[HN Gopher] Google no longer producing high quality search resul... ___________________________________________________________________ Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories Author : lando2319 Score : 1319 points Date : 2022-01-02 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | xenihn wrote: | This quote from a Wikipedia article about a Heinlein book is apt | for this. It makes me think that what has happened here is not | only inevitable for any disruptive tech company that grows large | enough, but also any other sort of human collective in general: | | "This theme is echoed elsewhere in Heinlein's works - that real | liberty is to be found among the pioneer societies out along the | advancing frontier, but the regimentation and legalism that | follow bring restraints that chafe true individualists." | superasn wrote: | This will always happen because there are people who make good | content and then there are people who are good at | marketing/spamming or have deep pockets to pay people who do. | | Also people who are the experts in their field and produce great | content are also terrible marketers and couldn't be bothered to | create "backlinks" or whatever google wants from you to get your | content on top. Which is why Google sucks to bad these days. | lehi wrote: | You shouldn't expect DuckDuckGo to be better. DDG results have | also gotten even more terrible with time. | | I realized just today that adding quotes around search phrases in | DDG makes it return nonsense (3 screenshots): | https://imgur.com/a/2SHpjPG | xibalba wrote: | Google is now openly boosting/penalizing pages based on | "inclusiveness"[1] in language. In other words, enforcing | Google's politics. | | [1] https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1468309343531642891 | pxmpxm wrote: | What's even the definition of "inclusive language"? I thought | the whole idea behind certain groups embracing post-modernism | lately was to avoid inconvenient things like reality; meaning | is meaningless. | swalls wrote: | I was thinking this last night, as I searched for where Android | Studio installed NDK and was directed to an article that started | from _how to open Windows Explorer..._ with a whole bunch of how | to troubleshoot _opening Windows Explorer_ to pad the article for | adverts. | oblib wrote: | I've noticed this too. In fact, some of their results are pretty | close to worthless. Last week I posted a link here to a demo I | made for creating and using "blobs" with PouchDB. I titled it | "PouchDB/CouchDB Save/Update/Load Image Blob Demo". | | After I posted it I monitored my web logs for a bit and watched | both Google and DuckDuckGo hit the page. | | 3 days later I did a search for "PouchDB Image Blob Demo" on both | Google and DuckDuckGo. | | Google had almost nothing at all for that search and my page | wasn't on any of the results they offered. DuckDuckGo had my post | at #1 for that search. | nyx_land wrote: | I often have to search the web for information about hormone | therapy for trans peoole, long story short being that doctors | tend to be pretty misinformed about HRT for trans people because | the standards they use are based off information that is 20 years | old, so trans women in the know tend to do their own research in | order to get a decent HRT regimen. | | Google is bad in general for health stuff, but it's particularly | bad for searching anything trans-related because almost | everything that comes up will either be clickbait liberal | feminist listicles or clickbait right-wing transphobic FUD. | Either way it's completely irrelevant to searching for something | like differences in administering estradiol valerate vs estradiol | enanthate. Like other people I tend to just look on reddit to | find stuff that isn't SEO'd to hell, and there's a big community | of trans biohackers on reddit, but it's very worrisome that it's | this hard to find good content on the web without looking on yet | another platform owned by a corporation that siloes peoples' | content and can delete or mismanage that data at a moment's | notice. It would be a tragic loss if reddit suddenly decided that | the TransDIY subreddit violated the TOS for some reason, and I | could very well see that happening. | | It's no wonder the United States is as politically divided as it | is considering that these services that are so deeply engrained | into the lives of everyone clearly favor divisive content like | politics that generates engagement. This is a thing that's been | known but it's so plainly obvious that it's the case when trying | to find information for something specific to your life if you're | a minority whose existence is constantly being used as a talking | point to signal where you stand in the culture war, and it | effectively serves as a reminder to me when I use Google that | this is all my existence is to most of society. You might think | it sucks trying to find information about a vacuum cleaner or | something and getting only shitty SEO'd spam, but you haven't | seen anything until you've seen that information about something | essential to your existence is nothing more than another piece of | chum to trick people into looking at ads. | alphabet9000 wrote: | ive been noticing something specific that seems not good: | sometimes if you search for a series of words as an exact match, | sometimes it will match but other times it doesn't, depending on | which string of words you use from an article. | | e.g. lets say a webpage has the following text on it: "hello my | name is john my favorite color is red" .. searching for "my name | is john my favorite" might find the page, but searching "is john | my favorite color is" will return 0 results; even though the | quote exists and should turn up the same result | arkitaip wrote: | It's not just those categories that are producing low quality | SERPs, almost any niche you can imagine is being assaulted using | weaponized SEO because content marketing has become the | competitive advantage of many organisations and part of the | default toolkit of any site team. | csomar wrote: | Is it weaponized SEO, though? Because I have been adding | "wikipedia" recently to many of my searches. Google has | penalized Wikipedia in search results significantly (at least | for me). I'm not sure what's the logic behind especially that | 1. Wikipedia is trustworthy and ad-free and 2. I click mostly | Wikipedia, so from a MLearning perspective I should be getting | more wikipedia results. | Guest42 wrote: | Same, I tend to trust wikipedia and it hasn't been showing up | nearly as much | MiddleEndian wrote: | Consider skipping a step and querying wikipedia directly. | Bookmark https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title | =Special... in your browser and giving it the shortcut w (or | whatever you think makes sense) | arkitaip wrote: | I've been using a Firefox search keyword for Google+Wikipedia | and it works great. | eddieh wrote: | Honestly, I think a good search engine would hardcode the | first two results to be the official website for "thing" and | the wikipedia page for "thing" if they exist. Then it can | list out the organic results. Just that change would make | search 10X better than it currently is. | fnord123 wrote: | Just use ddg. By nowadays its just better. | chapium wrote: | I prefer the results it provides over googles these days. | Where it falls short is on maps. | [deleted] | paganel wrote: | I found out today that one of my reddit comments (along with | many random others) had been scrapped out and automatically put | back together (together with those many random other that is) | on a blogspot page. I stumbled upon that page today as I was | googling for a very specific topic, it went something like | this: that SERP looks really interesting, nice! => this page | looks like spam => this page is spam => damn, that bunch of | text is really mine. | deltron3030 wrote: | I'm wondering how you guys are searching, do you type in short | word combinations like 20yrs ago or full sentences and questions? | Thing is Google values search intent above anything else right | now, and if you don't show clear intent they have to guess, and | the selection of search results will be mixed in consequence. | | Here's a up to date PDF from Google explaining search intent: | | https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... | DoingIsLearning wrote: | Very useful info but that reads like Apple's "you're using it | wrong" press releases. | | In my experience Natural Language queries return very poor | results except when you are doing a largely popular search. | | It is also far more verbose to write: "What is the frequency of | the ultrasonic driver in phacoemulsification?" | | Instead of: "Phacoemulsification+resonant" | | The second query is shorter and gives me a correct answer in | ddg whereas google returns irrelevant results mixed in with a | long lists of patents. | adsharma wrote: | Try "testing" as a sample query. I only see results about covid | testing. | | Would love to see dictionary like factual results instead of | reflecting the controversial topics of the day based on what | people are clicking on. | | If in fact the idea is that a search engine needs to reflect the | political opinions of its users, the incumbents are doing a very | poor job. | PaulHoule wrote: | It is a fundamental problem in search. | | One important metric is precision for the first result or "P@1" | which was something Google originally excelled at. | | I was working at a search vendor where I had the chance to | debrief high-level defectors from Google and Bing and found | that they (like us, with our patent search) struggled to get | P@1 above 70%. They saw personalization as a way forward but | also told us that personalization at both of those vendors was | limited to a few cheap tricks and their were structural reasons | why neither vendor would do it in a deep way. | | The trouble is that you can at best make an informed guess | about what somebody searching for "testing" wants. You | ultimately have to get them into a dialogue which might be "I | gotta search for 'nondestructive testing'" or could be based on | some diversity ranking so that 'covid testing', 'software | testing', 'psychological testing', etc. are represented in the | top few results. | adsharma wrote: | Right - this was called result diversity. But in markets like | the US, where avg revenue per user is high, polarization is | also high and there is some belief that big software | companies have a role in changing societal wrongthink, you | get these types of results. For this type of a query, I'd | think P@1 would be 0% for some 30+% of the society. | | Perhaps that'll be readjusted in a year, when covid is not | top of mind for a majority of the users. | PaulHoule wrote: | For a mass market product the emotional response that | people have to the results is pretty important. | | It doesn't seem crazy to me that people are seeking out | COVID-19 testing now. On the other hand I don't have any | question in my mind about where I would go for COVID-19 | testing because both Cornell and Cayuga Medical Center run | testing sites that are well oiled machines. I am entitled | to use one for free because I am staff, students are | required to get testing once a week. If I am getting a | medical procedures done I am required to get tested by CMC. | For people in Tompkins County there is very much a "right | answer". | | Is testing, particularly personal interested in testing | really politicized? My wife was required to get tested once | a week when she was helping out at a nursing home and she | found that pretty annoying. If somebody wants to get tested | personally though what could be wrong with that? | adsharma wrote: | > emotional response | | That makes it a social network optimized for engagement. | | Someone posted a link to you.com in another sub thread. | The results for the same query over there is what I'd | expect. | | I'm thinking that living in a deep blue geo is what's | coloring my experience. Perhaps others can post what they | see from an incognito browser. | | Ultimately this is where big data analysis should be | used. Log incognito results from a geo-diverse set of IPs | to understand (a) the ranking model (b) the consequences | of the model. | Volker_W wrote: | Can't confirm. My results: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing | https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/t... | https://www.testing.de/ | https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/en/coronavirus/i... | https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery/software-testi... | adsharma wrote: | Here's the logged out search result in the US: | | https://smallpdf.com/result#r=65aec01a358fb33d67f37736c8c099. | .. | projectileboy wrote: | It's possible that a decent search engine should be considered | public infrastructure, just like water and internet and roads and | a fire department. If not public, then forming a non-profit may | be the way to go. I don't see how for-profit search doesn't turn | to trash, given sufficient time. | wayoutthere wrote: | Yeah, Google today feels like the end stage of many of the pre- | Google search engines. They were ok for a while, but eventually | SEO tricks took over and ruined everything for everyone. What I | worry about is that back in the 90s, everyone had a healthy dose | of skepticism for anything you read off the internet. That's not | true today, and there's a whole lot more incentive to put false | information out there these days. | otherotherchris wrote: | Getting on the internet in the mid to late 90's required a fair | bit of intelligence to set up a modem and drivers, "kids what | the hell is UART", configure DUN settings, download and | maintain browsers, etc. | | I blame the iMac G3 and specifically Jeff Goldblum for all of | this mess. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg | pcurve wrote: | It's not just text search. Bing's Search by Image performs much | better than Google's | Retr0id wrote: | And Yandex outperforms them both. | the__alchemist wrote: | Unfortunately, there's no superior alternative. Anecdotally, | Google produces substantially more relevant results (For things I | commonly search for) than Bing and DDG. | PaulHoule wrote: | (1) No external competitor that is really better (e.g. DDG might | make you feel better about yourself, but it isn't much better.) | | (2) The internal competitor of advertising. If the SERPs were | perfect you'd have no reason to ever look at the ad. | aantix wrote: | What does it take these days to roll our own search engine? | | I'm working on a new kind of search - I'd like to create my own | independent index. Bing is fine, but restrictive. Gigablast is | ok. | | https://search-new.herokuapp.com/ | | Looks like the Common Crawl .WET files are about 10 TB | (https://commoncrawl.org/2021/11/october-2021-crawl-archive-n... | ). | | Typesense recommends 3X the amount of RAM to hold the indexes. | | 30TB of RAM. Each TB server, what, $5k? | | I'm sure some pages can be reduced. Worst case, $150,000 for | server costs? | crazypython wrote: | Brave Search and Bing wrappers like DuckDuckGo and EntireWeb as | well as niche search engines like deephn.org and twitter.com are | better | tayo42 wrote: | Ive wanted to share this similar sentiment but I had no idea | where! Google search results are terrible lately. I'm frustrated | by it. Im not sure how I feel about his categories though. | | I have mixed opinions on recipes. The recipes that do show up are | generally not great and seem to be there because of seo. And seo | is really ruining the recipes pages them selves (extra content, | misleading cook times) At the same time I don't really expect | google searches to be a curator of good recipes. There is to much | taste involved I think. But reputable site like serious eats | almost never show up in results unless I search for it. | | Health is a big topic, but health has been full of snake oils | salesmens forever too, so its not surprising. You should probably | talk with a doctor in most cases anyway? | | Going on google for anything related to illegal drug use is a | pita, it just brings you too like addiction sites and other | useless info ime. | | I also don't think that people are creating websites anymore? | Where is there supposed to be info for the search engine to | crawl? All real user content is on reddit, instagram, twitter and | youtube. Maybe medium sometimes. All of that is easier for people | to set up but not really set up for search engine to include as a | good result. Instagram and twitter are especially bad, black | holes of information. | | For better or for worse, I usually use google to search to search | reddit, then i can at least get some better starting point and | return back to google with better terms. I don't really like this | because reddit is a bit of a echo chamber. | | Ive also stopped trusting searches in fields Im not familiar with | because I know how bad the results are in fields I am familiar | with. But i don't really know where else to go. | epolanski wrote: | > Where is there supposed to be info for the search engine to | crawl? | | You actually make me realize how rarely I end up on websites I | haven't seen, and how different it is compared to two decades | rego. | Nextgrid wrote: | > I don't really expect google searches to be a curator of good | recipes | | I don't expect Google (or any automated service) to be able to | rank recipes from a culinary point of view. I absolutely expect | Google to be able to detect someone's SEO life story bullshit | at the top of a recipe and penalize that for ranking purposes. | | And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard, the | presence of ads or other marketing-style element is usually a | good proxy for weeding out shitty commercial content. | | > Health is a big topic, but health has been full of snake oils | salesmens forever too, so its not surprising | | Most countries have national health services that have no (or | at the very least less) bias to sell you something. Given the | amount of these is finite, a list of their domains can be | manually maintained to boost their results and outrank the | other garbage. | | > I know how bad the results are in fields I am familiar with. | But i don't really know where else to go. | | Same here unfortunately and I have yet to find a solution. | luma wrote: | > I absolutely expect Google to be able to detect someone's | SEO life story bullshit at the top of a recipe and penalize | that for ranking purposes. | | Agreed, but those life stories are there because Google | penalized the site if they weren't. | | A whole lot of this is a problem of Google's own creation | along with people adapting their behavior to fit how Google | works. | themacguffinman wrote: | SEO is not the reason recipes have life stories, the reason | is that the life story part of the recipe adds copyright | protection because the story is a "substantial literary | expression". Recipes by themselves are not copyright-able | as they are considered to be basic facts/ideas. | | And Google won't penalize these sites because these sites | are useful and contain useful recipes that many people want | to find despite your particular annoyances you have about | it. I do not want a search engine that filters out all | these recipes. | _vertigo wrote: | Why would including a story with a recipe make a non- | copyrightable recipe copyrightable? | | Every recipe I can find on Google that isn't from a | super-site with already strong SEO includes some sort of | life anecdote. I find it hard to believe that: | | 1) This purported copyright trick even works, and | | 2) Everyone who publishes recipes online got the | copyright trick memo, and | | 3) Everyone who publishes recipes online is interested in | copyrighting their recipes as opposed to just having good | ad revenue | | I find it much easier to believe one of the following: | | 1) The life story section significantly improves SEO | somehow, even if incidental. I'm not saying Google | rewards life stories, but somehow there is a mechanism | there that improves SEO, and people have cottoned on. | Every recipe you're going find on Google has strong SEO, | and hence every recipe you find has an SEO-improving life | story attached to it. | | 2) Food bloggers include the stories for differentiation, | to "build a stronger connection with their audience", and | once a couple big ones started doing it, the rest | followed. | | 3) Some sort of combination of 1 and 2. | Nextgrid wrote: | In this case, Google should adapt but they are not. | 6510 wrote: | recipes is a fun example. | | The obvious success formula IMHO would be to have a file | format for recipes (with a wrapper file format) and display | those as search results under a "recipes search" tab. (The | user picks his own tabs) | | Then, like news results, the results have to be parsed and | combined so that there is one main trend for mashed potatoes | & gravy with creative alternatives presented in a beautiful | crafted UI for the specific purpose that is cooking. One then | elects to add the raisins and the cheese and stores this new | combination some place private or public under a user name | (possibly with pictures, the beef foo bar, soup and desert | served with it) for future reference. If the raisins are a | wonderful or terrible idea the rating can be merged into the | mashed potato search result. | | There is no room for _good enough_ in my kitchen! | fancy_pantser wrote: | > And if detecting SEO bullshit life stories is hard... | | I took the opposite approach in my browser extension, | detecting if a recipe is on the page and cloning it to the | top of the page. I suppose you could add an accumulator to | see how much visible text is on the page outside the recipe | on pages where recipes are present to see the distribution of | signal:noise. I'd be very interested in the results of a | large-scale survey like that! | | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe- | filter/ahlc... | [deleted] | tome wrote: | > Ive also stopped trusting searches in fields Im not familiar | with because I know how bad the results are in fields I am | familiar with. | | The Gell-Mann amnesia of the 2020s. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... | tucosan wrote: | Since the incentives are currently stacked against the user, we | might need something similar to AdBlock for search results with a | community managed blacklist. | | I personally use uBlacklist [1] to black useless sites like | Pinterest or wikihow to appear in my search results. | | [1]: | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... | aronpye wrote: | Is there a plugin which allows you to curate your own index, | i.e. a whitelist of sites to search? | otherotherchris wrote: | In addition to the site:reddit.com trick, I find prefacing every | keyword in intext:keyword prevents most forms of substitution | (but disappointingly not stemming) and ensures what you search | for is actually on the page. | | Any other way of using google lets rankbrain swap your specific | engineering jargon for high click-through kardashian news and rap | lyrics. | elboru wrote: | I've been using HN search a lot more lately. In the past I just | used it to find old posts. But now I use it to research topics, | the same way I used to use Google. | 63 wrote: | I'd love to know why Google has started ignoring quoted terms and | treating them like normal words in a query. I put it in quotes | because I wanted that exact phrase, not something that sounds | similar. If that exact phrase doesn't exist, tell me. | firebaze wrote: | This has been true for a long time. I think it is still safe to | assume googlers are not stupid, so there must be a reason for | that. My guesses, in order of decreasing confidence: | | (by far) 1) globally seen, the results given are best for the | general population | | 2) search/ad revenue from "still-google-users" vs. switchers is | in a sweet spot | | 3) ??? | | I'd bet on 1), since google was historically nerd-focused, but | that changed long ago, and including inertia and stuff, they have | probably realized by now that the crowd of "i know what i want, | just give me the link" is not driving key performance indicators. | dageshi wrote: | I've noticed the same thing and given it some thought recently. | | I think a structural shift has occured. A decade+ ago people made | sites about their hobby's and interests, they were amateur | experts on subjects and because they enjoyed what they wrote | about they tended to build up extensive knowledge bases on their | subjects, effectively their sites let you learn a subject rather | than just trying to give you quick direct answers which might | actually not be right for you, their sites let you understand | what you really needed. | | I think the thing that changed, is those people or their newer | versions moved to youtube instead. People make videos instead of | articles and what's left on google is the seo'ified crap that | lacks the deep knowledge and context the original sites had. | | Of course google owns youtube so it likely doesn't care, but yes | google search is now a lesser product and I'm not actually sure | google can do anything about it. | didip wrote: | I am starting to think that Panda in 2011 caused Google to take | such a huge revenue hit that they never attempt similar move | anymore. | marstall wrote: | The one thing Google is good at is finding a specific named | thing: | | - google a company name, it will find the company's website. | | - google a historical figure or event, it will bring you to the | appropriate wikipedia page. | | - google a product, it will show you the amazon link. | | Google anything less specific, anything that requires some | judgment to discern, and you are dropped you into the SEO bramble | of bad information and hostile web design. That Google itself has | created. | | What a failure for a company with infinite resources, and which | has recruited the best minds in computer science. | lifeplusplus wrote: | 100% I end up prefixing my searches with Reddit it.. or | stackoverflow. It wasn't the case even just 4 years ago.. now if | if top results aren't it chances are that rest is even more | completely off mark | buybackoff wrote: | > In another way it doesn't - I get no direct benefit if you are | using the same search engine as I am. We don't interact with each | other directly through search. So if the search results being | displayed are no longer high quality... isn't the network effect | broken? | | This sounds like a need for a trusted community, not a bazaar- | like marketplace. Some system is needed where an intermediary is | responsible for its advice. Maybe Google was such an intermediary | initially, but now it's just a bazaar that charges for a place or | % of sales. | | Not a better search algo, but a better trust model. Staking comes | to mind, not only like in crypto betting, there was Pakistani | success story with micrifinance that was essentially based on | staking. | TechTiki wrote: | I don't believe 100% of the blame lies with Google. It could | partly be that there is just a lack of good content on the | internet nowadays. Take product reviews for example. You'd have | to pay for a web developer, designer, buy a lot of products, hire | journalists to test the them and produce content, that all costs | a lot. Is it feasible to do this based of a few ads and affiliate | links a lot of which will be blocked anyway? | | I think what we need is a global micro payment system which | enables good content creators to be funded for their work | directly. | littlecranky67 wrote: | I wonder if the world needs a stackoverflow for | products/travel/restaurant/recipies etc. Something with a | reputation system that works pretty well in SO - i.e. if you are | constantly ask stupid answers or given stupid/marketing answers, | you get downvoted and at some point lose your ability to vote. | Problem is of course, the majority decides what is "stupid", and | to my experience going over Amazon Reviews, the majority seems | not to get the idea. | | Unfortunately SO doesn't allow questions a la "Which is the best | printer for doing X" :( | littlecranky67 wrote: | Given the helpful replies on things here in these threads by HN | people, I think the problem could simply be fixed by using HN | karma as a reputation system for such a site. We would have a | community of supersmart and helpful people with access to lot | of specialists in their field. And 3-6 months later, when | marketing affiliates are catching up, HN would have its | "eternal september" moment and HN would no longer be the place | it is now, with upscale and kind questions and answers... | silisili wrote: | I would advise against Googling anything medical. Outside of | terrible SEO results, WebMD telling you you are going to die, the | ads linger around forever. | | I remember Googling something I had read about or saw on TV out | of curiosity. I got ads about help for said disease I don't have | for at least a month... | DoingIsLearning wrote: | With all due respect to Michael but has he not used Google in the | past years? This has been an issue since at least 2016. SEO won. | | Maybe some googlers can answer this but i assume that Singhal was | very conservative against AI for ranking. But when he left | Giannandrea started rolling out the "natural language" queries | with "let me just ignore your query because we know better" | algorithms, also slowly removed operators/keywords used by power | users. And well SEO really have gotten better so it all piles up. | dleslie wrote: | It's funny, I've gone through a number of search engines. | Webcrawler, altavista, lycos, yahoo, google and now duck duck go. | DDG is the only one that hasn't been an abrupt switch. I would | search DDG, then !g if I didn't find a tolerable result. But | that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the point | that I have stopped using !g altogether. | | More often I want !w, !gh, !mdn, !msdn, !v, !osm or similar. | | It's that which makes DDG great: instead of being one search | engine to fit all, it's a portal to services with specialized | information. If you're using DDG's basic search to find specific | information then you're using it wrong. | yosito wrote: | I think it would be really great if DDG suggested bangs when | you do a search. I often don't know which sites may be best for | the search I'm doing. | seanw444 wrote: | The bangs make it great. The keyboard interactivity makes it | awesome. Being able to search, and then use the down arrows to | select a result, and then press enter to follow the result, is | super awesome, and I'm surprised Google hasn't gotten that | right. | TOGoS wrote: | Aw neat; I didn't know about that feature of DuckDuckGo. I used | to have similar keywords configured in my browser ("gg", | "wiki", etc), but as the years go on I've become less and less | willing to invest that time every time I switch to a new | computer. Now I have a reason to set DDG as my default search | engine again. | mgh2 wrote: | DDG is built on Bing, and their business model is the same as | Google's. As long as you share this last part, search content | quality will suffer. | | We will need a company that does not rely on this model- ex: | Apple | btdmaster wrote: | Try Searx, it allows filtering search results with one ! | and redirection with two !!: https://searx.me/. | wyre wrote: | Yes, but what the comments are saying is that DDG has an | advantage over other searches because their bangs allow | anyone to easily use another websites search function, so | by using DuckDuckGo you aren't limited to Bing and DDGs | search. | solarkraft wrote: | > But that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the | point that I have stopped using !g altogether. | | Funny thing. I'm used to DuckDuckGo results being | unsatisfactory and reflexively append !g when the results are | bad. Recently I've been doing that more on Google. | ALittleLight wrote: | One point about all the "Top X lists" and general blogspam that | Google returns - I had once created a website that I was trying | to get listed on these sites. I emailed a few of them to get my | site listed and they transparently and directly offered to list | my site for relatively small amounts of money. It was literally | an exchange of 100 dollars for listing my site at number 1 and I | got to write the description that went on their website. | | My point here is to add that in addition to the Google results | being bad (they are listicles and blogspam rather than the | answers you want) they are also corrupt in that people can just | pay the owners of the spam sites to get the listings they want. | This is a tax on the users by giving them indirect and bad | results and also a tax on creators by forcing them to pay third | parties to get their websites to rank in the appropriate Google | searches or work on SEO voodoo to rank themselves. | agencies wrote: | Who has concrete steps to make this better? Seems like one or two | people are making their own engines, but moving the needle is | going to take a lot more than that... | pastelsky wrote: | I wish Google had a toggle switch that isn't slowed you real user | generated content... Like filter out all sites that are in Alexa | top 10 for the category, and just show geniune niche blogs and | forums with rich informed discussions. | jimrandomh wrote: | Google is pretty bad at handling specific technical queries, and | I'm pretty sure it's because their internal metrics don't account | for the possibility that a query might have no useful results, or | have only one result which requires some iteration on the search | terms to find. | | What happens is, if you search for something that's specific | enough that there are few results or no results, it will either | ignore keywords, assume that you meant to put a space inside a | multi-word identifier, or spellcheck-correct something that | wasn't actually misspelled. This produces convincing-looking | decoy results, and you have to look closely (or click through) to | find out that it's wasting your time, them rerun the same query | in verbatim mode or with more quotes. | | So then you've forced it to verbatim mode, and reached a query | which, let's say, has one StackOverflow thread which you've | already read and which failed to answer the question. Then your | search results will be a couple pages of StackOverflow scraper | sites. I _never_ want to visit a StackOverflow scraper site. They | should be easy to detect. Why aren 't those domains being blocked | properly? | alecbz wrote: | I admit I'm somewhat pre-inclined to defend Google here a bit. | That said: | | I wonder how much of this is an issue of the incentives for | producing different kinds of content, as opposed to just an issue | of what Google chooses to optimize for. | | I.e., yeah, lots of searches turn up mostly listicle bullshit. | But is that because higher quality content is more difficult to | monetize (e.g., people that are inclined to click on listicles | are more likely to click on ads?), and therefore less likely to | be produced in the first place, and even if produced, its authors | are less likely to put in money/effort into SEOing it? | bravoetch wrote: | This has been a known issue for years already. It's the | 'attention economy' where nothing matters as much as engagement. | Quality is not even an important metric. What we've been left | with is visiting the same few websites we like, interacting on a | couple of non-corrupted social channels where ads can't invade, | like group chats in signal, and constantly unsubscribing from | email lists because even the local ice-cream store knows that | mailing lists are the best conversion channel. | stavros wrote: | Google sucks completely for me (I use DDG as my main search | engine but that only sucks slightly less). It's all spam and I | can't find anything. In particular, I used to be able to find | useful blog articles on any programming problem I had. Now it's | either SO or nothing, whereas I'm sure the articles exist | somewhere. | | I saw kagi.com mentioned on an article here and tried it out, and | so far it's been much better than Google. It gives me reddit | results, which are very useful because it's just people posting | their reviews/solutions, and it gives me small site results, | which are usually helpful. If I have to pay for it, I will, | because the free option is just useless now. | ur-whale wrote: | From the Twitter thread: | | > I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search | aren't happy about the quality of results either. | | Strongly disagree. | | I'm pretty sure the kind of drive and passion that led to the | very high quality of Google search back in the day is _long | gone_. | | At this point, people do not join Google for the technical | challenge or the reputation and/or ethos of the company, but for | the fat bonuses and RSU grants. | dahart wrote: | > Also, how can a search category be SEO'd into ruin? Isn't | search engine optimization supposed to produce "better results"? | Doesn't Google exclusively control the results it displays... | | This seems almost willfully naive. Why would SEO produce better | results for the _searcher_? It's optimizing rankings for sites | who want to appear higher up in the results. Of course SEO is | going to degrade the results. Of course every site on the planet | is going to try to game Google search and appear higher in the | list. | | Yes there are conflict of interest issues between serving high | quality search results and making money serving ads in those | results, and yes Google is consciously allowing some of this to | happen. BUT - this was inevitable. Any popular search engine is | going to be gamed by the entire rest of the world, and the scale | is too large for Google to control it. Michael might not be aware | that, despite the conflicts of interest, Google really does spend | considerable amounts of time fighting against search-degrading | SEO? | baxuz wrote: | I've tried searching for some technical details on some of my | car's components. No matter what search query I used, the first | few PAGES of search results were links to non-original parts on | ebay, amazon, aliexpress etc. | | To get the actual details I had to go register on a forum and ask | people there. Feels like pre-google all over again. | spankalee wrote: | I'm a current Googler, so yeah, I'm biased, but I work far away | from search so I'm basically a plain consumer of it, and this is | lazy thinking: | | "I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search | aren't happy about the quality of results either. I'm wondering | if this isn't really a tech problem but the influence of some | suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases." | | I'm pretty sure Google doesn't make enough money on third party | sites to intentionally make its own search results worse. | | What's happening here is the ever-growing battle between search | algorithms and SEO. Most of sites that he is complaining about | are likely doing an incredible amount of optimizations for search | engines and human psychology to show on search results pages and | get people to click on them. They A/B test, within singe sites as | well as run the same or slightly modified content through site | networks. | | So sites optimize to get crappy filler content on Google, and | Google changes to demote those sites and produce better results | (which people still complain about). | | This is also the reason that it's not so simple to do better than | Google. A new search engine also has to have an algorithm and | presumably it'll share many of the same approaches that Google | has used and have been gamed by content farms. If a search engine | does come up with a break-though mechanism to separate the bad | from the good, then either sites will adapt to that, and/or | Google and other engines will adopt similar mechanisms too. | | And if a search engine somehow made an un-gamable algorithm, then | that would be a pure good for humanity and go them. | | But also in these types of discussions you really need to bring | receipts. Otherwise it's hard to talk about what's even good or | bad. What terms did he search for? Which results were bad? What | should have been there instead? | | I did a quick search for "hip replacement" and the results look | great to me: top result from American Academy of Orthopaedic | Surgeons, a definition card, then Mayo Clinic, medlineplus.gov, | Johns Hopkins, local MDs, new stories, images, WebMD, etc., and | seemingly useful related searches like "What are the signs I need | one"... | | Maybe that's just not a monetizable enough term. "quit smoking" | should maybe turn up crappy help articles, but it's also pretty | good. Two ads at the top this time, then CDC, Substance Abuse and | Mental Health Services, lung.org, local results, WebMD, etc.. | | Not that I don't believe the author, but he's certainly invested | either directly or indirectly into companies working both sides | of the SEO war, from search tech like Metaphor to algorithmic SEO | like RankScience. So rather than trusting him that results are | bad, it would help an honest discussion to point out examples. | otherotherchris wrote: | Google strikes out the least common (and therefore most | important) keywords in my queries. | | Google replaces specific jargon with common words that are | similar in meaning to laymen. | | Google returns pages which do not contain any of the keywords | that I've searched for at all. | | If you use your example and search for "hip replacement", or | any "what are the signs" variation, you get all of the content | free SEO spam farms specifically catered to returning useless | garbage to medical queries, but no informational | academic/government/ngo health sites. | | If Google's AI is catering to the GPT-3 and future GPT-X SEO | adsense spam vendor market and Google is not curating a | collection of high quality reference sites like librarians have | been screaming at them to do for 20 years, then it is doomed. | It is nearly completely broken now, and will become more broken | every year going forward as the algorithm/counter-algorithm | fight continues and human content drops off the index | altogether. | bigodbiel wrote: | Google broke it's own algorithm pushing too far their agenda, and | forgetting to balance the cat and mouse base with SEO. | | The time is ripe for another search engine to dominate, | preferably for niche segments of the web. I miss "I'm feeling | lucky button" search button! | cjlovett wrote: | It's amazing to me it's 2022 and Google search results are still | so useless. I'm finding myself use duckduckgo a lot more these | days. | Traster wrote: | >I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search | aren't happy about the quality of results either. I'm wondering | if this isn't really a tech problem but the influence of some | suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases. | | This seems like a pretty irresponsible and ridiculous thing to | say. "I think X product is shit, and I'm fairly sure that the | engineers working on X would agree and blame product managers" | sounds like a valid thing to say if you were at reddit, or | dropbox - where it's both true and Seibel should know about it | (since he's in a position to know how rubbish they are), but to | speculate about one of your competitors in this way is a | little... self serving. | | Google search actually really reassures me, because Seibel is | right, there aren't really any direct network effects, if it got | bad I'd move. In fact I did move. I started using duckduckgo when | I could, but any time I search for technical issues (something | that's likely to result in stackoverflow results or similar) I go | back to google. Why? It works. | LaunchAway1 wrote: | Internet is just for tourists now. We all know how it sucks but | no one finds a solution. Now what? | diegocg wrote: | Google was still useful for things that are non-marketable. But | in the last year or so, I have started to realize how awfully bad | has gotten even at that. | | Case in point: Open source mailing list archives. For various | reasons, some times I have to search for entire email threads | that are available in the web interfaces of some mailing list | archives. I have part of a phrase of some email, I put that into | google with quotes, and it returns some results, usually with the | main archive being in the first results. In the last year or so, | Google has started returning no results for some phrases of | emails that do exist and are available in one or more public | archives. | | When that started to happen, I tried Bing. And Bing returns | results with links to archive. So does duckduckgo most times. But | for Google, it's like if that particular email I'm searching at | that moment didn't exist (for other emails in the same mailing | list it works fine). It only happens occasionally, but it's | getting worse. So I have started to rely on DDG and Bing more and | more, because they always find what I want. | | So Google is starting to fail at some of the most basic aspects | of a search engine, it's not just the ordering of the search | results - there are some public web pages that it won't see for | whatever reason. | betwixthewires wrote: | One thing I learned from the unreliability of Google search is | that we should not rely on an external service to organize our | information. No matter the service, it _will_ change in some | way, and you will lose access to some information. | hubraumhugo wrote: | Curious to hear: what are some rising Google competitors that | try to do a better job? | XoS-490 wrote: | https://you.com | hubraumhugo wrote: | https://neeva.com looks similar | jart wrote: | It's hard to compete with Google. Back when Google started, | you could fit the world wide web on a single computer. Today | you can only really get started the same way Google did if | you focus on an unfancy subset of the web that hasn't been | react'd and wasm'd into exabytes of opacity. | https://wiby.org/ does it I think by refusing to index any | HTML page that has <script> tags. Websites like | https://millionshort.com/ provide pretty nice results | sometimes, but I don't think they actually index the web on | their own; they probably use the Bing or Google API on the | backend. With million short if I want bike reviews for | example, I get the authentic blog posts from 2010 with amazon | affiliate links to bike listings that are no longer being | sold lol. | | The problem is I don't think the Wiby model (rejecting | JavaScript) or the MillionShort model (rejecting popularity) | have done a good job capturing what we loved most about the | old web and systematizing its curation. There's definitely an | opportunity for someone to come along and create a focused | niche alternative that's better. | | One way I suppose it could be done, is if you convinced a | bunch of trustworthy high status trendsetter type people to | subscribe to a paid service with a browser toolbar that lets | them click a button for each website they visit to say "I | like this" or "I dislike this" and then use that information | to train a neural network that divides seo spam from content. | Mix that with classic page rank and you might have something | good. I'm not sure if it'd ever appeal to a more general | public audience though. | | Anyone who does it is also going to want to make a deal with | the archive.org to somehow get a snapshot of the old web, to | recreate those original experiments. Or possibly even | resurrect an old build of it. Plus Gutenberg. There's enough | content from 2005 web alone and all the books published | before to last anyone several lifetimes. That's actually one | of Google's blind spots. They're so good at up-to-the-minute | indexing of current events that sometimes if you just want to | get the text to something like Seneca it's like pulling | teeth. | ColinHayhurst wrote: | https://www.mojeek.com/ no-tracking, independent | crawler/index | JSONderulo wrote: | I've been playing around with you.com after someone mentioned | on HN. I dig the layout/quality of results. It's kind of | interesting to have it feel like you're netflixing your | search results by source (reddit, stack overflow, etc.) I'm | still toggling back and forth on you to google because i feel | like i might miss out something. Surprisingly some the | results have exceeded my expectations. We'll see. | bunnyfoofoo wrote: | This site is quite laggy, I'm assuming because of all the | JS. Tried to load it with JS disabled and it doesn't work | at all. | ffhhj wrote: | The side scrolling is nice, but when searching some code | related question it doesn't show useful results. Even the | Code Complete snippets aren't displayed in a readable way, | lines are too short, and the language highlight is not | recognized (every script is python by default?). | | Thanks for mentioning it since I'm creating a snippet | search engine and wanted some competitors to compare. | srcreigh wrote: | Blacklisting non advertisable media from the index. That's news | to me. Hmm. | | Why? Cost savings? Missing hard dependency on marketing ops | knowhow? Utter domination of non-marketing material? Forcing | experienced privacy-conscious users to a different platform to | reduce bad media coverage? | noizejoy wrote: | I for one am grateful that some of my worst mailing list | accidents (like accidentally sending a privately intended | message to a mailing list, rather then an individual email | address) are starting to disappear from Google's relentless | claws. | neals wrote: | Google is slowly becoming BING. I would love for Mircosoft to | step up and weird everybody out by building some kind of open | source superior search engine. | ncpa-cpl wrote: | What's a good alternative for recipes? | hereforphone wrote: | Ten years ago I complained on a random forum about Google's | seeming refusal to give me information about running Skyrim under | Linux with the Wine emulator. I tried various search combinations | and all I could easily get was information about wine | manufacturers and locations in the Skyrim world. Didn't matter if | I used "emulation" or "wine emulator" or similar terms, even in | quotes, or if I used the '+' character, or otherwise tried to | harness Google's literal search functions. | | Was I searching wrong? Didn't seem so to me at the time, but I | don't remember the exact queries. Those in the forum thread | thought I just didn't know how to use a search engine. I still | think it was Google telling me what it thought I really wanted, | instead of what I was literally asking for. | | I still see results that don't include words that I search for in | quotes, often. | visarga wrote: | I found that it confuses subject with object: do you want A for | B or B for A. It's all the same. Maybe Google doesn't really | use neural nets in ranking, or they are a joke. | | Desktop web search is trending down, voice and mobile | interfaces up. They should be focusing hard on direct question | answering based on retrieved web pages. A recent paper by Deep | Mind shows how it can be done, not that it matters, they won't | jump on it. Web search should be just as smart as Codex, | adapting and combining knowledge for the user. | | https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving-la... | hwers wrote: | Just today I googled "torch normalize -1 1" and it said "zero | documents matches your query". Insane stuff. (Censorship with | crazy high false positives? Incompetence?) I went to duckduckgo | and immediately found a useful answer. | [deleted] | melenaboija wrote: | I tried just to see what is returning for just '-1 1' and is | able to understand it, as latitude and longitude. But I use | 'minus' for these cases. | omegalulw wrote: | Try torch normalize "-1" 1 | | It gets me to | https://pytorch.org/docs/1.9.1/generated/torch.nn.functional... | | Note that that will only normalize to (-inf, 1]. Tweaking the | formula on that page You want (v - vmin) / (vmax - vmin + eps) | with vmin and vmax produced along th dimensions you care | normalizing against. | anarazel wrote: | Isn't that just because -1 is treated as a negative match? | Which you then also request as a match? | modeless wrote: | Um, just in case you don't realize, "-1" selects pages that | don't include "1". You just asked Google for pages that both | include and don't include "1", and that's the empty set. I'm | not aware of any way to search for negative numbers. | | This is really a UI problem. Google should probably use the | context in this query to infer that you didn't literally want | to exclude "1" from your results. However, half the comments | here are complaining about Google _not_ taking their queries | extremely literally. This problem is a good demonstration of | why inferring user intent can be useful and taking user input | literally all the time is not actually a great idea. | evouga wrote: | It's not just Google---the World Wide Web itself is rapidly | becoming a defunct protocol, the culmination of a decades-long | shift in the Internet's center of mass away from browsers and | towards centralized and commercialized apps---from personal web | pages to LinkedIn/GitHub/Twitter handles, from the ubiquitous | WordPress blogs to YouTube videos and Medium posts, and from | forums to Tweets and subreddits. | | The useful information on the Web is now concentrated in a few | places---Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, etc. When I | want reasonable search results, I search there instead of the Web | as a whole. (And even many of these services are in the late | stages of the Silicon Valley life cycle---desperate monetization | and engagement-increasing gimmicks---with uncertain futures.) | | Wikipedia, bless its heart, lurches on as a cathedral to early | Web's dream of information democratization. It stands as a wonder | of the ancient world: incomplete, built from technology few now | understand, and reflecting values and priorities that no longer | quite align with contemporary culture. But it persists thanks to | its inertia and the undeniable sense of awe it invokes even | today. | hirundo wrote: | Yesterday I heard a Joe Rogan guest mention a particular non- | Rogan podcast episode. It was a discussion about science and | policy by two professional, well credentialed scientists and a | layperson. I Googled it, couldn't find it. Same for Bing and DDG. | Turns out it had been a popular YouTube video, but they objected | to the conclusions and de-platformed it, from YouTube and the big | indexes. | | It took maybe another dozen clicks to find it on one of the | participant's own blog. And the podcast is still up and hosted by | Apple. So it's something that you can find if you know about it, | but not by searching on the topic. At this point, at least, the | shadow ban is still soft. | | Add that as a data point for Google no longer producing high | quality search results. | stargrazer wrote: | Perhaps with all the deplatforming, delisting, and other | deleterious effects, all the 'good' content is removed, while | at the same time those removals are affecting their machine | learning data sets. It is almost a self-imposed adversarial | attack on result quality. | mkr-hn wrote: | Apple hosts an index of RSS feeds. The hosting for the files is | elsewhere and varies. | IronWolve wrote: | Yup, Video got removed from twitter and youtube. But could | easily be found on Rumble and Bitchute. | | When the video is originally hosted on Spotify on the JRE | podcast. | | Seems crazy why twitter and google feels the need to remove | legal content | [deleted] | bmarquez wrote: | Rogan apparently* said that Spotify owns the rights to the | JRE video, so they'll take down rehosted videos regardless of | its content if they discover it. And if a video happens to be | controversial by YouTube standards, it gets discovered faster | and taken down faster. | | *2nd hand source, but seems plausible | IronWolve wrote: | But, Google Youtube and Twitter removed fair use clips, and | only that episode. | cronix wrote: | > so they'll take down rehosted videos regardless of its | content if they discover it | | If that were true then Joe's youtube channel would have 0 | posts since the time he joined spotify. It's chalk full of | clips from Spotify broadcasts. I'm also fairly certain | Spotify knows of Joe's YT channel considering that's where | they found him and hired him away. It likely also would | have been in his Spotify contract whether or not he could | continue to post clips to his YT channel, or elsewhere. | bmarquez wrote: | > It likely also would have been in his Spotify contract | whether or not he could continue to post clips to his YT | channel, or elsewhere. | | I think this is very likely, to allow Rogan to post short | clips on his own channel for marketing purposes and keep | existing content, while enforcing copyright on other | channels. | StevePerkins wrote: | > _" Yesterday I heard a Joe Rogan guest..."_ | | I don't think that intentionally de-platforming whatever | misinformation Joe Rogan is peddling this week falls under the | same category as unintentionally serving up poor organic search | results. | hirundo wrote: | I think a large portion of the internet agrees with you: the | problem isn't that this podcast was de-indexed; the problem | is that I was able to learn about it in the first place. | Traster wrote: | No, the problem is that you're conflating a decision by | google to not serve relevant results for moral and business | reasona with a failure by google to do what they intend to | do. They don't care if you search for far right stuff, they | aren't interested in serving it to you. They _are_ | interested in serving you infromation about other stuff you | 're interested in. | hogFeast wrote: | rileymat2 wrote: | To be fair, if you are specifically looking for that | misinformation, those are poor organic results. | coolso wrote: | Agreed; the former - a large corporation engaging in "too | much free time on their hands" Twitter/1984-tier cancel | culture - is arguably far more egregious, but par for the | course for a company whose leaders, directors, and executives | were brought to literal tears of anger and frustration in a | post-2016 election meeting within the company. [0], [1] | | [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/technology/leaked- | google-... | | [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/google-vs-trump-leaked-video- | reveal... | [deleted] | temikus wrote: | Yeah I often have to add "reddit" afterwards and hunt for links | there or use "site:" predicate to get decent results in addition | to using a results blocker to filter out a lot of useless SEO | results (e.g. Pinterest/Gitmemory) | alfiedotwtf wrote: | As long as Pintrest keeps coming up in the top 5 results, the | title holds | Commodore63 wrote: | Google seems to value recency over quality - a huge shame, given | that the quality content has moved off the open web into walled | gardens. If you elevate recently, you get churnalism, blogspam, | and vacuous GPT3 bot content. | firebaze wrote: | The most advanced AI staff, their algorithms beating even go | champions, still being worse in search than ever before. Beaten | by bing.com, yandex.com and others, at least in my humble | opinion. | | Something must be wrong, but I don't know what. | wolpoli wrote: | Has anyone noticed that we can't click past page 10 on many | search queries? Isn't Google being misleading when it claims it | found 2 million results, but it won't show past result 100? | woodruffw wrote: | Has anybody else noticed a decline in Wikipedia's placement on | many Google search results? | | More often than not I want Wikipedia as my first result, both as | a cross-reference for anything else I click on and as an index | for other useful or interesting links. They were consistently in | the top 5 results for anything that actually had a Wiki page for | years, but now I have to pull the top few pages or even write | `$query wiki` to get Google to reliably bring Wikipedia up. | temikus wrote: | Yep. Have to do that with medical/chemistry queries all the | time. | dennis-tra wrote: | What a coincidence, just today I had a conversation about the | decreased quality of Google's search results. Glad, I'm not | alone. | | I'll give you.com a full weeks trial as it wasn't mentioned that | often in the comments yet. | | Their CEO is following the twitter thread [0] and comments here | [1] but is probably hesitant to advertise it here on HN. | | So, I'm doing it now as I have high expectations. I'm not | affiliated in any way. | | [0] | https://twitter.com/richardsocher/status/1477748601539411971... | | [1] | https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=richardsocher#293994... | KingMachiavelli wrote: | It's a bit ironic that this post is part of the problem. It's | very hard to make money in decent product reviews but there is | money in SEO optimization & referral links. Most product feedback | and honest opinions are shared on sites like Twitter & Reddit | which range from bad-SEO (Reddit, Youtube) to deliberately anti- | SEO (Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest). While this thread/opinion is | on HN ATM, it will quickly be gone and no one using a search | engine will find it (if they do it will probably be via finding a | HN or Reddit post first). | | That said I'm not sure what search results this person is | actually getting but I really haven't had a problem using DDG or | Google. I just know that what's marketed and used by the average | consumer tends to be pretty bad if you ask any expert or | enthusiast. I don't think this is search engines being bad at | their job it's just that most topics bifurcate quickly into | average people and amateur experts/enthusiasts. | | Here's an example. Coffee. It's a very common beverage that | millions if not billions of people drink every day. However, | coffee culture for the average person is very different from | enthusiast coffee culture. | | Search engine's are not even that bad... if you look up a good | coffee grinder. The top sites on both DDG/Bing and Google do | mention the difference between a blade and burr grinder. The most | recommended option looks pretty decent. This is probably a much | better option for 90% of people than getting the 'enthusiast' | (no-brand industrial burr grinder) option off of Ebay. | | Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a | completely different demographic from the typical person. I don't | think Google's search as gotten worse but rather typical user | (i.e. training data) becoming more average. | | Another good example are TVs. Everyone and everyone's dad knows | that Costco has some pretty good deals on TVs as well as offering | a best in class warranty. However, if you read the forums and in- | depth reviews you will quickly notice that Costco doesn't have | 90% of the best TV in each price range. The average consumer | wants the best Costco TV not the best TV as long as you get X% | discount and you calibrate yourself, etc. | betwixthewires wrote: | > Anyone who complains about search engine result quality is a | completely different demographic from the typical person. I | don't think Google's search as gotten worse but rather typical | user (i.e. training data) becoming more average. | | I hear this argument a lot, and I think it is a cop out. | | Google literally bills itself as being able to personalize | itself to your interests and being able to learn based on your | queries. On top of that, google used to work 7 years ago | essentially perfectly. If there were really such a divergence | between myself and "typical users" you'd have heard them all | complain about google then, because they were using it also. | | What's going on here is a misalignment of incentives between | users and Google. They don't have an interest in being useful, | they have an interest in herding eyes to the most profitable | places and in using people to train their AI. They believe | nobody can oust them as incumbent and so they no longer feel | they have to deliver a good product if doing that hurts the | bottom line. | grishka wrote: | Searching anything related to programming inevitably yields some | of those StackOverflow mirrors. Sometimes they are crappily | machine translated into my native language. And sometimes they're | ranked higher than the actual StackOverflow. | | Google won't let people blacklist domains, so I had to write some | uBO rules to get rid of those results on the browser side. | Volker_W wrote: | uBlacklist can blacklist domains on google | laurex wrote: | I've felt this pain and often wondered why search engines don't | allow one to set fairly complicated ongoing preferences that lead | to more trusted results. Yes, I might miss some information by | aggressive filtering but I'd prefer it to the utterly useless | results I usually get. | | I typically use DDG but it's gotten to the point where even | putting quotes around terms still yields results without the | term, and where there seems to be almost no way to avoid results | that are untrustable SEO-driven dreck. | phkahler wrote: | >> This is why no software incumbent is truly protected from | startup disruption | | Not quite. It's why publicly traded companies are not protected, | they can _never_ make _enough_ profit. At least not in today 's | world where the whole market looks like a scam. | xqcgrek2 wrote: | Yes, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. There | isn't a credible alternative either, so the world is basically | returning to the altavista epoch with online tabloids everywhere. | bellyfullofbac wrote: | I'm going to start calling it googlevista... | mey wrote: | Give DuckDuckGo a try | hartator wrote: | I wonder if it will make sense to now build a meta search engine | using SerpApi [1], weight couple of websites more like reddit or | stackoverflow, remove adds, and repackage all this listings into | a super simple UI. | | [1] https://serpapi.com | ilamont wrote: | This was the nail in the coffin for me: | | When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars? | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730) (October 2021) | MiddleEndian wrote: | Months later and the live search still puts "July 20, 1969" at | the top. | fnord77 wrote: | protip: add "forum" to your search. you'll get hits from actual | forums and you'll bypass a lot of seo crap | joelbondurant1 wrote: | umvi wrote: | Ugh, this is so true. It's getting increasingly difficult to | break out of the SEO twilight zone. SEO is the worst thing that's | ever happened to online search because it's completely poisoned | the top N search results with garbage/ads. I have a very hard | time finding organic content anymore. For example, I was trying | to find an organic (written by a human who has tried the two | products) comparison between two processors. It was impossible - | I could only find AI generated sites that programmatically pulled | the specs in a side-by-side comparison (which I had already done) | but offered zero additional insights. | bryguy32403 wrote: | 300+ comments in a hour??? C'mon now, this all can't be genuine. | I don't think Google returns the best results all the time | either, but most "outage" posts don't get this much engagement so | quickly. | everydaybro wrote: | I have a question: why is google still number one? everyone know | that the search results are bad | throwawayboise wrote: | Inertia. It's the default on most browsers. Most people don't | really think about it. "To Google" has become a verb, that's | how entrenched it is. | [deleted] | com2kid wrote: | Someone could make a fortune launching a search engine running | Google's algorithms circa 2010! | | Actually, thinking about it, Google has always been fighting low | quality results from spammers and SEO. I remember 2017-2019 there | were multiple topics that you just couldn't research on Google | because the SEO blog spam was so overwhelming. | | I can confirm that recipes are a mixed bag, but some team at | Google is working hard to try and make them good, it is just a | really difficult fight. It doesn't help that the number of recipe | sites keeps exploding. | | Oh by the way, if you want good recipes, just pay for a Cook's | Illustrated subscription. There. Done. Sadly NYT Cooking has | started adding some really low quality recipes that honestly no | one should be making. | gumby wrote: | Google remains pretty good if you're searching for pretty obscure | topics. | | Which support's Seibel's point. | | You do have to go to extra lengths to keep the search on topic | though. Google tries to DWIM the search ("seems unlikely the user | is really looking for insect embryology"). Is this well meaning | or steering the search to revenue-generating topics? | bonyt wrote: | One category I've noticed this kind of thing in is calorie | counts. I'll search for a product that should have an official | nutrition page from the brand's website, and get pages and pages | of websites that just seem to regurgitate from some large | database. | | I use MyFitnessPal to log calories, and it already has one of | these large databases. I'm usually searching online to validate | it against another source, so this is pretty unhelpful. | Justin_K wrote: | Their algorithms find it more engaging if I have to click through | 50 crappy links to find one good one. If I spend 5 extra minutes | browsing Google, that's a great metric, right? | Nextgrid wrote: | If those crappy links have Google ads or analytics then it's | absolutely beneficial for Google. | solarkraft wrote: | Not only that, there are still ads on the search page. | antisthenes wrote: | Depends if you have adblock or not. | 15characterslon wrote: | Maybe deliver high quality results for adblock users only. | Lower server costs for adblock users while maximizing ad- | revenue for users without adblock. Win-win. | tonymet wrote: | Let's be honest, with rare exception, compelling & relevant | content is no longer on the web. It's found on chats where people | can be candid, like Signal & Telegram. To some degree it's on | twitter where you can curate trusted publishers, and other social | media. There are exceptions e.g. Substack, but most of the web | content is seo clickbait. | | The author ignores the more pernicious problem : ML fairness. | Google is editorializing results by up-ranking positions it | prefers. Check the results on any controversial topic like race, | politics, abortion, covid treatments, etc. | | The problem is that 95% of consumers believe google represents | the truth. | | Just go back to first principles before the internet and make | sure you trust the publishers, sources & references. Also don't | ignore your own observations. There's a PR campaign fighting your | own critical thinking abilities. | psyc wrote: | The problem remains that Google no longer delivers the most | compelling and relevant of _what is still on the web._ | omreaderhn wrote: | > It's found on chats where people can be candid, like Signal & | Telegram | | Can you recommend some of these channels? | Volker_W wrote: | > The author ignores the more pernicious problem : ML fairness. | Google is editorializing results by up-ranking positions it | prefers. Check the results on any controversial topic like | race, politics, abortion, covid treatments, etc. | | Source/Proof? | temikus wrote: | Not the OP but I think he might be referencing this study | from Columbia where they found that the "Featured" articles | were mostly left-leaning: | https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300683 | | The cause of this is debatable though - be it | editorialisation, unconscious bias on behalf of people | working on the algorithms or some common qualities to the | websites that lean a certain way politically. | quacked wrote: | No, it's overt--I wish I could find this for you, but I saw | a tweet from an apparently reputable source, it was a | Google engineer saying "I'm so proud of the work our team | has done to make it more difficult to find misinformation | using Google". Naturally, "misinformation" means whatever | the G-engineers want it to mean. | temikus wrote: | I used to work for GOOG and one thing I can attest to | that bias is taken VERY seriously, so it's not quite that | simple. | Jweb_Guru wrote: | Yeah, I often wish you could search public Discords without | joining them... it's where a huge percentage of information | lives nowadays. | lumost wrote: | The comments seem to regularly reference the poor quality of | content on crafting and other activities due to SEO spam and | affiliate marketing. However I wonder if the root cause is a | dearth of useful content _which is also not trying to sell you | something_. | | Anecdotally the only "interesting" content I find while searching | is either from the old internet or medium. I suspect that many | content makers have moved on due to lack of audience. | onion2k wrote: | I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and I've | come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to blame. | It's just that there isn't any good quality information on the | web anymore. Google does its best, but it's working with crappy | data. No one wants to spend time and effort making a great | website about <insert literally any topic here> unless they're in | it for the money. That means Google will only ever return | blogspam, affiliate websites, and SEO-optimized ecommerce | websites for practically any search now. This is in contrast to | the good old days when people made websites for fun and searches | actually found the high quality content that was out there. These | days searches don't find quality content because, on the whole, | it doesn't exist. | | This isn't universally true of course. There is some good | content. But it's never what you're searching for; it's only good | when you stumble across it, or you find a link on HN/Reddit/etc. | It's just interesting rather than specifically good or useful. | | To an extent Google is to blame because AdSense and DoubleClick | drove the shift from people publishing what they love to people | publishing for dollars, but, and this is somewhat cynical I know, | I genuinely wonder if we're actually on the brink of realising | the web as a publishing platform _just isn 't that great_. | visarga wrote: | It's true that we're drowning in shit, but at the same time | there has never been more useful content online. Google is just | incapable of ranking it, or it doesn't suit their financial | interests. | EscargotCult wrote: | > I've thought about this a lot over the past few years, and | I've come to the slightly sad conclusion that Google isn't to | blame. | | I don't know about that, at least in the realm of programming- | related searches. It's ridiculously frustrating when I'm | searching for a standard library function and the top 3 results | are geeksforgeeks, w3schools, and tutorialspoint, while the | canonical documentation for the language is only 4th or 5th in | the results. | overkill28 wrote: | Yeah much of the quality content for recipes and product | reviews have moved to video, and two of the most popular | platforms to host it on (Instagram and TikTok) are walled | gardens. | christophilus wrote: | There is good content, it just never shows up in search | results. So yes, I blame Google. Their ability to ban obvious | spam / copycat content is laughably bad. | o10449366 wrote: | I disagree with the notion that good quality content just | doesn't exist anymore. Quality content will always exist and | more quality content exists now on the internet than ever | before now that it's become more accessible to more people than | ever, but Google, Facebook, and Amazon have made this content | more difficult to discover because their algorithms reward | gamification with profit, incentivizing the production of high- | volume and low-quality but highly-optimized content. | | People passionate about sharing and learning will always be | driven to produce quality content, even if they don't have an | audience. The issue is that Google will never discover these | people because they're only interested in discovering the best | marketers on the internet. | onion2k wrote: | _People passionate about sharing and learning will always be | driven to produce quality content, even if they don 't have | an audience._ | | Those people moved to content websites like YouTube and Udemy | where they can cash in on what they do. They don't make | websites any more, so Google doesn't find links to them. | [deleted] | Volker_W wrote: | I wish there was a hackable search engine where you could e.g. | write a python script that moves all websites down that have ads | or appear in some list. | geoduck14 wrote: | This is an interesting idea! Would you be interested in doing | with with: Wikipedia, reddit, stack overflow? | Volker_W wrote: | Yes | rolph wrote: | anything that results from ignoring a specified word count | from the query terms. | | i.e. ignore 50% of the search query, go to the back of the | line | Volker_W wrote: | ??? I cannot parse that sentence. | rolph wrote: | let suppose you ask google for "fresh baked bread" | | search results give many results for fresh, but none | include baked or bread. | | this means less than 50% of the search terms are being | honoured for first in line. | | so ---browser app, please send all results with less than | 50% to the end of the line, until the results show 50% or | more relevance. | hk__2 wrote: | You could achieve something similar with a browser extension | like uBlacklist [1] with community-driven lists. | | [1]: | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... | Volker_W wrote: | I know of uBlacklist, and it's nice, but I think python | scripting can be more powerful than a simple Blacklist. | nikanj wrote: | I agree with the author re: results being useless, but strongly | disagree on the motivation. | | Google doesn't show crappy results to optimize adwords, blackhat | SEO hackers force their crap onto the fromt page. | | The whole thread after the first tweet seems to assume Google is | behind this, when in reality their failure comes from not | successfully blocking the spammers | redisman wrote: | Oh poor Google. If only they had the resources to combat it | nikanj wrote: | " What would a paid version of Google Search results look | like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible | results and not be worried about generating revenue?" | | The author seems to genuinely believe Google is not | combatting it, but trying to generate revenue via showing | lame results | Nextgrid wrote: | Google generates revenue via ads (or analytics, which helps | Google target ads down the line), which lame results often | include. | | Downranking ad-supported websites in favour of ad-free one | would cull a lot of spam and would be trivial to do, but | yet Google isn't doing it. Curious right? | unnouinceput wrote: | The comments on both Twitter thread and here on HN goes something | like "better have your own communities on Reddit and | StackOverflow for your advanced queries". Sooo, we go back to | Yahoo's grouping/directories that was the norm in 90's, eh? And | Google bested that by going with their unique search algorithm in | early 2000's. Hence next is going to be a reinvention of the | wheel by DuckDuckGo I suppose. | jeffbee wrote: | DDG has literally zero search technology. | anotheraccount9 wrote: | It's time for a(nother) revolution with search engines. The web | is, more than ever, filled with affiliate links, retarded ads, | and crappy sites that exist for the sole purpose of redirecting | traffic. Most of us browse less 2% of the web. I miss Archie and | Veronica. I'm probably complaining too much and totally out | there, but I miss discovering insane intellectuals, incredibly | unique and valuable content, rebellious nerds, everyday. (Yes, | I'm asking a lot). There's many brilliant people writing high | quality content online, but's too diluted, hidden, forgotten, | invisible, lost. Sometimes browsing feels like changing channels | on a tv. I feel trapped in a rotten loop. I need a search engine | that will rock my world. Show me the real stuff - I know it's | there. Rant over. | kvhdude wrote: | (circa 2012) i bootstrapped a company that connects people | searching for information to providers of said information in a | real time chatroom created for the duration of the query. This is | to solve pogo sticking when the website information is too dense | (say search for quitclaim deed without knowing too much about | it). I failed to get enough users on both sides ('two sided | market'). I am not from search/web space - my expertise is in | building routers/switches in the 90s. I extended xmpp so that you | could query from any chat box that can interwork with xmpp. | StreamBright wrote: | Or high quality translations. It is actually really funny how | broken translations Google translate produce. | short12 wrote: | They wll show you 49 YouTube results though _facepalm_ | busymom0 wrote: | I have observed this for the past 3 years now. For example if I | search for "reddit best soup pots" and set the date filter to be | within last year, it gives me results which are 7 to 9 years old. | This used to work perfectly fine 3 years ago. | amarento wrote: | helllloooo ... does anyone from Google Search engineering, | product management, and/or leadership have any comments on this | ... if this is true, at this rate Google Search, the foundation | of the whole Google / Alphabet enterprise, faces the existential | threat of becoming irrelevant in the world of search | mtgx wrote: | aronpye wrote: | How are these sites created? Are they hand crafted or | automatically generated with something like GPT? | | From what I've seen, a lot of them just seem to copy-paste | content from each other and sites like stack-overflow. I'm just | curious whether a human does this or a machine programmed to game | SEO. | jeffybefffy519 wrote: | Based on number of search engines appearing on HN recently I | suspect disruption is around the corner. | jlarocco wrote: | I'm surprised anybody needs a random guy on Twitter to tell them | this... | Shorel wrote: | This is true. | | But, the important issue is that no one else is producing high | quality search results either. | | When this changes, Google can kiss his profitable search engine | goodbye. But this is not an easy engineering challenge. | yashap wrote: | Yeah, the results are absolute SEO garbage far too frequently. | However, I'm not sure if this is Google "losing" to SEO ppl, or | them more short-sightedly choosing results that are more likely | to get them $$$ (i.e. SEO garbage pages tend to be packed full of | Google Display ads, so Google gets paid by advertisers whenever | you load them). I can easily seeing it being either, or maybe a | bit of both. | | Example of terrible SEO results - I saw an interesting magic | trick on Reddit, and someone in the comments mentioned they did | it using "Key BDM Scissors". I tried searching all sorts of | different things along the lines of "how do Key BDM Scissors | work", but literally every single result was just online stores | selling the scissors, with the word-for-word exact same blurb on | each page. No matter how I tweaked the query, the results were | identical, and in no way explained how the trick scissors worked. | Useless. | ssiddharth wrote: | I apologise, profusely, if this is bad form to talk about a | personal app. | | After years of getting steadily deterioring quality search | results, and being thoroughly fed up with it, I built an iPhone | app (other platforms soon) that removes spammy websites from your | Google search results and lets you add your personal, permanent | exclusions. Launched it to Reddit which seemed to love the idea: | https://searchban.com | flenserboy wrote: | This has been true for over a decade. What's changed is how | _obviously_ awful the results are. | mrdrozdov wrote: | I don't believe this (yet) and here's why. | | The claim is that Google search is producing worse results than | in the past. The analysis is mostly anecdotal, and similar claims | have been made before in a more concrete way. A prime example is | "time to cook onions" giving incorrect results, covered in this | slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/how-to- | cook-onions-... | | What we need is to see is specific queries, the results returned, | why they're wrong, and what they should be instead. | mrdrozdov wrote: | Some folks should post comparisons between Google and other | sites such as: | | * https://bing.com | | * https://duckduckgo.com | | * https://you.com | | Maybe use the categories mentioned in the twitter thread such | as health, travel, recipes, product reviews, etc. | freeflight wrote: | This has bothered me for a while now, even DDG is getting | increasingly less useful. | | Google works if I want to buy something, that's about it. But | finding any kind of news or actual information, particularly | about incidents in the past, often feels impossible past some | Wikipedia article. | | At least until narrowing down the date range for the search to | escape most of that SEO that just adds whatever you search to | make it top of the list. | | But even then, on certain topics going back years sometimes | yields very weird results, where it feels like there was some | kind of purge that only left certain outlets as "valid sources". | | Which in practice means the web has become very good at | forgetting, as often it's near impossible to rediscover the | article for some headline from a decade ago, it's just drowned | out by all the SEO if it never made any big waves to begin with. | | Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle, that's what a lot of these | results often seem to boil down to, and it's bluntly depressing. | lettergram wrote: | Interestingly enough, I've been frustrated by this for years | | https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ | | I used to manage hnprofile.com which utilized a patent I wrote to | target this exact problem. Effectively, Google optimizes for ads | (as pointed out) and optimizes to ensure you have to click | multiple links. In reality, we want to answer peoples question(s) | right off the bat, i.e. no ads. | | How do you make money then? | | Well, that's why I created this: https://insideropinion.com (or | https://metacortex.me/) | | I think the only way to make profit off of it is by targeting | corporations, where their revenue comes from maximizing | productivity. I think it's possible to create a paid service | ($5/month) for good search, but you'd still likely have to target | companies. | | At least that's the best I could come up with. | dpweb wrote: | G could just offer an ad free tier included with Google One or | something. | mark_l_watson wrote: | I agree that Google search is much less relevant to me than it | was > 10 years ago. I love some Google products (GCP, YouTube | Music, Play books/movies, and paid for no advertisements YouTube) | but search is no longer one of them. | | That said, Google search works better for me if I use a private | browser tab so the results don't depend on search history. I find | DDG to be useful. One good use case for Google search in the | logged in mode is when I am searching for work related things | that I might want to influence what I see in YouTube, but I could | simply search in YouTube. | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | My two big beefs with the Google search results right now are | these: | | 1) looks like low-quality linkfarms (like Taboola and that other | one) have a big comeback, under the guise of higher-quality | content, but Google doesn't give a fuck anymore since 2013 or so | when they kept twiddling their algorithm to reduce all the SEO | shit; | | 2) Google started using those low-quality linkfarms and listicles | as sources for its "authoritative" onebox answers to your queries | ("featured snippets", or "knowledge graph", or how they call it). | You look for answers, you get those things front and center as if | they are "the" answer. Don't look further. The so-called "deep | web" seems no longer to be a thing. | | Well, there's also this little problem that for some queries you | can easily get a first page of results with one or two organic | results and the rest being ads, but that's peanuts compared to | the first two. | beebeepka wrote: | No longer you say. That ship sailed more than a decade ago. | | I can't know for sure why that is but I'd bet on accurate results | not making as much money. It's been like a brochure for a long | time | eddieh wrote: | You're right. I've been complaining about Google results for | more than a decade. Things keep getting worse. People used to | dismiss my allegations, but I'm seeing more people noticing now | days. | marginalia_nu wrote: | It's been a long time coming, but it seems to have hit a | critical point recently where it's so obviously bad that it's | becoming very apparent. | hashtones wrote: | Too bad page rank became the bastard child of SEO bots instead of | the novel, mathematically innovative tool it was. | thebetrayer wrote: | I noticed this too over the past couple of years. Google, | Alphabet, and its shareholders don't care because they are still | making so much money. I truly think it's by design to further | ruin the state of the internet, just my opinion. | | Has anyone else noticed how many important websites, such as news | organizations, have Taboola or similar ads? Like it's the only | way to make any money online. Sensationalized paginated joke | content with ads on every page. | | It's crazy how many websites are scrapping stackoverflow and | getting on the first page of google results. Like, is it hard to | check if identical content is on stackoverflow? lol it's not | hard. | MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: | honkycat wrote: | A while ago I was doing research on guitar products. | | I did what I usually do, open the first 6-7 websites in google, | look at the quality of the website, and made a call which one | looked the most reputable. | | Only, here is the thing: All of the websites had different names. | They had different domains. But, they were all very... similar. | And then I started to compare them, and I came to a realization: | | They are the same website, with the same content, with a | different domain and slightly tweaked front-end. SEO has hit so | rock-bottom, it is no longer good enough to be number one. You | have to be number 1 - 10. | | Similar story researching fishing equipment. Different domain. | Same website. Same 10 products. | | In both cases, I found a discord server and asked the enthusiasts | on there for advice. | Traster wrote: | This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so | much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1 | spot means x% of market share, so a perfectly legitimate | strategy is duplicate your entire hardware 5x, since now you're | not 1/10th of the leading edge, you're 5/15 instead. Especially | when the costs of spinning up a new instance are low, but | you're going a lot via a small increase in share. | vecter wrote: | It's more profitable to run identical clones of the same | strategy N times? | mrtksn wrote: | I'm often critical of Google's recent product quality but how | much of the blame is really on Google? | | There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, everything | is produced by professionals that are guided by analytics and | optimisation. | | The social media is searchable by it's vendor but the content | there is also optimised for metrics that often don't align well | with qualities like accuracy. | | Only at places like HN or Reddit there's some organic content in | form of commentary. HN is kind of special IMHO as its probably | optimised for reach to a specific audience and pays for itself | that way, therefore it can be optimised for quality through | content moderation. | | The web is well optimised for monetisation. Unless someone finds | a way to optimize it for some other qualities, I don't think that | Google or any competition can do anything about it. | twoodfin wrote: | Indeed. I suspect that, despite the sensibilities of the | average HN'er, Google's metrics tell them these garbage results | are actually _satisfying_ the average user more than results | that alternative weightings would produce. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | Yeah, but their metrics probably suck. | | So do mine of course, and so do yours. Metric design is a | hard, hard problem. | | I've come to the conclusion that I should keep secret metrics | from people so that they aren't captured by Goodhardt's law, | but apart from the ethical implications, I haven't managed to | implement this anywhere yet. | politician wrote: | HN is a special kind of job board to steer people towards YC | companies. You can tell this is the case because they regularly | post job openings at YC companies that have comments disabled | on the front page. Is this form of advertising bad? I don't | think so, but it's good to recognize that there is a | transaction here. | draugadrotten wrote: | Google is not really fighting the political version of search | results either. One visually obvious comparison is the searches | for "happy black family" vs "happy white family". With such | clearly politically adjusted search results, how much do you | trust your search for "is the coronavirus vaccine safe?" | rightbyte wrote: | What is the difference for you? I get "happy family" stock | photos of either all white or all black skin color for both | queries. The only difference is that there are like 10x more | "happy black family" hits. | donio wrote: | > There are no longer "organic" content on the internet | | There is plenty of "organic" content, probably more than ever | before. But there is also 100x more junk and Google is no | longer good at surfacing the right stuff. Even for something as | seemingly obvious as github issues it will often prefer | spammified versions of the same. | anonymous9023u wrote: | > spammified versions of the same | | Seriously. What's up with these websites that are copies of | Github/stackoverflow with a different UI? Cash grab for ad | pennies? | mrtksn wrote: | Everything is measured and optimised by some simple metrics | like profit, growth, reach or fame as far as I am aware. | | Can you give some examples of great, contemporary organic | content that Google fails to surface? | betwixthewires wrote: | > There are no longer "organic" content on the internet... | | There are billions of people on the internet. The likelihood | that this is true is miniscule. Sure, it's probably smaller | than it used to be, seeing as most people not in it for some | commercial reason use silos to publish instead of their own | websites, but if it looks like there's no organic results | anymore, it's probably because your search engine isn't ranking | organic results, because the websites are out there. | agumonkey wrote: | It is an ironic if not sad fact of this global system. It's | become its own metric with all the bias and larsen you can | think of. | Nextgrid wrote: | > There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, | everything is produced by professionals that are guided by | analytics and optimisation. | | Then you detect commercial content and downrank it. Ads or the | aforementioned analytics should be included in ranking signals | to prioritize websites without them. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | And then the partner manager raises hell about how you | downranked their client, and it gets escalated, two VP's | enter a room, one VP leaves and the penalty is quietly | removed. | Nextgrid wrote: | Of course, for such a search engine to be viable the only | "partners" need to be the paying users. | NaturalPhallacy wrote: | I ditched google (including my alphabet stock) a few years ago. | | They're become so big and bloated they think they know better | which is death to innovation. | | DDG is my default search engine one every device and has been for | ages. | kelnos wrote: | > _Also, how can a search category be SEO'd into ruin? Isn't | search engine optimization supposed to produce "better results"?_ | | No, SEO is supposed to get your particular website higher up in | the rankings, regardless of whether or not the results are better | for users. | | "SEO" is just a nice marketing term for "figure out how the | search engine works and trick it into listing your site higher". | It's learning what metrics a search engine prioritizes, and then | playing to those metrics. | Imnimo wrote: | I recently tried to find some reviews for a computer I was | considering purchasing. A "review" from this website was on the | first page: | | https://ecomputertips.com/ | | This is an example of what the reviews read like: | | >As a desktop manufacturer Dell as an international company has | established itself very well in this competitive market of | digital gadgets. Check out best Dell desktop computers for | specific requirements and beginner's guide. In this 21st century, | a computer has become a very necessary product to everybody's day | to day life. | | This is what Google thinks is a front-page relevant search | result. | markus_zhang wrote: | Basically nowadays Google shows me Ads links on top, bunch of | medium or content-grabber sites (think a website full of blogs | from other blog sites). | londons_explore wrote: | Is there good evidence that Google isn't doing a good job of | finding content anymore, or that good content _doesn 't exist on | the public internet_ anymore? | | Google is only doing a bad job if what you're looking for exists | but can't be found. I have a feeling that for many searches, what | you're looking for simply doesn't exist anymore. | throwawayboise wrote: | And as long as Google is in the business of both search and | advertising, that will not change. | | They actually are not in the business of search, though -- at | least not anymore. Search is just the hook to show the ads. | | As long as the incentives are the way they are, things will not | change and will get worse from a search quality perspective. | sixothree wrote: | So the results listed higher all use google as advertiser? | alphabetting wrote: | >And as long as Google is in the business of both search and | advertising, that will not change. | | This has always been the case and general sentiment hasn't | always been that search was bad. The only way they wouldn't be | in search and advertising is if they charged for search, | because ads pay for it. They know it is in their best interest | to keep search results good so that people will keep using them | and see ads. They seem to be losing the battle right now | against SEO and marketing firms. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | I think this hits the head on tbe nail - its not a technical | problem, its all about insentive | wmu wrote: | DuckDuckGo is also not good. Last week I switched to Bing and its | results are surprisingly good. | throaway6942 wrote: | for opinions like product reviews or entertainment I usually | append my search query with 'reddit' | pastelsky wrote: | It's impossible to get accurate information about travel, hotels, | locations. Results are often filled with listicle crap that each | copy each other and contain outdated pop content. | | I've become so used to suffixing these queries with "forum" or | "reddit" to get articles written by real humans. | ncpa-cpl wrote: | One useful feature I use before visiting new places is sorting | Google Maps reviews and photos by date. I've found Google Maps | comments more accurate than TripAdvisor or Airbnb. | DSingularity wrote: | Exactly my experience this year. For products I have to watch | so many videos. Last year it was easier and all reading. | lifeplusplus wrote: | This! Had a printer bug and all results where like top 3 ways | to share a printer | dleslie wrote: | You ought to try using duck duck go. It's all about being a | portal to other search services. | | Ie, searching for `foo` on reddit is: "!r foo" | sefrost wrote: | The problem with that is it redirects you to the Reddit | search page, which isn't great. It's much better for me to | use "site:reddit.com [query]" on DDG than to use the !r. | CactusOnFire wrote: | Duck Duck Go is great at naive searches, though having | context into why I'm searching for something can be helpful | too. | | I couldn't make the switch over for my work while | programming. | cpeterso wrote: | Seems like we need a search engine for trusted sites, something | like MetaCrawler that searches more specialized search engines. | There are some sites I trust for travel information. There are | other sites I trust for reviews of consumer products and others | for movies. | baxuz wrote: | I've made a custom search in Chrome with the "r" hotkey, that | searches Reddit in the past year. Sites are also starting to | just fake the dates so I'm getting really old results on | regular. This takes care of both: | https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Areddit.com&tbs=qdr:y | goodells wrote: | Even appending "reddit" is often inadequate, as the algorithm | seems to artificially limit one search result item (potentially | with some children under it, but unrelated threads, 2-3 more | items) per host. So it becomes necessary to use | "site:www.reddit.com" to get more than a few non-sucky results. | sidibe wrote: | Reddit is a great place to get recommended the most expensive | stuff. 99% of the time the best sellers on Amazon work great | for me, but if I look at Reddit they insist only a couple very | expensive brands are worth owning in any category of item. It's | crazy and sometimes I even fall for it. Can't tell if it's | marketing or if people very into their hobbies become obsessed | with tiny differences. | neuronic wrote: | Reddit is full of subversive marketing. The real communities | discussing their passions are absolutely exploited by | "undercover" PR agencies. | [deleted] | rowanajmarshall wrote: | I find that's true in specialised subs, but not wider ones. | Like, if you're looking for a good coffee grinder, r/coffee | will only recommend the top-end stuff, but if you search in | something r/AskReddit you get more 'approachable' results. | kristofferR wrote: | They are correct for coffee grinders though, it's almost | pointless to cheap out of them, you negate all the benefits | of grinding it yourself when you buy a subpar non-burr | grinder that doesn't produce a consistent grain size. | | Buying a blade grinder is like buying a hammer with a | spongy face. | plorkyeran wrote: | Buying a blade grinder is a waste of money, but burr | grinders range from $50 to $500 and while there is a | significant quality difference, it can be reasonable to | buy one at the cheaper end. | raegis wrote: | You can do OK with a blade grinder. I used to have one | from Target, and I would grind in two or three stages, | stirring the grounds with my finger (!) in between to get | more consistent grinds. | datavirtue wrote: | Getting a bur grinder now | raegis wrote: | I disagree. The most common recommendation is the $150 | Baratza Encore, which is about correct for | price/performance on the low end. The manufacturer sells | cheap replacement parts for it, which is a massive | convenience. They also sell cheaper refurbished grinders | occasionally. I've had mine for 5-6 years and expect it to | last much longer. Better electric grinders start at | hundreds of dollars more (in the U.S. market). | deelowe wrote: | I had no idea others have begun resorting to this as well these | days. My assumption was that I had just somehow gotten | worse/impatient at researching things or that reddit was just a | more reliable source these days. Thinking back, may search | quality has just gotten wrose. | marginalia_nu wrote: | A funny thing is that the spammers are adapting to this. I | found a bunch of websites that all had "reddit" in the title a | while back, because that is something people add to filter out | the spam. | | https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/reddit-spam.png | daxuak wrote: | I use `site:reddit.com` instead of `inurl:...` or just | reddit. | thangalin wrote: | A combination that works well for product recommendations: | site:reddit.com inurl:bifl | chana_masala wrote: | What does inurl:bifl do? | derimagia wrote: | Searches for "bifl" within the URL. As others have said | though, I find it easier to only use "site:". Like | "site:reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife" | chana_masala wrote: | Ah I see, I didn't realize what bifl means. That's | helpful, thanks! | brewmarche wrote: | You can also do `site:reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife` | Bombthecat wrote: | Why bifl? What's for? | [deleted] | Dachande663 wrote: | Buy It For Life. Subreddit aimed at buying once vs the | modern buy cheap, buy twice. | notreallyserio wrote: | It's unfortunately a lot of survivor bias, but I like | looking at photos of turn of the century items. | theevilsharpie wrote: | You can just use a single "site" parameter in this case: | site:reddit.com/r/bifl | geoduck14 wrote: | Serious question: | | Why don't you go straight to reddit, and search there? | skeletal88 wrote: | At reddit they decided that you should not have to option | to restrict your search to a specific subreddit anymore. | Why they did that? It's a terrible idea! | detaro wrote: | For me reddit defaults to "search in current subreddit", | with a link to "Show results from all of Reddit" at the | top? | vxNsr wrote: | Bec Reddit search itself is worse than google | ncann wrote: | Worse than Google is putting it lightly... It's more or | less useless. | drumhead wrote: | reddit search is awful and has been since the beginning. | Im hoping they spend some of the money theyve raised on | improving that as a priority. | tomrod wrote: | They seem to be fixated instead on forcing a terrible UI | front end and ... not much else. | | Maybe some moderator tool updates after a decade that | were also user hostile. | richardsocher wrote: | If you get an account on you.com you can set that | preference once and your preferred sites will always come | up higher. | umvi wrote: | Companies are adapting to this too - marketers are | increasingly purchasing or grooming high-rep accounts for | astroturfing select subreddits related to company products | jcfrei wrote: | Let's hope reddit users catch on to this and downvote | such posts / comments. | not2b wrote: | Suppose a Google competitor emerged that produced wonderful | results in every category. Within a week, tens of thousands of | SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the | magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the | top of the rankings. The wonderful results would quickly degrade, | and it's unclear as to whether this new small company would have | the resources to keep up. | [deleted] | daxuak wrote: | I wonder if there's a project like sponsorblock, for google | search instead of youtube. Basically a centralized community- | driven database that blacklists certain urls (timestamps for | yt) based on submission & vote. It would be much less of a | clear cut than youtube's case, though. | | I personally just append `wiki` or `reddit` to queries. Crappy | but kinda works. | Nextgrid wrote: | It doesn't have to be community based. The search engine | could be paid and employ actual people to sift through the | garbage and vet domains/brands/etc before they are added to | the index. | | The problem with Google is that their business model is to | show you ads (either on their own website or third-party | websites embedding Google ads/analytics) and not to provide | you quality search results, therefore they have no incentive | to combat even the most obvious SEO spam (see Pinterest & | image search for an example). | not2b wrote: | That was the original Yahoo business model. It doesn't | scale. You can't hire enough human beings to curate the | entire web, and if you try to automate it, then the SEO | spammers can game the automation. | Nextgrid wrote: | You can enforce penalties (bans for the entire | brand/domain/etc) to deter gaming the system, which | should take some pressure off the humans which can then | focus on the top issues reported by end-users. | | It won't be perfect, but at least Pinterest wouldn't be | polluting image search for years for example. | wyre wrote: | If TikTok has the ability to human moderators then I | don't understand how a search engine couldn't get away | with the same thing. | keewee7 wrote: | The Google competitors should just permaban all sites that | contain affiliate links. That will instantly solve 90% of the | problem. | | The list of affiliate marketing sites might need to be human | curated (just like SponsorBlock) to avoid false positives. | wyre wrote: | This will block sites like OutdoorGearLab which has great | content and trustworthy reviews. I think doing a check on the | copy on the SEO website and comparing it to other websites | might do the trick though. | Retric wrote: | SEO isn't magic. Google decided to deprioritize Wikipedia for | example which noticeably degraded results. Where major websites | show up has nothing to do with SEO and simply relates to what | they think is important. | endisneigh wrote: | How do you know Google is deprioritizing Wikipedia? | Retric wrote: | It stopped showing up on the same searches. | endisneigh wrote: | That doesn't mean Google has deprioritized Wikipedia | specifically. | Nextgrid wrote: | Somehow humans are very good at telling apart SEO crap from | legitimate content even without understanding the content or | the language itself - SEO crap has some common elements such | as ads, affiliate links, a certain page layout, etc. | | I remember using an open-source ML model (trained on Buzzfeed | article titles) to detect YouTube clickbait based on titles | and it worked brilliantly, and that was just downloading some | code on GitHub and running it as-is. I'm sure the same could | be applied to search results and you could achieve much | better quality if you actually put some effort into it. | | I very much doubt this is some kind of hard problem as | opposed to Google just giving up because their business model | doesn't actually incentivize good search results. | not2b wrote: | The sites are serving Google a different version of the | page than they serve the rest of us. | Nextgrid wrote: | This isn't a new problem and I'm pretty sure Google has | countermeasures for that, and even if they didn't, it | doesn't look like an unsolvable problem - automation can | help but having a "report" feature on the search results | page or literally paying real people (using real | browsers) to review results can work and is virtually | bulletproof. | Volker_W wrote: | > I remember using an open-source ML model (trained on | Buzzfeed article titles) to detect YouTube clickbait based | on titles | | Link to the Repo please? | Nextgrid wrote: | https://github.com/peterldowns/clickbait-classifier | Volker_W wrote: | Thank you very much | bullfightonmars wrote: | It is all about incentives isn't it? Google gave all the | power to these SEO websites by making it difficult to get | your content listed as a search result on the first page. | | Google could start incentivizing high quality unique content | and websites from domain experts, but they have decided they | can't make as much money off of independent publishers as | they can from marketing/content farms. | newaccount74 wrote: | Suppose a dozen Google competitors emerged that produced | wonderful, but slightly different results in every category. | | They all use different algorithms, so the SEO specialists can't | game them all. | | Making crappy sites would maybe no longer be worth it. | keewee7 wrote: | Doman-Specific Search Engines is a great idea. I already use | PriceRunner to find products I need. | tobr wrote: | What if the search index was much more manually curated? For | example, say that you could create a custom search index | relevant to your field of expertise, and that other users would | rank their results to let the engine know which indices are | actually good and for which types of queries. You could still | game it, but probably not with traditional SEO techniques. | notriddle wrote: | > What if the search index was much more manually curated? | | Google would need to not have a monopoly if they wanted to do | that. Otherwise, they would be accused of anti-competitive | practices (since their policies would be aligned with their | policies in other services, they would rarely ban | themselves). | tobr wrote: | Yeah this is in the context of how a competitor could avoid | running into the same problems. | ByteJockey wrote: | > Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be | on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how | to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings. | | An algorithm could punish things inherent to SEO optimized | sites (ads and tracking). Removing the ability to passively | generate money without providing useful content is the key. | | Of the top of my head, a system like the following would be a | pretty good start: | | Scale of 0 to 100 (closer to 100 being higher up on the | results). | | You are penalized for the following: | | - subtract 10 points for any ad, using ublock origin's list as | a good starting point (this stacks, it's 10 points off for each | link) | | - subtract 100 points for google tag manager | | - subtract 100 points for the facebook like button | | - ... etc for each of the major tracking scripts | | This would obviously need to be updated as ad-tech evolves, but | it would cut out 90% of the current SEO spam. | | Can google do this? No, they have a conflict of interest around | placing ads. Somebody else, however, can absolutely do this. | cge wrote: | You can unfortunately see this with DuckDuckGo: people are | clearly targeting more than just Google. Python results, for | example, are so infested by SEO-specialist spam that searching | for standard library functions will return spam above the | actual standard library documentation, particularly for more | popular functions. Searching for "python datetime.now" or | "python json.loads" will both return spam above documentation. | This problem heavily impacts anything 'data scientist' spammers | see as important as well; it's actually worse on DDG than | Google. | | What's frustrating is that these often seem to be a handful of | domains, like 'geeksforgeeks' and 'towardsdatascience'; for a | while, of course, there was also the "gitmemory" spammer who | seemed to be able to push out Github results on both DDG and | Google. Yet I think Google removed reporting and blacklisting | domains from searches long ago, and I think DDG never had it, | leaving the only option for removing them client-side scripts | and extensions that work poorly. Likewise, no search engine | appears to be manually blacklisting them. Yet as you point out, | if one did, then the spammers would probably just move to using | many domains, which would probably be worse. | Nextgrid wrote: | Domain age & quantity/breadth of content should be taken into | account in ranking. | | A fresh domain that suddenly has a ton of content should be | viewed with suspicion and downranked as it's likely a spammer | (copying GitHub/Stackoverflow/official docs). | | Legitimate sites that are starting out shouldn't be affected | as they are unlikely to have a ton of content from the start. | | Of course, this isn't perfect, but it should take care of the | majority of spam copycat sites. | betwixthewires wrote: | Yeah, it's an arms race. That's the business you enter into | when you decide to run a commercial search engine. | | To me it seems to be compelling evidence that search engines | are _not_ a viable way to organize information on the web, but | that 's a different topic. | rolph wrote: | i remember a time when teacher would say form a line, and there | would be a chaos of who was getting there first. | | This was met with a second instruction, the first five people | in line, move to the back of the line, and last five in line | move to the front. | | it became a trial and error, with the usual kids jostling for | position now wanting to be, at the back of the line, then in | the middle of the line, hunting for the condition that creates | pole position. | | the idea that it was the personalities and the value sets, not | the position on the line, that triggered the condition, | seemingly was too abstract to be deduced. keep in mind this was | grade 2. | | so may the browser filter the first to the nth SEO spammers in | the query results be sent somewhere away from the front of the | line until a match for query terms occurs. | Nextgrid wrote: | > Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be | on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how | to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings. | | The Google competitor will have a human nuke their entire | domain or business (based on a manual index of banned | products/brands) from the search results forever, or have by | default a bias against ad-filled websites which would remove | any commercial incentive for those websites to exist in the | first place. | justaguy37 wrote: | I hope they'd have a human complaints department too, for | when (a real) business is upset | Nextgrid wrote: | Complaints need to require a small refundable fee to deter | spam. | ncann wrote: | That kind of manual intervention doesn't scale though. The | only way it can work is to have community-curated lists of | bad domains, similar to adblock lists, that users can upload | to personalize their search result. | Nextgrid wrote: | Somehow a distributed community of unpaid volunteers | manages to keep the entire advertising industry (where | billions are at stake) at bay by curating adblock lists. | I'm sure a company can achieve the same. It will never be | 100% perfect, but it will surely be better than what we | have now. | | But yes, supporting community-supplied adblock-style lists | would be a start, and Google isn't even doing _that_. | wumpus wrote: | Congratulations, you just invented Blekko! Which in turn | was inspired by the success of DMOZ. | | Maybe it's an idea whose time has come. | marginalia_nu wrote: | The efficacy of SEO is largely dependent on a search | monoculture. They only need to optimize for one set of unknown | rules, and that's something that is relatively easy to do well | with simple machine learning tools. | | Real competition in search is probably the best way of reigning | in the SEO sector. | scaredofgoogle wrote: | They have us - that is, the wider internet - (by the **s) so why | would they do anything other than return the most profitable | results? | | Wouldn't you do the same thing? (don't forget to toss billion- | dollar scraps to competitors, to head off monopoly restrictions). | neuronic wrote: | I have recently researched a laundry machine. No chance - if you | dont know where to ask or look you will be bombarded with fake | marketing crap and affiliate cancer. | gitgrump wrote: | [deleted] | ra-mos wrote: | Could the issues be less presumptuous about googles business, and | more technical? E.g the incorporation of NLP model(s) in search | that don't perform well in the wild? | | Curious about their query parsing as well. I can't recall exact | queries, but I had instances where scrambled typos (but still | obvious words to me) broke the results all together & no | suggested fixes. | thehappypm wrote: | Easy to blame some "suit" but when the rubber meets the road, | Googlers want their RSUs to be valuable maybe more than any other | group. Zero incentive to put user experience first at any level | of the organization. | ghoomketu wrote: | A thread like this happens every month now and the main point of | discussion always comes to how companies like Pinterest, Quora, | Stackoverflow clones, etc are openly gaming the search engine and | making results shit (1) | | I think first time I read this was like 5 years ago yet Google is | doing absolutely nothing about it and these sites still dominate | the results by gaming whatever metrics Google is using to rank | them. | | (1) | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... | deadalus wrote: | Yandex is the best when it comes to reverse image search, it | almost matches Pimeyes. | | Bing is the best when it comes to video search. | | Brave is great when searching for controversial or censored | topics. | fart32 wrote: | Google is best for searching Russian sites automatically (and | very poorly) translated to my language that hijack | history.back(). I'm getting those a lot lately. | [deleted] | ClumsyPilot wrote: | I was wondering for a while if SEO has gotten so good, or its | Google that's gone to this - and I have a feeling that it's the | latter. | | Search for COVID rules for entry to moldova - for me and my | friends the official website was like page 10 of search. Search | for various government services, and most of the time top result | is some scam. | | This is inexcusable - is is to hard to prioritise official | government websites? They could hire two dudes per country to | index them all by hand and they'd be done in a couple weeks. | fnord123 wrote: | Tip: add NHS or CDC to the end of any health search to get better | results from the NHS or CDC instead of however many pages of | grifter sites. | [deleted] | ape4 wrote: | But shouldn't google's page rank find those pages most | reputable and list them first? | jf wrote: | I also recommend buying a paper copy of the Family Medical | Guide by the American Medical Association | ClumsyPilot wrote: | Or go to NHS official website and search there? What's the | point of google in this case? | fnord123 wrote: | Theres no point. But people want to search using their url | bar. People don't want to change their default search from | Google. I use DDG and !nhs so I'm with you. | truculent wrote: | Another problem with google search is that it's no longer | something that you can become good at. Yes, the queries may have | improved on some KPIs (although the link here would suggest | otherwise), but you more or less get what you're given. It's very | difficult to tweak your query to get better, or more specific, | results. | Cwizard wrote: | Something I have noticed lately is that when searching for | technical information I often get result near the top of my | search that are crappy skins of StackOverflow, usually with many | more ads. Has anyone else noticed this too? | effable wrote: | Yes, I have definitely experienced this too. I also sometimes | get results from websites that seem to be reskins of github | (usually issues and pull requests). | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | I agree with this 100%, and could totally admit that I have a | giant deficit of imagination, but I still have a huge problem | imagining how a company could disrupt Google search at this point | (unless that other company is Amazon, Microsoft or Apple, i.e. | another company with gigantic resources). | | The costs of setting up a comparable search engine these days | must run in the multi-billions. The Internet is huge now, so your | crawling and indexing costs would be giant. Not to mention that | it can actually be _hard_ to crawl many sites that attempt to | restrict indexing to "the big boys" of Google, Bing and a couple | others. Also, Google controls the primary on-ramp of Android and | Chrome. They also control the primary ad networks that make | running a search engine profitable. | | I compare it to Microsoft. Nobody really ever "disrupted" | Microsoft in the desktop OS space - they still have a greater | than 75% market share. The thing that changed, of course, is that | the "desktop operating space" as a category became much less | important with the rise of mobile, and Microsoft famously lost | that OS battle. So my point is that I find it hard to see Google | being "disrupted" when it comes to the "Internet search market" - | the only thing I really see being possible is if some other | technology came along and superseded "Internet search" as a | category. | visarga wrote: | > the only thing I really see being possible is if some other | technology came along and superseded "Internet search" as a | category. | | Free natural language search, based on dialogue. A cross | between GPT-3 and web search. | (https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving- | la...) | throwaway4good wrote: | Search doesn't really that much anymore - not even to Google - | their monopoly on advertisement brokerage does though ... | JCWasmx86 wrote: | SEO is so annoying, I recently searched "Is XYZ healthy?", then | just some blogs/lifestyle magazines/whatever showed up, just | written in an absolutely verbose manner. I would have expected | Yes/No, not 4 paragraphs introduction, some about the advantages, | some about the disadvantages and so on. | GeoAtreides wrote: | try and use scholar.google.com to find primary literature | about... well, anything. | | for example: xyz meta-analysis will return meta studies that | summarize other studies about xyz | | sadly most studies are behind paywalls and only the abstract is | visible, but just copy and paste the DOI into sci hub to get | the full text | topicseed wrote: | SEOs don't write all of that for fun. They write it because it | ranks well, because Google seems to favor this verbose blurby | content. | | The second Google clearly favors shorter answers, SEOs will | publish just that. | | SEOs go where the wind blows. | CamperBob2 wrote: | _I recently searched "Is XYZ healthy?",_ | | I wouldn't expect that to work any better than the other | example someone quoted above, where a search for "nice | restaurants" returned restaurants in Nice. Put some more | thought into your queries. Like most tools, what you get out of | a search engine is largely a reflection of what you put into | it. | rchaves wrote: | Yes it had been getting worse, but I think there is a limit to | "find relevant results" anyway, Google is good for objective | answers, but for more complex stuff, there is an more and more | answers, the web nowadays is overwhelming | | At some point it starts reaching personal preferences as well, | and just tracking me like Google does is not good enough for | those filters, not to mention privacy concerns | | For example, many many times it happens that I read an awesome | article about a subject, then weeks later I try to google it back | to show to a friend, and I simply can't find it, because there is | a gazillion other articles about the same topic | | That's why I'm building a custom search engine, where you index | whatever you want, your bookmarks, your Twitter likes, building | your own brain's search engine | | Stay tuned! | Volker_W wrote: | > That's why I'm building a custom search engine, where you | index whatever you want, your bookmarks, your Twitter likes, | building your own brain's search engine | | Link to the Repo please? | tptacek wrote: | Google has never, ever produced high quality search results for | medical questions. The jokes about this are about as stale as the | ones about airline food. | redisman wrote: | Wouldn't you need general AI for actually useful medical | questions ? | ummonk wrote: | I suspect these ad-ridden junk sites are optimizing more for | Google than for Bing, as I tend to run into them more if I try to | check Google's results instead of relying on Duck Duck Go. | dijonman2 wrote: | Google and their shareholders are addicted to ad money. | Personally speaking I think this is more harmful to society than | cigarettes. | | I hope we normalize this and start fighting back. Ads first | destroyed youtube, google, and I'm sure a bunch of other products | I am not thinking about. | | Enough is enough, and we need to decouple morality from content | and edge back to the anti censorship wild west mentality the | internet championed for so long. | whatgoodisaroad wrote: | To what extent is this a supply side problem? What's the | counterexample high quality health website that Google should | have included? | | Part of the problem is surely how Google's ad model influences | the success or failure of various kinds of websites, but a deeper | problem seems to me how anybody qualified to share medical | information freely would be acting against their own interest. | pimterry wrote: | I switched from Google to https://kagi.com recently, I've found | them a significant improvement in search result quality so far! | | Right now they're free with a waiting list, but the long-term | plan is to charge for access - I'm personally hopeful that that's | a business model far less likely to incentivize results quality, | without falling into this ad trap. | cmurf wrote: | Not news, it's been getting shitty for awhile to the point most | of my searching uses "" to force those keywords to show up. And | now I'm regularly getting results in which the page doesn't | contain required keywords. Super aggravating. | AviationAtom wrote: | Freskis wrote: | Can I defend Google here? | | What are they supposed to do? The "Internet" as an information | resource is dead. All new topical information has moved to walled | gardens such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, | Reddit etc, and mobile apps. The open websites such as Wikipedia, | StackOverflow etc dominate everything else. Websites are legacy | objects which no-one visits anymore, and they have therefore | raced to the bottom to earn scraps of revenue. This is a | structural problem that Google cannot fix. Google itself is | doomed on the long-term unless it can index new relevant content. | mybrid wrote: | Yahoo is the same as it always was, but these days it produces | better results than Google. | | Bing is okay but getting worse over time. | | Google image search is the worst. Bing is marginal but at least | useful. | ncpa-cpl wrote: | Then there's websites like Scribd, SlideShare, and pdf hosting | websites which require accounts or subscriptions have hijacked | many results. This has happened even if the original pdfs are | still at the source. | mkl95 wrote: | Google have found a sweet spot where their search results are | almost correct but still insufficient. | | That "near-correctness" ensures you don't lose hope of finding | what you are looking for, so you keep reading result after | result. And most of those sites are conveniently loaded with ads, | sold by guess which company - Google! | | Eventually, pagerank cashes out, and you find what you are | looking for. You receive a much needed endorphin kick, and you go | on with your day. Rinse and repeat. | hintymad wrote: | I grew up with the amazing stories about Google engineers, and I | wish Google will not repeat the history of companies declining | gradually then collapsing suddenly, as it is such a revolutionary | company not just for its product but also for its amazing | contribution to the technology. The sad thing is that I'm seeing | more and more cracks in this great company. | zmmmmm wrote: | Is there some special significance to this individual? There | doesn't seem to anything more to this than their personal | anecdotal experience and opinion. | seaman1921 wrote: | Nope, just an excuse for HN big-tech shitposters to crawl out | and post their own anecdotes and theories without any link to a | proper research/study with concrete data. | [deleted] | 99_00 wrote: | On the one hand, I'm sad that other people are realizing this | because it means they can fix make some better before I can. | | On the other hand I probably don't have the ability to make | something better so it's good that someone will come up with a | solution I can use. | dimgl wrote: | I'm having issues with Google lately too. Every time I look up | some piece of code because I want to view documentation related | to it, all I get are these example websites that crawl open | source pages and index them with SEO optimized queries. Something | like hotexamples.com and garbage like that. All of the sudden | they're #1 on Google and provide little to no value. It used to | be all of the #1 pages were stackoverflow.com or Reddit and the | like, which always had really good discussions on these snippets | of code. | | Edit: in fact, it's gotten so bad that I've stopped using Google | for search results and now I go directly to Reddit or Stack | Overflow and do my searches there. Which is UNREAL. I don't mind | it, but I can't believe how bad it's gotten. | uejfiweun wrote: | Certainly Google Images has taken a major dip in quality. I am | unable to find images that I could even find a few