just my opinion.
Has anyone else noticed how many important websites, such as news organizations, have Taboola or similar ads? Like it's the only way to make any money online. Sensationalized paginated joke content with ads on every page.
It's crazy how many websites are scrapping stackoverflow and getting on the first page of google results. Like, is it hard to check if identical content is on stackoverflow? lol it's not hard.
I'm wondering how you guys are searching, do you type in short word combinations like 20yrs ago or full sentences and questions? Thing is Google values search intent above anything else right now, and if you don't show clear intent they have to guess, and the selection of search results will be mixed in consequence.
Here's a up to date PDF from Google explaining search intent:
Sorry but you're holding it wrong if you don't search intentful enough.
NL queries return poor results if the content creator didn't create it with searchers in mind. Most of these sites also often have a very poor UX.
There's of course a larger incentive to optimize for popular stuff, especially when there's commercial intent (or implied commercial intent by the absence of informational intent).
Bad search results can be opportunities, and many new bloggers focus on this right now which is why they often appear first in search results before the actual experts.
But it would only take experts to improve their content to outrank them because expertise and trust are also ranking factors right behind UX, and if you have both you win. Expertise alone just isn't enough.
> Sorry but you're holding it wrong if you don't search intentful enough.
i.e. the users of my search engine are not helping me well enough for me to do my job.
> NL queries return poor results if the content creator didn't create it with searchers in mind.
i.e. the content creators from 30 years ago where not clairvoyant enough to consider the robot crawling needs I have, in order to do my job.
> Most of these sites also often have a very poor UX.
i.e. the content creators I am indexing just have plain text which is not helping me well enough, for me to do my job.
I wonder if there is ever an instance wherein google employees are able to look within and realize there is work to be done rather than blame external constraints. Specially when other search engines are still able to satisfy exotic/technical/archive queries, despite these external constraints.
Google had a mission to organize the world's information and make it accessible. It seems Alphabet has rewritten it to "organize the world's information"... "for popular stuff, especially when there's commercial intent".
All search engines lack a feature that would make them hugely more useful: disambiguation. Suppose I search a common name "John Doe". I should next be presented with a disambiguation page allowing me to select whether I meant "John Doe who was President of Calexico 1905-1909", "John Doe who won the World Series with the Greensocks 1975" or "John Doe professor of Spanish Technicalities at Idaho Institute of Science". It shouldn't be my job to disambiguate my query. The search engine knows much more about the total search space than I do!
(circa 2012) i bootstrapped a company that connects people searching for information to providers of said information in a real time chatroom created for the duration of the query. This is to solve pogo sticking when the website information is too dense (say search for quitclaim deed without knowing too much about it). I failed to get enough users on both sides ('two sided market'). I am not from search/web space - my expertise is in building routers/switches in the 90s. I extended xmpp so that you could query from any chat box that can interwork with xmpp.
I have to agree. Lately (maybe year or so) it seems that researching anything that isn't clearly linked to some kind of product or service is difficult on Google.
It occurs to me that it could partly be that the "free and open" internet seems to be dying. For example, Discord or Slack are often used to replace message boards but that means they are no longer indexed and searchable. There are many examples like this right?
The old free hosted sites are dying off or provide no monetary value to Google. So even if they still exist, why bother indexing them.
This has nothing to back it up of course, just musings.
This has been true for a long time. I think it is still safe to assume googlers are not stupid, so there must be a reason for that. My guesses, in order of decreasing confidence:
(by far) 1) globally seen, the results given are best for the general population
2) search/ad revenue from "still-google-users" vs. switchers is in a sweet spot
3) ???
I'd bet on 1), since google was historically nerd-focused, but that changed long ago, and including inertia and stuff, they have probably realized by now that the crowd of "i know what i want, just give me the link" is not driving key performance indicators.
ive been noticing something specific that seems not good: sometimes if you search for a series of words as an exact match, sometimes it will match but other times it doesn't, depending on which string of words you use from an article.
e.g. lets say a webpage has the following text on it: "hello my name is john my favorite color is red" .. searching for "my name is john my favorite" might find the page, but searching "is john my favorite color is" will return 0 results; even though the quote exists and should turn up the same result
I agree with this 100%, and could totally admit that I have a giant deficit of imagination, but I still have a huge problem imagining how a company could disrupt Google search at this point (unless that other company is Amazon, Microsoft or Apple, i.e. another company with gigantic resources).
The costs of setting up a comparable search engine these days must run in the multi-billions. The Internet is huge now, so your crawling and indexing costs would be giant. Not to mention that it can actually be hard to crawl many sites that attempt to restrict indexing to "the big boys" of Google, Bing and a couple others. Also, Google controls the primary on-ramp of Android and Chrome. They also control the primary ad networks that make running a search engine profitable.
I compare it to Microsoft. Nobody really ever "disrupted" Microsoft in the desktop OS space - they still have a greater than 75% market share. The thing that changed, of course, is that the "desktop operating space" as a category became much less important with the rise of mobile, and Microsoft famously lost that OS battle. So my point is that I find it hard to see Google being "disrupted" when it comes to the "Internet search market" - the only thing I really see being possible is if some other technology came along and superseded "Internet search" as a category.
I've felt this pain and often wondered why search engines don't allow one to set fairly complicated ongoing preferences that lead to more trusted results. Yes, I might miss some information by aggressive filtering but I'd prefer it to the utterly useless results I usually get.
I typically use DDG but it's gotten to the point where even putting quotes around terms still yields results without the term, and where there seems to be almost no way to avoid results that are untrustable SEO-driven dreck.
Their algorithms find it more engaging if I have to click through 50 crappy links to find one good one. If I spend 5 extra minutes browsing Google, that's a great metric, right?
Maybe deliver high quality results for adblock users only. Lower server costs for adblock users while maximizing ad-revenue for users without adblock. Win-win.
I am using Google to look for programming documentation or solutions to particular problems. Top results are very often unrelated spam from Medium, clones of SO, SEO website against npm, etc
It’s quite hard to make specific searches - it insists to show me generic results, either by “did you mean?”, or excluding the keyword I explicitly added, or because it thinks I am looking for something more common.
If there are no results they should just tell me - instead of trying to keep me “engaged” with their spam.
It seems like most of the comments seem to be on one of two sides.
1. Learn to live with this, and you’ve helped creat this problem
2. This is terrible but some other non related point
It seems to be that the original only grail algorithm -page rank, that made google the superstar it is, can be hacked in a way that saturates the internet with low quality search results.
The obvious question seems to be what algorithm could be used to identify/differentiate low quality websites from high quality sites
I have recently researched a laundry machine. No chance - if you dont know where to ask or look you will be bombarded with fake marketing crap and affiliate cancer.
