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Comment by rmsaksida | Hacker News Reader

It's really frustrating when you need to find information about a specific product on Google but anything you search for yields e-commerce related results. I don't mean the ads - even the organic results will mostly be for shopping or review websites. Google clearly tries to push the user towards those. Sometimes I'm looking for specific technical details and I have to dig around a lot to find anything meaningful.

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It's not even ads but either crowdsourced or machine generated "lists of the best" and such. It's nearly impossible to do research on products these days

It is frustrating. The vast majority of results point to poorly written ‘best of’ lists with Amazon affiliate links (on pages full of Google ads).

Have fun trying to find real product reviews if the product isn’t sold on Amazon.

Me: I’d like some information about propane grills, please.

Google: can I interest you in page after page of algorithmically generated “review” text and Amazon affiliate links??

Nowadays my searches always consist of "reddit + search" to get actual user reviews or comments

I do the same, but it seems that more and more reddit comments are also astroturfed so my faith in them is faltering. Finding authentic recommendations at this point is extremely tiring because I have to constantly be gauging a user's sincerity.

There are too many benefits to fake reviews and few downsides. And it's easy to spam these fake comments and reviews especially if you have the budget for a dedicated marketing team.

Or news articles.

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