months ago, | and the number of results is shrinking for identical queries. On | top of that, they are rolling out an absolutely HORRIBLE | interface for image search on mobile. | | Google is just in "big company" mode where the company is just so | vast that it is nearly impossible to guarantee a consistent | product quality. It will continue to offer good salaries and nice | perks, but the innovation has stopped, and the company is doomed | to inevitably slowly stagnate and fail. | j45 wrote: | Google is likely inclined to return higher quality ad results, | than high quality search results. | | Clicking on one makes them money, the other does not. | | Look at the percentage of the initial search result screen that | is devoted to ads vs organic results. | [deleted] | thedailymail wrote: | "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search | engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business | model do not always correspond to providing quality search to | users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top | results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use | Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail | the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell | phone while driving. This search result came up first because of | its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an | approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is | clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing | cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that | our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of | reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], | we expect that advertising funded search engines will be | inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs | of the consumers." | | The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, | Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. | http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf | aaron695 wrote: | tester756 wrote: | how do you people remember the quality of Google years ago? | | If somebody asked me whether Google's quality was/better 10 5 3 2 | years ago then I'd have no idea despite using it daily shitton of | times | commandlinefan wrote: | > I'm pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search | | I have the distinct impression that engineers haven't been | responsible for Google Search for a long, long time, having been | supplanted by biased activists. | u2077 wrote: | I've noticed they started to limit search length, my search was | too long and they removed small words like "of" and "the. I also | saw a message somewhere along the lines of "to show you the best | quality results, we limited this search to two pages" | | Google is only good for finding stuff you already know exists. | What ever happened to exploring the web? | yawaworht1978 wrote: | I agree, the results are too heavily influenced by domains like | reddit, Pinterest, Quora. | | The next thing I have realized, if I am looking for something | about a topic or a person and there are current events heavily in | the media on the person or the issue, it's almost impossible to | get something useful or even related. | | Stack overflow results are sometimes replaced by less useful | GitHub links. | | Then , job search results are pretty bad too , same for shopping | items. | | It seems like media outlets and the big traffic domains get | preferential treatment. | | And this is just for English, God knows how bad this will be in | other languages. | turrini wrote: | For better search results, I always use google in verbatim mode | coupled with this TamperMonkey script to block scrappers and | other stuff: | | https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d... | visarga wrote: | Google, why are you slacking off search and also the Google | Assistant? It feels like a rerun of the 2003-2010 period in | Microsoft. | | Web search is getting worse, people complain, problems persist. I | thought your mission was to organise the information and make it | useful. | | And the Assistant is just as dumb as years ago, while NLP has | been progressing leaps and bounds in the last 2-3 years. Where's | the progress? Are you aware speech is going to dominate direct | web search? | 14 wrote: | Any time I search how to repair X on my car I get 10 sites of | places selling the part but none of the forums discussing how to | do the repair. Back in the day it was not like this. Very sad and | I have now learned to basically ignore the first set of results | and scroll past them. | emptybottle wrote: | If you haven't switched your default search to duck duck go yet I | highly recommend doing so. | | As a user of DDG for years now rarely does searching with !g give | better results. | | At this point its the opposite. The DDG first page results aren't | all ads above the fold. | csours wrote: | Web search is an adversarial context. Just try to list the things | a search engine provider has to fight against, then try to define | some criteria for each of those things that more than 50% of the | population will agree upon. | a_square_peg wrote: | I wonder how much of this is due to Google or that the rest of | the web (the crappy parts at least) has figured out the algorithm | sufficiently to degrade its performance overall? | albertopv wrote: | When looking for gift I go straight to Amazon. For travel | booking.com, for info is wikipedia and so on. I basically avoid | google as much as possible. | throwawaysea wrote: | It's not just about high quality search results. It is also about | wanton manipulation of societal narratives, which ultimately is | manipulation of elections. For example, YouTube recently started | taking down videos of Joe Rogan's interview of Dr. Robert Malone. | One of the concepts Malone brought up is 'mass formation | psychosis', which has resulted in many people searching for that | phrase. Google has a dystopian message at the top of their search | results that suggests they are manipulating the search results or | in the least using such messages to undermine the legitimacy of | certain content | (https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1477403661701689352). | This is not how a search indexer should be operating and it is | not the basis for open societies where you can freely exchange | ideas on an even playing field. | cracker_jacks wrote: | Can someone provide some explicit search queries so we can see | the bad examples? Lots of criticism is being doled out in that | thread without an actual example to see for myself. | symlinkk wrote: | Try "best kitchen knife set" and compare it to "best kitchen | knife set reddit" | littlecranky67 wrote: | Just researched good/quality crafting printers yesterday. Search | results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that offered | obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to direct you | to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad since those | affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This product is | currently not available" sites. | | Repeated my search on Youtube to find reviews or unboxing. Most | video search results were basically "Youtube SEO" again - the | most viewed/top-ranked videos did never show a single actual | print run or even the printer available. It was mostly marketing | websites turned into video (slowly scrolling/moving over product | description or pictures clearly taken from the web). And of | course, affiliate links in the description. | | The web has become a crappy place to research products as long as | money can be made with those through affiliations. I wonder if | outlawing affiliate marketing would make the world a better | place. | | P.S: Whats most ridiculous about my Youtube Printer research | experience, the best and most helpful video was a sales video | from a home shopping TV station [0], where they actually showed | some printing action and handling of one of the models I was | interested in. | | [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytMXgjCReO0 | trevex wrote: | I unfortunately share your experiences. However in Germany | there is a foundation called "Stiftung Warentest" [1], which | does independent testing of products. With reviews full of | Amazon affiliate links dominating search results, I tend to | purchase their tests for ~3 Euros more often than ever. | | However this only works for popular product categories, but | less so for specialized equipment. | | My impression is also that affiliate links hurt consumers in | the long run as they reduce the selection of products in | reviews or blogs to those the authors can earn money with. This | however leaves out potential alternatives. More often than not | the winner of product categories (at least those I was | researching) of independent tests were not available from sites | running affiliate programs. For example a consumer-grade lawn | mower from an otherwise professional gardening company or a | tent from a Scandinavian brand. | | [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest | ohashi wrote: | I'm in a strange position here. I fundamentally agree that | reviews for the most part are absolute steaming pile of crap | of a space for many niches. I work in one of the worst - web | hosting reviews. It's plagued by fake affiliate reviews | dominating basically every search result. I've been trying | for 10 years to run a company that did reviews differently in | the web hosting space. | | Full disclosure, I have affiliate links on companies that | have them too. But I also list companies without them and it | has had zero bearing on any result in 10 years. In fact, when | I launched I had to beg the CEO of the top rated company to | create a special affiliate program for me. Why? Because he | didn't believe in review sites and affiliates in the space. | It took months, but I told him if he didn't create one, what | I was trying to do would never have a chance because I'd | never make a dollar - you're the top rated company. I want to | do something different, but it needs to remain somewhat | financially viable and if you don't have a program I'm dead | before it starts. | | So what happened in those 10 years? | | Honestly, not a whole a lot. I have mediocre rankings (often | page 2-5) on some of the most competitive terms on Google. I | can't afford to buy the links my competitors do because they | make 10x or more what I do pushing the highest paying | affiliates and designing for conversion. The site has some | traction within niche communities - especially the WordPress | hosting space - because I also run annual performance | benchmarks (https://wphostingbenchmarks.com) where I document | and thoroughly test most of the meaningful players in that | space. | | It makes a couple grand a month, I've disclosed the revenue | publicly on IndieHackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/interv | iew/reviewsignal-e1ddcc26...) and it's gone down since then. | | The data I'm providing is almost surely the most transparent | data tracking the industry and maybe the least biased (the | reviews work by analyzing Twitter sentiment at scale - | everything publicly documented in terms of ranking algorithm | and published comments). | | But outside little bubbles in communities that care, nobody | noticed. Google doesn't care. Google happily ranks affiliate | sites spending six figures buying links off apache.org and | other open source projects (look at those sponsor lists on a | lot of open source projects - hosting/gambling is a bad | sign). | | I got excited when my work fighting against .ORG registry | price increases and sale at ICANN | (https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2019/06/24/the-case-for- | regula...) got a lot of press, even getting cited by the | California AG in his letter which effectively killed it. I | got backlinks from a lot of large news sites and traffic. I | honestly saw no meaningful improvement in rankings or | traffic. | | So I'm stuck, I keep the sites running - part time - mostly | between other projects. I've moved back heavily into | consulting and other projects because being an honest | affiliate - I can't compete. Providing honest, transparent | data and presenting it with the goal of informing versus | pushing sales is a terrible business model. The majority of | people simply don't care. A lot of 'in-the-know' folks read | and get informed by my work. They advise their clients using | it, and I never see any financial benefit from it. The | broader world, especially Google, doesn't know or care. | | Is the root problem affiliate links? It certainly skews | incentives and pushes manipulation. If we removed them, what | fills the void? Ads? Sponsored content? Something else? I | don't think the problem goes away - there is so much money in | some of these industries and the stakes are so high. | Companies and people will take advantage of it one way or | another. | | How do we identify honest / good content from the garbage | seems to be the bigger question. After 10 years, I'm don't | have an answer and I'm certainly not being noticed. | edbloom wrote: | This is a perfect example of how fundamentally flawed | modern SEO is. @ohashi has been producing the best hosting | reviews in the WordPress ecosystem since forever. It seems | like at some point in the past decade on page quality | signals have been completely drowned out by backlink | signals that can be easily amplified by bigger content | producers and a resurgence in cheap on page SEO tricks. | | Sorry Kevin I don't know what the answer is, but I'd | thought I'd just say a huge thanks for the great work you | do year after year. It might be VERY niche but perhaps some | sort of annual premium membership for professionals in the | WP ecosytem might be something that _might_ work? I 'd | certainly be happy to support your work on an ongoing basis | with access to niche "members only" performance reports on | things like WooCommerce benchmarking tests etc. | thih9 wrote: | Rtings seems a similar project; some of their test results | are free, some are paid. They have a wide set of comparison | tools, they test for a lot of features and they document | their testing procedures well; it's a really nice change from | SEO spam articles. | | I recommend their tests of headphones [1], I especially like | how they measure breatability [2]. They also have a page | about printers [3]. | | [1]: https://www.rtings.com/headphones | | [2]: | https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/breathability | | [3]: https://www.rtings.com/printer | cortesoft wrote: | The US has Consumer Reports, which is similar I think... but | yeah, only works for major product categories. | vlovich123 wrote: | There's also the NYT WireCutter which tried to do a good | job isolating it away as an independent review source that | you can trust. | michaelmrose wrote: | Bought a pair of audio-technica headphones based on their | review. Sound quality was as described but it was so | uncomfortable I returned it 5 minutes after picking it | up. It was described as comfortable for long wear but it | had a hard band with little padding and was uncomfortable | for any duration. | short12 wrote: | That fell to complete shit a while back. They are not | wrong but I would ignore their rankings and focus on the | review aspects | ghaff wrote: | I find Wirecutter and Consumer Reports are pretty | reasonable for product categories where I just want a | reasonable choice and don't necessarily have deep | knowledge and preferences myself. And, yes, it's worth | reading _why_ they picked something. But if I were buying | an interchangeable lens camera or a computer I might read | their recommendation but I 'd look elsewhere also. For a | sprayer for a hose? I'm sure their recommendation is | fine. | hnov wrote: | Some of the WireCutter's picks were fairly terrible, | which makes sense: testing diverse categories of products | is too expensive for affiliate links to cover. I've | gifted dashcams on their recommendation that shot | beautiful QHD but had MTBF measured in single digit | months. The TP-Link C7 Archer was kind of a turd and | within a stone's throw of a decent router price-wise. | seanp2k2 wrote: | I've written extensively about this recently, but these | days with $300+ "gaming" routers using crappy sweatshop | software on whatever Atheros router SoC, many users would | be much better served with legit SMB routing / switching | / wifi systems that are available for around the same | price. | kayodelycaon wrote: | I didn't know what good Wifi until I switched to using | some TP-Link Omada equipment. | | If you run your own controller, you can set up a small | network (router, PoE switch, and AP) for less than $300. | Hardware controller is ~$90. A controller isn't strictly | necessary, but I don't recommend doing a standalone | setup. | | Downside? It's business class equipment and you need some | idea what you're doing. It's not plug-n-play. Also, it's | layer 2 only. If you want mDNS across vlans, you'll need | to run a reflector. (Not difficult. It's built into | avahi.) | bentcorner wrote: | I switched to Unifi access points and a wired router and | switch and am much happier with the result. | | The consolidation of router, switch and access point | means you can't upgrade individual parts. It's the modern | equivalent of the TV-VCR combo and most consumers don't | realize they actually can be separated. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | I've always found anything tagged as "gaming" to be lower | quality and more expensive than the business machines. | | ==== | | This message sent from a Thinkpad business machine that I | use for gaming (and ML, theoretically). | bobthepanda wrote: | I mean this is a known thing in general; the best kitchen | supply stuff you can buy is often stuff intended for | commercial use, because it quite literally goes through | the wringer with near-constant usage over long periods of | time. | | The problem is finding a place that sells commercial | things to individual buyers. That, and sometimes what a | commercial kitchen needs is vastly oversized for a | regular house; you're probably going to set off your | residential fire alarm very often with a massive | commercial range designed for woks, for example, unless | you also upgrade the ventilation, etc. | m0lecules wrote: | To be fair, MTBF is not something you can measure in a | reasonable time for these kinds of review sites. Far | better for this kind of thing is niche-specific youtube | channels. | | But in any case, what you're asking for here is a | prediction of your future satisfaction with a product. | It's a non-trivial problem even for the most innocuous | purchases. | | Will I like Lysol or Clorox wipes more? Who knows, and | the reviews aren't going to beat first-hand experience in | any circumstances. | macintux wrote: | > The TP-Link C7 Archer was kind of a turd and within a | stone's throw of a decent router price-wise. | | Can attest. I finally ditched mine, got tired of it | falling over multiple times each week. | michaelmrose wrote: | Maybe you got a lemon I've been using mine for a while | now. Not as nice as my old one with customer firmware but | still consistent. | sumoboy wrote: | wirecutter's picks are definitely bad, more like products | to avoid. | Sunspark wrote: | The C7 is a good router if you put OpenWRT on it. | greggman3 wrote: | My experience with NYT product reviews is pretty awful. I | wish I could be more concrete. Tried to look in my | history but I could have sworn at least one article was | just effectively, "top 10 most popular on Amazon", with | quotes from user reviews. Maybe I'm getting my sites | mixed up. | xiphias2 wrote: | I'm a subscriber to consumer reports, but as it put Tesla | Model 3, the most successful car in the past few years on | the back as the least reliable, I feel that I can't trust | its results to be 100% independent reviews. I don't have a | Tesla, but if something grows so fast where people pay a | significant amount for it, it can't be that bad. | aix1 wrote: | I don't know anything about how reliable or not Model 3 | is, but surely reliability != popularity? | xiphias2 wrote: | It's the growth that's staggering. What I read is that | older car companies changed the rating to include small | software bugs in the entertainment system. As Tesla has | much more non-essential features, these while these small | bugs are not that important for the end user, can bring | the ratings down vs other cars that don't even offer the | feature. | awslattery wrote: | Rtings is my go-to for most things. Been satisfied with | several purchases researched there. | mcguire wrote: | For kitchen tools, there's America's Test Kitchen reviews | (from Cooking magazine, IIRC). It's a limited segment but | high quality. | | On the other hand, it has the same problem as Consumer | Reports: they only test and review a single model which | will probably be out of production before you need one. On | the third hand, if one manufacturer consistently gets good | reviews (OXO Goodgrips, for example)... | emsy wrote: | I have used their tests in the past and I've never regretted | a purchase influenced by their tests. | hubraumhugo wrote: | I was always fascinated by the idea of "field testers" | testing products in their daily lives and writing a short | review about their experience. A cook would write about a | chef knife, a post officer about comfortable all-weather | boots, a craftsman about a tool etc. | | The biggest problem would be how to incentivize such people, | but gamification and some monetary rewards from the community | could probably solve this. | tucosan wrote: | Sadly, Stiftung Warentest often doesn't have the expertise to | properly test many products. I often notice the shortcomings | in product tests for products that I know and use. | | I was reminded of this with their last test of 3d printers. | Their test results where far from what everyone with | experience in the field would consider accurate. | mschild wrote: | For some products, I agree, but realistically its about as | good as it gets unless you do thorough research on a given | product and are actually able to find a somewhat unbiased | review. | | Take washing machines for example. How do you know which | ones are good and which ones are not? Public reviews from | any website tend to only be a good indicator if there a | lots of bad ones. I have 0 faith in the average consumer to | accurately rate a product. Overwhelmingly negative reviews | will clearly show a deficiency but positive ones are | unfortunately more and more a gamble. | | Stiftung Warentest isn't perfect, but they do, on most | occasions, put in a high amount of effort to test products | to the best of their abilities without any personal | opinions. I don't know of a single other | person/organization/website where that is the case. | petra wrote: | Most washing machines offer quit similar features. The | key difference is reliability. | | Testing for reliability is expensive, so most likely | Stiftung Warentest and similar companies don't do that. | brnt wrote: | I base those sorts of purchases on duration of warranty. | Recently bought a dryer, and apart from a brand that cost | significantly more, they all came with 2 year warranties. | One reasonably priced machine had 4, so I picked that | one. | pooper wrote: | Counterexample: Korean auto manufacturers Hyundai and Kia | offer longer warranties than Japanese manufacturers Honda | and Toyota because that's the only way people will buy | Korean cars. | 14 wrote: | My brand new LG turbowasher model lasted 3 months before | one morning sounded like a hammer smashing something. I | ran to the machine and a support bracket inside had | broken. It took 2 months for them to replace it I was not | impressed. It has since lasted 3 more years no issues but | I doubt I would go with LG in the future since it was a | horrible customer service experience getting my first one | repairs under warranty. Had they helped me better after | it breaking I may have said it was just a fluke and still | recommended them. | onli wrote: | No, that's exactly what they do test and test well. Their | model mostly breaks down for computer technology and | peripherals in that space. When testing a mouse they | would test how often it can click before breaking down, | and that's only slight hyperbole. Might be a bit better | now in that area than back then when I read their tests | regularly. | turbinerneiter wrote: | I bought their test of basmati rice and these monsters | had an intern court the broken vs. whole rice grains in a | 500g package. | | I assume they only counted a sample of the the 500g, but | it's funnier to imagine otherwise. | nkrisc wrote: | As long as their methodology is clear you can at least | judge their results for yourself and whether you consider | them meaningful, even if it wasn't perhaps as good as an | expert could have done. | kkjjkgjjgg wrote: | They are OK, but I remember when they decided a Nokia phone | was better than an iPhone. | | Tests usually have subjective criteria that determine the | ranking. | frabcus wrote: | Which? https://www.which.co.uk/ is great, based in the UK, | not very expensive to join for a month to look up one | product. | amelius wrote: | > which does independent testing of products | | Can we have some independent testing of web search engines? | seanp2k2 wrote: | Yep; a huge portion of Google results, especially for spicy | searches like "best ______ 2021" are just lists of affiliate | links to top 10 selling items on Amazon from made-up brand | names that are rotated once a product receives a few bad | reviews. | | It's really hard to find legit review sites; at least | Wirecutter seems to actually test things, but sites like | SeriousEats, OutdoorGearLab, Carryology, DCRainMaker, | SoundOnSound, Adventure Journal, Magnetic Magazine, The Loam | Wolf, etc that are quite niche / domain-specific are where I go | for actual trustworthy reviews. | | I agree that Google seems to be dominated by clickbait ad- | riddled BS SEO sites now more than ever, and I can't help but | think that Google is allowing this to happen because it pays | the bills. I've posted about this before, but at the end of the | day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more | than that. The difference to me is that I'm willing to reward | actual reviews and effort with rev share if I decide to buy | something reviewed, but I'm super unimpressed with all the | irrelevant ads we still get in 2021 despite having so much | personalization data about users. | | Another thing that advertisers don't seem to understand | somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB | ad and bought it, the chances that I'm also interested in | buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are | drastically reduced. They seem to be totally missing this | signal, showing me ads for some category of thing I already | purchased for a very long time after I don't need any more | suggestions. | | Lastly, I would literally pay per month for an Amazon search | that filters out all the fake brands. If I search for "webcam", | there are half a dozen brands I want to see, yet instead I'm | forced to sift through piles of junk that I would never even | consider purchasing to find what I'm looking for. I've heard | that Amazon knows this is a thing but chooses not to fix it due | to some psychological allure of sifting through the junk to | find the nuggets of gold. In the worst cases, I have to use | Google to find stuff on Amazon because their own search is so | horrendous, with the categories being an absolute joke. | greggman3 wrote: | > I can't help but think that Google is allowing this to | happen because it pays the bills | | Google is not that short sighted. They know that if people | stop trusting it to give good results then they'll lose their | market. | | I suspect the problem is just harder than it seems. | littlecranky67 wrote: | And just at this moment, we have hordes of affiliate | marketers working 24/7 updating their "articles" to say "best | _______ 2022". | Nextgrid wrote: | I would be very surprised if there wasn't a Wordpress or | similar plugin to automate this. | coliveira wrote: | > They seem to be totally missing this signal | | Ok, but how would they know that you already bought the | product? As advanced as ads are, they still don't have the | Amazon confirmation telling them you already completed the | purchase. | tagawa wrote: | Google partners with at least one major credit card | company[1] so their ad network should be aware of purchases | if a particular payment system were used. I expect this is | far more widespread than we realise (unfortunately) but | using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers would | harm revenue, so they remain visible. | | [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45368040 | gruez wrote: | >but using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers | would harm revenue, so they remain visible. | | that doesn't make any sense. By that logic they wouldn't | want to do targeting at all, because targeting by | definition reduces the amount of people you can show ads | to. | coliveira wrote: | I imagine that Google does in fact use credit card data, | but there is no way to tell if you already bought | everything you want. | travisjungroth wrote: | > the chances that I'm also interested in buying a similar | thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced | | This is a comment sentiment (I've already bought a fridge! | Don't need another!) and it is a bit of a failure mode. But, | I think value on advertising around recent purchases to | people is super high. A recent purchase, although often | wrong, is one of the best signals you can get. So much | purchasing happens in clusters (setting up a space, picking | up a hobby, etc) that a specific person is in buying mode for | a specific topic is crazy valuable. And there's splash damage | on the wrong ads. Maybe you don't buy a second rice cooker, | but the ad reminds you to get a toaster. | Retric wrote: | Not just that, the odds some one will return a product are | non trivial. | enduroman wrote: | Dcrainmaker has been "pay for play" for at least the past 10 | years. He's very thorough, but not altruistic. There was a | guy on Slowtwich that shared a conversation with him that was | enlightening to that fact. | jeromecornet wrote: | Can you share a link to this ? | jwagenet wrote: | Someone has to pay the bills. I don't think receiving money | to do a review is inherently wrong, there are just too many | products to afford to review, but having a rigorous process | to eliminate or expose bias is important. However, it does | suck looking for reviews of a product which is not a main | player in the market or category. | mad182 wrote: | Not surprising. It's incomparably quicker and more profitable | to list a few top selling products with affiliate links and a | bunch of relevant keywords, than to spend significant time | and money actually researching and comparing these products | in a meaningful way. | fault1 wrote: | > Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more | than that | | This also seems to be what Amazon is also devolving into. | Amazon ads is the fastest growing part of amazon! | fxtentacle wrote: | Yes. Just searched for "cholimex soy sauce". 