I’ve been using HN search a lot more lately. In the past I just used it to find old posts. But now I use it to research topics, the same way I used to use Google.
This will always happen because there are people who make good content and then there are people who are good at marketing/spamming or have deep pockets to pay people who do.
Also people who are the experts in their field and produce great content are also terrible marketers and couldn't be bothered to create "backlinks" or whatever google wants from you to get your content on top. Which is why Google sucks to bad these days.
The future of search isn't better search results - it's a customized solution to you and what you are looking for at that moment. I imagine a future where Google returns an AI interactive summary query with sources.
But at the same time I always thought of how odd it is that Google competes in an area where there is no user lock-in whatsoever - I mean search should be one of the most easy areas to disrupt - with almost no competitors.
You mean to tell me that when you use Google design paradigms, to implement Google promoted "best practices" in a way that scores highly on Googles own test suite and build it on Google promoted Javascript-by-the-pound libraries and then strap it with Google analytics and ads, promote it with Google ads, and then host it on Google cloud platform that you're actually building a dirtier, shittier web?
I am going to go out on a whim and say that I think this is intentional. There are a lot of power games being played these days. I am reminded of this quote from Chomsky,
"There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated." [1]
Google is how the masses are "educated" these days. There is also the narrative of how students, high school, university, and collage are just googling everything for their tests and exams and not learning everything. (I am one of them)
I am sure SEO spam is part of the problem but there are always multiple narratives going on.
One category I’ve noticed this kind of thing in is calorie counts. I’ll search for a product that should have an official nutrition page from the brand’s website, and get pages and pages of websites that just seem to regurgitate from some large database.
I use MyFitnessPal to log calories, and it already has one of these large databases. I’m usually searching online to validate it against another source, so this is pretty unhelpful.
Yeah, Google today feels like the end stage of many of the pre-Google search engines. They were ok for a while, but eventually SEO tricks took over and ruined everything for everyone. What I worry about is that back in the 90s, everyone had a healthy dose of skepticism for anything you read off the internet. That’s not true today, and there’s a whole lot more incentive to put false information out there these days.
Getting on the internet in the mid to late 90's required a fair bit of intelligence to set up a modem and drivers, "kids what the hell is UART", configure DUN settings, download and maintain browsers, etc.
I blame the iMac G3 and specifically Jeff Goldblum for all of this mess.
I’m telling you my experience not their goals. The searches seemed nearly exactly the same. I didn’t see any sites that didn’t appear on the other in first glance.
Yeah, the results are absolute SEO garbage far too frequently. However, I'm not sure if this is Google "losing" to SEO ppl, or short-sighted greedy behaviour by Google ads ppl. It certainly could be the greedy case - SEO garbage pages tend to be packed full of Google Display ads, so Google gets paid by advertisers whenever you load them. If they are favouring pages with Google Display ads (or favouring domains that spend a lot of Google Search ads in "organic" results), then that'd hurt the results a lot.
Example of terrible SEO results - I saw an interesting magic trick on Reddit, and someone in the comments mentioned they did it using "Key BDM Scissors". I tried searching all sorts of different things along the lines of "how do Key BDM Scissors work", but literally every single result was just online stores selling the scissors, with the word-for-word exact same blurb on each page. No matter how I tweaked the query, the results were identical, and in no way explained how the trick scissors worked. Useless.
> I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either.
Strongly disagree.
I'm pretty sure the kind of drive and passion that led to the very high quality of Google search back in the day is long gone.
At this point, people do not join Google for the technical challenge or the reputation and/or ethos of the company, but for the fat bonuses and RSU grants.
Theres no point. But people want to search using their url bar. People don't want to change their default search from Google. I use DDG and !nhs so I'm with you.
One thing that would help immensely is a programmatic API for search. That way anybody could write a program to contact a REST search server and get back 100 results, and then filter out sites that were on one's personal blacklist, and also check the remaining results to see that they did in fact contain the search terms requested.
If you try this with Google you'll immediately be captcha'd to hell and back. You can do it with a browser extension (and many of these exist) but you're always at the mercy of the browser maker (often Google itself) who can arbitrarily decide break your extension.
Programmatic access to the web was exactly the premise of the so-called "semantic web" from a few years back but it never caught on. We probably need a government-funded search spider and database that is mandated by law to allow REST access and which can never be commercialized. Of course any attempt to build such a thing would be lobbied into the ground by Google, but I can dream.
On a side note, I went to use Google places API yesterday and the offering is trash. They get reviews for free (including my own) then expect me to pay through the nose to access that data and guess what, if you want to cache any of the results for performance and reliability reasons you’re violating their terms of service because that would impact their bottom line.
This has bothered me for a while now, even DDG is getting increasingly less useful.
Google works if I want to buy something, that's about it. But finding any kind of news or actual information, particularly about incidents in the past, often feels impossible past some Wikipedia article.
At least until narrowing down the date range for the search to escape most of that SEO that just adds whatever you search to make it top of the list.
But even then, on certain topics going back years sometimes yields very weird results, where it feels like there was some kind of purge that only left certain outlets as "valid sources".
Which in practice means the web has become very good at forgetting, as often it's near impossible to rediscover the article for some headline from a decade ago, it's just drowned out by all the SEO if it never made any big waves to begin with.
Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle, that's what a lot of these results often seem to boil down to, and it's bluntly depressing.
It feels like I’m the only one who gets consistently excellent results from Google search (and it feels like they’ve gotten better for me over time)? Maybe it’s because most of my searches are basic and lowest common denominator? I just don’t need obscure information most of the time and when I do it’s honestly still not that hard to find it.
Another problem with google search is that it's no longer something that you can become good at. Yes, the queries may have improved on some KPIs (although the link here would suggest otherwise), but you more or less get what you're given. It's very difficult to tweak your query to get better, or more specific, results.
Could this be a side effect of web developers moving away from traditional websites to single page web apps? Single page apps are notoriously difficult to make SEO friendly but right now they are the hotness. A 'crappy' WordPress site will be much easier to get ranked on Google than a multi million dollar angular site.
The linked tweets imply that this decline in search results was Google's choice, led by desire for further monetization or exec incompetence, but I think Google is simply facing an impossible task.
Receiving an arbitrary question and finding the most helpful site for that question out of the entire web is already nearly impossible.
Now consider the above problem, except the sites you have to search are highly adversarial. More precisely, the internet is roughly divided into people who post useful content and have little interest in SEO and those who only care about SEO and clicks and not about creating useful content. The latter are more motivated and have more resources. For every useful site, they can take that site and create 100 of their own copies with the same content, more aggressive SEO and their own ads.
How is Google, or anyone else, supposed to navigate this landscape?
Searching for content which you know is on GitHub is the biggest issue for me. Now rather than returning results for code from GitHub, you instead get results from sites which copy content from GitHub.
It’s actually useful they perform this or else some of that content would never appear in Google’s search results.
Can we also talk about the dumpster fire that is YouTube?
I look up anything news related and the entire first few pages are Foxx/Murdoch and whatever other batsh*t content I don't want to see.
I cannot block channels from my search results and I have hardly any control of the content I see. I can't organise subscriptions by folder, I am inundated by "YouTube shorts".
Worst of all, I have a legacy YouTube account with a failed "gaia migration" that I cannot delete because the migration somehow failed and I can't access the content. I have tried contacting their support staff and they told me they couldn't help. It's been 6 years and they haven't been able to do anything about it.
Amazon, Microsoft, Apple - please make a competition service to YouTube focused on the viewer's experience.
Does attempting to delete generate an error page of some sort? If so, you could try triggering it over and over again, as quickly as you can, for at least 10-15 minutes. This will cause their error rate to spike, and likely get the attention of their engineering team.
I'm having issues with Google lately too. Every time I look up some piece of code because I want to view documentation related to it, all I get are these example websites that crawl open source pages and index them with SEO optimized queries. Something like hotexamples.com and garbage like that. All of the sudden they're #1 on Google and provide little to no value. It used to be all of the #1 pages were stackoverflow.com or Reddit and the like, which always had really good discussions on these snippets of code.
Edit: in fact, it's gotten so bad that I've stopped using Google for search results and now I go directly to Reddit or Stack Overflow and do my searches there. Which is UNREAL. I don't mind it, but I can't believe how bad it's gotten.
I was thinking this last night, as I searched for where Android Studio installed NDK and was directed to an article that started from how to open Windows Explorer... with a whole bunch of how to troubleshoot opening Windows Explorer to pad the article for adverts.
Any time I search how to repair X on my car I get 10 sites of places selling the part but none of the forums discussing how to do the repair. Back in the day it was not like this. Very sad and I have now learned to basically ignore the first set of results and scroll past them.
I vaguely recall reading that Google uses time spent on a page/domain as an indicator of the relevance or quality of the search result/content, but I just googled to try to find that source and only found articles stating the opposite [^1],[^2]. Does anyone know if it is indeed used, and if so, why does it not work to demote low-quality SEO-abusing sites?
[^1]: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-important-is-time-on-site-...
[^2]: https://ahrefs.com/blog/dwell-time/
Yes it had been getting worse, but I think there is a limit to “find relevant results” anyway, Google is good for objective answers, but for more complex stuff, there is an more and more answers, the web nowadays is overwhelming
At some point it starts reaching personal preferences as well, and just tracking me like Google does is not good enough for those filters, not to mention privacy concerns
For example, many many times it happens that I read an awesome article about a subject, then weeks later I try to google it back to show to a friend, and I simply can’t find it, because there is a gazillion other articles about the same topic
That’s why I’m building a custom search engine, where you index whatever you want, your bookmarks, your Twitter likes, building your own brain’s search engine
> That’s why I’m building a custom search engine, where you index whatever you want, your bookmarks, your Twitter likes, building your own brain’s search engine
The claim is that Google search is producing worse results than in the past. The analysis is mostly anecdotal, and similar claims have been made before in a more concrete way. A prime example is "time to cook onions" giving incorrect results, covered in this slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-...
What we need is to see is specific queries, the results returned, why they're wrong, and what they should be instead.
I think the problem is that we all expect to get perfect results. We want automated systems to identify and remove unimportant useless things. But how will those systems get to know that?
We can't build another AI black box to try and do that. There is a option in search to report spam or improve search results.
Out of our laziness and expecting getting everything perfect, sometimes collectively working and reporting bad content-copying websites, etc. would be collectively useful for all.
Search had gotten so good that we probably expected to get perfect results everytime. Untill bad guys started to game it. I beleive it's more of cat and mouse game, and where all users collectively should help and mark as spam.
> ...collectively working and reporting bad content-copying websites, etc. would be collectively useful for all.
How would you combat commercial actors weaponizing this reporting to perform takedowns of legitimate competitor websites via distributed bot reporting attack (DRoC, distributed reporting of content attack)?
I have observed this for the past 3 years now. For example if I search for "reddit best soup pots" and set the date filter to be within last year, it gives me results which are 7 to 9 years old. This used to work perfectly fine 3 years ago.
A thread like this happens every month now and the main point of discussion always comes to how companies like Pinterest, Quora, Stackoverflow clones, etc are openly gaming the search engine and making results shit (1)
I think first time I read this was like 5 years ago yet Google is doing absolutely nothing about it and these sites still dominate the results by gaming whatever metrics Google is using to rank them.
Ugh, this is so true. It's getting increasingly difficult to break out of the SEO twilight zone. SEO is the worst thing that's ever happened to online search because it's completely poisoned the top N search results with garbage/ads. I have a very hard time finding organic content anymore. For example, I was trying to find an organic (written by a human who has tried the two products) comparison between two processors. It was impossible - I could only find AI generated sites that programmatically pulled the specs in a side-by-side comparison (which I had already done) but offered zero additional insights.
Beside of having more and more ads in the search results (which I think mostly driven by the pandemic because of significant revenue loss in 2020 Q2?), I think the web itself is the most significant offender of this problem. Not only those annoying SEO (which makes the problem exponentially harder), now more and more quality contents are going beyond unsearchable walled gardens. Basically almost all "platform" from mid-sized tech companies now require some sort of sign-in by default and if you try to crawl it at scale, you'll get banned. Perhaps Twitter is the only significant exception to this trend.
Yeah I often have to add “reddit” afterwards and hunt for links there or use “site:” predicate to get decent results in addition to using a results blocker to filter out a lot of useless SEO results (e.g. Pinterest/Gitmemory)
Search results are decent for most technical stuff, but anything consumer product-related is abysmal. I always seem forced to go to YouTube for that.
When I'm searching for "best short throw projector", most of all the results on Google are SEO spam. The same search on YouTube has a lot of low quality YouTuber garbage as well, but there are at least a couple of high quality results where the host tests input lag, fan loudness etc of several projectors. This is the kind of content that used to exist in sites (I remember Tom's Hardware from the early 2000s), but now seems to be hidden deep in YouTube only.
The most advanced AI staff, their algorithms beating even go champions, still being worse in search than ever before. Beaten by bing.com, yandex.com and others, at least in my humble opinion.