80% of the | search results page was covered by an ad for mayonnaise... | cwilkes wrote: | I never had problems with fake products on Amazon until I | looked for a usb thumb drive for the Arlo camera base | station. | | There's a dramatic difference in price for 1T sizes. Some at | $30. Others at $150. I couldn't understand it. | | One of the 0 star reviews said it was actually a 32Gb drive | that somehow fools the OS to think it is bigger. Not sure how | that happens but it steered me away from any of the cheaper | options as I don't need a headache. | tomcam wrote: | > trying to be more than that | | Citation needed ;) | riazrizvi wrote: | It's a policy problem, there's no easy fix. | | Design a system of rules to rank content. Watch as highly | incentivized participants work harder than everyone else to | game the system to their advantage. | | "But I can see these results are obviously bad, surely | something can be done?". Leads to System-Amendment#5796 = | _Gather user feedback to alter results_. Leads to highly | incentivized users gaming the feedback system. | stefan_ wrote: | This sounds more like a Google curse - the inability to do | something extraordinarily simple because it can't be | sufficiently automated. | | Like there is no reason to have a site like | "https://gitmemory.cn/" in the index, ever. It is pure and | utter spam. Ban the domain. | MiddleEndian wrote: | In the meantime, check out the uBlackList extension to | block individual sites from Google's (and a few other | sites') results | littlecranky67 wrote: | I wonder if we just would disallow affiliate links in | general. I.e. you can still create your own webshop, take | orders and forward to someone else (similar to dropshipping) | but basically outlaw the process of collecting | money/commission just for a single placement of links. Or at | least, force those sites to correctly mark themselves as | "Advertising". | riazrizvi wrote: | A second order policy problem is to design good policy to | make good policy makers. Meaning that it's hard for a | public company entity to codify company policy so that | their people in charge of search results are not at all | susceptible themselves to sliding in an advantage here or | there to assist some group that they become financially | enmeshed with. | mkr-hn wrote: | The people doing actual, good reviews/guides also use | affiliate links. Getting rid of affiliate links to get rid | of the bad actors gets rid of people trying to do it right. | The bad actors will have another path in within a month | while the person who was run out of their honest business | is left hanging. | creato wrote: | I think affiliate links are positive for Amazon, because | they crowdsource aggressive sales and marketing, but are | negative for Google (and everyone else). I think if | Google could somehow ban affiliate links, they would. | jsemrau wrote: | I ran into the same problem when building finclout's feedback | loop. In my opinion, there is no way around keyword matching | for search. As a result SEO is unlikely to be preventable. | However, if the feedback can be collected at scale and is | actually incentivised (i.e., did this link solve your problem | ? ) this might actually work. | Nextgrid wrote: | This assumes the rules are black and white and there's no | concept of bad faith. | | A system could very well have rules/guidelines and then have | humans review & monitor the system and user-submitted | complaints for any abuse, and harshly penalize such abuse | with a temporary or permanent ban. | | It could end up in a situation where it's technically | possible to gain a slight advantage by gaming the system but | no participant will risk a complete ban and the system ends | up working well for everyone. | zinekeller wrote: | I _would_ want that, but that puts Google (and other | companies) in the legal position of a _publisher_ , which | means that they're liable for "a bad thing". | Nextgrid wrote: | Most websites and platforms moderate for abuse and aren't | classified as publishers, I don't see why this would be | any different here. | [deleted] | zinekeller wrote: | I can't remember the precise reason, but if I remember | correctly the reason is that because the poster is the | originator in most sites including YouTube, while in | Google's case it curates links instead without input from | the general public. This is also the reason why Wikipedia | still only officially operates in the US: the relatively | freer publication rules as opposed to UK or Brazil for | example shields them from a lot of lawsuits. | Manuel_D wrote: | There exists no distinction between "publishers" and | "platforms" as far as Section 230 protections from online | liability goes. It's entirely decided by who produced the | content: users are responsible for content that they | upload, the sites hosting user-generated content are not. | It doesn't matter if the site selectively promotes, or | otherwise acts as a "publisher", so long as it's the | user's content. | | https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230 | zinekeller wrote: | Ah yes, US laws are the only laws applicable to Google. | | I should have prefaced that with "outside the United | States": notably UK moves the bar to the middle, which | will put Google in legal jeopardy (and libel cases!) | there. | hubraumhugo wrote: | Same experience here. Researching high-quality products on | Google is very frustrating: | | - Results 1-3 are ads | | - Results 3-5 are blogs that get sponsored | | - Results 5-10 are full of astroturfed user reviews | | Finding trustworthy and consistent information is so hard that | I mostly rely on Reddit for product research. There is a | subreddit for literally every product category, and posting a | request with your requirements takes much less time than | cutting through all the noise on Google. | | To make this whole mess a better experience, I'm now working on | my own startup that tries to solve these issues. | hw wrote: | In the end search is about relevancy. Trustworthiness of a | blog or article is hard to discern by machines. The blogs | likely rank high because of relevancy as well as clicks. | Sponsored doesnt always mean that the reviews are biased. | Reviews on reddit aren't exactly trustworthy too - there are | always going to be competing arguments and reviews for a | product, you just have to use your own judgment which plays | into your personality, risk tolerance etc. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | Indeed but as to the linked thread's point, it's an | opportunity for a startup to come in. A startup which could | tackle the quality problem not just relevancy. | h3mb3 wrote: | YouTube's latest brilliant "innovation" to hide the dislike | count made this problem so much worse too. When e.g. trying to | make a purchase decision, you can't quickly skim through a | bunch of search results any longer. Instead you are forced to | sit through so much bad content that you could've previously | avoided. Maybe that was their real motivation too - to boost | some watchtime metrics. | Blackthorn wrote: | Even before that, I hate hate HATE how they don't have a way | to say "don't ever display this channel in search results". | So much spam. | thelittleone wrote: | I've also noticed something similar when researching mobile | phones. Device pages that are clearly automatically created | with poor and often nonsensical sentences and repition created | by some script. And ranking top of Google. Similarly on YouTube | videos that are collection of still images with robot voice | reading clearly copy texts with almost zero original content. | Again ranking near the top for a topic. | xxs wrote: | The only reviews I respect nowadays are... tear downs. No | innards, no fun. Unfortunately printers would be proper hard to | tear down on a review. | holoduke wrote: | One thing what helps me getting better results is adding the | keyword 'forum'. Usually still have okayish results. Forums are | nowadays the only source information not spoiled by SEO etc | aix1 wrote: | That's a good tip. I too do this quite a lot; forums can be | quite noisy but also a great source of first-hand | experiences. | pxmpxm wrote: | Beat me to it | tcoff91 wrote: | Google used to have a great discussion search mode that only | showed forum results. I miss it dearly. | fnord77 wrote: | > The web has become a crappy place to research products | | I'd say most people's interface to the web has become crappy. | Beta-7 wrote: | I've also had the same problem. For a while i could get good | recommendations/reviews by adding "reddit" to the query as i | could find good information there, however i think that the | sites have caught up on that and now i only get 1-2 results | from reddit.com and then the rest are other sites that | reference reddit so they are in the results. | ghostpepper wrote: | At the risk of any SEO-blogspam people reading this and | adjusting their tactics, you can filter by domain, eg. | | product name review site:reddit.com | throwitawayfam wrote: | The problem with using Reddit specifically is that you | can't filter by date anymore. Reddit has poisoned their | results to show old posts with new dates on Google. | noizejoy wrote: | As long as only a few people use a successful white hat | trick, that trick isn't generally worthwhile for the darker | hats to combat. | | So the problem isn't so much that blog spam people will | read your comment, but that many ordinary readers will | start using the trick, and thus make it worthwhile for the | dark hats to address. | | So the unfortunate side effect of kindness in information | sharing is that it decreases the value of that information. | | Therefore, I don't think there's a practical way out of | endless arms races between $good and $evil | Beta-7 wrote: | Great tip, thanks. Funny how much i used to do google dorks | (that got introduce to me in a college course), but | overtime i completely forgot about them. | | About the risk though: it's happened already. Remember the | "to find any book free online just do "filetype:pdf book- | name"" tips that were popular online a while ago? Now it's | all just PDFs on public google drives with tons of book | names and a single link leading to some sketchy site. | pxmpxm wrote: | I find myself appending the word "forum" to a large percentage | of my google queries these days, to avoid the dynamic you | mentioned. This essentially filters the results for | real/original content of other people that were looking for the | same information as me. | ranit wrote: | > Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly | resulted in "This product is currently not available" sites. | | This should not be considered "especially sad" in my view. It | would be worse if these links worked, thus generating | additional revenue for these "web players" (pun intended). | ashtonkem wrote: | This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching | for "best intro <power tool>" yields a bunch of low quality SEO | that's just pulled from Amazon. | | I think the interesting question is this: why is this | happening? There's always been a battle between Google and SEO | black hats, but I can't remember the last time it got this bad. | Is Google just temporarily losing, or have they lost the will | to fix this at all? | megablast wrote: | Consumers laments the effect of consumers consuming too much | stuff. | | Maybe buying more useless stuff isn't the solution??? | ramraj07 wrote: | This is far worse in a place like india. It's pretty much | impossible to find anything technical or product related that's | localized. The only non blogspam source often is <vomit/> | quora. | | For example. Most construction happening in india now uses | something called M-Sand. I actually CANNOT find what the hell | it is except from some company websites or random YouTubers | blabbering non engineering garbage about it. | ummonk wrote: | What is there to know about it? Looks like it's just sand | that's produced by crushing stones in an industrial process, | rather than relying on rivers to do it for you. It's probably | used as an aggregate for concrete. | | Edit: a quick search on Google Scholar brings up papers like | http://www.kresttechnology.com/krest-academic- | projects/krest... | d0gsg0w00f wrote: | Could be due to the difficulty of getting sand in the | region. I watched this fascinating Vice documentary about | illegal sand mining in the region. I had no idea it was | such a big deal. | | https://www.vice.com/en/article/4av9jm/illegal-sand- | mining-i... | zo1 wrote: | Honestly disappointed at the documentary but curious | about the topic. They kept repeating the exact same thing | over and over and over again, dripping little bits of | info. | otherotherchris wrote: | You've probably already google-fu'ed this, but its ~4mm | crushed granite used as a concrete-sand substitute where | granite/gneiss sand isn't available. | | Most construction materials businesses sell locally by word | of mouth, and if they paid for a website at all it's old and | still using http. So Google drops them. | PaulHoule wrote: | In photography I have struggled to choose products, often I | have to rely on my experience (e.g. it takes six months to | discover that your Epson EcoTank printer makes prints that fade | in six months) and specialized forums (DPReviews) You might | find lightfastness rankings for some printers at | | http://wilhelm-research.com/ | | _if_ somebody paid them to do the research otherwise you might | have rely on heuristic 'pigment based inks are relatively | lightfast' and that at least one other person who does similar | work, has similar skills, and uses similar method gets good | results. That still doesn't help with problems like '90% of | instances of this Sigma lens seem to be pretty good but 10% | have defective autofocus'. | | I find online reviews are close to worthless because there are | so many people who don't know how to use gear or have | unrealistic expectations. At Best Buy I saw a review of a | printer where somebody showed pictures of prints they made | where they printed on the wrong side of photo paper and blamed | the printer, for instance. | a-dub wrote: | yeah, had this experience myself while purchasing holiday | gifts. amusingly, it made me pine for the days when you could | walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you | a few questions and pick the right stuff for you. | | it's funny because internet shopping became popular in the face | of salespeople becoming corrupt under commission and | performance schemes, now a big part of the commerce related | internet is worse for pretty much the same reasons. | kristofferR wrote: | Rose colored glasses. Workers in stores were the original | "affiliate marketers", in a lot of stores (especially | electronic ones) workers were/are being paid to push the most | expensive products. | | Then when you try to pay, you get upsold warranties. | treeman79 wrote: | Guessing Migrine's? Probably easier to search FL-41 | glasses. | | I like my axon brand, very helpful. | taffronaut wrote: | Actually it would make more sense for them to push the | highest margin products. This could quite often be lower | cost or in-house brands since prestige brands can dictate | lower margins to the retailer. | | Agree sales guys pushing warranties is a real pain but I'm | almost nostalgic for it compared to dodging Prime sign-up | every time and other online anti-patterns. | JoshTriplett wrote: | > it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a | shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few | questions and pick the right stuff for you. | | I still remember being in Best Buy and hearing the | salespeople scamming less knowledgeable customers about how | much computer they need or how important expensive cables | are. I don't think there was ever a time when you could trust | electronics store salespeople to sell you "the right stuff | for you". | sgtnoodle wrote: | I was recently in a Best Buy and overheard an employee | explain the difference between a Pixel 6 and a 6 Pro as, | "EVERYTHING is better". I had personally just compared the | two side-by-side and concluded that the pro's only material | differences were more RAM, worse build quality due to the | curved screen edges, and the addition of a telephoto | camera. | bcrosby95 wrote: | My favorite line was some salesperson saying "you wouldn't | want to connect a $2k tv with a cheap cable!". It certainly | made me laugh. | zo1 wrote: | We kid and joke about expensive cables, but we're at a | point where it's become true. It's hit or miss buying USB | cables. For fast-charging as an example (double-trouble if | you don't have a quality or compatible charger to pair it | with). Likewise for USB transfer rates (e.g. for the Oculus | Quest that I was _not_ planning on testing with 10 | different 5m USB cables to see which worked). | | Same goes for the connectors. All the IEEE and ISO | standards out there in the world and the damn USB plugs | stick out half the time (nevermind the Chinese-made ones I | had that were 1.5x the normal length). In other instances | 3.5mm jacks don't stay in or something or other becomes | loose. And trying to find reviews or info about this | online, or filtering it out to some level on purchase sites | like Amazon is... _tiring_. | seanp2k2 wrote: | At least that was better than Fry's or Home Depot, where | salespeople actively walk away when they see you | approaching, and have zero knowledge of what is even | carried by the place they work. After a while I figured out | that it's better to just look myself on the shelves and | endcaps vs trying to ask anything of the sales drones. | Kinda like a physical Amazon. I'm sad that they're out of | business now, and with no more MicroCenter left in the Bay | Area, the choices are now basically Amazon, eBay, or small | online shops (if Central Computer and Halted, now closed as | they sold to Excess Solutions @ 1555 S, 7th St. San Jose, | CA 95112 don't have what I'm after). | tomc1985 wrote: | The folks at Frys (particularly in hardware) were a useful | resource (and good source of shop talk) all the way up | until Fry's faded into irrelevance. They helped me sort | through a good number of hardware-related issues | throwanem wrote: | Micro Center staff still are like this, and that's much | more than anything else why I buy whatever I can from | them before looking anywhere else. I _want_ them to stay | in business, because otherwise I have to do my own | research every time, and who has the time for that? - | well, this, and also because I just delight in being | still able to walk into one brick-and-mortar store where | I know for sure I won 't have wasted the trip. | colechristensen wrote: | I've only ever overheard good quality advice at | Microcenter. | wetmore wrote: | As much as I love Microcenter, even there I've had a | salesman give me uninformed advice, throw his bar code | sticker on the thing he told me to get, and walk away. | throwanem wrote: | So don't talk to that guy again. The others should be | fine, unless your local store happens to have a lousy GM. | | Initially I dealt with this concern by benchmarking the | advice I got on a topic I _do_ know a lot about. I haven | 't worried about that in a while; at least in the Towson | store, the quality of advice and discussion has been such | that the next time they steer me wrong will be the first. | datavirtue wrote: | Ah best buy sales incentives. It reminds of the time I | watched a salesman force the wrong case on an old lady's | iPad, cracking the screen, and then blaming her for it. | carlivar wrote: | There was a time - the smaller the store the better. I | agree big box stores were rarely good. But Radio Shack had | excellent, helpful employees. Probably because RS vetted | their employees carefully and paid pretty well (I know this | from trying and failing to get a job there when I was | around 16 years old). | ghaff wrote: | It wasn't really a golden era. | | Small local camera stores didn't carry much and were | expensive. They tended to recommend something that they | had in stock. Was still a pretty regular customer though | because mail order wasn't as developed and you couldn't | easily showroom gear locally. | | And Radio Shack was certainly convenient for cables etc. | and had often knowledgable employees. But most of the | actual stereo equipment and other gear they carried just | wasn't very good. | matsemann wrote: | While not perfect, it was often good enough. Go in, see 6 | cameras in three price ranges, choose the one fitting the | best for the price you're willing to pay, then walk home | happy. Now there's sooo much choice, and most of us end | up trying to find the perfect purchase. | ghaff wrote: | The (somewhat disputed) thesis of the paradox of choice. | | But I don't really disagree especially for relatively | commodity purchases. Yes, I actually looked up a spray | nozzle for a hose on Wirecutter. But would I have been | perfectly fine just walking into Home Depot and grabbing | one? Probably. | | That said. I'm probably better off researching thins like | dishwashers rather than walking into a store (then or | now) and picking one that catches my eye or that the | salesperson recommends. | | But you can certainly get into analysis-paralysis with | any number of things from travel to cameras. And you're | often better off just shutting the analysis down at some | point. | slowmovintarget wrote: | I worked at Radio Shack. They had an extensive training | program that all employees went through. There were | multiple 50-page manuals for each product category. This | meant training in A/V equipment and how to hook up TVs | (which splitters and switches did what, how to wire many | different audio setups, how VCR outputs worked, telephony | equipment, pagers and Blackberries... etc.) | | We had to go through all the certifications within | something like six weeks of hire in order to be eligible | for pay bumps and promotions. This even meant training on | circuit components (at least knowing what they were, and | how they were organized). | | Any Radio Shack clerk that wasn't completely green went | through this training, so we all knew our stuff. | | One of the cool things about the job was getting to talk | to "elder geeks" that would come in for components. One | guy I helped had set up an old IBM 360 mainframe in his | garage. The university he worked at didn't want it any | more. He used it for messing around with assembly and as | a space heater. | | It was still a retail job, but it was better than most | for a tech-head like me. I would've been flipping burgers | or selling shoes (Payless was next door), so Radio Shack | was a better stepping stone for me. It did nothing for | getting me into a programming career, but it was a stop- | gap to get there. | kragen wrote: | As far back as the 01990s my memories of Radio Shack are: | | 1. The only place around where you could go to buy a | breadboard, or a transistor, or a resistor, or a | headphone cable connector. Component selection | unparalleled in the places where I lived. I don't want to | exaggerate --- they had maybe ten kinds of transistors, | not a hundred like Fry's, but I didn't live within 1000 | km of a Fry's. And certainly not forty thousand like | Digi-Key has today. | | 2. Salespeople who apparently didn't know anything but | tried to get my phone number (!?) and, later, sell me | cellphones. And cellphone plans. Jesus. | | 3. Stuff for makers getting gradually crowded out by | worthless goods for mere consumers, stuff I could have | bought at Best Buy or Sears if I wanted it. Things like | TVs, VCRs, pagers, and Blackberries. | | I still use a store-brand Radio Shack multimeter | sometimes, and in the 01980s a lot of my early years of | programming were on store-brand Radio Shack computers in | my day care and elementary schools, both TRS-80 Model III | and the CoCo. | ipaddr wrote: | I worked at radio shack. We didn't have certification | program but you are forced to learn quickly. | | It was less about selling and more about people walking | in knowing what they wanted or wanting to browse around | and once in awhile someone with a problem that you had to | piece together components to help. It was unlike other | electronic stores I worked. You had to understand how | invertors worked, rc cars and sell computers while trying | to maintain an 80% names/address recorded. | | You did sell. You entire got paid minimum wage or a % of | what you earned for a two week period. 4% for name brand | stuff 10% for store brand. My first two week period I | sold computer after computer got highest sales in the | district. For the next month or longer the minimum. | Replacing the computer inventory took forever and I | wasn't as good selling all of their other products. Great | fun learning experience. | megablast wrote: | You want someone to pick gifts for your family and friends? | datavirtue wrote: | "it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop | and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions | and pick the right stuff for you." | | THAT is retail. The craptastic experiment we see these days, | online and in meatspace are scams masquerading as retail. I | miss Sears. | 1over137 wrote: | >it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop | and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions | and pick the right stuff for you. | | Uhhh, you can still do that, you know. | evilduck wrote: | For the most part, why would I trust random employees at a | store? | | Knowledgable retail sales employees have completely | vanished outside of niche "passionate enthusiast turned | their hobby into a business". Homebrew shops, gun stores, | marijuana dispensaries, comic and table top gaming stores, | etc, but even many of those are plagued with the same cheap | shit you can find on Alibaba or Amazon and a good chunk of | the time if it's not the business owner you're dealing with | you might as well skip asking questions. Outside of those | niche interest stores there's often not even sales staff | present, there are just people who stock shelves and | operate the point of sale system but they don't even | attempt to present themselves as knowledgable and can at | best only point you to the right aisle of the store. | theteapot wrote: | > For the most part, why would I trust random employees | at a store? | | Don't trust. Ask questions. If the answers seem fishy, | take your business somewhere else. | ejb999 wrote: | >> If the answers seem fishy, take your business | somewhere else. | | If you know enough to know whether or not the answers you | might get are fishy, you probably already know more than | the guy you are trying to get advice from. | evilduck wrote: | At this point in my life I've mostly given up asking | employees questions. There's only "fishy" answers to be | had in retail and there's not generally a competing store | with more knowledgable employees. It seems like most of | the time I can choose between bad and another brand of | bad. Think Hobby Lobby vs. Michaels or Home Depot vs | Lowes, Target vs. WalMart, Sams vs. Costco, Macy's vs. | Dillards, Dicks vs. Academy Sports, a Ford dealer vs. a | Toyota dealer, or worse they've consolidated operations | like Bass Pro vs. Cabelas. There might be reasons to | choose one over the other for reasons like employee | welfare and return policies, but typically prices are all | in line with each other and the retail staff are equally | useless. | | There's only a couple of nationwide exceptions that come | to mind like REI and Microcenter but even then people | might have to travel prohibitive distances to have those | options and they might as well just buy online. | | Small regional stores and mom n' pop operations trend | towards having more passionate employees that might have | an interest in the products (like a ski shop is generally | only staffed by people who've at skied, bike shops tend | to only be staffed by people who enjoy cycling, etc) but | it's still pretty infrequent. | selimthegrim wrote: | The knowledgeable RadioShack employees were probably | canary in the coal mine for RadioShack | injidup wrote: | Yeah right. Two days ago I go into our local electrical | goods store. I would like a USB-C to HDMI adaptor, I say. | Sales guy looks around, scratches his nut. Sorry don't have | one he says. Then he wanders off. I turn around and see one | on the shelf. The price is double what you can get online. | I tell him this. He shrugs and scratches his other nut and | wanders off again. I walk out. | evilduck wrote: | Yeah, I went into a Home Depot store that wasn't my | regular location a couple weeks back looking for dowel | rods. Trying to speed up my trip I asked two different | employees on my way to the general area of the store | which specific aisle they would be on. Neither of them | even knew what a dowel rod was, let alone what aisle it | might be on, and obviously neither of them would be | qualified to proactively try to help avoid the ones with | knots or badly angled grain. It's not just that sales | staff are ignorant nowadays, it's that the job itself has | practically vanished. | MiddleEndian wrote: | On that very topic, I saw a customer ask an employee | manning the wood cutting station at a Home Depot if he | could cut a dowel rod in half. The employee didn't know | if it was possible because it was "round." I think they | realized they can get away with just not training their | employees. | tsomctl wrote: | Cutting round things in a saw can be dangerous if they | aren't clamped correctly: they can spin. (Don't know of a | link, this was taught to me at community college in the | context of cutting round metal stock in a band saw.) | taeric wrote: | I mean, yeah? Train the staff on how to clamp correctly? | | I would expect all cuts to be fully clamped in a store. | MerelyMortal wrote: | Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of | stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous | knowledge/experience. It's possible that there are just | less people with that experience, that also want to work | at a store like Home Depot. | evilduck wrote: | In that specific situation there's likely training | because operating a saw can be dangerous and incurs | liability, not because Home Depot wants to impart | knowledge to customers. | ejb999 wrote: | >>Did Home Depot ever teach their employees that kind of | stuff? I always assumed they hired people with previous | knowledge/experience. | | I think they used to hire people with industry experience | - i.e. semi-retired or retired plumbers, electricians, | carpenters handymen etc and that worked pretty well | coming of the 2008 RE meltdown and economic mess at that | time - but now any halfway qualified tradesperson can | make close to or more than a six figure salary - so | working at HD for $15/hr doesn't seem all that attractive | anymore. | | I don't even try to ask the employees any actual | 'technical' questions - I am happy if they can just point | me to the correct aisle to find what I need these days. | marcosdumay wrote: | The good news is that there isn't enough volume to justify | the corruption of the salesperson, so he is often more | honest nowadays. | | The bad news is that physical stores simply do not carry | any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is irrelevant. | cortesoft wrote: | > The bad news is that physical stores simply do not | carry any diversity nowadays | | They never did, you just didn't realize they didn't | before the internet exposed you to the options. | evilduck wrote: | I think there's lots of factors going on here too. | Products were less often considered disposable two or | three generations ago. A manufacturer wouldn't offer 6 | versions of nearly the same thing to capture all price | points. Things used to be predominantly manufactured by | hand, which also meant they were inspectable and | repairable by hand. Manufacturing businesses typically | kept less products on the market for longer periods | (model numbers have become quarterly iterations or | specific to a retailer). There's now 50 options that | appear identical for nearly every product when previously | there might have been 5. It all contributes to it being | difficult for staff to meaningfully "know" what's being | sold even if they wanted to, and businesses aren't going | to spend that time and money training employees on a | product they won't be selling in a month. | datavirtue wrote: | Microcenter blows Amazon out of the water. Selection is | rediculous. | cortesoft wrote: | There are exceptions, but most people don't live near a | store that has good selection. | a-dub wrote: | > The bad news is that physical stores simply do not | carry any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is | irrelevant. | | yes, that is why i was shopping online. | sundarurfriend wrote: | > The bad news is that physical stores simply do not | carry any diversity nowadays, so their knowledge is | irrelevant. | | Is that a "nowadays" thing though? At least in my | location, the reason a lot of us flocked to the online | option was the diversity of options available. Physical | stores (for understandable reasons) stocked only the few | top-selling options, knew about a few other options | enough to say "no we haven't got that", and anything else | would get a blank stare and a "is that a company's name?" | | If you had put effort into your search and optimized the | selection for your specific needs, you were much more | likely to find the product online - the physical stores | often forced you into a choice between different | suboptimal products. | seanp2k2 wrote: | With all this lamentation about electronics stores of years | past, nothing will compare to the malicious incompetence of | car dealerships and service departments. Their business | model these days is "if we all keep behaving badly | together, consumers will have no choice but to accept our | lies, markups, and chicanery". The dealer groups paying | politicians through campaign contributions to allow them to | block manufacturer-direct sales (look up how you can't buy | a Tesla in Michigan, home of The Motor City, for example) | is just the cherry on top. | ejb999 wrote: | Buying a new car is one of my absolutely least favorite | things to do - even worse then doing my taxes. I will | avoid it at all costs. | | Current vehicle is coming up on 10 years old, hoping to | get another 10 out of it - not because I can't afford a | new one (I can), but because I feel like I have to take a | shower every time I walk out of a car dealer. | amelius wrote: | Salespeople nowadays are basically recruited from the same | pool as Uber Eats delivery people. They don't care about | what they sell, they just want to make it to the end of the | month. | chana_masala wrote: | Yeah but it is not a good experience, except for a few | types of products. I needed a car jump starter so I tried | going to AutoZone instead of Amazon. The only one AutoZone | had was 3x what