Google results change frequently, even when they shouldn’t. Searching for “shrimp recipes” gives me mostly food blog articles that are from the years 2020 or 2021. Why would I want recent recipes over tried and true recipes? Where did the good recipes from 2013 go?
Shrimp recipes may not be a “significant category” but this I think highlights one of Google’s search issues. It’s also how they make money. If there were no revolving door of promoted content, then how would today’s advertisers ever reach you? It’s a balancing act to maximize profits while minimizing damage, and they aren’t doing a good job with balancing.
Ironically, I think reddit's search sucks, but the knowledge of reddit is pretty decent, so searching google and adding reddit gets some of the better recommendations... at least you skip the shitty ad sites.
Certainly Google Images has taken a major dip in quality. I am unable to find images that I could even find a few months ago, and the number of results is shrinking for identical queries. On top of that, they are rolling out an absolutely HORRIBLE interface for image search on mobile.
Google is just in "big company" mode where the company is just so vast that it is nearly impossible to guarantee a consistent product quality. It will continue to offer good salaries and nice perks, but the innovation has stopped, and the company is doomed to inevitably slowly stagnate and fail.
I agree that Google search is much less relevant to me than it was > 10 years ago. I love some Google products (GCP, YouTube Music, Play books/movies, and paid for no advertisements YouTube) but search is no longer one of them.
That said, Google search works better for me if I use a private browser tab so the results don’t depend on search history. I find DDG to be useful. One good use case for Google search in the logged in mode is when I am searching for work related things that I might want to influence what I see in YouTube, but I could simply search in YouTube.
I agree, the results are too heavily influenced by domains like reddit, Pinterest, Quora.
The next thing I have realized, if I am looking for something about a topic or a person and there are current events heavily in the media on the person or the issue, it's almost impossible to get something useful or even related.
Stack overflow results are sometimes replaced by less useful GitHub links.
Then , job search results are pretty bad too , same for shopping items.
It seems like media outlets and the big traffic domains get preferential treatment.
And this is just for English, God knows how bad this will be in other languages.
Yes, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. There isn't a credible alternative either, so the world is basically returning to the altavista epoch with online tabloids everywhere.
Accuracy aside, I find one of the biggest barriers to easy searching is content padding.
So many queries can be answered in a sentence or two but are spun out into an entire article so that it is more search engine 'friendly'.
Same goes for YouTube videos, pad it out so there's enough time for ads.
I think Google would like something like Pagerank but for authors. Unfortunately Google+ never reached critical mass. Structured data is more prevalent, though, but the accuracy/trustworthiness of it is something that'd have to be taken into consideration.
This is actually one place I think blockchain could make sense...
Use people's servers as a sort of botnet to process search results, the more you process the more you earn, you'd need maybe storage nodes for indexes, processing nodes for ai/ml categorization of results, and then maybe people can also earn coinage for ranking results they do get, and that way the shitty sites could be more likely filtered out.
To advertise, costs coins which allows advertisers to basically buy ads not from the SE itself but from users via a marketplace.
You're right. I've been complaining about Google results for more than a decade. Things keep getting worse. People used to dismiss my allegations, but I'm seeing more people noticing now days.
This has been a known issue for years already. It's the 'attention economy' where nothing matters as much as engagement. Quality is not even an important metric. What we've been left with is visiting the same few websites we like, interacting on a couple of non-corrupted social channels where ads can't invade, like group chats in signal, and constantly unsubscribing from email lists because even the local ice-cream store knows that mailing lists are the best conversion channel.
The one thing Google is good at is finding a specific named thing:
- google a company name, it will find the company's website.
- google a historical figure or event, it will bring you to the appropriate wikipedia page.
- google a product, it will show you the amazon link.
Google anything less specific, anything that requires some judgment to discern, and you are dropped you into the SEO bramble of bad information and hostile web design. That Google itself has created.
What a failure for a company with infinite resources, and which has recruited the best minds in computer science.
Hmm I don't think SEO spam and fake reviews are Google's only problem. These have been useless for a long time, but I believe they're altering search results on purpose just to give you more crap to click on.
Random example: paste a stack trace in google, add, say, raspberry pi. First 5 pages of results will be beginner tutorials on how to set up something on your Pi. If you're lucky you'll get something related to your stack trace in the later results. Sometimes you don't get squat.
This quote from a Wikipedia article about a Heinlein book is apt for this. It makes me think that what has happened here is not only inevitable for any disruptive tech company that grows large enough, but also any other sort of human collective in general:
"This theme is echoed elsewhere in Heinlein's works – that real liberty is to be found among the pioneer societies out along the advancing frontier, but the regimentation and legalism that follow bring restraints that chafe true individualists."
Google is producing predatory monopolistic practices, blocking users and deplatforming businesses amidst pandemics without any sane reason, destroying businesses and ruining lives.
I want a good search engine for searching internet "chatter" - basically forums, comment sections, etc. I know we have FB, Reddit, Twitter, and so on, but these are all centralised platforms with centralised censorship when the "wrong" comments are made, or the preferred comments are intended to be surfaced/stickied.
It's frustrating to me that I almost never get forum results from Google any more. DuckDuckGo/Bing has been much better in that regard.
Isnt that the yc guy? This seems to me like a call for entrepreneurial people to come up with google alternatives just so that YC can dip their fingers in it while doing jack.
Sometimes I search a big chunk of lyrics from some fairly popular song that I hear in several radio stations and cannot find it... This wasn't the case a few years ago.
I apologise, profusely, if this is bad form to talk about a personal app.
After years of getting steadily deterioring quality search results, and being thoroughly fed up with it, I built an iPhone app (other platforms soon) that removes spammy websites from your Google search results and lets you add your personal, permanent exclusions. Launched it to Reddit which seemed to love the idea: https://searchban.com
Since 2013 we’ve been publishing AgFunderNews as the site of record for investment and entrepreneurship in foodtech and agtech. For whatever reason we were never able to get into Google News but other were who write summary articles on the articles we publish. Similarly, Google will defer to a site like Forbes which has no real authority in our space. It’s really really bad. There is good info out there but increasingly Google is not able to surface it.
It's been bothering me for a while. Whenever I search anything programming related, low quality websites (like w3schools and geeksforgeeks) always rank on top. I have to write a script that attach
Who has concrete steps to make this better? Seems like one or two people are making their own engines, but moving the needle is going to take a lot more than that...
Google, why are you slacking off search and also the Google Assistant? It feels like a rerun of the 2003-2010 period in Microsoft.
Web search is getting worse, people complain, problems persist. I thought your mission was to organise the information and make it useful.
And the Assistant is just as dumb as years ago, while NLP has been progressing leaps and bounds in the last 2-3 years. Where's the progress? Are you aware speech is going to dominate direct web search?
The comments on both Twitter thread and here on HN goes something like "better have your own communities on Reddit and StackOverflow for your advanced queries". Sooo, we go back to Yahoo's grouping/directories that was the norm in 90's, eh? And Google bested that by going with their unique search algorithm in early 2000's. Hence next is going to be a reinvention of the wheel by DuckDuckGo I suppose.
I don't know about that. I use Firefox with DDG as default search engine and I go to Google only in case of searching for local stuff (as in my country's local stuff). For everything else DDG pretty much covers my needs.
One thing everyone seems to be overlooking is that "quick answers" (or whatever they are called) and the accompanying "related questions" are very good and Google seems to be optimizing for them for the most part.
I agree, Google is no longer good for technical questions or specific queries (like copy/pasting errors messages) but I imagine they crunched the numbers and found that they don't bring much revenue anyway
He wonders what a paid version of Google search would look like. I don't think most people would be able to afford such a service and it'd be reserved mostly for people with lots of disposable income. However at that point, you're losing your most valuable ad clicks. From what I understand a single click on a Crypto.com ad can cost $40-$60 dollars. I don't see it being a sustainable subscription model.
Google is slowly becoming BING. I would love for Mircosoft to step up and weird everybody out by building some kind of open source superior search engine.
I mean isn’t the issue at hand a by product of how massive the internet is now and Google’s relative impartiality?
In a truly inclusive and expansive index isn’t it a bit of cat and mouse with SEO? Presumably the only way to get rid of them would be for Google to basically start curating the web. It’s an interesting thought but a bit unsettling at first. A secondary/premium product line or competitor seems more palatable.
This makes me optimistic. Why? For the longest time, Google has had a monopoly on internet search. This is unhealthy for the entire internet. Google's declining quality opens a rather large door for competition, and I see really promising alternatives such as DuckDuckGo.
Perhaps this is simply an example of the business life cycle in action. Eventually all businesses crush themselves under their own weight and greed.
Google and their shareholders are addicted to ad money. Personally speaking I think this is more harmful to society than cigarettes.
I hope we normalize this and start fighting back. Ads first destroyed youtube, google, and I’m sure a bunch of other products I am not thinking about.
Enough is enough, and we need to decouple morality from content and edge back to the anti censorship wild west mentality the internet championed for so long.
Sure, google is bad, but it's 2022 and searching for shows in Amazon Prime is ridiculously bad. Just yesterday I searched for "Adams family" knowing that they had a movie called "Adams family 2", and it just didn't show in the search results at all, lots of pretty unrelated movies. I had to specifically "search" for the exact movie title.
Are you sure you didn't just spell it wrong? "Addams Family" brings that up right away on Prime Video for me. Though it would be nice if the search was able to deal with errors like that.
I’ve been noticing Google returning lower quality results consistently for at least a year.
My guess is that the results are based on relevant info, but also on which pages can serve up the most ads at the same time. Because the internet is heavily influenced by search algos, over time, this decision feeds back on itself and results in search results being spammier, less content rich, and less accurate.
To what extent is this a supply side problem? What's the counterexample high quality health website that Google should have included?
Part of the problem is surely how Google's ad model influences the success or failure of various kinds of websites, but a deeper problem seems to me how anybody qualified to share medical information freely would be acting against their own interest.
When i started using DuckDuckGo, i somewhat frequently had to do a !g to find what i was looking for, but for the past couple of years DDG has been spot on, and Google returns mostly trash. Not that it matters when all the good answers are on Reddit or StackOverflow.
Sadly, DDG lacks behind in the (local) shopping category, at least if you're in the EU.
I grew up with the amazing stories about Google engineers, and I wish Google will not repeat the history of companies declining gradually then collapsing suddenly, as it is such a revolutionary company not just for its product but also for its amazing contribution to the technology. The sad thing is that I'm seeing more and more cracks in this great company.
I actually created "my own search engine" because of this: notrashsearch.github.io.
It uses Google search tech under the hood (which I've found superior to other search engines), but filters results with a white list. It's only ~100 sites long & very focussed on STEM, but the results are surprisingly good.
If anyone has suggestions for site to add, please let me know!
Google remains pretty good if you’re searching for pretty obscure topics.
Which support’s Seibel’s point.
You do have to go to extra lengths to keep the search on topic though. Google tries to DWIM the search (“seems unlikely the user is really looking for insect embryology”). Is this well meaning or steering the search to revenue-generating topics?
Is there good evidence that Google isn't doing a good job of finding content anymore, or that good content doesn't exist on the public internet anymore?
Google is only doing a bad job if what you're looking for exists but can't be found. I have a feeling that for many searches, what you're looking for simply doesn't exist anymore.
Could the issues be less presumptuous about googles business, and more technical? E.g the incorporation of NLP model(s) in search that don’t perform well in the wild?
Curious about their query parsing as well. I can’t recall exact queries, but I had instances where scrambled typos (but still obvious words to me) broke the results all together & no suggested fixes.
Searching anything related to programming inevitably yields some of those StackOverflow mirrors. Sometimes they are crappily machine translated into my native language. And sometimes they're ranked higher than the actual StackOverflow.
Google won't let people blacklist domains, so I had to write some uBO rules to get rid of those results on the browser side.
If anyone has the skills / wherewithal to work on this problem please send me an email asap (my email address is in my profile.)
And as I've stated, I will give you $500 if you do not like the demo of what we are building just to show you that I am not f*&%ing around with this. Our small team is growing very carefully in a well-defined niche for this.
In addition to the site:reddit.com trick, I find prefacing every keyword in intext:keyword prevents most forms of substitution (but disappointingly not stemming) and ensures what you search for is actually on the page.
Any other way of using google lets rankbrain swap your specific engineering jargon for high click-through kardashian news and rap lyrics.
I’ve noticed they started to limit search length, my search was too long and they removed small words like “of” and “the. I also saw a message somewhere along the lines of “to show you the best quality results, we limited this search to two pages”
Google is only good for finding stuff you already know exists. What ever happened to exploring the web?
I've tried searching for some technical details on some of my car's components. No matter what search query I used, the first few PAGES of search results were links to non-original parts on ebay, amazon, aliexpress etc.
To get the actual details I had to go register on a forum and ask people there. Feels like pre-google all over again.
I agree with the author re: results being useless, but strongly disagree on the motivation.
Google doesn’t show crappy results to optimize adwords, blackhat SEO hackers force their crap onto the fromt page.
The whole thread after the first tweet seems to assume Google is behind this, when in reality their failure comes from not successfully blocking the spammers
” What would a paid version of Google Search results look like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible results and not be worried about generating revenue?”