I could find on Amazon. | asciimov wrote: | Most auto parts stores are terrible places these days | with low quality parts at high prices, and staff that are | just competent enough to check out your items. | | It used to be (20-25 years ago) you could go in tell them | what you were doing and they could tell you which brands | to avoid, what other parts you might need, and any | secrets that might help you get the job done faster or | without having to remove quite as much stuff. These days, | the people they hire are so incompetent if you asked them | for Headlight Fluid they would take you over to the | fluids aisle to look for it. | leeoniya wrote: | thats why i always buy my headlight fluid on amazon | | https://www.amazon.com/Headlight-Hilarious-Automobile- | Hyster... | WalterBright wrote: | I've had great success with the Gooloo jump starter. It | has saved me from grief many times, most recently when I | left the headlights on. | seanp2k2 wrote: | The Noco ones are decent, but the Clore Automotive Jump- | N-Carry is the only thing approaching a BIFL (buy it for | life) quality jump starter that I'm aware of. User- | replaceable sealed lead acid battery like a quality UPS | (which if you're looking, grab an Eaton 5PX off eBay for | a couple hundred bucks shipped...my 3 have outlasted half | a dozen consumer APC junk units). | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | Lead acid batteries self-destruct after they've been left | to discharge. Not something you want to keep in a trunk | or store at home unplugged. The lithium jump starters | have much more dependable passive storage life. | Nextgrid wrote: | Online shopping is a major threat to small mom & pop shops. | noizejoy wrote: | Arguably, small mom & pop shops already started dying in | large numbers when big box stores started taking over, | and online shopping is continuing the small shop's march | to extinction. Globalization of commerce has only added | to the margin pressures. Add a global pandemic for good | measure, and it's been a brutal few decades for small | shops in increasingly many parts of the world. | cheese_van wrote: | > it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a | shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few | questions and pick the right stuff for you. | | When you use Google you are walking into their shop. That | salesperson is very knowlegeable, but about you. | addaon wrote: | At least in the past (haven't checked in years), the Amazon | affiliate program rewarded the affiliate for the next purchase | made (within a pretty long time window) after clicking an | affiliate link, even if it's not of the product linked; so | there's no downside to sending you to an arbitrary, | unavailable, irrelevant product as long as you're clicking on | links when you're in a shopping mode and likely to make a | purchase soon. | geerlingguy wrote: | 24 hours, any purchases made, and it's still a thing. Though | rates are much lower nowadays than they were 3+ years ago. | temp8964 wrote: | Also because YouTube removed downvotes, it becomes basically | useless for searching product reviews. | freeqaz wrote: | In the USA, Consumer Reports exists to help deal with this. | It's a yearly fee to subscribe, but it's as unbiased of reviews | as you can get! | mthoms wrote: | Pro tip: You can often get free access to Consumer Reports | paywalled website with a library membership. | x0x0 wrote: | Right, but the majority of folks on here squeal when consumer | reports or wirecutter want to be paid for their | recommendations. Buying the devices, comparing them, etc all | cost money, and refusing to pay inevitably leads to the state | we're in... | | I don't have a solution for this; I just think we're in the | exact state we would expect. | freeqaz wrote: | I don't mind paying for my subscription, just like I don't | mind donating to Firefox and Signal. But I get that I'm | probably in the minority for that. I try to put my money | where my mouth is, and not the other way around! | DoreenMichele wrote: | _Just researched good /quality crafting printers yesterday. | Search results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that | offered obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to | direct you to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad | since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This | product is currently not available" site._ | | I am going to remind people that this happens because that's | the internet (and world) we designed. If you aren't a coder and | you want to earn a living online, blogging is a way to do that | and Amazon links are a way to make it pay. | | People use AdBlock and don't want to leave tips, support | Patreon etc for a blog. Good jobs are hard to find. Telling | someone "Get a real job" is often not a viable solution for | various reasons. | | If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about | the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De | facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing | an internet where those people can hijack your search results | to try to eat gets you this. | | I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that's | the actual root cause of this stuff and you won't fix it if you | don't address those issues. | | I've tried for years to take the high road, to not have ads or | Amazon links on my sites, etc. The result is starvation and | intractable poverty and everyone telling me to get a real job. | (I tried. They didn't hire me and continue to cyber stalk me | and steal my ideas.) | | Anyway, I know all replies to this comment will boil down to | "Quit your bitching. No one gives one damn if you die on the | streets of starvation and we are so bored with hearing about | your whiny problems." Rest assured, I am not leaving this | comment with any expectation whatsoever that it will in any way | help me. | | But maybe after I die on the streets someone will pause and | think "Maybe she had a point. Maybe we designed a shitty system | with bad incentives and we are getting exactly the crap we pay | people to give us." | | Because the "high road" where someone tries to add value and | respect the fact that you folks don't want ads or affiliate | links etc literally doesn't pay to the point of it will keep | you underfed and either homeless or underhoused and then your | poverty will be a new excuse to have no respect for your | observations that "Hey, people, the system you designed is | broken and this is why and how." | nine_k wrote: | Three problems here. | | 1. Skewed incentives. A company that buys "organic" product | placement wants to show it in the best possible light, and | increase sales. They don't need an impartial review, so the | blogger has a hard time to produce one. | | 2. Fragility and failures. Affiliate links expire and don't | get updated. Ads point at things no longer available. Ads | spend an inordinate amount of resources on the viewer's | machine. Targeting is inaccurate, despite incessant attempts | to track and correlate users' profiles. | | 3. Direct payment is rarely an option! I personally would | greatly appreciate an option to pay $1-2 and read an | impartial review of something I'm planning to purchase. Maybe | even $5-7 for expensive stuff. But there are very few places | that offer this. Those that do try hard to peddle a yearly | subscription. Also, it appears that I'm the minority, and the | number of visitors willing to pay directly is too low to | sustain the authors. | | I still hope that it's Patreon and direct support by | consumers what the future looks like, not corporate | sponsorship and ads. | kelnos wrote: | Right. We need direct payments to be an option. If someone | is going to pay the reviewer, I'd rather it be me than the | product manufacturer. | | But I also agree that I think we're in the minority, and | that most people won't do direct payments. I think this is | the reason for the aggressive push for yearly | subscriptions, because they know that a) it's hard to get | people to pull out their wallet for each transaction, and | b) it's hard to get people to _come back_ to spend money in | future transactions. | | As much as I want a general micropayments system, I know | that even I will spend more cognitive effort than I should | when deciding something like "will this article be worth 10 | cents to me?" The difference between $0 and even $0.01 is | emotionally very large. | kelnos wrote: | > _If you want a better internet, you might stop and think | about the fact that it is built by people and people need to | eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then | designing an internet where those people can hijack your | search results to try to eat gets you this._ | | The problem is that the sane alternative, where people can | get fed while selling quality a-la-carte content directly to | the reader, doesn't really exist. If one or more review sites | would work to develop a good reputation, I'd be happy to | spend a one-shot $3 or $5 on their (for example) wireless | earbud reviews. But this thing basically doesn't exist (or at | least I can't find it, because of all the aforementioned | shit-quality search engine results). Someone upthread | mentioned a German site that does this, but then someone | replied saying their expertise is limited and their reviews | in many product categories aren't that great. Then we have | things like Consumer Reports in the US, but I've found the | quality of their reviews to have declined over the past | decade or so; I've read some of their free content for | product categories where I'm already knowledgeable, and I've | disagreed heartily with enough of their findings to be | skeptical of them. | | When it comes to news and opinion pieces, I'd be fine paying | on a per-article basis, but we have no established | micropayments system, and I'm not paying $10-$20/mo for each | of the 50 sites that come up in various news aggregators I | read and have paywalls. There are a few sites and YouTube | channels that I read/watch nearly daily, so I subscribe to | their Patreon or periodically drop money in their donations | bin. But the majority of the content I consume comes from | various sources, from a list that changes nearly daily. | | > _Maybe we designed a shitty system with bad incentives_ | | Who is the "we" here, though? I would love to change this, | but I feel pretty powerless to do so. At least not without | making it my life's work, with a very high chance of failing | at it regardless. | DoreenMichele wrote: | Let people know that you are willing to pay for good | writing online without a paywall. | | Support Patreon or similar. Leave tips. | | One of my first big successes on HN got 60k pageviews and | made me not one thin dime. No one left a tip. No one | supported my Patreon. | | I have been writing for years because I am seriously | medically handicapped but educated. Writing is something I | can do. | | People don't want to hire me for resume work or other | freelance writing. I'm a woman and former homemaker and | most successful business people are men. They rarely want | to talk to me about my work or how to succeed. Most often, | if men try to talk to me, they are hoping for a romantic | connection and from my end the experience boils down "All | you horrible people are watching me starve but you think I | will _sleep_ with you??? Seriously?!!!! " | | Leave tips (or support Patreon or similar). Tell people you | leave tips on sites with good writing. Promote the various | means people can accept cash for their online writing. | | I don't know what else to tell you. But saying you can't | make a difference because you are a nobody is part of the | problem. | | You don't have to save the world. Just buy a writer lunch | or a cup of coffee, so to speak. Spread the word. | littlecranky67 wrote: | > Let people know that you are willing to pay for good | writing online without a paywall. | | Or easier, adhere to the GDPR (at least in the EU) and | provide a "reject all non-essential" button as demanded | right next to "accept all" without any dark patterns, and | their ad-business plummet and you _have_ to demand | payment for the service to be sustainable. So my point | is, the whole thing can be fixed if Megacorps would abide | by the law, and law enforcement would also not take >5 | years to act on violation lawsuits (see noyb's lawsuits | against FB which are going on 8 years and even date prior | to the GDPR). | no_wizard wrote: | I genuinely agree with you. People need to eat, and live | comfortably and be able to afford things like medical care, a | place to live safely etc. | | I also think the blanket of "all affiliates are bad" is a bit | much. I love supporting people who just do a good job. SEO | spam is not what I call a good job, it's a sleazy | exploitation of the average consumer. | | With that said, I have purchased many things based on what I | consider honest good reviews who linked to affiliate programs | and I do not regret this. I wish companies (Amazon for | instance, as they're rent biggest right now) simply policed | their affiliate programs better to incentive good unbiased | reviews sites that Specialize in high quality, and dropped | the SEO spammers | littlecranky67 wrote: | > I am going to remind people that this happens because | that's the internet (and world) we designed. | | _we_ didn 't design that - they did. I used the Internet in | the 90s on my 56k modem and it was mostly ad-free. Stuff was | still free, but mostly because people created content out of | curiosity and because it was their hobby (yes, I had a | website and was using frames and image maps heavily) or | university sponsored (IRC, NNTP, Mailinglists). I paid | 5$/month for a shell account, later shared the cost for a | dedicated server with a couple of friends (we had a traffic | limit of 50GB/month) to offer content and services to other | people - expecting nothing in return. | | Then companies realized how much money was in, and suddenly | all good, federated and free services were overrun by spam | (mostly NNTP). To this day, companies like FB, Insta, Google | etc. try to lure as many content-creators to users their | "free" sites, while they actually pay with their data or the | data of your content consumers - while the data is used to | steal attention to show you ads for stuff you don't need. The | amount of GDPR violations by those Megacorps is immense as | they very well know that presenting a "reject all tracking" | button as demanded by the GDPR ruins their business model | (less than 10% actually agree to being tracked when | presenting them the choice). | | My solution to all this is easy: Ban all advertising on the | internet, or, at least advocate to as many people as possible | to use adblockers. Only when ads are gone, will people spend | money on products such as FB and Youtube, and only then can | there be actually competition - because right now, you can't | compete with "free" services with any other model than using | ads+tracking yourself. | greggman3 wrote: | I'm not going to say "quit your whining" but rather, maybe | this isn't "the world we built", maybe it's "the way the | world is". I know I've been guilty of thinking the later when | I should think the former but really don't know what we'd | change. Do you really think the internet would have | flourished if it was pay per view (or similar solution)? | | I remember using online services in the 80s where they | charged by the minute. CompuServe, GEnie, and even just my | ISP when I first got internet in the 90s. Data of 1 but I | know that gave me a "use it as little as possible" mindset. | | Further, if some groups set out to charge and some other | groups offered "free with ads" I'm pretty confident "free | with ads" would win (see Radio, TV, Podcasts as other | examples of "free with ads"). So, short of outlawing free | (which would likely never happen), I don't see how we'd have | not gotten where we are at the moment. | | That isn't to say we can't do better now but I'm less | confident we could have conscientiously directed ourselves to | better. I think natural forces got us her and will take | people experiencing better to get them to switch better. | | To put it another way, without tasting the "free with ads" | kinda sucks, few would be willing to fork over $ for better. | DoreenMichele wrote: | I personally do not like paywalls. I had Google ads. I | discontinued them. | | For a long list of reasons, I want my writing to be freely | available. I got my very first Amazon payout of like $16 or | something a few months ago. I also got an email reminder | that I am legally required to very prominently display | information telling people I have Amazon links on my site. | | I took the links down and thought about updating my sites | to comply with the requirement and so far haven't, in part | because I suspect the $16 was from some local asshole | unqualified for his job (the job I applied for) buying ugly | bike racks and plopping them down in bad locations all over | my lovely downtown area like little piles of manure as a | daily reminder of how corrupt these people are, how much | they have shafted me for no real damn reason other than | pathos on their part and they are ruining the town I hope | to improve. | | I was unable to readily find links to bike racks I would | like to see in this town and I'm angry at what is being | done to this town by these immoral, incompetent cretins and | it causes me to think that I might actively encourage their | shit behavior ruining this town because I'm so desperate | for money that $16 on that day meant I could afford a | fucking coffee which put an end to my splitting headache. | | I do not wish to make the world and town I live in a worse | place because I'm so desperate for money and I think taking | the Amazon solution potentially pushes me in that | direction. | | Anyway, I don't know how to fix this. I try to tell people | what it looks like from where I sit because I know HN has a | lot of coders, etc and they aren't daily exposed to the | reality that "If you choose to not be a sell out, you go | hungry." basically. | | I just want my life to work. I don't actually want to make | what sounds like "political" commentary to other people. If | my life worked, I would likely be all "Meh. Not my problem. | I don't want to fight with these fools and trying to point | this out is not worth the drama. Moving on." | | But it does impact me. It impacts me to the point where I | literally fear for my life due to my intractable poverty | and sometimes I feel compelled to comment, though I don't | really expect it to help me. Maybe after I am beyond help, | people will stop wondering what's in it for DoreenMichele | and think "She had a point. Let's find a solution that | incorporates these observations." | | This is possibly rambly at this point. I'm posting it | anyway and then will try to stay out of this conversation. | kragen wrote: | Well, there are at least two separate, though not unrelated, | problems: | | 1. Good jobs are hard to find, so some people try to make a | living instead by influencing what other people buy, in | exchange for kickbacks from the sellers. | | 2. The sellers offering the largest kickbacks are never the | sellers offering the best value for money, because if they | are, a reseller can buy the products from them, charge a | higher price, and spend some of the markup on kickbacks to | product shills. This results in a systematic bias toward | overpriced junk in heavily advertised products. | | 3. While some knowledgeable people do still take the time to | share their knowledge and unbiased judgments, which is for | example mostly how Wikipedia is written, Google and other | search engines are increasingly directing search traffic to | the product shills instead. | | I agree with you that, given problem #1 and problem #3, | problem #2 is sort of inevitable, and all three problems tend | to mutually reinforce each other. But I think we could reduce | either problem #1 or problem #3 by an order of magnitude | without significantly reducing the other one. In particular, | we might not be able to _completely_ solve the SERP quality | problem without solving the jobs problem, but I think we | could improve it enormously just by writing a better search | engine, which is an easier problem than fixing the entire | economy. | | I'm sorry to hear you're back on the streets, and I hope your | situation improves before you die. I'm glad you're not dead | yet because I often find your comments insightful. Happy new | year! | DoreenMichele wrote: | I'm not back on the streets _yet._ I moved a few weeks ago. | I have been told this is a _temporary_ solution and I live | in fear, as I have for several months now, of ending up | back on the streets and dying there. | | I don't see surviving that a second time, for reasons I | don't care to dig around in. | kragen wrote: | I understand. Condolences. I'm at least a few months away | from that. | DoreenMichele wrote: | We need to solve the housing supply issues in the US. (I | don't know where you live, I just don't feel qualified to | speak to issues in other countries. I've studied them for | mine.) | | That's off topic for this discussion, but deeply | intertwined with why so many people are so desperate for | money and throwing in the towel on ethics in favor of | asking themselves "Does it pay enough?" | codingdave wrote: | If you want to solve the problem of product research in an old- | school way, Consumer Reports still exists. Their business model | for almost a century has been to produce independent reviews of | products, and charge for the reviews. It is also run as a non- | profit. I'm honestly surprised how little I hear about them. | Not that any organization is perfect, but they have been the | poster child of success via paid content since the 1930s. | | It also makes me think that part of the problem is not only | that Google's results are getting worse, it is that much of the | population goes to the internet for all problems. Whether it is | googling or asking on social media... the "front-line" | information on the internet is simply not reliable anymore. | fnord77 wrote: | I don't trust consumer reports any longer. they have amazon | affiliate links. I suspect the current CEO is selling them | out, bit by bit. Also, their current web format makes it hard | to find recommendations on used cars. | KarlKemp wrote: | You can buy most any product at Amazon, so the affiliate | links are not an incentive for CR to rank one product | better than the competitor they would otherwise also link | to. | | Plus Amazon affiliate links are standardized and automated | to such a degree that's there's no chance they would | manually penalize or reward CR for editorial content. | andrewf wrote: | Aw man. I just signed up for the $59/yr magazine + online | access. I believe the bulk of what you're saying, and that | CR's methodology has value. That said the following was also | part of my experience on consumerreports.com - | | In the bottom footer, I click on "Ad Choices". I'm presented | with a list of advertisers in a TrustArc-branded dialog. To | opt out of being retargeted by consumerreports.com, there are | checkboxes for three vendors: Microsoft, LiveRamp Inc. and | Google Advertising Products. For seven other vendors, there's | no checkbox, just instructions to visit the website: Amazon | Advertising, Bidtellect Inc, Comscore B.V, Facebook, Google | Inc, Kibo Commerce, and Twitter. | | Also in the footer (maybe only for California residents such | as myself?) there is a "Do Not Sell My Personal Information" | link. It opens a OneTrust-branded dialog with the option to | disable "Share My Information with Third Parties on Digital". | It also declares that "If you are a Print or All-Access | Member and receive Consumer Reports magazine or Consumer | Reports on Health through the mail, we may share your name | and mailing address for direct mail purposes with selected | companies offering products or services that we believe will | be of interest to you." I followed a link to a separate page, | which required me to copy-paste in my just-received | membership number, to opt out of this. | evilduck wrote: | CR today: "After extensive review, LG Microwave model | AX7J3498-2 is best avoided" | | LG tomorrow: "Announcing LG Microwave model G8A867FL2-B! | Also, model AX7J3498-2 will no longer be available" | | Consumers two days from now: "Well, there are no bad reviews | for model G8A867FL2-B when I look it up, I guess it's ok to | buy" | | I like the idea of Consumer Reports or in depth reviewing but | manufacturers have learned to game it too. | KB wrote: | Consumer Reports is my first stop whenever I look to purchase | some non trivial item. I typically use the top five from | their recommended list to quickly narrow down my initial | result set. Then I'll cross reference with Wirecutter to see | if they are in agreement (usually are). If I'm down to one or | two choices at that point I'll try to find some unbiased | reviews on YouTube. Not a perfect system, but I find it works | pretty well compared to just going right to a Google search | result. | jimmaswell wrote: | I usually just search the topic plus "reddit." The advice | from a subreddit on something will usually be reliable. | | Then other times I take a chance on Amazon, like the ~$700 | Viribus mountain e-bike I got a few months ago. E-bike | enthusiasts seem to say that price range is universally | junk, but it's been treating me great on trails and the | road. Oddly can't find anyone else talking about it online | but the Amazon reviews were good. | jerkstate wrote: | Yeah I sing the praises of Consumer Reports all the time. I | think I pay $10 annually for a subscription and every time I | buy or recommend something I check with them and so far have | not been let down. Their reviews almost always include | objective measurements and durability testing, it's really | surprising how people miss them among more modern options. | doktorhladnjak wrote: | It's $10/month or $39/year | jimmaswell wrote: | What more can Google even do about the onslaught of ever- | evolving SEO spam besides hardcode some arbitrary "winners", | which would have its own set of problems? It seems like a | very hard problem. | codingdave wrote: | But that is the point - it is Google's problem, not ours. | They don't have the best info anymore, so use someone else. | There are other search engines. If Google wants us back, it | is their problem to improve. | 23B1 wrote: | Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports | is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products | & services are not the best, and often times criminally bad. | | As an example, I used them for moving services for a state- | to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving | services are merely dispatchers run by a single company, run | by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating number | of businesses and cutouts. | | When I contacted Consumer Reports to let them know about the | many tens of thousands of complaints about the companies they | were ranking highest, they referred me to their attorney. | unkeptbarista wrote: | In all the years I've used Consumer Reports I've never seen | them rate moving services. I just jumped on their site now, | and there are no reviews for moving services. | tablespoon wrote: | >> If you want to solve the problem of product research in | an old-school way, Consumer Reports still exists. Their | business model for almost a century has been to produce | independent reviews of products, and charge for the | reviews. It is also run as a non-profit. | | > Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer | Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst | products & services are not the best, and often times | criminally bad. | | > As an example, I used them for moving services for a | state-to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving | services are merely dispatchers run by a single company, | run by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating | number of businesses and cutouts. | | Honestly, "moving companies" is not a category that seems | like it would be in Consumer Reports' wheelhouse, and I'm | surprised they offered any recommendations in that area at | all. | | Also, your anecdote doesn't really support the notion that | they're "pay-to-play, just that they did a bad job in some | category. | stanmancan wrote: | I wish CR did -more- reviews in each category. I know it's | next to impossible to thoroughly review every single product | in the world, but I would pay 10x the subscription fee if I | could reliably go there and find all the current models | available in the different categories. | 88913527 wrote: | You can't even search for GitHub issues anymore. You'll get | some mirrored site that has the discussion, and from that | webpage, you can't even get a direct link back to GitHub. | ljm wrote: | Github issue clones and StackOverflow clones pretty much | dominate most of my programming related search results these | days. | | Unfortunately DDG isn't much better. | | It takes a lot of effort to finesse a search query such that | I can get a good result, like a link to documentation or a | personal website where someone wrote something up (which is | often more thoughtful than what Medium and Dev.to offer). | Volker_W wrote: | I have never seen a Github issue clone or StackOverflow | clone in my life. | fxtentacle wrote: | Yeah, I also noticed that for "tiptoi wiki" Google ranks | | https://github-wiki-see.page/m/entropia/tip-toi- | reveng/wiki/... | | higher than the actual GitHub wiki that all of the content | was copied from | | https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi-reveng/wiki/Languages | | BTW, building my own interactive book was a great thing to do | over Christmas. | kelnos wrote: | That might be fixable, if people want to expend the effort. | Wiki pages are almost certainly copyrightable, so the | owners could send DMCA takedown notices to github-wiki- | see.page. If they're not responsive, send the DMCA notices | to Google, which should be required to delist them. | Unfortunately you have to do it on a URL-by-URL basis, and | you can only send notices for pages you actually own | copyright for, so it would mean a big coordinated effort to | get them brought down. | | I just don't understand why Google themselves allows this | and doesn't rank these sorts of sites lower. They're | clearly garbage sites with low utility. | crazysim wrote: | I also do not host the content at all. That said, people | have submitted outdated content requests if they move off | GitHub Wikis to Google and they are honored. | londons_explore wrote: | Google puts substantial effort into identifying copycat | content. The main way they do that is to see which site | had the content first. | | Unfortunately with smaller sites, it could be a few days | till their search bot finds the content, and often the | copycat sites have agressive scrapers so appear to have | the content first. | | From googles point of view, the copycat is the original, | and the original is the copycat. | | There are also some kinds of copycat content which users | actually prefer. For example, sites which bypass | paywalls, sites which quote other sites, sites that | display decrapified content from another site, etc. | crazysim wrote: | In the case of http://github-wiki-see.page/, the original | isn't even on Google! That's why my copycat wins. | | FWIW, GitHub seems to be letting some Wikis be indexed on | a test basis and I am very happy to see they are | outranking GHWSEE. That said, with the current guessed | criteria, there are still many publicly editable wikis | with many stars and publically un-editale wikis on repos | with few stars but useful information out there that | aren't being indexed. | crazysim wrote: | Please read my explanation at http://github-wiki- | see.page/ and observe why it exists. I believe it to be a | site with extremely high utility. | | It has already recently convinced/defrosted GitHub to | gradually change their policy to not let GitHub wiki | pages be indexed since 2012. For at least 9 years, people | were writing content into GitHub and not realizing it | wasn't indexed at all. | | I'm happy to answer any questions or suggestions you | have. | Volker_W wrote: | From https://github-wiki-see.page/ | | GitHub Wiki Search Engine Enablement (GHWSEE) allows non- | indexed GitHub Wikis to be indexed by search engines. | | This site will be decommissioned to redirect old links once | the block is lifted or GitHub produces some other solution | to index GitHub Wikis in harmony with their SEO concerns. | | I do not see any wrongdoing from github-wiki-see.page here. | They don't even amke money from it. Quite contrary, I do | think that this is a useful project. | crazysim wrote: | Hah, yeah I don't make any money from it. I think I'm | like currently $300 in the hole from experiments and | queries with it until I've settled on the current ramen | architecture. | crazysim wrote: | I run https://github-wiki-see.page. Please read the about | page link at the bottom or visit https://github-wiki- | see.page for an explanation. I put it up after realizing my | GitHub wiki contributions weren't available via Google. | | GitHub blocks https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi- | reveng/wiki/Languages and many other wikis from being | indexed. In the case of the page you linked, GitHub serves | the content with "X-Robots-Tag: none". The content of that | page currently does not exist in Google at all. You can see | the robot blocking header by looking at the Network tab in | Chrome while loading the page in incognito mode or | equivalent in other browsers. | | As for having no link to GitHub, my service provides a huge | button at the top and a direct URL to the original content. | Please use those controls at the top to get to the content | on GitHub. I do not automatically redirect to not trip | cloaking detection or risk the indexing helper being | classified as a redirect in search engines. | | If you have any other questions or suggestions, please let | me know. | hinkley wrote: | I use DDG which is backed by Bing and it's much the same. | Product reviews and some how to questions are just a couple | pages of SEO garbage. | | Google used to measure engagement to try to get feedback on the | quality of the links, but perhaps clickbait has broken that as | well. | hemloc_io wrote: | When I do product research I generally search for whatever the | enthusiast community lives and usually there are guides there. | Blogs are exactly as you describe, either built in ads or | useless. | | For common items it's kinda difficult, but still possible! | (Printers had a pretty active subreddit/community for example.) | chongli wrote: | I am in the exact same quagmire trying to research water | softeners and drinking water (RO) systems. I am having to pull | fragments of information from many different sites / videos and | having to discard large amounts of contradictory and misleading | information. | | At this point, I've had to resort to reading scientific papers | on how some of these technologies work (and how some don't | work) just to avoid the bad information. Unfortunately, the | more I research the farther I get from making a purchase. This | is not where I want to be, however, since the water in my area | is very hard and everything gets scaled up all the time. I'm | looking to purchase an espresso machine to get into the hobby | but I'm not going to drop the money in expensive equipment | until I can get access to water which will not damage it in | short order. | exhilaration wrote: | I bought my home water filter based on a Consumer Reports | recommendation. I feel that's still a reliable source. I | think you can sign up for online access for a month to do all | your research. | | I also really like the Wirecutter but I know not everyone | here agrees with me. | colechristensen wrote: | Wirecutter advice seems dubiously linked to how much they | can get paid by their "winners". It's not all bad advice, | it often seems quite good, but it has the same corruption | as top SEO blogs. | xtracto wrote: | Ha! I was searching for the same (water softening systems) | for Mexico... the amount of signal to noise ratio is so small | in google, that it's mostly unusable. | tomrod wrote: | It isn't just me noticing this. | | I had a project take me into an unfamiliar knowledge space. | Up until... 