The author seems to genuinely believe Google is not combatting it, but trying to generate revenue via showing lame results
Google generates revenue via ads (or analytics, which helps Google target ads down the line), which lame results often include.
Downranking ad-supported websites in favour of ad-free one would cull a lot of spam and would be trivial to do, but yet Google isn't doing it. Curious right?
Have to confirm. I find myself using yandex, (or sometimes https://www.gnod.com/search) to get better results. This was not the case 5 years ago... just my two cents but Google's search has declined from my point of view.
> The more I think about this, the more it looks like classic short term thinking. Juice ad revenue in the short run. Open the door to complete disruption in the long run…
This is the key insight from the thread. Publicly traded companies get pulled into the short term thinking cycle and this is the inevitable outcome.
Google is now regularly ignoring search constraints like the - operator to remove results containing a term and "" marks to only give results with a certain term. This is quite infuriating when you're searching for something that sounds like something much more common but isn't.
It’s possible that a decent search engine should be considered public infrastructure, just like water and internet and roads and a fire department. If not public, then forming a non-profit may be the way to go. I don’t see how for-profit search doesn’t turn to trash, given sufficient time.
A challenge I see for anyone trying to disrupt this space is that in principle Google could fix this at any moment.
So a startup would still need some secret sauce, otherwise they might gain a toehold just to get absolutely wrecked by Google tweaking their algorithms a small amount and regaining dominance.
I wonder if it will make sense to now build a meta search engine using SerpApi [1], weight couple of websites more like reddit or stackoverflow, remove adds, and repackage all this listings into a super simple UI.
I think many queries to google includes the term "reddit" i know me and my mates all do this a lot more than 5 years ago. The value of 'reddit results' are of course that is mostly real humans (yes not always) providing data and content for a variety of topics.
That's another, adjacent problem. Reddit has obviously given Google a truckload of cash. Almost everything I search for, when I have a question about programming or a video game, includes Reddit results at the top of the list. The problem is that I have NEVER seen a good answer to a question about ANYTHING at Reddit. NEVER. I often use "-reddit" in my searches because of this problem.
>Reddit has obviously given Google a truckload of cash.
Source ?
>The problem is that I have NEVER seen a good answer to a question about ANYTHING at Reddit. NEVER. I often use "-reddit" in my searches because of this problem.
Can you guys give me some good examples of sites that are "SEO crap" or google searches that do not return anything useful? I want to do some experients if I can write a program that takes a search query, hands it to google, takes googles result and reorders them a bit.
I searched this entire thread for the word "fidelity" and got 0 results. The problem is the sophistication of the web has lost cadence with the coarseness of the tools. There is no way to get to there from here. What search means and how it is interfaced has to change.
How are these sites created? Are they hand crafted or automatically generated with something like GPT?
From what I’ve seen, a lot of them just seem to copy-paste content from each other and sites like stack-overflow. I’m just curious whether a human does this or a machine programmed to game SEO.
Google search is shot. They need to revert the jillion microservices to pre-covid versions and just let go of whatever they've done. The changes have surely increased some key performance indicators but they've also made their service look like its always April 1st.
I almost always get better results from Bing, and while they’re not good they’re not obviously getting worse (barring ahem porn queries which Bing has consistently been better at and still is, you just frequently need to add “porn” to the query now).
>> This is why no software incumbent is truly protected from startup disruption
Not quite. It's why publicly traded companies are not protected, they can never make enough profit. At least not in today's world where the whole market looks like a scam.
Not news, it's been getting shitty for awhile to the point most of my searching uses "" to force those keywords to show up. And now I'm regularly getting results in which the page doesn't contain required keywords. Super aggravating.
uBlock Origin is a must when clicking on some first page Google results how, as well as a good pause and study of the results. The unscrupulous ad baiters have gotten real good at Google SEO and content scraping. I'd guess they do well for themselves, as the practice has picked up significantly in recent times. It reminds me of part of the reason Google stole Yahoo's marketshare so rapidly: if you deliver useless results too often then it's a waste of my time to use you. Perhaps the time has come for a new breed of search engine, to disrupt the search engine game, which it seems Google shifted their focus from long ago.
I wish Google had a toggle switch that isn't slowed you real user generated content... Like filter out all sites that are in Alexa top 10 for the category, and just show geniune niche blogs and forums with rich informed discussions.
I'd noticed this too but I've found that the best results usually are now on page 2 or 3 and the first few pages I've mentally written down as 'sponsored links' so I've just trained myself to ignore them!
Searching for any PC technical issue solutions is impossible, all you get is grifters selling you PC cleaner junk or some poor overworked Microsoft support tech telling you to run "sfc /scannow" to fix a hardware issue.
To all those hating on affiliate marketing and how google is ruining the internet as a place for reliable product research, I propose a different take. Affiliate marketing is actually a way to fund product research and testing. The problem is those that currently pay out are too few. Imagine if all products/sellers provided a potential payout equally on par with one another? Then you could help protect against the bias that leads to only Amazon and Walmart stocked reviews. To boot, you create incentives to shop from a wider scope of vendors and marketplaces.
We do affiliate marketing on ATTIC.city that we believe is honest and fair. We let every product on, from almost any vendor (that we can technically support), regardless of whether we have a commission agreement. Our search results always give the best match that we can for your query. Period.
Kind of scary when you realize there are only really two search engines in the most of the world. Google and Bing. Google and Microsoft. The world deserves more than this. DDG, Ecosia, Yahoo, etc are just Bing behind the scenes.
300+ comments in a hour??? C'mon now, this all can't be genuine. I don't think Google returns the best results all the time either, but most "outage" posts don't get this much engagement so quickly.
Web search is an adversarial context. Just try to list the things a search engine provider has to fight against, then try to define some criteria for each of those things that more than 50% of the population will agree upon.
We need a classic spam filter for search results. I can mark emails as spam. Why can I not mark search results as spam? This could be used to train a naive bayesian filter similar to the spam filter in my inbox.
Easy to blame some “suit” but when the rubber meets the road, Googlers want their RSUs to be valuable maybe more than any other group. Zero incentive to put user experience first at any level of the organization.
100% I end up prefixing my searches with Reddit it.. or stackoverflow. It wasn't the case even just 4 years ago.. now if if top results aren't it chances are that rest is even more completely off mark
I suspect these ad-ridden junk sites are optimizing more for Google than for Bing, as I tend to run into them more if I try to check Google's results instead of relying on Duck Duck Go.
Has anyone else noticed that Google’s image search, but the standard one and the visual search, have decreased in quality in the last few months? I’ve switched to Bing for images.
I wonder how much of this is due to Google or that the rest of the web (the crappy parts at least) has figured out the algorithm sufficiently to degrade its performance overall?
At least 3 times in the last week I've noticed that trying to search for information that is not the government narrative about covid vaccine leads to the crappiest piece of garbage having an attempt at discrediting whatever I'm searching on.
Google / YouTube suggestion engine is now evil and corrupt to the bone.
Unfortunately, there's no superior alternative. Anecdotally, Google produces substantially more relevant results (For things I commonly search for) than Bing and DDG.
Kagi seems to be limited access, and Neeva spammed me with registration popups almost immediately. I'll investigate both more, but this isn't a promising start.
It's a bit ironic that this post is part of the problem. It's very hard to make money in decent product reviews but there is money in SEO optimization & referral links. Most product feedback and honest opinions are shared on sites like Twitter & Reddit which range from bad-SEO (Reddit, Youtube) to deliberately anti-SEO (Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest). While this thread/opinion is on HN ATM, it will quickly be gone and no one using a search engine will find it (if they do it will probably be via finding a HN or Reddit post first).
That said I'm not sure what search results this person is actually getting but I really haven't had a problem using DDG or Google. I just know that what's marketed and used by the average consumer tends to be pretty bad if you ask any expert or enthusiast. I don't think this is search engines being bad at their job it's just that most topics bifurcate quickly into average people and amateur experts/enthusiasts.
Here's an example. Coffee. It's a very common beverage that millions if not billions of people drink every day. However, coffee culture for the average person is very different from enthusiast coffee culture.
Search engine's are not even that bad... if you look up a good coffee grinder. The top sites on both DDG/Bing and Google do mention the difference between a blade and burr grinder. The most recommended option looks pretty decent. This is probably a much better option for 90% of people than getting the 'enthusiast' (no-brand industrial burr grinder) option off of Ebay.
Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a completely different demographic from the typical person. I don't think Google's search as gotten worse but rather typical user (i.e. training data) becoming more average.
Another good example are TVs. Everyone and everyone's dad knows that Costco has some pretty good deals on TVs as well as offering a best in class warranty. However, if you read the forums and in-depth reviews you will quickly notice that Costco doesn't have 90% of the best TV in each price range. The average consumer wants the best Costco TV not the best TV as long as you get X% discount and you calibrate yourself, etc.
> Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a completely different demographic from the typical person. I don't think Google's search as gotten worse but rather typical user (i.e. training data) becoming more average.
I hear this argument a lot, and I think it is a cop out.
Google literally bills itself as being able to personalize itself to your interests and being able to learn based on your queries. On top of that, google used to work 7 years ago essentially perfectly. If there were really such a divergence between myself and "typical users" you'd have heard them all complain about google then, because they were using it also.
What's going on here is a misalignment of incentives between users and Google. They don't have an interest in being useful, they have an interest in herding eyes to the most profitable places and in using people to train their AI. They believe nobody can oust them as incumbent and so they no longer feel they have to deliver a good product if doing that hurts the bottom line.
I'm building a new kind of search engine. Would love if some of you could provide me with some difficult search queries that target very specific content.
Google has never, ever produced high quality search results for medical questions. The jokes about this are about as stale as the ones about airline food.
I don't believe 100% of the blame lies with Google. It could partly be that there is just a lack of good content on the internet nowadays. Take product reviews for example. You'd have to pay for a web developer, designer, buy a lot of products, hire journalists to test the them and produce content, that all costs a lot. Is it feasible to do this based of a few ads and affiliate links a lot of which will be blocked anyway?
I think what we need is a global micro payment system which enables good content creators to be funded for their work directly.
I'm a current Googler, so yeah, I'm biased, but I work far away from search so I'm basically a plain consumer of it, and this is lazy thinking:
"I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either. I’m wondering if this isn’t really a tech problem but the influence of some suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases."
I'm pretty sure Google doesn't make enough money on third party sites to intentionally make its own search results worse.
What's happening here is the ever-growing battle between search algorithms and SEO. Most of sites that he is complaining about are likely doing an incredible amount of optimizations for search engines and human psychology to show on search results pages and get people to click on them. They A/B test, within singe sites as well as run the same or slightly modified content through site networks.
So sites optimize to get crappy filler content on Google, and Google changes to demote those sites and produce better results (which people still complain about).
This is also the reason that it's not so simple to do better than Google. A new search engine also has to have an algorithm and presumably it'll share many of the same approaches that Google has used and have been gamed by content farms. If a search engine does come up with a break-though mechanism to separate the bad from the good, then either sites will adapt to that, and/or Google and other engines will adopt similar mechanisms too.
And if a search engine somehow made an un-gamable algorithm, then that would be a pure good for humanity and go them.
But also in these types of discussions you really need to bring receipts. Otherwise it's hard to talk about what's even good or bad. What terms did he search for? Which results were bad? What should have been there instead?
I did a quick search for "hip replacement" and the results look great to me: top result from American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, a definition card, then Mayo Clinic, medlineplus.gov, Johns Hopkins, local MDs, new stories, images, WebMD, etc., and seemingly useful related searches like "What are the signs I need one"...
Maybe that's just not a monetizable enough term. "quit smoking" should maybe turn up crappy help articles, but it's also pretty good. Two ads at the top this time, then CDC, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, lung.org, local results, WebMD, etc..
Not that I don't believe the author, but he's certainly invested either directly or indirectly into companies working both sides of the SEO war, from search tech like Metaphor to algorithmic SEO like RankScience. So rather than trusting him that results are bad, it would help an honest discussion to point out examples.
Google strikes out the least common (and therefore most important) keywords in my queries.
Google replaces specific jargon with common words that are similar in meaning to laymen.
Google returns pages which do not contain any of the keywords that I've searched for at all.
If you use your example and search for "hip replacement", or any "what are the signs" variation, you get all of the content free SEO spam farms specifically catered to returning useless garbage to medical queries, but no informational academic/government/ngo health sites.
If Google's AI is catering to the GPT-3 and future GPT-X SEO adsense spam vendor market and Google is not curating a collection of high quality reference sites like librarians have been screaming at them to do for 20 years, then it is doomed. It is nearly completely broken now, and will become more broken every year going forward as the algorithm/counter-algorithm fight continues and human content drops off the index altogether.
> If you use your example and search for "hip replacement", or any "what are the signs" variation, you get all of the content free SEO spam farms specifically catered to returning useless garbage to medical queries, but no informational academic/government/ngo health sites.
I did do the hip replacement search and got no spam and all medical organizations.