2018? I could have relied on Google to find the | meaningful information. | | The reason people accepted Google was that it dramatically | lowered information acquisition costs through the Internet. | That benefit doesn't seem as common now. Back to webrings. | xapata wrote: | Same for my experience buying a furnace. Science journal | articles were my best source of information, because I | worried the manufacturers and installers would be biased. | | I'm not sure how this could be otherwise. Who's going to pay | for someone to stay current on such things and publish an | easy to understand summary? | Sunspark wrote: | Which science journals review furnaces? | chongli wrote: | Most people's experience with HVAC specialists comes from | dealing with the technicians who install and service | these systems in our homes. It turns out there's an | entire subfield of mechanical engineering dedicated to | inventing, designing, and improving HVAC systems. | | Wherever there are engineers, there are academics who do | engineering research. They have journals of their own to | publish this research. | replwoacause wrote: | I've been there and it's a hell of a rabbit hole, one that is | easy to lose days to. Whatever you do don't fall for the | Berkey scam. | DaftDank wrote: | Check out APEC RO systems. | Fricken wrote: | You guys had a bad time trying to search things that are at | least a little complicated and obscure. I had the same | experience trying to find a basic brownie recipe last week. | jcrawfordor wrote: | Recipes have somehow become one of the absolute worst parts | of the internet. Google results are consistently dominated | by websites that will require scrolling past multiple | screens of narrative and increasingly some clicks to see | the actual recipe. And when you start looking, you quickly | discover that most of the time these websites are just | repeating recipes from well known sources like The Joy of | Cooking, or worse they have made changes that it's not | clear they ever actually tested. | jansimonek wrote: | If you are reading papers on water softeners you might | already know everything this video contains. For me it was a | good intro to the topic of good water for making coffee: | https://youtu.be/jfElZfrmlRs | chongli wrote: | Thanks for this! James Hoffmann is how I got into the | hobby. I binge watched all of his videos, including this | one. But then I forgot a lot of the useful information he | gives here, only remembering his frustration at the | complexity of the problem. Upon second viewing I think | there is some good stuff for me here. | | I had been following Jim Shulman's research which Hoffmann | mentions in this video. It's very dry and technical though | and doesn't provide much in the way of actionable advice on | what equipment to purchase, instead recommending bottled | water which I absolutely refuse to use (my household is | already addicted to bottled water and I'm trying to break | that addiction). | nicoffeine wrote: | Buy a Brother Color Laser printer. $250 and the ink never | dries. I haven't thought about printing other than pressing | "print" in 6 months. | rejor121 wrote: | This is something I have a problem with as well. Search results | typically include the first five results being paid ads. | | Everything else for the first couple pages are typically review | sites that are not really reviews. | | YouTube isn't much better. | | I'm trying to addresss this in my own way by making long term | product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people and | companies did the same thing. | Volker_W wrote: | > I'm trying to addresss this in my own way by making long | term product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people | and companies did the same thing. | | Link? | ren_engineer wrote: | Seibel doesn't seem to understand how affiliate ads work | either, Google doesn't make money from them. Google would be | better off just applying a ranking penalty for any page that | has numerous Amazon affiliate links. 99% of dedicated affiliate | sites are trash | rtpg wrote: | Sorry but what do you expect apart from blogs and review sites? | Like what's the magical result here? | | I feel like the fallacy here is assuming that the problem is | that Google isn't finding the good websites. There's also a | simple explanation that the content simply doesn't exist. | psyc wrote: | I began to notice some time ago that Google basically disregards | my query, and fixates on the lowest common denominator. So, | recently I was trying to search for a particular event or quote | or something related to some famous person. But no matter how I | worded the query, Google ignored everything but the person's | name, and returned only fluffy flattering results about the | person from popular magazine sites. | | So I tried Bing, and the thing I was looking for was result #1. | Like how it used to be with Google. So I switched to Bing. | | Now after a few weeks of that, I see that Bing does the exact | same thing much of the time. Totally different queries + same | general subject = identical top ten results. | | So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in | 1998? | postingawayonhn wrote: | I've noticed this a lot as well recently. It's not as really | the search results themselves that are bad but rather Google | simply ignoring key words/phrases in my query. | marginalia_nu wrote: | > So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was | in 1998? | | I've tried, not quite there yet, but it's got its moments. | | https://search.marginalia.nu/ | hulitu wrote: | Thank you. Looks sane. I'll give it a try in the next days ( | a quick search for gopher is better than i expected). | marginalia_nu wrote: | It's situationally very good in some topics. Perhaps not a | replacement for Google, but at least a complement. | ColinHayhurst wrote: | We are trying - with no-tracking principles and practices | https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-... | ffhhj wrote: | > Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in | 1998? | | I'm creating a faster search engine for coders, using good old | literal search, with synonyms of programing operations in | different languages, ie. array.push in javascript, array.append | in python, array[] in php, and so on. The database is loaded in | memory instead of huge analytics libraries, and searching is | performed instantly. I see no need to protect my DB, since it | contains basic snippets, and that allows these fasts queries. I | move between several languages and needed a super quick | reference without all the SO clones and spam. | nikanj wrote: | I've noticed same. Google "amusement parks italy", get a list | of world-famous parks (such as Central Park NY). | pkulak wrote: | Huh. My first result is pretty darn helpful and relevant: | | https://public.kulak.us/google-search.png | mleonhard wrote: | I get extremely relevant results from Google for "amusement | parks italy". I use a privacy proxy (VPN) and a browser in | privacy mode. Perhaps Google only switches into guess-what- | you-meant mode when it can link your search to their profile | of you? | vmception wrote: | the searches results aren't the same, you are fingerprinted | | its been this way for years now, at least in how it | drastically alters search results for different users in the | same country speaking the same language | iso1210 wrote: | ddg gives me: | | Amusement parks in Italy, top 5 fun parks you have to visit | | 20 of Italy's best amusement parks - TravelMag | | THE 10 BEST Water & Amusement Parks in Italy - Tripadvisor | | 10 Best Theme Parks in Italy - Find the best Amusement ... | | Family amusement in Italy: 15 excellent parks - Italy ... | | Gardaland | The biggest amusement park in Italy | | Amusement Park Emilia Romagna Italy | Mirabilandia | | The 5 Best Theme Parks in Italy: Italy Logue | | THE 10 BEST Water & Amusement Parks in Tuscany - Tripadvisor | | Category:Amusement parks in Italy - Wikipedia | | Not great, but seems reasonable. Google gives similar answers | to be fair. | CactusOnFire wrote: | Not quite as big of an offender, but when I was looking up | "Nice Restaurants" with google maps fixed on my city, it | instead started looking up Restaurants in Nice, France. | Raed667 wrote: | And as someone who lives in Nice, you can imagine how much | of a pain it is to look for local venues or services when | google thinks its an adjective. | zoomablemind wrote: | Current location bias? | | There used to be a way to turn of location priority in | advanced search. | crucialfelix wrote: | For me every single result was quality articles or Wikipedia | listing amusement parks in Italy. | | I'm in Paris | | I don't click on trash sites ever. Not sure what else might | bias your results. | | Try creating a new chrome profile and searching. | LeoPanthera wrote: | The problem is that Google was only good in 1998 precisely | because it was pre-Google. Now the web is SEO'd to hell and | actively trying to prevent you from getting good search | results. | | A "new old Google" would only be good at searching the 1998 | web, and if all you want is nostalgia, http://theoldnet.com is | right there. | Fricken wrote: | My experience is that Google continually improved up until | around 2014 or so. For the last 3 or 4 years it has slowly | been getting worse. | mike00632 wrote: | I spent the holidays with someone who does all their | searches using only voice input. His eyesight is poor and | he chooses to just say what he wants instead of putting on | his reading glasses and typing it out. The types of things | he was saying and the level of understanding his phone had | if him wouldn't have been possible in 2014. | chiph wrote: | Agree. The web material being searched is bad at the source. | So there's little that a search engine can do to improve it. | As the adage says - garbage in, garbage out. | shadowgovt wrote: | The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search | engines. Google came along with a better algorithm for | sussing out the signal if what content people found useful | from the noise of attempts to trick the browser into | increasing relevance signal. | | It's not entirely clear what the next iteration of algorithm | should be... SEO has gotten very good at its game. | hericium wrote: | > The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search | engines. | | But mostly with invisible meta tags, not phrases repeated | multiple times and texts written by content creators with | no passion towards the subject. | | Today's web posts remind me of ridiculous SEO-driven | "effective product names" on multiple sites with low value | products or fakes. | | SEO aside, '98 web was passionate while today's web is | written for robots, not humans. | tomrod wrote: | So we need a new web. | samtheprogram wrote: | We need competition. A new web would be a temporary benefit | exactly because it would have competition, until it | doesn't. | JasonFruit wrote: | Gemini is nice. | mad182 wrote: | Exactly. | | I don't think its only the google search algorithm to blame, | this has a lot to do with the extinction of old school forums | and blogs. These days large part of the real discussions and | posts without financial motivation have moved to facebook, | whatsapp groups, discord, slack and other places behind | logins and paywalls which google can't index. What's left in | public are mostly blogs and websites motivated by affiliate | or ad revenue and SEO'ed to death. So there simply is much | higher garbage to valuable content ratio in the public, | indexable web. | nefitty wrote: | 95% of my Google searches are suffixed with "MDN" or | "site:reddit.com". | | If I'm looking for something particularly technical I'll | search HN. That especially helps when I feel at my wit's | end about some general concept like "sinuses" or | "parenting". It's more common to get my mind blown by some | offhanded revelation dropped by an HN commenter. | mad182 wrote: | Same, I also often use site:reddit.com Thankfully Reddit | is still left mostly indexable, but most of the other | sites where discussions take place are not. | more_corn wrote: | Google did good work fighting against SEO over optimization | for a long time. Then they gave up and it all went to hell. I | stopped using them a few years ago. I found their practice of | dropping search terms infuriating. I switched to DuckDuckGo | which is arguably lower quality but less infuriating. | colechristensen wrote: | Would you be willing to pay a subscription fee to a search | engine? | [deleted] | groone wrote: | I remember around 2010-2012 it felt really great. You could | learn the keyword-fu skill and with few keyword change / | reorder iterations could explore topics and find obscure things | on the internet. Now that method does not work at all. Always | the same results and cannot find specific things. Around that | time they started adding ML/AI and now searching with keywords | is extremely unsatisfying. | hwers wrote: | I almost feel as if they have like 100k actual pages that they | present (and have looked through manually) and if it's not in | that group they just show you the closest one (or say "no | results"). | psyc wrote: | I have no knowledge or evidence, but this has indeed become | my mental model for whatever Google actually does these days. | I do wonder what they actually do. All those engineers, for | 20 years. Surely they haven't just been scaling up BackRub! | But I find it very hard to believe that they're crawling the | whole web. I find it very hard to believe that PageRank is | still the same PageRank that we understood in 1998. And it | looks like they're managing to editorialize quite heavily, | even if they're doing it via algorithm somehow. But again, I | can't really discern what they're doing anymore. | | So for now, I have to disagree with the "garbage in, garbage | out" theory. I don't believe Google has the same goal now | that they did then. | jbay808 wrote: | > I find it very hard to believe that PageRank is still the | same PageRank that we understood in 1998. | | It's not, because as good as PageRank was, it was | vulnerable to being exploited by link farms, which started | popping up in its wake. I do remember that by the mid | 2000s, about 5% of search results were pages just spamming | search keywords and hyperlinks. | JasonFruit wrote: | Do they say "no results" anymore? It seems like Google | ignores parts of your query until you get results, no matter | whether they are specifically connected to your search. | ckastner wrote: | > _began to notice some time ago that Google basically | disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common | denominator._ | | Same here. I was perplexed to see undisputed leader of search | engines (which nobody managed to successfully rival, no matter | how many billions they threw at the problem) decline in this | way. | | But now I wonder: is fixating on the lowest common denominator | perhaps ultimately the more profitable approach? | | Compare this to Amazon. A decade ago, buying on Amazon used to | be a fantastic experience; no other retailer could rival it. | Now the experience is utter crap, as are many of the products. | But that crap still outsells everyone else by a large margin. | | Perhaps we are seeing a general shift towards a focus on | volume, rather than quality. | rich_sasha wrote: | I think this is how giants fall. The various titans of times | long gone - steel, chemical companies, mines etc. were one | day so mighty that it was impossible to imagine them | faltering. And then they stumbled, then tripped, then | eventually fell. | | Google, Facebook, Amazon will probably all eventually be | replaced by a plucky, energetic and hungry competitor out of | nowhere, just as they exploded in the faces of the | predecessors. | wenbin wrote: | Digital products could have a "finished" state, which is great | for users, but bad for companies. | | Dropbox could've been a finished product in 2012. Simple and | focused personal storage solution. But it can't justify the | valuation of Dropbox, the company. | | Same for Evernote. | | However, could Google be a "finished" product at some point | (e.g., 2000)? Probably not. When google was incorporated in | 1998, they indexed only 25 million web pages. As the number of | web pages grows exponentially, Google as a product needs to | evolve, e.g., doing a better job to fight web spams / blackhat | seos... The problem is that the web evolves way faster than | Google could improve their search result relevance. | hk__2 wrote: | > So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was | in 1998? | | I don't know if it works well, but there's Neeva [1]. It | started as a search engine with a paid subscription model but | then switched to a freemium pricing with a premium tier that | will come "soon". | | [1] https://neeva.com/ | com2kid wrote: | > Now after a few weeks of that, I see that Bing does the exact | same thing much of the time. Totally different queries + same | general subject = identical top ten results. | | When I worked at Microsoft, the Bing team had an internal | version employees could use where you could report if Bing's | top results didn't equal Google's top results. | | This was nearing a decade ago, so don't read much into it for | what they do now. | sb057 wrote: | I was attempting to find some historical data on the Soviet | Ruble the other day, but found the task nearly impossible | because Google "helpfully" considers "Russian" and "Soviet" to | be synonyms, and so all the results were about the modern day | Russian Ruble. I can't think of any other examples off the top | of my head, but this isn't the first time I've run into this | sort of problem. | Digory wrote: | That's probably not a bad substitution for the average | person, but a bad one for a precise vocabulary. | | I get the feeling though, that the need to compensate for | mobile misspelling means a dumbing down of precise | vocabulary. | aix1 wrote: | That's very odd. I just typed "Soviet Ruble" into Google and | every single result on the first page is about the Soviet, | not modern Russian, currency[*]. This includes the box of | images on the right-hand side, all of which depict USSR | money. | | Not really sure what to make of this. | | [*] With the arguable exception of an Encyclopedia Britannica | article on "ruble", which covers USSR, Soviet Union and | Belarus currencies at the same time: _ruble, the monetary | unit of Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and Belarus | (spelled rubel)..._ | twofornone wrote: | I believe Google's algorithm will confound such experiments | because it tailors search results according to user | history. Which may mean that some portion of the HN crowd | could see worse than average performance if they are more | likely to clear cookies and/or search without a login. | quitit wrote: | I have no inside information on this, but it's based on my | usage of Google recently. I believe Google seem to be guessing | at people's intended search query rather than performing the | query based on the actual terms. | | This is probably great for most people as Google's own data | shows that most people do indeed search the same things at the | same time, so guessing intention (especially with relation to | current affairs and the queries of others) is probably a | winning strategy for giving most people what they want - even | if their search terms were a bit junk. | | The down side is that the ability to hone results by tweaking | or rearranging ones search terms goes largely ignored. | Previously one could peel away layers of results with such | meddling, now it seems there will usually be some word or name | in the search query which Google will be affectionate towards, | and the results are unmovable from that. | version_five wrote: | > Google seem to be guessing at people's intended search | query rather than performing the query based on the actual | terms. | | I've read that google uses "Machine Learning" for their | search results which I interpret to be exactly as you say | they provide a stereotyped result based on what they think | you are searching for (possibly optimized either for what is | inevitably clicked on or for ad revenue), instead of actually | matching terms. | | What this means is that search results may be more accurate | in some statistical way, like more people click on the top | result, but it also pumps up the number of edge cases where | it guesses wrong, while simultaneously making it impossible | to tell where the results went wrong because you can't | understand how they were generated (compared to eg keywors | search where good or bad, the reason you got a result is | obvious) | momenti wrote: | I suspect the change we are seeing is that Google is now using | a neural network to (re-)interpret the search query.[1] | Presumably that neural network also calculates some sort of | neural hash for document/paragraph/sentence similarity. The | upside is that it can correct more typos, intelligently drop | irrelevant terms and understand the meaning of the query to | some extent. But the downsite is less precision when you know | exactly what you want. It sometimes even seems to ignore the | quotes syntax for exact string matching. Very frustrating and | very poor quality control. | | [1] I bet they train these models based on unsuccessful queries | as inputs (in which the user did not click any search result), | and then the final search query after which the user left as | desired output. | otherotherchris wrote: | From personal experience the final search query is when the | user realizes that none of the results contain useful | information, or your actual keywords, and rage quits. | | The user then asks someone in the office or goes and spends | an hour at a university library. | throw_m239339 wrote: | > I began to notice some time ago that Google basically | disregards my query, and fixates on the lowest common | denominator. | | Which is funny. Google beat other search engines in the early | 2000 because it actually did find what people where looking | for, not what the "search engine" wanted people to see. | | Now it's more and more the latter, I imagine because it's more | lucrative for Google to display the results advertisers pay | for... | | That's really the product of the lack of competition in the | search space. Nothing more. Why should Google bother? It would | take billions in VC for a competitor to truly threaten Google | dominance on search. | | Same with Youtube. Youtube straight out doesn't care anymore | about search terms and will just show some results Youtube | "cooked up" for the user, unbelievable... | anigbrowl wrote: | Consider also the possibility that they do want to deliver | good results but their algorithms just passed their useful | limit some time ago and people can game the system faster | than they can improve the system, but there's too much money | on the table to ever admit this in public. | heartbeats wrote: | Surely they could just have a system to filter out bad | sites? | | For example, if I want information about some programming | stuff, I only really want | | * Wikipedia * StackExchange * MDN * cpp-reference * | whatever official docs | | There's absolutely no need to have * geeksforgeeks * | w3schools * cyberciti.biz * random wordpress blogs | | This takes all of 5 minutes to code, you could even have a | userscript for it. | zo1 wrote: | Google benefits from a chaotic and spam-filled ecosystem. | At this point technology and network speed are at a point | that anyone could re-code a Google if all they did was | ignore 99.9% of the wesites out there that are crap and | that _Google_ (and Amazon and a few other spam- | benefiters) had a hand in creating or promoting. | | This is why Adwords has to go. It allowed Google to | weaponize the collective man-power of the world to create | and regurgitate new ad-space for Google to monetize. Ad- | space that didn't exist, and doesn't need to exist. | OvidNaso wrote: | This is the answer thats getting little attention. The SEO | game didnt just give us hidden keywords, there are hundreds | of millions of 'sites' and blogs for all these topics that | are basically crap. Google can't tell the difference | anymore. the majority of the internet is now mostly hidden | (except during search) spam. | planb wrote: | But I can tell the difference within a blink of an eye. | There must be a way to train a ML model on ,,crappy | seo"... | kreeben wrote: | This is Google, after all. Their interns could do that | over a weekend. But then again, perhaps they don't have | their sharpest working on search. They surely don't have | their sharpest working on that silly, silly thing they | call the YT algorithm. To much to do in the ads team, | perhaps. | noizejoy wrote: | > it actually did find what people where looking for | | I believe that is more a function of the web being less | commercially relevant back then. | | And every small and then massively growing online community | goes through the same evolution: | | While the community is small, commercial value is small | enough, information is less tainted - and once it becomes big | enough, the commercial value of that community becomes | worthwhile to game. | Agentlien wrote: | I've noticed exactly this. One thing I do from time to time is | try to find a song after just remembering partial lyrics. It | used to work so well it felt like magic. | | The last two weeks I've had two occurrences where the lyrics I | remembered contained a common word which was also a brand name. | It focused on that and completely ignored the rest of my query. | So in both cases I added "lyrics" and now it ignored all but | one word which happened to be the title of another song, no | matter how I massaged the query. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | Blogspam and SEO folks are essentially adversaries to good | ranking strategies on search engines. In 1998 there weren't | many adversaries and it was mostly a technical issue. Now the | game is much more complicated. | 88913527 wrote: | Even lowest common denominator has gone too far. Querying | "Barcelona" gives you 100% search results for the League team | above-the-fold. You must search "Barcelona, Spain" to get | information on the city, which then gets you direct links to | Google Maps, etc. | kristopolous wrote: | I also get these results and I've never spectated a sports | game in my life. These aren't just customized results for | different people - if Google keeps a "completely | uninterested" personal score I'd have the maximum value for | sports | [deleted] | greatpostman wrote: | Yeah their entity resolution algorithms are really annoying. | Half my searches come up with some random movie on IMDb | rickdeveloper wrote: | I actually created "my own search engine" because of this: | notrashsearch.github.io. | | It uses Google search tech under the hood (which I've found | superior to other search engines), but filters results with a | white list. It's only ~100 sites long & very focussed on STEM, | but the results are surprisingly good. | | If anyone has suggestions for site to add, please let me know! | paulcole wrote: | It feels like I'm the only one who gets consistently excellent | results from Google search (and it feels like they've gotten | better for me over time)? Maybe it's because most of my searches | are basic and lowest common denominator? I just don't need | obscure information most of the time and when I do it's honestly | still not that hard to find it. | bin_bash wrote: | What are people's impressions of Neeva? I just registered and a | few searches seem equivalent to Google but it's a lot faster and | cleaner. | techload wrote: | Not available in my region, Brazil. | sefrost wrote: | I'm in Canada, signed up and it said it's not available in my | region. | yborg wrote: | The whole point is to not be equivalent to Google since Google | is an ad revenue engine now, not a search engine. | bin_bash wrote: | I'm telling you my experience not their goals. The searches | seemed nearly exactly the same. I didn't see any sites that | didn't appear on the other in first glance. | ohmanjjj wrote: | Google is no longer a search engine. It's a propaganda tool | funded by ads and run under the guise of providing results to | search queries. | tome wrote: | All search engines lack a feature that would make them hugely | more useful: disambiguation. Suppose I search a common name "John | Doe". I should next be presented with a disambiguation page | allowing me to select whether I meant "John Doe who was President | of Calexico 1905-1909", "John Doe who won the World Series with | the Greensocks 1975" or "John Doe professor of Spanish | Technicalities at Idaho Institute of Science". It shouldn't be my | job to disambiguate my query. The search engine knows much more | about the total search space than I do! | colordrops wrote: | I vaguely recall google doing this long in the past. Probably | just confusing it with Wikipedia though. | 99_00 wrote: | Not just search. I subscribed to a print news paper. | | I enjoy reading the news again. Good mix of local, financial, | entertainment, international, human interest. | | I'm exposed to things outside my bubble and I often like them. | | The print edition excludes a lot ofnlow quality content because | its limited space. | zelon88 wrote: | You mean to tell me that when you use Google design paradigms, to | implement Google promoted "best practices" in a way that scores | highly on Googles own test suite and build it on Google promoted | Javascript-by-the-pound libraries and then strap it with Google | analytics and ads, promote it with Google ads, and then host it | on Google cloud platform that you're actually building a dirtier, | shittier web? | | Well paint me surprised. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-02 23:00 UTC)