I just tried "what are the signs I need a..." and chose the first completion of "pacemaker". That also had very high quality results from government health orgs, medical associations, Mayo and Cleveland clinics, healthgrades (looks ok), and a nice list pulled from Vein, Heart and Vascular Institute.
Do you have a specific search that has bad results?
helllloooo ... does anyone from Google Search engineering, product management, and/or leadership have any comments on this ... if this is true, at this rate Google Search, the foundation of the whole Google / Alphabet enterprise, faces the existential threat of becoming irrelevant in the world of search
the free internet was cancelled w/ Richard Stallman I guess. This is what we get. what a great future we computer folks have provided to our next generation.
> I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search
I have the distinct impression that engineers haven't been responsible for Google Search for a long, long time, having been supplanted by biased activists.
I often have to search the web for information about hormone therapy for trans peoole, long story short being that doctors tend to be pretty misinformed about HRT for trans people because the standards they use are based off information that is 20 years old, so trans women in the know tend to do their own research in order to get a decent HRT regimen.
Google is bad in general for health stuff, but it's particularly bad for searching anything trans-related because almost everything that comes up will either be clickbait liberal feminist listicles or clickbait right-wing transphobic FUD. Either way it's completely irrelevant to searching for something like differences in administering estradiol valerate vs estradiol enanthate. Like other people I tend to just look on reddit to find stuff that isn't SEO'd to hell, and there's a big community of trans biohackers on reddit, but it's very worrisome that it's this hard to find good content on the web without looking on yet another platform owned by a corporation that siloes peoples' content and can delete or mismanage that data at a moment's notice. It would be a tragic loss if reddit suddenly decided that the TransDIY subreddit violated the TOS for some reason, and I could very well see that happening.
It's no wonder the United States is as politically divided as it is considering that these services that are so deeply engrained into the lives of everyone clearly favor divisive content like politics that generates engagement. This is a thing that's been known but it's so plainly obvious that it's the case when trying to find information for something specific to your life if you're a minority whose existence is constantly being used as a talking point to signal where you stand in the culture war, and it effectively serves as a reminder to me when I use Google that this is all my existence is to most of society. You might think it sucks trying to find information about a vacuum cleaner or something and getting only shitty SEO'd spam, but you haven't seen anything until you've seen that information about something essential to your existence is nothing more than another piece of chum to trick people into looking at ads.
Is there some special significance to this individual? There doesn't seem to anything more to this than their personal anecdotal experience and opinion.
Nope, just an excuse for HN big-tech shitposters to crawl out and post their own anecdotes and theories without any link to a proper research/study with concrete data.
The question in my mind, is whether Google has now gone too far in one particular direction for it to be able to ever recover.
It feels like we need a new kind of search engine with a radically different commercial/operating model to take over, with healthier underlying incentives driving the decision making. I don't see the likes of DDG or Bing as being good enough alternatives - they have many of the same problems and aren't significantly different enough from the "Google model".
Perhaps we need a not-for-profit structure for something as important as search. I know Mozilla and Wikimedia have their own problems, but perhaps something along the lines of how these organisations are structured.
Or, we remove the "indirection" baked into the commercial model and allow people to just pay directly for good quality search. Essentially have a model where the "product" is high quality, unbiased search results, as opposed to the product being the eyeballs of the customers using it. The revenue comes from people who can afford to pay for some premium features, where the search results fundamentally are the same for all, but the subscribers (or donors) get added benefits like bookmark syncing, cloud storage or other value-adds.
But, the subscribers effectively subsidise the otherwise completely free search engine for everyone else. The core search results are the same for everyone, paid or not, it has to be a fair, open and non-discriminatory in that respect.
I don't know whether this works commercially, without being pulled into the cesspit of "paid listings" and advertising, or whether it would have to be a not-for-profit/charity setup which also relies on external donors, but that has its own challenges.
As someone who relies on search as part of my day-to-day job, I would happily pay a monthly subscription for a good, clean search engine. Partly out of a moral conviction that an unbiased search engine with good underlying incentives is an important thing for the world, and partly from a more selfish perspective of wanting to improve the quality of a tool that I use and rely on.
I pay Google nothing currently. I considered signing up to YouTube Premium - which I'd be happy to do, if it didn't rely on a whole extra level of Google tracking then being turned on for me (ie. needing to be constantly signed in to YouTube - which then conveniently signs you in to all other Google properties). It feels like even when you pay for a Google service, you're still "the product" and not "the customer".
I occasionally see new search engine projects listed on HN. I wonder if anyone is working on something that may one day be able to knock Google off the top spot - a position which I believe it no longer deserves.
"What would a paid version of Google Search results look like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible results and not be worried about generating revenue?"
Micheal Google sort of already does this, like tailspin2019 and I said YouTube Premium exists[1][2].
> Google is now openly boosting/penalizing pages based on "inclusiveness"[1] in language
I just read the transcript of that podcast found here: file:///C:/Users/jccal/AppData/Local/Temp/Search_Off_the_Record_-_27th_episode_1.pdf and that is NOT what they claim they are doing.
It seems like what they are doing is basically using synonyms. From the transcript: "So if you search for something like fireman, it would automatically include the different versions, including websites that mention firewoman or fireperson." (most of their examples are French or other languages that have more genderded forms of words than english)
They also say, "we are not in a position to tell what people-- how people
should write."
What's even the definition of "inclusive language"? I thought the whole idea behind certain groups embracing post-modernism lately was to avoid inconvenient things like reality; meaning is meaningless.
It’s not just about high quality search results. It is also about wanton manipulation of societal narratives, which ultimately is manipulation of elections. For example, YouTube recently started taking down videos of Joe Rogan’s interview of Dr. Robert Malone. One of the concepts Malone brought up is ‘mass formation psychosis’, which has resulted in many people searching for that phrase. Google has a dystopian message at the top of their search results that suggests they are manipulating the search results or in the least using such messages to undermine the legitimacy of certain content (https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1477403661701689352). This is not how a search indexer should be operating and it is not the basis for open societies where you can freely exchange ideas on an even playing field.
Repeated my search on Youtube to find reviews or unboxing. Most video search results were basically "Youtube SEO" again - the most viewed/top-ranked videos did never show a single actual print run or even the printer available. It was mostly marketing websites turned into video (slowly scrolling/moving over product description or pictures clearly taken from the web). And of course, affiliate links in the description.
The web has become a crappy place to research products as long as money can be made with those through affiliations. I wonder if outlawing affiliate marketing would make the world a better place.
P.S: Whats most ridiculous about my Youtube Printer research experience, the best and most helpful video was a sales video from a home shopping TV station [0], where they actually showed some printing action and handling of one of the models I was interested in.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytMXgjCReO0