Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories
twitter.com
twitter.com
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.
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.
Uhhh, you can still do that, you know.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Headlight-Hilarious-Automobile-Hyster...
Retail is just about pushing a product these days. The moment they can fire the staff and still have a brick and mortar store they will.
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.
They never did, you just didn't realize they didn't before the internet exposed you to the options.
Is that a "nowadays" thing though? At least in my location, the reason a lot of us flocked to the online option was the diversity of options available. Physical stores (for understandable reasons) stocked only the few top-selling options, knew about a few other options enough to say "no we haven't got that", and anything else would get a blank stare and a "is that a company's name?"
If you had put effort into your search and optimized the selection for your specific needs, you were much more likely to find the product online - the physical stores often forced you into a choice between different suboptimal products.
I would expect all cuts to be fully clamped in a store.
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.
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.
It's still annoying, but do it online and have your own financing.
Most dealerships are stupid, but a couple have figured out that if they offer a reasonable price online they can move cars with very little touch.
Having your own financing prevents idiocy from when you walk into the dealership to sign the paperwork. Unless the dealer has something special, you're never going to do better than your own financing.
Do be aware, buying a car right now is simply totally apeshit. Until the supply and demand equilibrate, things are going to be weird.
For a while, I was buying cars for people because they hated it. I would save them a ton, and get a nice spiff for each one.
What I did was work through their whole process and then work them, usually getting out of there at invoice plus a few percent. Average deal took 4 to 6 hours. And the work would involve a dry run purchase somewhere other than where the target buy would happen. Sometimes a second one just find where the pivot points are and what it takes to swing them in buyers favor.
Started the whole thing on a new Expedition purchase in the '00s. It worked well, the MSRP was something like $45K, and I got the rig for $32K and some change. Not all the deals were that dramatic. Depended on the target car and time of year, but there was always mid to high 4 figures that could come out of the deal.
I've never purchased a new car for myself since. And I quit doing it for others a few years in.
The whole thing is generally terrible. While it was a sort of sport, fine! Game on. But it got soul draining very quickly.
Many dealers have responded with a hard line, "no bullshit" kind of approach, being willing to push people away and just take the ones who will pay and appreciate a smooth transaction. And those people will just pay more and just don't generally care.
And no judgement. That's worth... about mid to high 4 figures apparently.
Right now? No way. Sellers have all the advantages, and even better used car deals are crazy due to the shortages and the impact all that has on car pricing.
Could not imagine attempting it again today. Would be a mess, and probably would get told to pound sand. Look at the Ford dealers putting the squeeze on people who pre-ordered the EV F150! Pay an extra $30k right now, or continue to wait for it... Brutal.
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.
Don't trust. Ask questions. If the answers seem fishy, take your business somewhere else.
There's only a couple of nationwide exceptions that come to mind like REI and Microcenter but even then people might have to travel prohibitive distances to have those options and they might as well just buy online.
Small regional stores and mom n' pop operations trend towards having more passionate employees that might have an interest in the products (like a ski shop is generally only staffed by people who've at skied, bike shops tend to only be staffed by people who enjoy cycling, etc) but it's still pretty infrequent.
If 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.
Then when you try to pay, you get upsold warranties.
I like my axon brand, very helpful.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
The challenge I have now in most product categories is filtering out the sewage-offerings from the genuine values. I don't mind lots of choice if presented with an adequate McMaster-Carr type information-oriented UI (as opposed to the ad-friendly UI's we suffer through these days). I mind when most of the choices are dumpster fire quality, and I have no way to filter them out.
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.
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.
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.
I'd rather make software handle an unsigned long long as a year: I want our optimism to extend beyond the presumed heat death of our universe, and into, if not finding a multiverse, creating it.
[1] https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...
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.
Remember RadioShack?
THAT is retail. The craptastic experiment we see these days, online and in meatspace are scams masquerading as retail. I miss Sears.
And even that might not last long. Warehouse demand is exploding across the world right now. We're in the midst of a massive commerce transformation where there are a lot of giants racing to establish JIT delivery footprints in the most high-margin MSA's containing 80% of every nation's population. It won't be long before we're in a Stephenson'ian Snow Crash-esque world where we're getting an ML-computed 80% of goods everyone orders within 30 minutes, 15% of goods in 4 hours, 4% of goods in a day, and the remaining 1% in five days.
Once that happens, I would be surprised to see supermarkets or even small groceries outside of very niche segments like ethnic and farmer's markets, or hyper niche high-end shops like butchers specializing in rare quality cuts, exist in brick and mortar form, unless you go to where 20% of the population lives in low-density areas not served by these logistical nets.
When you use Google you are walking into their shop. That salesperson is very knowlegeable, but about you.
Google used to measure engagement to try to get feedback on the quality of the links, but perhaps clickbait has broken that as well.
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.
A hypothetical honest reviewer would genuinely be recommending products to buy, and if affiliate links pay, then why not?
Just like any other tool, it’s not the affiliate links, it’s the user.
A system could very well have rules/guidelines and then have humans review & monitor the system and user-submitted complaints for any abuse, and harshly penalize such abuse with a temporary or permanent ban.
It could end up in a situation where it's technically possible to gain a slight advantage by gaming the system but no participant will risk a complete ban and the system ends up working well for everyone.
I 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.
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.
I swear there's an opportunity for an enterprising startup to create a search engine that leverages a friends/family/contacts network for consensus domain credibility, and scrubs "non-credible" domains from all results.
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.
At this point, I’ve had to resort to reading scientific papers on how some of these technologies work (and how some don’t work) just to avoid the bad information. Unfortunately, the more I research the farther I get from making a purchase. This is not where I want to be, however, since the water in my area is very hard and everything gets scaled up all the time. I’m looking to purchase an espresso machine to get into the hobby but I’m not going to drop the money in expensive equipment until I can get access to water which will not damage it in short order.
I also really like the Wirecutter but I know not everyone here agrees with me.
I had a project take me into an unfamiliar knowledge space. Up until... 2018? I could have relied on Google to find the meaningful information.
The reason people accepted Google was that it dramatically lowered information acquisition costs through the Internet. That benefit doesn't seem as common now. Back to webrings.
I'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?
Wherever there are engineers, there are academics who do engineering research. They have journals of their own to publish this research.
As to the question of reviews, I’m not sure any articles actually review specific furnace models. The point of reading the papers is to educate yourself on the principles behind the technology so you can read manufacturer’s technical specifications and avoid the non-technical marketing language.
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).
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.
====
This message sent from a Thinkpad business machine that I use for gaming (and ML, theoretically).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Can attest. I finally ditched mine, got tired of it falling over multiple times each week.
Mine has worked great. The only issues I've seen are (1) the traffic stats don't count IPv6 traffic, and (2) there is something odd that sometimes goes on when a connection ends that can result in packets from the LAN side showing up on the WAN side without the LAN-side IP address being replaced with the WAN-side IP address.
The first is a bit of annoyance, and the second as far as I saw didn't actually cause any problems.
The reliability data also is likely sourced from outside, such as the AAA, insurers, or any other place where car trouble data naturally accumulates.
In the electric cars over $75k category, everything except the Audi E-Tron gets the tier between worse and average, including the Tesla Models S and X. The Audi gets the bottom tier.
This article talks about why the Teslas other than the Model 3 get low reliability ratings [1]:
> Commonly reported issues from Model Y owners included defective sensors that had to be replaced, problems with heat pumps, air conditioning, body panels that didn’t line up and water leaks in the trunk due to missing seals, according to Fisher. Owners also reported a variety of electrical and hardware issues with the higher-priced, and less-popular, Model S sedan and Model X falcon-wing SUV.
> Older models typically fare better in reliability, as companies tend to make tweaks and redesigns to solve known problems, while sticking with the same parts and suppliers.
> But Tesla deviates from this approach, Fisher explained. “At almost random times during the year Tesla will switch major components, suppliers or sensors and other units. The more you change, the greater the chances you’re going to have some problems.”
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/18/consumer-reports-2021-auto-r...
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-recall-model-3-s-fr...
Second time I request a retrofit a speaker from a newer models and hardware + work cost me $100 usd. Engineers did all the job at my home while i was working. I only clicked from the App open the car . Oh well, consumer report doesn't count this things that makes consumers happy.
Consumer reports also doesn't count that after two years of ownership i received tons of new features and my car still feels fresh. I can put here a huge list. Since I bought the car :
- my range improved
- winter regenerative brakes improved
- automatic blindspot cameras after turn
- improved climate control, especially automatic seat heat
- more music/video sources
- dramatically improved autopilot
- view cameras from phone
- updated for free hardware for temperature measurements during one of the unrelated visits
- improved charging time ( faster)
- charging network doubled
- automatically synced profiles to my second tesla
- better charging scheduling, that works well with my local electricity provider incentives, saved me ~600 usd already
- far better navigation included way points
- better security when backing up ( sound)
- improved auto wipers, that become 100% reliable( more a fix)
- i don't include tons of fun stuff like games, easter eggs etc...
This are only improvements that are useful to me. The actual list is waay bigger.
Oh well... someone paid this journalists to portrait it in a bad way. But that basically shows how vulnerable is the system. You pay 10-20 journalists and boom, you got your marketshare of people who trust to some bs like consumer reports.
On the other hand, it has the same problem as Consumer Reports: they only test and review a single model which will probably be out of production before you need one. On the third hand, if one manufacturer consistently gets good reviews (OXO Goodgrips, for example)...
Some of the purchases I have made with their guidance have been (trivially) life-changing.
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.
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.
Testing for reliability is expensive, so most likely Stiftung Warentest and similar companies don't do that.
I assume they only counted a sample of the the 500g, but it's funnier to imagine otherwise.
It took me a while to understand what you meant.
But then Basmati rice is judged on grain length too. Wonder if they report like "22 cm of broken pieces per km of grains".
Some would claim these old appliances waste energy. I am not convinced. We need to heat our buildings here from September to May. Whatever a very modern appliance warms the building less the heating has to substitute. It's all energy and losses produce heat.
Getting one great one that will last for a few decades isn't a bad call. That's what I do personally.
And there are still ways to save, reduce energy impact. Moderation is a big one. Just be frugal and prudent with the appliances. That has a major impact and everyone could do more and capture those gains right away.
Tests usually have subjective criteria that determine the ranking.
Can we have some independent testing of web search engines?
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
Ended up with the OnePlus 8T due to good battery life, fast charging and reasonable size.
Still very happy with that purchase, which wouldn't have been as easy without that site.
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/interview/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.
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.
Break Google up. Course that will never happen as politicians like the power Google has over the internet in the hands of a US company.
I wanted to build something different and meaningful. I did. It just hasn't mattered in a broad context.
If making money was the goal, I'd put whomever wants to pay me $300/sale first and pimp them out as the best company in the universe. Fuck that. I hoped that I could make a reasonable amount (at least enough to keep it going and maybe scale it a bit) and create a more honest review space.
Winning in this case isn't defined by money earned, you're advocating a race to the bottom I wanted to avoid. Google needs a shakeup and so does search as a whole.
There is so much money being passed around in web hosting review space, by companies to affiliates. I still make thousands per month off these affiliate deals. If my site were to rank at the top of search engines, I would be plenty compensated. Having individuals sponsor the work and it continuing to languish is a position I'm not really a fan of. A single sale commission can range from a few dollars to high hundreds or occasionally a thousand+. I can't imagine enough people wanting to donate a meaningful amount that would change that equation. I'd personally feel bad for every Patreon sponsor putting in 5,10,20 dollars because I might feel like I'm not doing enough with it. If those people just sent one person who ended up purchasing via a link on my site, it would likely outweigh most donations, it would also spread the reach to places I likely can't get to.
That's just what is running through my head, I don't know if that makes any sense.
It really does help motivate me to hear people get value from my work, because it definitely isn't financially motivated at this point.
I appreciate the offer of premium members only payments. I want my data to be public, I like open sourcing my contributions when possible. I think transparency and openness are the key to better reviews. So I've not ever approached that route. I've also avoided taking any sponsored money from web hosting for any sort of advertising because of even the potential conflict of interest (many have offered to sponsor those benchmarks).
There might be something in the works to help it financially this year, nothing really concrete, but I'm exploring some new options. Ultimately though, I'd rather it wither and die than just doing what every shitty affiliate ruining the space has done.
Make it a variation on the "businesses pay for business-class stuff, amateurs get the free stuff" model.
For the top say, 20% ranks, it is behind a paywall. People will know which vendors are members of the set of the top 20%, but not their ordinal collection. The bottom 80% members of the set's ordinal collection is displayed. If I'm looking for a site to store Grandma's cat pictures, the bottom 80% is probably good enough.
You could also tilt the paywall so free only reveals who NOT to do business with, and who ranks at the bare minimum acceptability.
You can have the paywall only enforce an embargo, instead of all historical results. Say some period beyond which the businesses that can afford to pay you will not care for the results, like a year or whatever.
You can have a "free hour(s)" once a review cycle just before when you publish where the in-the-know crowd can get the results for the newest review cycle, tied to a YouTube livestream, where you do a monetized Q&A.
There are lots more variations to ponder, but I can't help but think there must be more useful ways to slice and dice the valuation of the information here, and monetize in tranches like finance and entertainment do, instead of all in one go.
Does hiding some information behind a paywall fit with my goal of a better review landscape in the web hosting industry? Sadly, no.
Sure, I would come out financially ahead, but the industry basically wouldn't be any different. I'm not going to rank any better or have my information spread more effectively behind a paywall. The number of folks impacted would also surely go down as many wouldn't pay.
If the goal is simply profit maximization at this point, there are definitely avenues to explore like what you've suggested. That's boring to me honestly, unless it can have impact to along with it. I do appreciate your thoughts on the matter and suggestions.
Personally, if it gets to that point I'd rather sell it off and move on to working on something else. Most of us are software developers and entrepreneurs. I'd rather build something more interesting and with more potential. I can make money doing consulting work any day, after 10 years, the allure of simply trying to profit maximize on what I built by introducing barriers doesn't appeal. That might be part of the reason it hasn't been as successful as it maybe could have been. I suppose that's the hill I may die on - open, honest, transparent review data for everyone.
You already have an objective measure to flog, build a "council" or "board" around it, with the "Platinum" members being the providers who were most consistently in the top three ranks in all the past reviews. Get some good writers who can whip up some clickbaity articles that would find placement for some fun.
"You're getting cheated out of bandwidth if you don't use these web hosting providers!"
"Most Web hosting providers don't want to let you know this secret council!"
Make it tongue in cheek, self-parodying maybe to the clickbait industry.
Intermix with and reference to some more serious PR to avenues where industry people are likely to read it, where you lay out your concerns of improving the industry and the benefits to them. Make the report red-orange-green-easy to at-a-glance interpret for non-technical management for good-enough outcomes, then analyze the results into a historical trend for the aggregate industry's progress.
Honey versus vinegar, basically.
Your consulting expertise on designing projects to make it easy to transition between providers, and a calculator to compute when to pull the trigger to perform the transition would probably more than pay the bills.
I tried some more expose type stuff, revealing spam networks operated by hosting companies, publishing pay to play attempts, exposing fake reviews and even getting one CEO on record supporting astroturfing. Despite how outrageous this behavior is, it never gets much attention. That last company I'm talking about tends to be on all those affiliate garbage sites you will see and has popped up in the past few years (https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2018/07/22/hostinger-review-0-...). I make sure to let as many people know as possible anytime I see the brand. But their marketing/astroturfing campaign certainly dwarfs anything I can do. And most people don't care. The publishers take the money, the company takes the customers and funnels more money into deceiving poor customers via affiliates and search. The only loser is customers as a whole, who have little voice or power in the equation at any level.
In little bubble communities, I do have some traction and recognition. People may know, but they tend to be echo small chambers. Sure, some people flow in and get recommendations. But the majority of people, it's just who ranks at the top of search results. They don't invest in doing deeper research. They want to see 'X is the best product' and move on.
That's another problem, nuance. Is there a best web hosting provider? Not even close. Even with a very specific use-case, it's extremely rare to say, yes, this is the best company. I've been tracking 10 years of data and no company comes close to perfect reputation. The extreme top just crack into 80% range in terms of positive sentiment. The generally pretty good are in the 70's. That means 20-30% of people are having bad experiences with the best companies.
I've publish the review data with ranks based simply on statistical numbers, but I don't do ranking for performance benchmarks. I also encourage that it's one data point, simply being in the fastest tier or having the highest consumer opinion doesn't mean it's the best. There could be other factors which matter.
For example, Pantheon is the perfect company for has a great reputation but I wouldn't recommend it to most people to consider. First, they specialize in WordPress and Drupal. So if you're not on those platforms, it's not relevant. Even if you do, they are very opinionated hosting. If you have a development team and want strict Git workflows where code moves up and data moves down, they are fabulous. If you're a semi technical person who mostly does marketing, it's probably a terrible fit because you don't want to learn Git, have to push every change through testing, staging and then production to make progress. But their hosting in my tests were fast. They have great consumer reviews. For the people who it makes sense for, they love it. And I would recommend it to probably less than 10% of people who meet the basic criteria of using WP/Drupal for the reason stated above.
As far as consulting experience goes, I actually end up consulting more for the people who build sites. After running the largest benchmarks for WordPress for ~8 years now, people have brought me on to help test new WordPress products or scale existing sites. That's more interesting and rewarding honestly seeing direct results, being compensated to help them achieve goals. My compensation overall is okay, it's just not coming from reviews these days.
The biggest problem would be how to incentivize such people, but gamification and some monetary rewards from the community could probably solve this.
product name review site:reddit.com
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.
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
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.
Edit: a quick search on Google Scholar brings up papers like http://www.kresttechnology.com/krest-academic-projects/krest...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4av9jm/illegal-sand-mining-i...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately with smaller sites, it could be a few days till their search bot finds the content, and often the copycat sites have agressive scrapers so appear to have the content first.
From googles point of view, the copycat is the original, and the original is the copycat.
There are also some kinds of copycat content which users actually prefer. For example, sites which bypass paywalls, sites which quote other sites, sites that display decrapified content from another site, etc.
FWIW, GitHub seems to be letting some Wikis be indexed on a test basis and I am very happy to see they are outranking GHWSEE. That said, with the current guessed criteria, there are still many publicly editable wikis with many stars and publically un-editable wikis on repos with few stars but useful information out there that aren't being indexed.
GitHub blocks https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi-reveng/wiki/Languages and many other wikis from being indexed. In the case of the page you linked, GitHub serves the content with "X-Robots-Tag: none". The content of that page currently does not exist in Google at all. You can see the robot blocking header by looking at the Network tab in Chrome while loading the page in incognito mode or equivalent in other browsers.
As for having no link to GitHub, my service provides a huge button at the top and a direct URL to the original content. Please use those controls at the top to get to the content on GitHub. I do not selectively redirect to not trip cloaking detection or automatically redirect which risks the indexing helper being classified as a redirect in search engines.
If you have any other questions or suggestions, please let me know.
GitHub Wiki Search Engine Enablement (GHWSEE) allows non-indexed GitHub Wikis to be indexed by search engines.
This site will be decommissioned to redirect old links once the block is lifted or GitHub produces some other solution to index GitHub Wikis in harmony with their SEO concerns.
I do not see any wrongdoing from github-wiki-see.page here. They don't even amke money from it. Quite contrary, I do think that this is a useful project.
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).
1. Search for something 2. See the cloned issue but no results for the original 3. Copy some unique-looking text from the clone 4. Search the repo directly for that text
It's awful. Seems to be a very recent problem? Maybe the last few months?
https://newbedev.com/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-...
But this blocks it:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/arosh/ublacklist-stackover...
Maybe buying more useless stuff isn't the solution???
I don't have a solution for this; I just think we're in the exact state we would expect.
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.
"Proton & Atom LT vs Nano Air: Key Points ([month_year])"
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.
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.
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.
This also seems to be what Amazon is also devolving into. Amazon ads is the fastest growing part of amazon!
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.
Citation needed ;)
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.
Let's say I want to do a '10 best bikes for under $1,000' article. How am I going to do that well without actually going out and buying 10 bikes and being prepared to make hardly anything in return?
Even if you look for the top 10 trucks, they will end up showing all the major brands, because they will break it down for: 4x4, extended cab, full size, mid size, ...
Lists are mostly garbage because you dont care about the top 25, you really only need to know the best item and the next best at a certain budget
Looked at Netflix clicked on a movie that I though may be interesting, it was overdubbed in English since it was a Korean movie. I watched maybe 5 minutes of it then exited. Go to YouTube and suddenly Korean videos are being suggested.
At a car dealership with my sister she asked me to be there for support when she leased a car. At home same day hours later YouTube again it is plastered with "how to buy a car" videos. I hadn't been looking for a car, never searched for anything like that in the previous days ever.
Went to a doctor over issues with my feet. Got spammed with ads covering various health issues. Patient data tends to be protected in most countries, no one should have access to when I visit what doctor and I find it insane that Google gets away with using that protected information to sell ads.
A day after I started using an Android device: I cycled to work, and my phone gives an alert and asks me to rate X. WTF? Oh right, I cycled by X on the way. I immediately turned off what I could; no more popups like that but do I really think Google doesn't track my location any more?
This is a ten-year old talking point. Why people continue to insist on this falsehood is beyond me. Do you think these advertisers are stupid?
-> buy refrigerator. gets lost during transport / is damaged / “oh, I wanted the 550T, not 505T” / “works great, let’s also replace the one in the beach house” / etc.
You have to remember that these possibilities are competing with other ads that have extremely low rates of success.
> This is a ten-year old talking point. Why people continue to insist on this [...] is beyond me.
Because it continues to happen.
> falsehood
The only falsehood here is your claim that this is a falsehood.
> Do you think these advertisers are stupid?
Yes, apparently they are.
And no, I don't care about the tiny, tiny number of legit reviews with links. I doubt I'd see them anyhow.
Of course disincentivizing ads would never fly at google and an ad-free search engine would have a hard time being economically viable.
Wirecutter has been pretty hit-and-miss for me recently. I have found my best product recommendations through a bunch of random blogs who have some particular expertise.
When I find a review site I like, I add it to mine. (https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=dc408db269da4e769) Then I have a bookmark bar button that searches just my whitelisted review sites.
Initially because I hate monopoly but also because looking for something decent on amazon is a major PITA I avoid amazon for nearly everything. If I need a computer, I buy direct to the vendor or to a computer shop. If I need new bicycle parts I go to an online bikeshop, if I want a new sampler groovebox, I go to a store selling home studio gears. Well this isn't totally true as I now favor second hand stuff but the reality is Amazon is not very effective at offering you the best things, and not even at the best price. Most online shops nowadays offer shipping time on par with what you get on Amazon.
In then end I don't see any good incentive to use Amazon. Some people will say centralized market place but if searching a decent product takes much more time than finding a good specialized store and getting decent product quickly you haven't really gained anything. Single account for all your shopping? Many shops offer buying without creating an account. Others will allow you to seamlessly create the account at ordering time and password managers make it easy to manage multiple accounts.
I see what you did there.
- 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.
- Let the community vote on the most trusted sources
- Include results from enthusiasts that have little incentive to write biased reviews (Reddit, HN, expert forums)
- Look at the ownership of the site and how transparent they are about it
- Regularly reassess these criteria
Curious to hear your thoughts on this.
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."
I also think the blanket of “all affiliates are bad” is a bit much. I love supporting people who just do a good job. SEO spam is not what I call a good job, it’s a sleazy exploitation of the average consumer.
With that said, I have purchased many things based on what I consider honest good reviews who linked to affiliate programs and I do not regret this. I wish companies (Amazon for instance, as they’re rent biggest right now) simply policed their affiliate programs better to incentive good unbiased reviews sites that Specialize in high quality, and dropped the SEO spammers
1. Skewed incentives. A company that buys "organic" product placement wants to show it in the best possible light, and increase sales. They don't need an impartial review, so the blogger has a hard time to produce one.
2. Fragility and failures. Affiliate links expire and don't get updated. Ads point at things no longer available. Ads spend an inordinate amount of resources on the viewer's machine. Targeting is inaccurate, despite incessant attempts to track and correlate users' profiles.
3. Direct payment is rarely an option! I personally would greatly appreciate an option to pay $1-2 and read an impartial review of something I'm planning to purchase. Maybe even $5-7 for expensive stuff. But there are very few places that offer this. Those that do try hard to peddle a yearly subscription. Also, it appears that I'm the minority, and the number of visitors willing to pay directly is too low to sustain the authors.
I still hope that it's Patreon and direct support by consumers what the future looks like, not corporate sponsorship and ads.
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.
That’s my concern as well: I like the idea in theory but al increasingly thinking the reason past attempts have failed is that it’s more of a mirage than a stable alternative. Advertising has worked better for people with no money, people who disagree about what your content is worth, people who want to see before they pay, people who say they want to see before they pay but will cheat, people who don’t want to be constantly asked to make financial decisions, people who don’t want potential surprises of their kid/roommate/etc. uses their computer, etc. That’s definitely not saying that the status quo is great but it avoids a lot of failure modes which immediately become roadblocks if you’re asking people for money.
This has real societal consequences, too: we’d be much better off if the average person got their news from the NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc. but those sites have paywalls while a lot of less principled journalism to outright propaganda is free. I really wish we had a more convincing story for how to support things like that but it’s still unclear whether we do.
Man I don't know about that. In some ways, yes I agree with you. But in other ways I can't.
None of the major entities produces news and commentary from the labor point of view, for example. It's hard to get them to talk about media consolidation, news for profit, and a whole pile of other issues too, and it all boils down to a couple things:
1) AD driven models favor those who can buy the products and services pitched in the ADS
2) Conflicts of interest abound! The massive media consolidation we saw after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 really did a number on one of the basic dynamics we depend on, and that is many owners, many models, competition all tended to work as checks and balances. A small, indie house could run a labor story, or talk about Net Neutrality without having a conflict rooted in a big corporation not wanting to publish news and commentary that would impact it's bottom line in a negative way. Just one example.
Today, we've got investigative journalism relegated to niche players who are doing good, often quite expensive work that isn't being seen due to suppression and a misinformation problem that is not easy or cheap to solve.
Your point isn't invalid. I am saying it's more complicated than that.
This is an easy way to get depressed wondering whether we can successfully navigate a global news environment.
Those sites run propaganda :( Access journalism, Iraq as you mention, Russiagate... There are other examples not hard to find.
Kind of a mess really. When I was a kid, we had some class segments on news bias, and actually had to find and identify news and commentary, differentiate fact from opinion, and find pieces written from various points of view: labor, big business, left, right, etc... My own kids did not see any education of that kind. I did it.
I suppose another angle might be clarity. There is a lot of low clarity "news" being put out there. Fact and opinion are not clearly, nor easily, differentiated. That's a problem, and a major feeder to Uncle Liberty posting on FB...
I do feel competing with FB would be effective given some entity somewhere can get funded in a way that allows for a labor and or not pro-war point of view, and that's just as an example. Any meaningful differentiation that can contrast with the majors might work.
On the upside, global is actually a benefit! One thing people can, and I suggest they actually do, is get news from abroad. There does remain some of the older dynamic between nations and their various news services. It's possible to get a diverse take on the US that way, and it's what I do personally.
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.
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.
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).
In all honesty, I haven't found a writer, or journalist, I'm giving any money to besides a few honest non-profits. (And yes it's hard to find a honest 501c3.)
I feel you should put the affiliate links on your writing. It's not selling out. It's selling out when you have good income, security, and a home.
I don't have any problems with average people putting up affiliate links, or ads.
It's the wealthy boys who can never get enough monetary praise I have a problem with.
It's not much, but I know very well it all adds up, and maybe a little positive energy plays out for you too.
What I did was quit buying my coffee. :D
And that worked out!! I have a little percolator, which I love when camping or something. That thing makes the best damn coffee. For the quickie at home, this is corny, but I got an Aeropress and it also makes a fantastic and kind of fun cup of coffee.
1. Good jobs are hard to find, so some people try to make a living instead by influencing what other people buy, in exchange for kickbacks from the sellers.
2. The sellers offering the largest kickbacks are never the sellers offering the best value for money, because if they are, a reseller can buy the products from them, charge a higher price, and spend some of the markup on kickbacks to product shills. This results in a systematic bias toward overpriced junk in heavily advertised products.
3. While some knowledgeable people do still take the time to share their knowledge and unbiased judgments, which is for example mostly how Wikipedia is written, Google and other search engines are increasingly directing search traffic to the product shills instead.
I agree with you that, given problem #1 and problem #3, problem #2 is sort of inevitable, and all three problems tend to mutually reinforce each other. But I think we could reduce either problem #1 or problem #3 by an order of magnitude without significantly reducing the other one. In particular, we might not be able to completely solve the SERP quality problem without solving the jobs problem, but I think we could improve it enormously just by writing a better search engine, which is an easier problem than fixing the entire economy.
I'm sorry to hear you're back on the streets, and I hope your situation improves before you die. I'm glad you're not dead yet because I often find your comments insightful. Happy new year!
I don't see surviving that a second time, for reasons I don't care to dig around in.
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?"
Deliberate social policy.
Making sure we have the basics available to people should be a top priority. And yeah, some would take advantage. I've reached the point, due to many people I know struggling, where I basically don't care. Let them.
The net good out of all that would be worth it, and maybe, just maybe a little less money is made, or efficiency or whatever crazy metric being looked at isn't peak optimized... Again, just don't care.
Given all we have and the smarts, tech, info available, we should not be facing this crap too many of us are.
That's all, just venting a little and I sure hope your situation can improve.
Happy Holidays and all that. You are one of the good people, and it shows.
As for Wikipedia itself, I stopped contributing a few years ago, since I did not have the energy and the time needed to fight the systemic bias that the editors had (and have) on a variety of topics.
Also, 2021 was probably the first year in which I did not donate to Wikipedia.
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.
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.
For a long list of reasons, I want my writing to be freely available. I got my very first Amazon payout of like $16 or something a few months ago. I also got an email reminder that I am legally required to very prominently display information telling people I have Amazon links on my site.
I took the links down and thought about updating my sites to comply with the requirement and so far haven't, in part because I suspect the $16 was from some local asshole unqualified for his job (the job I applied for) buying ugly bike racks and plopping them down in bad locations all over my lovely downtown area like little piles of manure as a daily reminder of how corrupt these people are, how much they have shafted me for no real damn reason other than pathos on their part and they are ruining the town I hope to improve.
I was unable to readily find (affiliate) links to bike racks I would like to see in this town and I'm angry at what is being done to this town by these immoral, incompetent cretins and it causes me to think that I might actively encourage their shit behavior ruining this town because I'm so desperate for money that $16 on that day meant I could afford a fucking coffee which put an end to my splitting headache.
I do not wish to make the world and town I live in a worse place because I'm so desperate for money and I think taking the Amazon solution potentially pushes me in that direction.
Anyway, I don't know how to fix this. I try to tell people what it looks like from where I sit because I know HN has a lot of coders, etc and they aren't daily exposed to the reality that "If you choose to not be a sell out, you go hungry." basically.
I just want my life to work. I don't actually want to make what sounds like "political" commentary to other people. If my life worked, I would likely be all "Meh. Not my problem. I don't want to fight with these fools and trying to point this out is not worth the drama. Moving on."
But it does impact me. It impacts me to the point where I literally fear for my life due to my intractable poverty and sometimes I feel compelled to comment, though I don't really expect it to help me. Maybe after I am beyond help, people will stop wondering what's in it for DoreenMichele and think "She had a point. Let's find a solution that incorporates these observations."
This is possibly rambly at this point. I'm posting it anyway and then will try to stay out of this conversation.
> If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.
Even if no one used ad blockers and tips were commonplace, we'd still have these problems with crap SEO and affiliate links. It's like with technology products: they say "if you aren't paying for it, you're the product not the customer," but even if you are paying for it you can still be the product (e.g. your TV manufacturer putting ads in your expensive TV's menus).
Ultimately the problem is greed and the ridiculous degree of tolerance of it, unchecked by any cultural expectation of quality or virtue.
> I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that's the actual root cause of this stuff and you won't fix it if you don't address those issues.
I think the real issue, is, the world is much bigger than the first world countries. I would love to have a diploma, to get a "real" job as a programmer for some random company, to add that "value" to the internet, to design useful software for actual people, etc. etc. But I was born in Eastern Europe..
I tried freelancing a few times through gac, rac, and scriptlance which later got "globalized" (all acquired and killed by freelancer.com, yay capitalism).. and I just can't compete with indians on that site, way too many of them, somehow quoting 5% of the price promising double or triple of what I can do somehow...
So I tried looking for that "Real" job, except I was born ugly as hell with broken teeth, so nobody would even take me seriously. Even one of my professors in uni told me once: "See.. if you could do less drugs and study more, I bet you could get an A, it's a B- for now..".. I never even tried drugs, but apparently I'm so ugly half my profs thought I was drugged. As far as I can tell, It's just nepotism right and left, people only hiring other pretty-looking-people-alike for both normal and startup-like jobs where I come from. Zero chance for me.
So on the brink of giving up on everything, I took a construction job for 6 months, which allowed me to save enough money for a plane ticked and my first month of rent in UK. Now I'm a Reach Truck driver in a warehouse.. making >triple the salary I could make as a programmer in my home country, but slowly destroying my back and knees every d day.
Funnily enough, I've met quite a few programmers, lawyers, accountants, pharmacists and even a surgeon through my warehouse jobs in the last two years. Quite smart people, a few broken teeth here and there, a couple disfigured faces, husbands, kids, sick family, plenty stuff...
The internet is just bullshit, just like most of this society. Making money, jobs, starvation, HA! I don't even know what I'm trying anymore or why I still keep reading on this site.
Sorry for the rambling, your message just resonated somehow for me so I felt I should say something. Good luck to you!
If you have studied that much CS, then you likely have fulfilled many of the ACM recommended curricula [1] for at least an associates degree if not more. If that is true, then you have some options. Do not discount your dual fluency in English and your mother tongue. There is no shame in taking a good small-scale Internet business idea implemented in the Anglosphere and reproducing it in your mother tongue. There are numerous tiny ideas mentioned in comments here on HN that bring in modest sums, but fill a niche unlikely to have already been implemented in your home country. If it is enough to pay for a laptop upgrade once every 3-5 years, and maybe some beer money, then that's as good a start as any.
Bonus points if you find a Net-based business opportunity that also leverages your current UK geographic location.
Lift weights, eat right, sleep enough, and take good care of your body in the meantime, those warehouse jobs are no joke, and you are ahead of the pack by already recognizing that. If I was single, living alone, young, and working a warehouse job while working on my coding, then I'd abandon all real estate-oriented shelter, stealth vandwell, and digital nomad between free WiFi hotspots for my connection to free-tier cloud resources (CLI and tmux for the win on high-latency, low-bandwidth connections); rent-to-wage ratios are completely insane in developed nations' urban, suburban and exurban areas.
Stay out of the rentier trap. Trying to rent a room cost me a few years of unnecessary toil when I started out that contributed nothing towards my advancement, when for all practical purposes, I lived out of my car with the hours I was spending at a part-time job, on campus classrooms, labs, and libraries, napping in my car, and about every other day crashing back in my rented room that really was more a storage shed than used as an apartment. If I had a stealth van and student gym membership back then, then I would have been better off, but I was too stupidly proud to do that ("gasp, I'll be homeless!" was a complete red herring).
If so, then that's a very underappreciated domain at this time (much to our detriment, but that's for a different discussion). Not just in tech, but everywhere. The entire field has been aggressively monetized to near extinction; whatever writing doesn't directly impact revenue/profits, gets dumped onto line workers. And the results show.
The quality of writing and lucid ideas found in advertisements and landing pages is markedly higher than from say, in a somewhat-technical presentation to managers-of-managers. I've sat through more than a few quite underwhelming presentations that violated some of the most basic principles of presenting ("don't mumble hoping the slide will carry the presentation", "don't read the slide word-for-word", etc.).
There is a dearth of assistance for coaches to help improve those kinds of "writing". And a huge number of aspiring, gung-ho FAANG employees who are wondering why management won't listen to them. There's a gap to be filled here, and people with the disposable income to pay for outcomes.
Leverage your non-technical sphere as a strength (I liked your pull request journey, it is true that coders don't normally perceive and accommodate skill stratifications in our docs, a byproduct of the monetization of writing that killed too many technical writing/librarian positions in our industry). Perhaps look into positioning the writing assistance you offer to technical staff as a way to communicate to non-technical managers, where you help translate the technical concepts that have to be broken down to you due to your non-technical background, into ideas the managers readily grasp. It would help if you retained a lot of the corporate-speak that Rands in Repose sometimes writes about that you doubtless saw in your Aflac stint, and knew when to judiciously use it.
Maybe investigate some offer like helping coders write emails to managers. If that gains traction, offer small-medium-large presentation improvement coaching, based upon the length of the presentation (15, 30, 60 minutes). Where shorter lengths increase in cost. Then if that gains traction, offer coaching linked to an annual performance goal of "improve communicating with managers".
People don't/can't pay for things anymore because trillions of dollars have been siphoned out of the holdings of the middle and working classes over the past 50 years. If not for piracy and subscription services, the music and film industries would have collapsed years ago. If you made people pay for the things they used to, they... wouldn't. Because they can't.
Often the answers are not the best. What can I expect? I paid nothing for them! When I want good information, I pay for it.
>Often the answers are not the best.
Well, which is it?
Have you tried making some content available only to subscribers?
For common items it's kinda difficult, but still possible! (Printers had a pretty active subreddit/community for example.)
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.
Link?
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).
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?
Cannot reproduce.
I always observe what tools trades carry when they work on my properties, and chat with them over the drinks and snacks I offer them, on what they like and don't like. That figures heavily into my decisions.
Google's main purpose these days for me is non-mainstream, far niche searches. I've taken to looking into deploying my own ArchiveBox to just store my own curated search results that I like. When I initially noticed the SEO spam around 20 years ago, I began to prepare for it by manually saving into text files the page links off of search results that I used, and that has helped me a lot. Ironically, I'm building my own personal Yahoo Directory. I don't see any solution on the horizon to SEO pollution getting better, so I want to scale up my solution.
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.
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.
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.
This was my first ebike, so I wanted to test the waters with something cheap. If it starts falling apart, I'll probably build a custom one or two and spend more money since ebike riding's been working great for me to get consistent exercise and go on trails more conveniently.
I think your strategy is totally valid, and I do that with most power tools in my shop. Buy the cheap one, and when it breaks, make a call on how to upgrade.
For me, I actually side-graded to a Onewheel electric skateboard (https://onewheel.com/) at the very beginning of the pandemic.
As a commuter vehicle, it's less practical than an e-bike. You can't carry as much (limited to a backpack), and it's almost certainly an order of magnitude more dangerous (but more fun!). The biggest downside for me us the inability to take my dog with me (I used to tow him in one of those bike trailers for kids). But all of these don't really apply in WFH pandemic times.
On the other hand, being able to pick up and carry the Onewheel opens up a lot more commute options that aren't as easy on an e-bike. In particular, pairing it with public transit is powerful. It's difficult or impossible to load a bike into crowded light rail car, but trivial to fit in with a Onewheel.
Where I live in Seattle, I can Onewheel 1.5 miles to the nearest light rail station in SoDo, take the train 7 miles north to Greenlake, and then Onewheel another 1 mile to my friend's house. The whole trip takes 40 minutes. It's 30 minutes by car.
I also go grocery shopping with it. In the store, I just stow it in the bottom shelf of the cart. This makes grocery shopping super frictionless, because I don't have to lock up a bike or anything. I just don't get more than 2 bags of groceries at a time. Grocery shopping is so frictionless for me now, that is not a big deal. It's a 5 minute ride (1 mile) to the store, I'm in and out in 10 minutes, and then back home in 5 more.
The only times I drive anymore are when I'm not traveling alone or when it's raining heavily (I am fine to Onewheel in the typical light Seattle rail).
It's really revolutionized mobility for me, much more than the e-bike ever did.
I believe popularized by Adam Savage of Mythbusters, if I'm remembering where it hit internet-widespread from.
But an excellent point, because people don't realize the % of things they're not going to use regularly. Or the fact that it usually takes (time for the cheapest version to break) to figure out if you're going to use it frequently.
(Also, side note: absolutely no professional review site has any incentive to remind you that cheaper, used, or previous model gear exists or is viable)
And yup! That was the math: (cost of cheap things) * (total number of things) - (cost to rebuy) * (% of things you end up rebuying) << (cost of mid-range things) * (total number of things)
Sticking with wood or plastic on cheap saws/drills/mills can be ok, but really limits the kinds of things you can fix.
Early in life, my uncle Ray suggested doing that and showed off an impressive collection of tools. And he was that fix it uncle that had a big influence on me as a kid. We tore into basically everything and I never saw him without some book or other close by. One thing he liked to do was stock the car trunk in addition to the shop stuff. Road tools get lost, loaned out, abused, whatever it may take to deal with a scenario on the road. To that end, I've put some of those cheaper high count sets that come in the fold up containers. Perfect for the trunk.
And a diverse collection is really the other side benefit. Gives a person a lot of options. Most of the time they all see light use except for a few. Going expensive limits the collection unnecessarily and that limits what one can do, or might attempt to do, again unnecessarily.
The value from having a broad set of stuff generally exceeds the replacements that will come along the way. And that's mostly true, even when there are periods of inactivity. Others may benefit. Doesn't hurt to lend a tool, or a hand to help someone else get through a project.
And frankly, as people gain experience, learning where tool limits are tends to cut back on the wear and tear on even cheapo tools. It all tends to add right up.
The other strategy I would suggest is scoring tools every year at yard / garage sale time. Estates are often great for this too.
Sometimes I will see a collection and just bulk buy if I can. Over time I've lost some while moving and that was a great way to stock back up and have a lot of options for not very many dollars.
The only variation I would suggest is to avoid very rock bottom stuff, like dollar store, or that crap in the hardware store promo bin. Some of those might not even survive the first use! But, it can be hard to tell too, YMMV.
The reason nobody is talking about the bike you got, is because it is simply so bad, nobody who rides remotely seriously as a hobby or otherwise would even consider it as part of the category of mountain bikes.
I know you probably have fun riding it around on some dirt or gravel or something - but really, it's not a mountain bike.
Disclaimer - I'm not even that wild a rider at all.
I would have those breaks burned out in less than one decent, and probably tear the drivetrain apart on my first or second climb (tripple front derailleur? really?)
The geometry is whack and the tires are trash. That thing that looks like a front fork, is not. I would blow that up first day too, without a doubt.
I don't think you appreciate the world of difference between something like this, and even a cheap 2.5k ebike. (Yes that is cheap. You have the dollar store equivalent of an ebike.)
You should have saved your money and gotten a nice second hand kona hard tail or something, rather than buying and rewarding chineesium scrapheap contenders.
You're probably familiar with laptops and such to some degree.
This is the equivalent of someone buying the top reviewed amazon promoted laptop, sorted by cheapest, with some kinda piece of shit 1152×648 screen, 4gb ddr2 ram, 2.xGhz celeron processor, and telling people it's a gaming pc because it says gaming on the box. Then commenting how you find it odd nobody in the gaming space is talking about it :)
Harsh I know but... that's life. Sorry. I hope you enjoy riding and upgrade your bike soon. I just wish that such a e-waste disaster wasn't your stepping stone.
You're looking at this one, right? https://viribusbikes.com/products/emb-a277-rd?variant=406754...
I have no illusion that it's the best bike in the world, but it certainly works for my combination of roads and bike trails. I wouldn't put it on some crazy steep obstacle course or huge jumps but I wasn't looking to do any of that anyway.
But what's the big deal about a triple front deraileur?
Take the time to actually read and understand before criticizing.
Suggesting OP not buy anything or spend 3.5x as much isn't helpful.
Is there a specific model you're thinking of?
[1] requiring a reputable manufacturer, even accounting for second-hand bikes. Conversion might be an option, I don't know what those run.
Not to mention not knowing how well the electric part is done, especially the battery. I'd be ok taking my $200 commuter on some light trail because I'm mechanically inclined and I've got the measure of it. I have no idea about how to assess the electricals but given the cost-cutting, bad workmanship, and bad design I can see in the rest of the bike's build, I'd be really concerned about that.
"Whether you are a professional athlete" lmao
> If it lasts me a year that's good enough
I don't like this attitude because it is wasteful. That's another thing I was taking issue with. Worse because it's an ebike. If it was just some aluminum it wouldn't be nearly as bad, but still kinda bad.
> But what's the big deal about a triple front deraileur?
More moving parts, super unreliable, always low quality.
Modern mtbs use a 1x11 or 1x12 drivetrain (no front derailleur at all, never mind 3x).
I doubt this bike is going to be ewaste soon though. I know a few people I might give it to who might use it. And I drive old cars into the ground instead of buying new so far, so I think I have a good track record on waste.
Even if I wanted to just throw it out, the battery and frame are recyclable.
... which creates much more chain wear from chain crossing ...
> More moving parts, super unreliable, always low quality.
I have a 35 year old Shimano Deore XT front derailleur. I raced the bike hard in the 80s during "the prehistory of UK mountain bike racing". I then rode it for another 8 years, doing several multi-thousand mile tours on it (before the name "gravel bike" had come along). Then I used it as a city commuter for another 5 years.
The derailleur has never failed me, has always been reliable and is built better than most contemporary equivalents.
The fad for 1x setups illuminates some of the pros, but because it's largely a fad, fails to shine a similar light on the cons. For crazy downhill racing, 1x is an obvious choice. For ultra-distance events, long distance off-road touring and general gravel duty, the choice is not quite so obvious.
It's got 5k miles on it and works fine. Just needs little tweaks every once and a while and you can't do full crosses like Big Big. But it goes as fast and as torquey as you could please (or can buy).
These things work pretty well. Just learn to tweak em or get them tuned up.
Why are you comparing your name brand derailleur from a reputable company (from a time when there was basically only x3) that you say is still better than contemporaries, with the absolute worst of those contemporaries, as a way to somehow imply this particularly bad contemporary is worthwhile?
Wild train of thought.
Interesting how you assert 1x setups as a fad for mountain bikes, and then go on to talk about how it's not a clear choice for... long distance touring? Gravel biking? What are you talking about lol
I guess you've not ridden the Great Divide? Long distance mountain bike touring. You could do it on a gravel bike, but it would be much more comfortable on a mountain bike.
Gravel biking ... mountain biking ... the difference is mostly in the eye (or saddle) of the beholder.
> I guess you've not ridden the Great Divide? Long distance mountain bike touring.
That is the most easy going barely off road biking on earth. Thousands of miles of fire and access roads, with a few miles of zero difficulty single track.
> You could do it on a gravel bike, but it would be much more comfortable on a mountain bike.
"A mountain bike". The overwhelming majority of mountain bikes are unsuitable for this. You wouldn't use any of the most popular types: trail, downhill, enduro.
Gravel biking and mountain biking are world's apart.
The closest thing to gravel biking or other long distance off road biking in mountain biking is cross country - but even then xc is _way_ more demanding than gravel. You can't ride gravel bikes on xc routes. Gravel biking is not a form of mountain biking. There does not need to be any elevation change of any kind to gravel bike. There are no features on a gravel trail.
Anyway, sure, a hard tail xc bike is probably the best bike for that trip just due to the comfort of the larger tires. I bet you'd actually be just as happy with a fatty gravel bike though.
You know, I just went and searched to see what people ride on that trail to confirm my suspicion about big tire gravel bikes. Would you look at that - I'm right. Hard tail xc / gravel bikes with fat tires.
Additionally, the vast majority of them are running 1x front chainrings.
Surprise surprise, I know what I'm talking about, and the people that seriously ride the trail you're trying to use to one up me made the same choices I recommend. What a "fad".
https://bikepacking.com/bikes/tour-divide-rigs-2019/
> Gravel biking ... mountain biking ... the difference is mostly in the eye (or saddle) of the beholder.
Absolutely clueless. The difference is stark.
Because the GGP -- you? -- didn't specify "the absolute worst of those contemporaries" but just complained about how "front triples" -- which implies all front triples -- "suck". So the GP quite reasonably showed that they don't.
It's not him moving the goalposts; it's you.
Is that a fairer statement, or would you like to just say I'm once again moving the goalposts by clarifying?
No it isn't and yes I would: Now you're trying to move the conversational goalposts by calling your moving of the goalposts "clarifying".
This conversation simply never was about your snobbish True Mountain-Biking Scotsman perspective, and no amount of your attempts at obfuscation will make it have been so.
In other words it's a sign that the bike is built to a price, and maybe to a list of features and not actually to a quality standard.
Not necessarily bad (I'd trust any 3x Shimano drivetrain assuming it's installed correctly) but it's a sign to watch out.
To go with your analogy, if someone bought the laptop you're describing and was having fun playing games, can't we see that as a good thing? We don't have to get them hooked on more powerful more expensive options.
Another problem with buying such a lowend bike online is they are very often badly assembled. You might find quickly that it becomes noisy because some parts were installed without enough grease, or components may become nearly impossible to remove because of oxydation when it will become time to replace them, and it may just be unsafe because something hasn't been torqued to spec. I once had a thorough look at these kind of bikes and a sticker on the fork clearly stated it was not really rated to be used off road. Thanksfully the CE norms have been done so that bicycles do not explode on potholes filled roads so even a bike not made for off-road is made to survive common abuses on and off the pavement.
My biggest issue with these kind of cheap e-bikes with stupid barely functionnal gimmicks such as (badly) suspended fork and chinese low end electric system is they often turn very quickly to the landfill because something end up being non functionnal and the owner do not know how to fix it himself and which component to replace wit. So to the eyes of many what you really bought appears to be waste (or soon to be) which would have been better replaced by something that might last better. Take the same bike, replace the suspended fork with a steel rigid fork and remove the electronics and you have a bike that can be ridden for years with decent maintenance. But how many people will do that instead of sending it to the landfill and replacing it with the same shit when it gets to this point?
Having said that the good thing with cycling is you don't have to have the newest more expensive bike to enjoy riding and as long as you do it within the capabilities of the bike. And suprisingly a bike can be operated for long while being in a very bad state as long as speed is kept low, squeaking and grinding his way to your destination.
This terminology difference might be meaningful in biking circles, but the places I go are designated as "trails" both colloquially and often by various governments.
> Take the same bike, replace the suspended fork with a steel rigid fork and remove the electronics and you have a bike that can be ridden for years with decent maintenance.
Wouldn't it be too heavy as a normal bike? From what I understand, ebike frames work out cheaper because they don't have to care about not making them heavy.
As for your other question it really depends on the kind of e-bike.
Well integrated e-bike from bigger companies have the engine in the bottom bracket area so you can't remove that and the battery is usually so integrated inside the frame. Most cheap e-bike like yours, if it is the same as the one I see on the viribus website, are regular cheap alu frame on which they have strapped a battery on the standard 2 bolts usually dedicated for the water bottle holder cage and the engine is on the rear wheel. So the frame is pretty standard in that regard. Remove the battery and swap the rear wheel for a regular rear wheel and you have a conventional very entry level hardtail.
Sometimes you can't afford the thigs you want.
I made a good and realistic recommendation for the price range, that would leave OP well off in the long run.
I understand that you could say the ebike part is a hard requirement but, well, I don't think someone who knows so little about mountain biking or biking at all is in a position to make that kind of hard requirement in an informed way.
I also understand that you could read this as really pompous, but please consider what someone saying otherwise amounts to:
"I NEED an ebike mtb, but I also know nothing about mtbs or ebikes"
I used to ride a road bike occasionally but the difficulty turned me off. If I'm stuck with an unpowered bike I just won't ride.
More (or less?) power to ya.
To everyone else, it’s a category of vehicles capable of off-pavement riding on trails. They should be referred to off-pavement bikes.
But the same can be said for most bikes. Very few folks actually run the tour de france or any other competitive race. People get all excited by capabilities or let those who do know and use those features influence their buying.
You presumably are not actually knowledgeable about mountain bikes and riding them?
And yes, I used to cross trail several times a year in MO and mtb park (duthie hill) downhill (stevens) when I moved to Seattle, then watched several people get massive concussions and stayed with snowboarding.
If a thing becomes mainstream it gets diluted. The top 1% definition of a thing is not the thing exclusively.
Pal, come _on_. Read my initial comment, and any other comment thereafter. I was very clear and explicit that I was giving this criticism from the perspective of not "anybody" but rather someone who actively mountain bikes.
You're still not understanding. Those bikes you were talking about - while they may be marketed as 'mountain bikes' (a term anybody can use for anything) - are not fit for the purpose of mountain biking (a set of well establish sports and related types of riding).
You have now moved on to confusing the way marketers lie in their descriptions of bikes in order to sell to the ignorant, with the actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein.
> The top 1% definition of a thing is not the thing exclusively.
Everybody who mountain bikes (more than once har har har) does so on an actual mountain bike. It's not the 1%. It's more like the 99%. People don't repeatedly take these wallmart bikes down trails. Nobody survives that setup long enough to make it in to the group you can by any good standard call mountain bikers.
Go to your local trail that isn't some fireroad or featureless single track, and tell me how many people you see on shit bikes like this.
You know, I'd normally agree with you about this diluted point as it relates to many other things, but I can't here. For example - car racing is not just formula 1 or other top tier engineering categories. The vast majority of car racing is amateur and hobby stuff in comparatively low or very low spec vehicles. The difference is that you can "technically" compete with a formula one car on a racetrack in a 1997 nissan micra with 40hp. The micra can cruise around the track basically indefinitely, stopping only for fuel - and complete the race days after the f1 car. A road is a road.
This is not the case with mountain biking. All non mountain bikes basically explode on contact with mountains. It's self selecting such that people who continue to mountain bike past the first outing or two, must do so on a purpose built good quality bike.
It is in this distinction, that you are missing the point.
It's unacceptable to me that when I have _clearly_ been talking in the context of real mountain biking, you are now deciding, it seems, to take the totally walked back, side stepped, and frankly revisionist approach of only now saying "well technically these bikes are labeled mountain bikes so I'm right". Nuh uh.
Yeah, and everybody else was pretty clear and explicit that that perspective is irrelevant to, like, 95% of people.
Edited to add:
> You have now moved on to confusing the way marketers lie in their descriptions of bikes in order to sell to the ignorant, with the actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein.
That's not the problem. The problem is that you started out by confusing the "actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein" with this discussion, which was an ordinary amateur consumer talking about ordinary amateur consumer products and reviews thereof, and every time someone tried to steer the discussion back to the topic at hand, you've gotten more and more snitty-snotty about your irrelevant No True Mountain-Biking Scotsman perspective.
HTH!
Sometimes you don’t understand what those things are until later. Sometimes the shape is weird and you don’t know how poorly you’re treating your body until you switch to a reasonable bike (and oh, random pains go away). Often the parts are substandard or nonstandard… some part wears down and then you can’t easily repair the bicycle.
It’s hard to trust comments from random consumers because I see so many bicyclists out there which very obviously lack the knowledge, skill, or will to set up or ride their bicycle reasonably. I see people on the road with horribly maladjusted seats, or people who ride a geared bicycle but have no clue which gear they should be in.
With a low-quality bicycle, a bad setup, or poor technique, you end up putting more strain on your body. It’s not necessary to go to more expensive options but you should take some care in choosing & setting up your bicycle.
GP could have been gentler, but they're right to say it's not a mountain bike, and shouldn't be ridden like one.
And that sucks. The things we buy should be fit for the advertised purpose. Mountain biking should be more accessible and there should be trails that GGP can ride on a safe budget bike without requiring that much fitness.
[1] https://viribusbikes.com/products/emb-a277-rd?variant=406754...
Can you show me an example of technical terrain where this line would be drawn?
I'm not sure where the line is, but here is a video of a local mtb park I used to ride a lot and it might give you a good idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFYcnQTcmrw
It's pretty rocky and you can carry a ton of speed in some parts. It will definitely eat up cheaper bikes if you aren't careful.
If you want to find more examples of why cheaper bikes struggle to handle that type of stuff, I'd look up "walmart bikes vs mtb trail" or something along those lines on youtube. Lots of videos and they are usually somewhat entertaining. That said, your bike looks better than those and if you respect its limits, then it should be okay. The trails you describe sound fine for that type of bike, just be careful on hard bumps and stuff.
It's okay to buy something cheap with the understanding that its a stepping-stone to something else. After all, if the hobby doesn't "take" and you move on to a different hobby, at least you haven't wasted too much money.
> This is the equivalent of someone buying the top reviewed amazon promoted laptop, sorted by cheapest, with some kinda piece of shit 1152×648 screen, 4gb ddr2 ram, 2.xGhz celeron processor, and telling people it's a gaming pc because it says gaming on the box.
But if the buyer of this laptop was happy with the games he was playing on this laptop, why are you getting bent out of shape? Sure, he can't run the latest AAA game in HD, but it's clear that it is working for him.
Now I actually get this attitude from gamers often because I have a 1st-gen i7 (from 2011) with no SSDs but a modern video card (GTX 660ti), running Linux of all things.
I say I use it for work and gaming, and the response I get from gamers is very similar to yours - that my "gaming" machine is trash; I should throw everything out (maybe keep the video card) and get a new machine.
The thing is, it works for me - I play mostly Starcraft 2 and have played Far Cry [2/3/4/5] on it. Those are demanding AAA games. It works for me.
Same with OP - his bike works for him, and you are recommending a different product as an alternative, which frankly is a stupid thing to do (Harsh, I know, but someone had to say it).
You'd understand if you ever needed a lawnmower and someone recommended a pair of scissors as a replacement for a lawnmower.
For the "Did you start with a 55k bmw".
No, but for mountain biking I started with an entry level hardtail cannondale that if it was given to someone today, 15 years later, would still be a fun and safe bike to take down your average mtb trails. (Roughly the same cost as this person's bike, new.)
The analogy is bad though. Learning to operate something in the category of cars is not analogous to starting what you believe to be mountain biking.
More apt, would be to ask me about starting a subset of driving as a hobby - like rally driving.
"If you were going to start rally driving would you start with a 200k race spec subaru, or a 1.5k ali express golf cart car with the word rally written on it?"
I would answer, as I did - neither. I'd get something second hand and more appropriate at the same price point.
> It's okay to buy something cheap with the understanding that its a stepping-stone to something else.
If you are ok with 1) rewarding the scam artists that make these 2) contributing to a culture of low quality throwaway goods and 3) using unsafe and inappropriate tools for the job - go ahead.
> You'd understand if you ever needed a lawnmower and someone recommended a pair of scissors as a replacement for a lawnmower.
Again, no. It would be like if someone offered me a dollar store lawnmower that would break in x mins, or a scythe. You might get farther initially with this piece of shit lawnmower, but I'll get all the way with the scythe. And I'll be fitter. And it will last a lifetime.
> Same with OP - his bike works for him, and you are recommending a different product as an alternative, which frankly is a stupid thing to do (Harsh, I know, but someone had to say it).
I bet you wouldn't give this advice about your own hobbies.
>
> Again, no. It would be like if someone offered me a lawnmower that would break in 10 mins, or a scythe. You might get farther initially with this piece of shit lawnmower, but I'll get all the way with the scythe.
Firstly, OP said it lasted a year, not 10m. We aren't comparing something that lasts for 10m with something that lasts a lifetime, we are comparing something that lasted for a year with something that lasted longer (not a lifetime).
Secondly, does it matter if it is possible to get further with the expensive tool if you're not going that far in the first place? If the cheap tool lasts long enough to never require replacement because it isn't used for the entire distance that the expensive tool would be used for, why bother?
Thirdly, a scythe is not a replacement for a lawnmower that lasts 10m. If you're mowing a green at the golf course, a lawnmower that lasts 10m beats out a scythe that lasts a lifetime.
Fourthly, pros in a field generally don't give out the crap advice you're giving out (I have an impressive list of hobbies, which put me in contact at various times with pros from different fields). The only time I've seen the advice you give is when it's given by newbies in a particular field. They don't know any better, because they have not been in the field long enough to notice that its only a minority of first-time purchasers who will go on to want the best. The majority of people entering a new hobby don't stick with it.
> I bet you wouldn't give this advice about your own hobbies.
You'd lose that bet, because I give it all the time. Here's the advice I gave out, and how it turned out.
(To a nephew, wanting to learn guitar, at start of pandemic) "Why a $500 Yamaha? Buy a $50 guitar if you've never laid hands on one before." He only lost $50 before realising that it was not as easy as he'd thought. He would have lost even less had he simply accepted one of my old guitars.
(Acquaintance who wanted to learn to weld): "Don't get a $1000 welder; why not take some classes first to see if it's something you want to do?" After three lessons he decided that woodworking is more practical. Saved $1000 dollars there.
(To my brother-in-law thinking about getting into DIY, four years ago): "Don't get a top-of-range set of tools: Buy a cheap set and then replace the tools as they break with expensive tools." He's not yet replaced any tool in the cheap tool set, because he found that he didn't really enjoy fixing his own stuff. Good thing he didn't spend $1000s on tools.
If you were to stop and think about it you'd realise that the majority of first-time buyers in any hobby field aren't going to stick with it long enough to make the more expensive option worthwhile. If you were in the hobby for any length of time (i.e. not a newcomer) it'd be obvious as you see people join and then leave. The fact that you haven't seen this tells me that you're still quite new to it. Or maybe you just don't have that many hobbies.
In fact I still give this same advice wrt all of my hobbies: pay entry-level money to participate before paying pro money in case you don't want to continue with it.
My hobbies include playing music, painting/drawing/sketching, auto repair, metal-working and wood-working, household DIY (plumbing, plastering, etc), gardening, writing (fiction), electronics (including embedded software), basket-weaving, sewing, cooking ... and a few more that I forget.
In every single one of those hobbies I meet new people who started with the expensive stuff that would last a lifetime, but they only needed it to the last the 3 weeks it took them to decide that they do not like it. Most hobbies are abandoned before even the cheapest kit breaks.
I see the rest of your comment is nothing but accusing me of giving bad advice, followed by examples of exactly the same kind of advice I gave or would give, mixed with a dose of bragging about being in touch with pro... welders, cooks, gardeners and other normal jobs that everyone has contacts in. Except basket weavers. I'll give you that one.
Way to totally miss the mark.
If you drop the basket weaving and gardening, and add mountain biking, machining, and lockpicking - we're about the same on being over-hobbied individuals.
Gotta heavily disagree with you on this point. Not about the sticking to a hobby, you're spot on about that, but about the advice given being "crap".
If you walked into an an actual bike shop and asked them if a $700 hardtail e-bike was a good first choice, they would tell you something like: "oh, that's far too cheap for a hardtail e-bike.. they must've cheaped out heavily somewhere to get it at that price point and trust me, you don't want to be on it when you find out what they cheaped out on. If you want an entry level hardtail e-bike, you'll probably need to spend x dollars more or you can spend about the same for a non-e mountain bike that is a decent entry level one. Just depends on what you are looking to try. If that's too much, second hand is probably your best bet."
Granted, the advice would be different if you already bought it. They would simply warn you that it's probably not strong at all and to be careful taking it on any trails.
> pay entry-level money to participate before paying pro money in case you don't want to continue with it.
Great advise. I fully agree. The thing is, entry level hardtail e-bikes typically go for much higher than $700. Ask anyone into biking about this and they will be concerned about the integrity of the bike at the price point for that style of bike. E-bikes are expensive. You are looking at entry level mountain bikes at that price point, not entry level mountain e-bikes.
It seems far more like its someone buying that cheap laptop, primarily using it to surf the web and play solitaire (or FPSes from 2001) and talk about how great it is. And it is great for what they're doing. Who needs 8 cores and 32 gigs of RAM? The answer is some subset of people between "everyone" and "no one".
Also, the statement that Goggle doesn’t have the best information anymore seems objectively false. We can wish there were other players doing it better, but that doesn’t make it true. I’m open to the idea that Google is just riding their wave, but I’ve yet to see proof. I just see the search industry at large shedding quality results.
I think Google could step up its ranking game w/ ML eliminating a lot of bad patterns, but I'm not sure they have the will to do it, or are afraid of the consequences (every travel blogger selling an ebook will go apeshit about it for instance).
Google is not interested in serving us the "best" search results possible, they are interested in serving us their customers ads. In other words, Google search results are crap, because Google wants them to be crap.
Like I said though, maybe they are just riding their wave (dominance) at this point, but then I'd expect to see better results from a scrappy competitor already or soon. Here's hoping, but even as a discerning user, I haven't yet.
I'm confident that even if Google doesn't solve it, for whatever reason, someone else will eventually. In the meantime, results continue to degrade and the desire / reward to fix it will increase.
I have no idea if that's even possible. The number of people who (a) Google pays to be the default engine for and (b) aren't even aware there are other engines is huge. If the various google search domains went offline, the number of people who wouldn't even be able to find facebook is probably a double-digit percent, let alone those who cannot figure out to fail over to bing, ddg, yahoo, whatever.
That competitor simply doesn’t exist yet, and I think that’s because no one has figured out how to beat Google at search (which is why I think real ingenuity is required).
Not when compared to the trillions of dollars of e commerce revenue that is the reward for getting to the top of Google results - even if you don't deserve it.
Somehow I think Google with the ability to devote billions to solving the problem has more resources to throw at it than any ecommerce company. Except for possibly Amazon.
The point of google is to surface good content above bad content. If they can identify what good content is, surface it, by any means necessary.
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.
CR's freelance writers have written general advice articles on moving services, like https://www.consumerreports.org/moving/how-to-choose-a-relia..., which might be useful to some readers but certainly aren't very deep. These articles aren't the same as CR's actual reviews, which have scores and detailed ratings for each product metric.
> Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products & services are not the best, and often times criminally bad.
> As an example, I used them for moving services for a state-to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving services are merely dispatchers run by a single company, run by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating number of businesses and cutouts.
Honestly, "moving companies" is not a category that seems like it would be in Consumer Reports' wheelhouse, and I'm surprised they offered any recommendations in that area at all.
Also, your anecdote doesn't really support the notion that they're "pay-to-play, just that they did a bad job in some category.
Are you actually thinking of the Better Business Bureau but got it mixed up with Consumer reports? I would expect the BBB to rate moving services and I've heard that they have some kind of membership program for businesses that seems to allow better control over complaints, which is pretty close to "pay-to-play."
CR doesn't review this category and a search of past CR review categories doesn't yield moving services. In general, they don't review anything regional.
They have articles on how to avoid dodgy ones but make no recommendations.
And--- I appreciate Consumer Reports' accuracy, but I doubt that they are 100% accurate. There are probably recommendation sets that end up as garbage for one reason or another (incorrect weighting for my use case, statistical noise, evolution in products since survey experiences, etc).
There's also times where I have personal expertise or preferences that outweigh CR's rankings. CR rates computers, after all, and I would probably not weigh them very heavily in my choice.
AAA guidebooks do exactly this. I remember using them to pick hotels in the 90s.
CR do not and have never recommended moving firms.
They in fact have articles on how to avoid being scammed by firms and best practices but make no recommendations.
I think the burden here is on you or others making this claim to link some evidence.
Agreed. As a PSA do not use the True Car services that are "included" in a membership. It's basically a free pass to sell all of the contact information CR has on you to any dealership that's paying them for leads. You will be hounded for weeks if you try to use that service. I recently found out, through a family member, that the deceptive practice still exists when they were trying to get actual dealer invoices (which CR used to provide, but no longer does). I cannot not recommend CR enough.
From wikipedia, I gather they've tweaked their compensation models and exec team since then, so no idea what they're like now.
Effectively, everyone is AutoTrader though, and you should never give any insurance or auto quote company a real phone number or non-spam email.
That is the point. Given the reputation CR tries to uphold and their relationship and integration with True Car there is not much warning (if any) using that feature in CR will result in dumping your contact information to many dealerships and is a dark pattern one wouldn't expect from CR given the end user is paying for the service. For most non-technical folks I can't imagine this experience is positive after they've handed over their actual phone # and email.
They had a nice histogram, showing the range and most common price and how far off msrp it was.
I don't know how accurate it really was, and if it was accurate, someone might have "gotten to them" in later years to inflate the statistics and preserve profit margins.
But it seemed to me really valuable information for negotiating a new car purchase. The special True Car price and "services" and all that seemed like a diversion to me.
It's like some other things on the Internet - a sensible person subsists on the free "teaser" information and never ever engages in any sort of relationship.
Apart from an indication of what a fair price is, the histogram showed relative discounts between models, and there's frequently/always ones that are being disdained by the public that are very good cars and dealers are desperate to move, versus ones that are in high demand that they won't discount.
It's pay-to-access, but as I understand it they don't make money from ads or from borderline extortion.
I'd describe Which as a good starter for 10, these days, but no more.
They do a decent legal angle and always have done, ie consumer rights - that's their forte for me.
I find independent YouTubers significantly better.
To a point! There are a number of obvious non-critical flooded reviews for lots of products.
I suppose in closing CR is garbage and you have to do relevant research commiserate with how much you want to spend/care.
If only we had a review organization we could trust!
> I find independent YouTubers significantly better.
Could me extremely skeptical. "Independence" on YouTube is very cheap and easy to fake.
IMHO, YouTube is mainly useful for video of someone poking at a product, because for some reason retailers and manufacturers don't provide good enough media on product pages to get anywhere close to substituting for seeing something in person.
YouTube isn’t even a similar product. I assume all reviewers are paid and have no idea their methodology.
I like CR because their methods are defined and they don’t have any competing agendas (ads, sponsored posts, product placement , etc)
Do you mean to say that they receive money to issue reviews (which would be alarming)? Or do you mean to say they charge fees to access review information (which has always been the case AFAICT)?
GE’s quality also tanked, but the power thing is worth looking into.
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.
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.
No, the retailer-specific model numbers are requested or required by the retailers, who either want a slightly different featureset, or just want to avoid people doing price-matching. The manufacturers don't really like it.
Sometimes those retailer-specific tweaks are kinda questionable, but sometimes, if it's the right retailer, they're actually pretty thoughtful.
Their people will tell you all about doing that too.
The difference?
The set I got for $650 (and again, not exact, just representative numbers here) had the faster video processor and ran at 120Hz, which means the 3D capability ran at a full 60Hz for each eye, and game mode was low lag. Both very nice options, and finding them together sometimes meant buying another expensive model that comes with other fat margin, mostly useless features.
I have no doubt it's all about the price matching, but sometimes, depending on the retailer and their business model, it can be about differentiation, like actually having something better in some distinct way. The Video Only people cater to the home theatre crowd and tend to stock sets that are high technical performers at great prices.
Seeing it in the other direction, WalMart tends to have their special edition of whatever it is, and it's almost always price / performance, and or some extra pack in, or size change.
> Turns out each major chain gets their own model number for certain products like TV’s and refrigerators. Just to fuck with consumers trying to make an educated choice.
You:
> No, the retailer-specific model numbers are requested or required by the retailers, who either... or just want to avoid people doing price-matching.
I mean, I don't see the difference. both of you are in agreement it's to fuck people trying to price match. I guess the fact that the retailers insist on it makes it okay in your mind??
Meanwhile, I doubt there are any real featureset differences for most things with model numbers. There are cheap versions of clothing for Walmart, but that's ironically going the other way and trying to confuse the customer by making them think they are the same items.
Model numbers seem to mean little these days to a lot of manufacturers.
They just mean very little to sales, who typically get their way for major chain account.
And if you use the scale that if a manufacturer produces one bad microwave that all their microwaves are bad, I suggest cooking over a fire as no manufacturer is going to meet your judgement scale.
In general, for very large appliances (large fridges; double-stoves; double ovens) you can just ask them to keep an eye out at the local restaurant auctions. My house came with a 48" prosumer fridge. When my fridge died I got a 10-year-old exact replica from a warehouse for 3500$, rather than 18000$. It's worked flawlessly for 8 years, now.
Reviews? Have pretty much ignored them for many things. It has been hard to see the value, frankly. There are always a lot of them, and the information quality has been high noise and dubious in many cases.
They can delete reviews, they can keep the reviews and start shipping a slightly different product instead, they can ask certain customers to write positive reviews for incentives. The list goes on and on.
It's asymmetric warfare and manufacturers hold all the cards. That's why there generally are consumer protection laws, and not the other way around, e.g. protecting manufacturers from consumers (lol).
The semi-good news is that for most consumer goods like microwaves, it doesn't really matter, because they are all "good enough".
I just ask them which models are coming back to the store, and or for a recommendation.
My last washer, dryer, dishwasher and stove were all purchased this way and have ran for a long time now. Needed a new element for my dryer and stove a while back and both were available, easy to install.
And that's the last question: Service. What's available and can I get parts, etc...?
I recently came across a YouTube channel where a guy does various thorough-seeming tests of a medium range of brands for a bunch of product categories (think spanners and scissors and suchlike) and he’ll talk quickly and provide lots of numbers but when you think a little more, it seems that there isn’t much reason for the test results to correlate with a good product (eg maybe if your Phillips head cams out it is because that is what it’s meant to do and not because it’s bad)
Evidence for this? Is it just for stuff specifically tagged as paid content, or is there any evidence that their standard reviews might be tainted by money?
They claim the reviewers go in neutral, but I'm sorry, I just don't trust it. Thr fact that they only test a subset of products in a given competitive space alone makes this too tainted for my liking. (CR also doesn't hit every company in a space, but at least they're not incentivized to pick the ones that pay them.)
1. They aren't often comprehensive enough in their product lineup to be valuable. Obviously a hard problem to solve on product categories like consumer electronics where the product choices can count in the hundreds.
2. They aren't often including the latest and greatest in their reviews either, so I'm quite often not confident I'm getting the best bang for my buck going with their reviews.
https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/
Whenever I visit them I get the opposite of Gell-Mann amnesia syndrome and remember how terrible their recommendations are on products I am familiar with.
However I do find the webcam recommendation article wirecutter did to be of worse quality than the others they had. Its a very room dependent item. Its certainly easy to look at that review having played with other webcams and say hey I think their methodology sucks.
But I recently bought a new toaster oven - I had already had a kitchenaid one that got fine reviews on most sites, but I found it to be really inconsistant. The wirecutter site had photos of the uneven toasting of the same model I had, in the exact same way that mine was. They also showed photos of their recommended toasters. I picked up their recommended one. It toasts exactly as they recommended. So its not a total loss.
I'd say most people's interface to the web has become crappy.
I feel like the fallacy here is assuming that the problem is that Google isn’t finding the good websites. There’s also a simple explanation that the content simply doesn’t exist.
This. The web would be a much better place if Netizens didn't continue to monetize garbage like MKBHD, Unbox Therapy and others that provide absolutely no value in "reviews". They're all just shills for product placement at this point. And yet these paid for commercials rack up millions of views and get pushed to the top of YouTube results whether they're of value or not. YouTube doesn't want new creators - instead they've invested in a few that push the content they want based on the advertising dollars that are rolling in. Google isn't search comparative to the early days of the web. Now it's garbage results driven by SEO hackers. A world without Google would be a much better place IMO.
Even in the tech space, while exceptions like Stackoverflow targeted google as an UI, lots of content is buried in unindexed GitHub issues, etc.
And the removal of the "Dislike" count so that you too can avoid non-informative content i.e. unbox spam, just furthers how shit this situation is getting.
Online advertising will make Google better and that will make you and the world better, too. Therefore, always support online advertising in every way you can.
Look for the helpful crafting printer ads (after you purchase a crafting printer).
In case the reader is unsure, this is sarcasm.
Also note, probably none of these are actual strawberries. they are probably fake plastic representations for sales
The "front door" of the Web has become the gift shop. It's time to find another way in :-)
site:reddit.com + "search phrase"
At least if I want to hear from "real" people.
Also reddit can unfortunately be unsufferable.
- affiliate links? Down ranked
- affiliate links to Amazon? Down ranked further
- page contains advertising? Down ranked
- page contains extensive javascript? Down ranked
- page contains links to Social Media? Down ranked
- post _is_ on Social Media? Down ranked further
- page contains duplicate text, found elsewhere? Down ranked
- page contains many links? Down ranked
- page contains grammatical errors or bad sentence structure? Down ranked
But why would they do it, their whole business is built on these things to exist.
Let's look at some things for upranking:
- page uses a static site generator, e.g. jekyll, mkdocs, hugo? Upranked
- page has a balanced ratio of pictures/text and the text actually refers to picture (+ pictures are not stock imagery): Up ranked
- ... (you continue)
Perhaps you mean: a new incumbent could
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.
However, what is meant here is that content in Discord isn't reachable via search engines such as Google. Whole communities are invisible to traditional search indexing and only reachable through either a special client or an API, both of which require an account and empower gatekeepers.
With respect, I don't think the problem is as bad as you suggest. Some pretty awful articles have survived deletion processes so long as they are on a notable topic.
I could provide endless commentary on this example, but suffice it to say, it is very difficult to look at this comparison and rationally argue no moderation bias exists. Now consider that this is just one tiny corner of the site. This is happening to millions of pages. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder, has been very vocal about its political bias. I, for one, believe him.
The article is so small, though, and on a topic unsympathetic to the largely white and male editor base, that flagrant original research doesn't register.
I had an experience a few years ago when a teenage girl was having consensual sex with me on a party in her room, but she didn’t like the sex, so she just casually told me that I have to put my clothes on fast and get out of the room (so that she can have sex with another guy), or else she goes to the police and tells them that I raped her. At that time I believed that it would be impossible to get me into prison for something I have not done, but the ease of how she said it scared me: the incentives against false reporting are clearly missing.
Whether it's moderation, deletionism, or annual budgets... Wikipedia always seems to have detractors enough to make exon-mobile shudder.
Now you’re just being dramatic. I’d review the whole comment and de-dramatize it.
Yes the web has changed and most Forums are dead, but it doesn’t mean change is not possible. Blogs are still a thing, even if you get to them through Twitter.
The issue stems from Google rewarding junk and people wanting to monetize their content. Couple the two and you have lengthy BS lost in ads, while short clean content is lost on page 59 – but it’s there.
I guess most technologies are like that. Once it is written, once the major bugs are caught, few revisit the code anymore.
The inaccessibility of the software is (was?) widely acknowledged as a significant barrier to new contributors by the project itself. I didn’t think this was especially dramatic or controversial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexFridman
Only to find he's not notable enough for an entry. There isn't an article in a "reliable" source about him, so he doesn't exist as far as the club that now manages Wikipedia is concerned. I wasted about an hour seeing if there was something applicable I could add, but to no avail, as Google failed me.
"Someone should have made this page about [some obscure thing]."
Followed by "I did a bunch of research"
without a "so I created an entry"
SMH
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.
It's only in the last year of trying to index and organize information within my own company that whoever controls the index holds a _lot_ of power to index it poorly.
The core problem is a disconnect between the knowledge available on the internet and search tools. Indexing is a stop gap to enable the web to be usable without solving this problem, but it is becoming untenable and was always known to be non viable, just treated as a problem for another day. The sheer amount of information online and its disorganization, as well as the misaligned incentives of search tools are beginning to make this once far away manageable problem a day to day reality for all of us, the solution requires an architectural change to the way information is stored and accessed and updated online.
I am working on a browser extension to automatically grab text (visible phrases) from the pages I am reading in the browser, save them to my index and implement search. I want to always be able to recall anything I see. In order to match texts I will use neural embeddings computed with a pretrained Huggingface model, fast enough even on CPU.
An alternative way to implement this would be to take screenshots every few seconds (only after recent user interaction). Then I can OCR the images and search anything that passed on the screen, in any app.
It's as if I become the Google Bot responsible with exploration and filtering of potentially useful data.
In the future I might be able to use my index for neural question answering, add a voice interface to my data.
Of course the local index could work for images too. You can grab images and embed them with CLIP to get Google Photos like semantic search.
I think web browsers are going to morph into personal internet agents, responsible with logging, searching, interfacing with external APIs and services, filtering ads, news and mail, making sure we don't accidentally leak personal information, etc. In other words AI that works for the user, locally.
And you think that will happen, while the browsers are still mostly add funded?
But I am with you, that this is a change, I want to see, too.
I think I sponsored it for a year or something by paying for it even though I didn't use it much but I must have used it to some degree because on one or more of my machines it injects interesting results from my earlier browsing when I search in DDG (or was it Google?) at least.
I'm really impressed how far they've taken this idea even as Mozilla has simultaneously been busy dismantling the extension API that made Firefox great.
Sustainability TBD, but they do have a plan.
Sustainability remains TBD.
Thanks for mentioning it since I'm creating a snippet search engine and wanted some competitors to compare.
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.
> Stumbled was created by Kevin Woblick to revive the famous discovery experience StumbleUpon offered back in the old Web 2.0 days.
Brave Search (with their own index) is new and is already better or as good as duckduckgo.
We don't appear to have any of those pages or anything relevant indexed. We'll look into whether these lyric sites have put up some barriers to crawling. If they are big sites we won't have crawled and indexed many of their pages.
When someone need to know the weather or a sports score they usually just ask Siri or Alexa. If they want to do product research most people go to Amazon. Google search is now below 50% and still falling.
Think about it. You want to buy a coffee maker. What is the first site you go? It is probably not Google.
Being highly rated on Amazon is so valuable, that there are whole industries on making sure your reviews are high, including all sorts of malicious review hijacking.
Amazon the company does not seem to care.
> How much will Kagi cost? Kagi will be completely free during the beta-test period for all users. Once we officially launch, we plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, ...
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?
Let me just speculate wildly here:
Seems no-ones Google is the same and how do one manage approximately 4 billion [1] a/b/c/etc experiments if not using artificial intelligence and reinforcement?
Now imagine 4 billion agents ("monkeys") who flip bits everywhere and every time one of them is unusually successful that pattern is reinforced across a part of the "population" of agents.
Every time one of them does something particularly stupid Google relies on users to report an error and swaps out that agent. (This explains why if you report an error in search it appears to magically be fixed 15 minutes later.)
Let's say this has been running since way before 2008 and 2008 just happened to be the time it got completely out of hand:
Mostly it works very well economically speaking but search quality suffers year by year and no one can do anything about it since by now so many optimizations have been applied that for a decade no single human has been able to really understand it.
The AI - using end to end optimization techniques - learns to prioritize ad-heavy sites (since thise are more likely to result in positive reinforcement in the form of juicy ad impressions or clicks) and sites that doesn't really answer the question (since that brings the user back to Google for a new chance to serve ads both in search results and on other high ranking pages.)
In the same manner the system learns to avoid easily understood clean pages without ads as that means game over for this query.
By now everyone who knows anything about it sees that it broken but nobody dares to fix it since that would result in a massive revenue loss.
[1]: assuming half the world uses Google
Some investigation seemed to suggest they were hard excluding any page which hadn't changed in ~5 years.
I have to wonder if the poor behavior from google doesn't come from automatically a/b testing behavior changes against advertising revenue. Up to the point that you make users give up completely giving worse results will result in more search traffic...
I had another hypothesis: that they exclude pages which have no backlinks from other websites, and at the same time are hard to reach from front page of the website they are on. It seems old unpopular mailing lists posts and forum posts are exactly like that.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
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.
The Gell-Mann amnesia of the 2020s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Photos and anecdotes are the common mechanisms used to make the recipe content copyrightable. Even physical cookbooks have these; they just seem longer on websites, because the format lends itself to more text-heavy presentation than a book, which normally has a full-page photo on one side and the recipe/short anecdote blurb on the other.
But don't take it from me, here's the FAQ from the US Copyright Office: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
> A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. Note that if you have secret ingredients to a recipe that you do not wish to be revealed, you should not submit your recipe for registration, because applications and deposit copies are public records. See Circular 33, Works Not Protected by Copyright.
And here is the relevant court case, Publications International, Ltd. vs Meredith Corp. with the legal criteria:
> In addition, nothing in our decision today runs counter to the proposition that certain recipes may be copyrightable. There are cookbooks in which the authors lace their directions for producing dishes with musings about the spiritual nature of cooking or reminiscences they associate with the wafting odors of certain dishes in various stages of preparation. Cooking experts may include in a recipe suggestions for presentation, advice on wines to go with the meal, or hints on place settings and appropriate music. In other cases, recipes may be accompanied by tales of their historical or ethnic origin.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=182201036052136...
Several Google updates later (and after much SEO-driven copycatting), it's difficult to crack the top 10 without ~1500 words of nonsense before the recipe.
This is why we can't have nice things.
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!
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...
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.
Just lately? I've had the feeling Google search results have been terrible for years now.
Someone should really build a better search engine, and preferably one that gives the user more control.
Although frankly it's baffling that Google hasn't implemented some sort of up/downvoting on search results. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing they would love.
I 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.
For example: there is now an epidemic of StackOverflow clone sites. They just post the SO answers with their own ads. But I don't want that site. So how on earth can Google show the clone sites on top of the true StackOverflow?
You'd think they have systems in place with hundreds of thousands of canary queries and "known expected rankings" such that IF one of the fraud sites manage to trick their system, they can just swiftly patch it to restore order and bury the clone sites after page 100. But no.
I never saw a single StackOverflow clone site in my life.
It’s been a thing for years See e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545
But lately (last 6 months maybe) it exploded.
Example from now:
https://coderedirect.com/questions/190779/changing-the-color...
They even have the same url fornat and everything.
Actual result
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-co...
Here I took a random SO post and searched for a sentence in an answer. This result is in the top 5 results (in this case the real SO result was above - but not rarely the impostor sites are above)
They are being intelligent now and using NLP to mix-up the content, but it's very much the same question or answers, or just the answers, or some variation of the two, or made to look like a forum with SO comments as forum replies, etc. Most of it is non-nonsensical if you try understand it.
Example:
"What you can do is set the FormBorderStyle property to None and do what ever you want with the form using GDI" from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-co...
Gives you:
https://pretagteam.com/question/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-winform
https://www.xsprogram.com/content/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-winform.html
http://62.234.115.194/ask/111862315.html
http://www.apes.today/post/11862315/1
https://geek-qa.imtqy.com/questions/193507/index.html
https://www.itdaan.com/blog/2012/08/07/b72deb841dfd594210520ce0edc22516.html
https://stackqna.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-color-of-the-title-bar-in-winform
https://www.extutorial.com/en/share/497449
https://code-examples.net/en/q/b5012b
https://csharp.developreference.com/article/24268263/Changing+the+color+of+the+title+bar+in+WinForm
I 100% guarantee that if you wacked 95% of the above domains and forever banned whoever registered them legitimately from the web forever that you'd make the web a better place.
First google page when using uBlacklist:
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/e8f5a...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11862315/changing-the-co...
clone: http://62.234.115.194/ask/111862315.html
https://books.google.de/books?id=rLCy1mCqChEC&pg=PT189&lpg=P...
https://github.com/xv/xrails-login-ui
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-1-4302-2550-...
"python split csv file into chunks" https://www.py4u.net/discuss/208592 https://pretagteam.com/question/how-do-you-split-reading-a-l... https://coderedirect.com/questions/648201/divide-csv-file-in... https://coddingbuddy.com/article/53776705/how-do-you-split-r...
"python format float up to 2 decimal places but drop zeros if whole number" https://www.codegrepper.com/code-examples/python/python+roun... https://pretagteam.com/question/formatting-floats-without-tr... https://pretagteam.com/question/add-zeros-to-a-float-after-t... https://www.py4u.net/discuss/10930 https://coderedirect.com/questions/141868/drop-trailing-zero...
"python RuntimeError: module compiled against API version 0xe but this version of numpy is 0xd" https://gitanswer.com/causalml-runtimeerror-module-compiled-... https://githubmate.com/repo/moble/quaternion/issues/176 https://pretagteam.com/question/runtimeerror-module-compiled... https://gitmemory.cn/repo/GamestonkTerminal/GamestonkTermina...
It just seems unlikely that they can't do anything to fix it.
Discussions and forums have also been declining, as their discoverability has decreased dramatically due to SEO spam optimizations
> it is no longer good enough to be number one. You have to be number 1 - 10.
I don't blame them, a lot of online store's business model hinges almost entirely on SEO, and Google can change their ranking overnight for just about any kind of arbitrary decision on ranking signals. Building in some redundancy is a smart move, but it's a pretty big red flag that the ecosystem and incentives are all twisted up.
The other thing I hate is "top 10" lists or "is x healthy" articles etc made by a writer who has to churn out x number of articles a day. They end up doing no more than surface-level research on said topic, the site or blog makes money from ads or referral links, and I waste a minute in figuring out that the blog is low quality.
Online ads have had such a negative impact on the quality of web content.
I used to struggle sometimes with DuckDuckGo but 90% of the time it now serves the same or better quality results.
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.
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.
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.
Google indexes and returns links to YouTube videos for queries now and will even point you to the relevant part if the video uses chapters.
STRONGLY disagree. Wordpress is plenty professional looking and modern, and makes it dead simple to find a hosting service, create a site, choose a theme, and start writing content.
I can take a video with my phone and upload it to YouTube from my phone. My phone camera can work surprisingly well in poor lighting conditions. I can spend < $100 dollars and get a couple of cheap ring lights and improve the lighting massively. If I wanted to make a spoof news show, I'd just need OBS and a good webcam or a cheap DSLR now. Way easier than in 2002 where I'd need a Video Toaster and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020325234352/https://www.ninte...
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.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that the blocking happens client-side, and that these spam results often end up taking up multiple results slots. This means that sometimes you will get an empty or close-to-empty Google results page.
Ideally, I’d like to be able to configure Google itself to never return me results from particular domains instead.
Have you tried marginalia and kagi?
If not, come back after you have tried.
Until I tried those I could have thought you were possibly right.
After testing those I am again confident it is just Google and DuckDuckGo.com who fails, which has been my position since a decade or so ago.
I've become so used to suffixing these queries with "forum" or "reddit" to get articles written by real humans.
site:reddit.com inurl:biflIn this case, isn't that the selection criteria rather than an interfering bias?
site:reddit.com/r/biflWhy don't you go straight to reddit, and search there?
Maybe some moderator tool updates after a decade that were also user hostile.
Or just have a memelord managing your Twitter, and soon your latest funny post will find its place all over the internet. I have never eaten at Wendy's in my life nor stepped on US soil once, yet I have seen their "memes" dozens of times.
Ie, searching for `foo` on reddit is: "!r foo"
I couldn't make the switch over for my work while programming.
Buying a blade grinder is like buying a hammer with a spongy face.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Areddit.com&tbs=qdr:yIt 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.
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
*2nd hand source, but seems plausible
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.
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.
My suspicion is that its been poisoned by some combination of an improperly-considered tagging process and malfeasance.
Blocking access to information seems optimally bad for truth.
Of course, that would lose them advertising money, which is probably why they didn't go that route.
I was trying to explain VACnet someone and wanted to link the original talk. Youtube didn't have it anymore. 3kliksphilip covered the topic and he linked to the video. It said the video had been removed, though not why. 3kliksphilip's video helpfully said it was a GDC 2018 talk in the first sentence, so I searched google for that and found the video hosted on another site.
I don't think censorship was at play. I just think the world of mutable data is volatile and impossible to keep a 100% accurate up-to-date index.
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.
We will need a company that does not rely on this model- ex: Apple
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.
Sometimes I still try Google when I don't find useful results in the DDG but more often than not, there are no useful results in Google either.
Still, I don't know what should I do with Google maps, as I use it to find local businesses and when they are open. I don't use it for navigation at all, it's more like an address book for me. Haven't found a viable alternative yet. It's especially hard since I'm in a country that doesn't have good coverage in either Apple maps nor OSM.
It feels like going 15 years back in time - to the time when Google found what I searched for instead of mangling and/or ignoring my actual query every single time.
(Note: it seems some people consistently get better results. I'm not saying it is impossible to get good results with Google, only that I personally have given up.)
Edit: I might sound like a paid shill but I am not. I only know the Kagi founder via HN as freediver and I have not received anything, neither money nor anything else from anyone related to Kagi. (With one big exception: good search results :-)
Google knows about it if you try searching for kagi search engine. Still not amazing, but given how mad I'm at Google I better compensate slightly.
In duckduckgo.com it is the third result when I just search for kagi.
Also with Kagi I don't have to test n different options to get ahead of dumbifier AI that keeps rewriting my queries into something that is simpler to answer :-]
There are no longer "organic" content on the internet, everything is produced by professionals that are guided by analytics and optimisation.
The social media is searchable by it's vendor but the content there is also optimised for metrics that often don't align well with qualities like accuracy.
Only at places like HN or Reddit there's some organic content in form of commentary. HN is kind of special IMHO as its probably optimised for reach to a specific audience and pays for itself that way, therefore it can be optimised for quality through content moderation.
The web is well optimised for monetisation. Unless someone finds a way to optimize it for some other qualities, I don't think that Google or any competition can do anything about it.
There 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.
Can you give some examples of great, contemporary organic content that Google fails to surface?
The fact that Google is showing these blatant scam sites that mirror questions is absolutely mind boggling to me. You'd think Google would just manually derank them for being absolute garbage. At best they're horribly mangled versions of the real site, at worst they're portals for malware infested ads.
Seriously. What's up with these websites that are copies of Github/stackoverflow with a different UI? Cash grab for ad pennies?
It costs almost nothing to run a crawler and host these mostly static clone pages. So yeah, if there is a $100 profit in this, someone will do it. Keep in mind there are still plenty of countries out there where the average wage is well bellow $1k. For many people, the "ad pennies" are worth it.
It can't be that they don't see the problem themselves. I have trouble believing they're OK working on such a shoddy product or that they're told to leave it so shoddy (when they could probably work anywhere else). Maybe there is some technical challenge I'm missing.
If only we could send all these money obsessed intermediaries & creators to an island somewhere, left to scalp & scam & plagiarize each other out.
Then you detect commercial content and downrank it. Ads or the aforementioned analytics should be included in ranking signals to prioritize websites without them.
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.
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.
So I tried Bing, and the thing I was looking for was result #1. Like how it used to be with Google. So I switched to Bing.
Now after a few weeks of that, I see that Bing does the exact same thing much of the time. Totally different queries + same general subject = identical top ten results.
So. Anyone fancy creating the 2022 version of what Google was in 1998?
I've tried, not quite there yet, but it's got its moments.
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
There used to be a way to turn of location priority in advanced search.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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".
A "new old Google" would only be good at searching the 1998 web, and if all you want is nostalgia, http://theoldnet.com is right there.
I used to visit like 20 or 30 forums everyday and get great content. Then answering and getting help was a lot easier too. I had an RSS setup that pulled it all in and things were great. Somewhere around 2009 things just started to fall apart with each dominant social media or content site having their own sections for everything.
The barrier to entry for setting up a wide ranging community became far too low, along with that came the barrier to entry of bad information. I'm in several Facebook groups and subreddits concerning topics that interest me and the information is often crap. Also the same questions over and over. All the things people would complain about on the older forums is now the bulk of the content in FB groups, none of the good features are their, the format is terrible and every discussion eventually seems to turn into politics.
I 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.
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.
It's not entirely clear what the next iteration of algorithm should be... SEO has gotten very good at its game.
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.
If I search for "Barcelona city" do not get any results about the Soccer team.
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.
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.
I frequently research historical topics on India, and I get no results or single digit number of results.
[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.
The user then asks someone in the office or goes and spends an hour at a university library.
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.
I get the feeling though, that the need to compensate for mobile misspelling means a dumbing down of precise vocabulary.
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)...
P.S. Driven by curiosity, I repeated my experiment from an incognito window and it yielded the same results. This time I looked at the results beyond page one, and at least the first few pages of results are 100% relevant.
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.
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.
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.
When I worked at Microsoft, the Bing team had an internal version employees could use where you could report if Bing's top results didn't equal Google's top results.
This was nearing a decade ago, so don't read much into it for what they do now.
This is 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.
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)
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.
Well... it's not fair!!! In 1998, most of the content was published by enthousiasts for fun, the "business web" wasn't really existing yet, and Google was a minor player, so nobody was interested in "gaming" the search engine because there was not really some money to take
Fast forward: now, the web (and apps) is a major driver for ANY business, so there's a lot to win (or lose) to game the system. So the SEO and other user-hostile strategies are widespread (and no IA or algorithm will be good enough to change that)
Solutions that could help ? Maybe:
1) meta search engine: using cross verification and ranking with different search engine might help a little bit (more different algo to game for the SEO)
2) user-validated search: allow user to rank website AFTER they checked the page to exclude bad actors. It's gamable too (like comments and Amazon rank)
3) not-for-profit web: excluding business from search engine (but informations without sell is a kind of pre-sale however)
In any way, I don't see a lot of ways to decide an un-gamable system
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.
But yes, supporting community-supplied adblock-style lists would be a start, and Google isn't even doing that.
Maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
I personally just append `wiki` or `reddit` to queries. Crappy but kinda works.
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).
It won't be perfect, but at least Pinterest wouldn't be polluting image search for years for example.
The list of affiliate marketing sites might need to be human curated (just like SponsorBlock) to avoid false positives.
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.
Link to the Repo please?
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.
They all use different algorithms, so the SEO specialists can't game them all.
Making crappy sites would maybe no longer be worth it.
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.
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).
Real competition in search is probably the best way of reigning in the SEO sector.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And what makes you think search engines don't take quantity and breadth of content ? And, why do you think SEO won't be able to take advantage of that ?
Most people commenting and lamenting about search quality need to understand how much of search quality is an adversarial game, that neither side (search engine vs SEO people who want to manipulate the result in their favor) can win decisively forever. And generally it's not for the lack of trying the quality hasn't improved as much - it's just some areas it's more difficult to make progress due to more money spent on making it difficult for the search engines.
What I am most disappointed about Google and search engines in general isn't so much about ranking simplistic things like generic recipe or product reviews and stuff like that - most recipes for general items are all similar, and product review is inherently commercial that reviews always have been biases (short of using Consumer Reports, almost all magazine review articles are biases and influenced by manufacturers). What I am most disappointed is the lack of improvements in UI and retrieval/recall. Interactive UI that can narrow down search space iteratively and interactively so that I can describe what I want in more precise way is lacking. Where is the virtual librarian that I can talk to to narrow down what I want in a step by step way ? Instead of a single search query being the only input, why shouldn't search engine ask for clarifications and let users more precisely describe what they want ? Human languages and human brain just don't produce a single phrase to describe what we want - it takes sentences and questioning back and forth to determine what we want, and we often need more input to realize and describe what we actually want. And all search engines have failed to provide such an interface. And my bet is that whoever can crack that would beat all other search engines, since users can give better, higher quality input for the search to find.
If there were multiple search engines in use with different ranking algorithms and different search strategies, then "SEO" would be difficult to impossible to achieve because optimising would one search engine would likely be a pessimisation for the others.
We don't just need one competitor, we need many. And they can't just be copycats, they need to do their own thing, and that might well make the cost:benefit of SEO unviable.
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.
Source/Proof?
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.
Can you recommend some of these channels?
But those communities aren't interested in advertising their existence.
What happens is, if you search for something that's specific enough that there are few results or no results, it will either ignore keywords, assume that you meant to put a space inside a multi-word identifier, or spellcheck-correct something that wasn't actually misspelled. This produces convincing-looking decoy results, and you have to look closely (or click through) to find out that it's wasting your time, them rerun the same query in verbatim mode or with more quotes.
So then you've forced it to verbatim mode, and reached a query which, let's say, has one StackOverflow thread which you've already read and which failed to answer the question. Then your search results will be a couple pages of StackOverflow scraper sites. I never want to visit a StackOverflow scraper site. They should be easy to detect. Why aren't those domains being blocked properly?
I map this decline to the exit (with some sex scandals mixed in) of Ranking VP Amit Singhal and the start of John Giannandrea leading R&D. From what I understand from the grapevine Singhal was uber conservative about how anything AI would scale in the ranking algos whereas Giannandrea was pretty much a 'let's AI all the things' kind of guy.
This aligns with the start of forced 'natural language' queries. After this roll out you now have to second guess how AI expects a query in order to get half decent results out of google.
As an example, in the early 2000's you could just type: "phacoemulsification+resonant"
Nowadays the expectation from googles AI is to query along the lines of: "What is the frequency of the ultrasonic driver in phacoemulsification?"
(BTW the first query still gives me a correct answer in ddg.)
In addition to the AI galore, google dropped all the power-user feature keywords (as in they are still there but we will politely ignore them when convenient),
Also from forum discussion the GOOG employees feedback was always that the bolean opearators were underused (probably only a few millions of users?!) so it got removed "but you can use quotes", because it is so much more convenient.
Google search has been slowly adding just too much friction. Now I just use ddg and get decent results 85% of time with zero friction/frustration.
For my use cases the only scenario where google's AI shines is in 'Google Shopping' product/price search, for everything else it truly feels like the right tech for the wrong problem.
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.
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.
Unfortunately SO doesn't allow questions a la "Which is the best printer for doing X" :(
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The second Google clearly favors shorter answers, SEOs will publish just that.
SEOs go where the wind blows.
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
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.
Stop thinking of google/alphabet/insertnewbrandnamehere as a search company. They attempted to make money from the search engine in the 1990s when they couldn't find customers willing to pay for that technology and the company chose to make money from ads. Your company is defined by how you make money, not by user perception or press releases. Google is an ad company because they make money off of advertising. Goodies they give you that leads to better targeting of advertising for them is merely good ad business, stop thinking it's for any other purpose.
I have the same problem for years. I simply can’t find the best library / package out there. Neither on Google nor on Github, npm, Duck and co. Therefore I’ve started to build my own personal search engine powered by bookmarks and tags. The irony is that I use Gmail as a bookmarking and tagging provider where search works just perfect.
In addition I subscribe to lots of newsletters, so an inbox search gives the industry pulse + my personal faves.
Outside my expertise / domain I rely on friends. Want a new technical jacket for winter? I ask my friends who do winter sports for ages. In reverse, I give them advice for the web.
And I don’t mind. This is how we went back to ‘personal’ computing.
1. The term being searched for
2. Screenshot of the actual results
3. Demonstrably better link that doesn’t appear high in the results
I’m not sure Google is capable of doing anything about the issue without some concrete examples.
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.
Two days ago I searched for a mission description of a game because my partner was talking to me and I only got half of the mission description. Top results were sites which copy headlines from forums and display tons of advertisements. This made me furious and I wouldn't be surprised if Google is by design ranking search results from certain categories based on advertisement real estate. The more Google-ads the more prominent the search result.
I make Pichai responsible for all the spam. He is, in my opinion, actually an idiot who doesn't understand that his strategy will be the downfall of Google as THE search engine. I really miss Page and Brin and their "Don't Be Evil" culture.
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.
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.
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...
Bing is the best when it comes to video search.
Brave is great when searching for controversial or censored topics.
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.
1) Its by a forbes contributor, who makes listicles for a living. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/people/...
2) It does not appear the person writing the review actually purchased any of the knives. The article is an assembly of quotes from Chefs. While Chefs do have domain knowledge, and probably sometimes have good opinions, theres no way to tell if any are sponsored by different knife brands. It's not a REVIEW comparing the actual products, its somebody who googled chef knife quotes and cut/paste a page together. The review itself does NOTHING to actually compare the products to each other.
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.
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?
Until people pretend to monetize it will never work like that again.
After I posted it I monitored my web logs for a bit and watched both Google and DuckDuckGo hit the page.
3 days later I did a search for "PouchDB Image Blob Demo" on both Google and DuckDuckGo.
Google had almost nothing at all for that search and my page wasn't on any of the results they offered. DuckDuckGo had my post at #1 for that search.
What are they supposed to do? The "Internet" as an information resource is dead. All new topical information has moved to walled gardens such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Reddit etc, and mobile apps. The open websites such as Wikipedia, StackOverflow etc dominate everything else. Websites are legacy objects which no-one visits anymore, and they have therefore raced to the bottom to earn scraps of revenue. This is a structural problem that Google cannot fix. Google itself is doomed on the long-term unless it can index new relevant content.
i.e. ignore 50% of the search query, go to the back of the line
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.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
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...
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.
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.
It certainly is the approach facebook has taken with their marketplace place search engine, where the signal to noise is just barely high enough to keep the audience and there is absolutely no tooling exposed (verbose search etc) to increase the signal rate.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like many HN users, I assume, my method for finding useful info online has always been to find a forum. You can't monetize a forum post without it being ignored or discouraged by the community so until that changes forums will always provide the most consistently helpful content on the net.
Obviously these companies are making enough money off the segment of the population that does not behave this way to make it worth their while. My question is how big is this segment and will it slowly dissolve as older generations pass and more grow up with the internet? Or will there always be enough people susceptible to this spam that the internet will never get better?
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.
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.
Perhaps that'll be readjusted in a year, when covid is not top of mind for a majority of the users.
It doesn't seem crazy to me that people are seeking out COVID-19 testing now. On the other hand I don't have any question in my mind about where I would go for COVID-19 testing because both Cornell and Cayuga Medical Center run testing sites that are well oiled machines. I am entitled to use one for free because I am staff, students are required to get testing once a week. If I am getting a medical procedures done I am required to get tested by CMC. For people in Tompkins County there is very much a "right answer".
Is testing, particularly personal interested in testing really politicized? My wife was required to get tested once a week when she was helping out at a nursing home and she found that pretty annoying. If somebody wants to get tested personally though what could be wrong with that?
That makes it a social network optimized for engagement.
Someone posted a link to you.com in another sub thread. The results for the same query over there is what I'd expect.
I'm thinking that living in a deep blue geo is what's coloring my experience. Perhaps others can post what they see from an incognito browser.
Ultimately this is where big data analysis should be used. Log incognito results from a geo-diverse set of IPs to understand (a) the ranking model (b) the consequences of the model.
One cheap personalization trick that works is to raise the rank of links that you click on preferentially. It drives SEO and other people concerned with their rank up the wall because they see it changing and can only speculate about what other people see.
https://smallpdf.com/result#r=65aec01a358fb33d67f37736c8c099...
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...
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.
I also installed https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/ recently to block some annoying sites from results such as geeksforgeek polluting C++ related searches. I am uncertain if this is inevitable because I am increasing interested in higher-quality content, while most content on popular (SEO optimized?) sites is definitely not the best.
I am still happy with Google Scholar results, though I have no benchmark to compare against. ReserachGate?
I’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?
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.
Here's a up to date PDF from Google explaining search intent:
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
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.
NL queries return poor results if the content creator didn't create it with searchers in mind. Most of these sites also often have a very poor UX.
There's of course a larger incentive to optimize for popular stuff, especially when there's commercial intent (or implied commercial intent by the absence of informational intent).
Bad search results can be opportunities, and many new bloggers focus on this right now which is why they often appear first in search results before the actual experts.
But it would only take experts to improve their content to outrank them because expertise and trust are also ranking factors right behind UX, and if you have both you win. Expertise alone just isn't enough.
i.e. the users of my search engine are not helping me well enough for me to do my job.
> NL queries return poor results if the content creator didn't create it with searchers in mind.
i.e. the content creators from 30 years ago where not clairvoyant enough to consider the robot crawling needs I have, in order to do my job.
> Most of these sites also often have a very poor UX.
i.e. the content creators I am indexing just have plain text which is not helping me well enough, for me to do my job.
I wonder if there is ever an instance wherein google employees are able to look within and realize there is work to be done rather than blame external constraints. Specially when other search engines are still able to satisfy exotic/technical/archive queries, despite these external constraints.
Google had a mission to organize the world's information and make it accessible. It seems Alphabet has rewritten it to "organize the world's information"... "for popular stuff, especially when there's commercial intent".
It occurs to me that it could partly be that the "free and open" internet seems to be dying. For example, Discord or Slack are often used to replace message boards but that means they are no longer indexed and searchable. There are many examples like this right?
The old free hosted sites are dying off or provide no monetary value to Google. So even if they still exist, why bother indexing them.
This has nothing to back it up of course, just musings.
(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.
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
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.
Free natural language search, based on dialogue. A cross between GPT-3 and web search. (https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving-la...)
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.
It’s quite hard to make specific searches - it insists to show me generic results, either by “did you mean?”, or excluding the keyword I explicitly added, or because it thinks I am looking for something more common.
If there are no results they should just tell me - instead of trying to keep me “engaged” with their spam.
It seems to be that the original only grail algorithm -page rank, that made google the superstar it is, can be hacked in a way that saturates the internet with low quality search results.
The obvious question seems to be what algorithm could be used to identify/differentiate low quality websites from high quality sites
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.
But at the same time I always thought of how odd it is that Google competes in an area where there is no user lock-in whatsoever - I mean search should be one of the most easy areas to disrupt - with almost no competitors.
Well paint me surprised.
"There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated." [1]
Google is how the masses are "educated" these days. There is also the narrative of how students, high school, university, and collage are just googling everything for their tests and exams and not learning everything. (I am one of them)
I am sure SEO spam is part of the problem but there are always multiple narratives going on.
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.
I blame the iMac G3 and specifically Jeff Goldblum for all of this mess.
Example of terrible SEO results - I saw an interesting magic trick on Reddit, and someone in the comments mentioned they did it using "Key BDM Scissors". I tried searching all sorts of different things along the lines of "how do Key BDM Scissors work", but literally every single result was just online stores selling the scissors, with the word-for-word exact same blurb on each page. No matter how I tweaked the query, the results were identical, and in no way explained how the trick scissors worked. Useless.
> I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either.
Strongly disagree.
I'm pretty sure the kind of drive and passion that led to the very high quality of Google search back in the day is long gone.
At this point, people do not join Google for the technical challenge or the reputation and/or ethos of the company, but for the fat bonuses and RSU grants.
If you try this with Google you'll immediately be captcha'd to hell and back. You can do it with a browser extension (and many of these exist) but you're always at the mercy of the browser maker (often Google itself) who can arbitrarily decide break your extension.
Programmatic access to the web was exactly the premise of the so-called "semantic web" from a few years back but it never caught on. We probably need a government-funded search spider and database that is mandated by law to allow REST access and which can never be commercialized. Of course any attempt to build such a thing would be lobbied into the ground by Google, but I can dream.
Disgusting.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
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.
I realized just today that adding quotes around search phrases in DDG makes it return nonsense (3 screenshots): https://imgur.com/a/2SHpjPG
Receiving an arbitrary question and finding the most helpful site for that question out of the entire web is already nearly impossible.
Now consider the above problem, except the sites you have to search are highly adversarial. More precisely, the internet is roughly divided into people who post useful content and have little interest in SEO and those who only care about SEO and clicks and not about creating useful content. The latter are more motivated and have more resources. For every useful site, they can take that site and create 100 of their own copies with the same content, more aggressive SEO and their own ads.
How is Google, or anyone else, supposed to navigate this landscape?
It’s actually useful they perform this or else some of that content would never appear in Google’s search results.
I look up anything news related and the entire first few pages are Foxx/Murdoch and whatever other batsh*t content I don't want to see.
I cannot block channels from my search results and I have hardly any control of the content I see. I can't organise subscriptions by folder, I am inundated by "YouTube shorts".
Worst of all, I have a legacy YouTube account with a failed "gaia migration" that I cannot delete because the migration somehow failed and I can't access the content. I have tried contacting their support staff and they told me they couldn't help. It's been 6 years and they haven't been able to do anything about it.
Amazon, Microsoft, Apple - please make a competition service to YouTube focused on the viewer's experience.
The gaia migration tool simply says "account not available for migration", and that's that.
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.
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!
Link to the Repo please?
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.
Maybe use the categories mentioned in the twitter thread such as health, travel, recipes, product reviews, etc.
We can't build another AI black box to try and do that. There is a option in search to report spam or improve search results.
Out of our laziness and expecting getting everything perfect, sometimes collectively working and reporting bad content-copying websites, etc. would be collectively useful for all.
Search had gotten so good that we probably expected to get perfect results everytime. Untill bad guys started to game it. I beleive it's more of cat and mouse game, and where all users collectively should help and mark as spam.
How would you combat commercial actors weaponizing this reporting to perform takedowns of legitimate competitor websites via distributed bot reporting attack (DRoC, distributed reporting of content attack)?
I 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...
(2) The internal competitor of advertising. If the SERPs were perfect you'd have no reason to ever look at the ad.
When did Neil Armstrong set foot on Mars? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730) (October 2021)
When I'm searching for "best short throw projector", most of all the results on Google are SEO spam. The same search on YouTube has a lot of low quality YouTuber garbage as well, but there are at least a couple of high quality results where the host tests input lag, fan loudness etc of several projectors. This is the kind of content that used to exist in sites (I remember Tom's Hardware from the early 2000s), but now seems to be hidden deep in YouTube only.
Something must be wrong, but I don't know what.
Shrimp recipes may not be a “significant category” but this I think highlights one of Google’s search issues. It’s also how they make money. If there were no revolving door of promoted content, then how would today’s advertisers ever reach you? It’s a balancing act to maximize profits while minimizing damage, and they aren’t doing a good job with balancing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So many queries can be answered in a sentence or two but are spun out into an entire article so that it is more search engine 'friendly'.
Same goes for YouTube videos, pad it out so there's enough time for ads.
I think Google would like something like Pagerank but for authors. Unfortunately Google+ never reached critical mass. Structured data is more prevalent, though, but the accuracy/trustworthiness of it is something that'd have to be taken into consideration.
Use people's servers as a sort of botnet to process search results, the more you process the more you earn, you'd need maybe storage nodes for indexes, processing nodes for ai/ml categorization of results, and then maybe people can also earn coinage for ranking results they do get, and that way the shitty sites could be more likely filtered out.
To advertise, costs coins which allows advertisers to basically buy ads not from the SE itself but from users via a marketplace.
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
- 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.
Random example: paste a stack trace in google, add, say, raspberry pi. First 5 pages of results will be beginner tutorials on how to set up something on your Pi. If you're lucky you'll get something related to your stack trace in the later results. Sometimes you don't get squat.
"This 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."
It's frustrating to me that I almost never get forum results from Google any more. DuckDuckGo/Bing has been much better in that regard.
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
> -site:w3schools.com -site:geeksforgeeks.org -site:programiz.com -site:realpython.com -site:tutorialspoint.com
to every search I make, in order to avoid all these BS and get to the official sites.
But bad news is, that list keeps growing and it's impossible to filter out every single one of them.
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?
I agree, Google is no longer good for technical questions or specific queries (like copy/pasting errors messages) but I imagine they crunched the numbers and found that they don't bring much revenue anyway
In a truly inclusive and expansive index isn’t it a bit of cat and mouse with SEO? Presumably the only way to get rid of them would be for Google to basically start curating the web. It’s an interesting thought but a bit unsettling at first. A secondary/premium product line or competitor seems more palatable.
Perhaps this is simply an example of the business life cycle in action. Eventually all businesses crush themselves under their own weight and greed.
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.
I’ve been noticing Google returning lower quality results consistently for at least a year.
My guess is that the results are based on relevant info, but also on which pages can serve up the most ads at the same time. Because the internet is heavily influenced by search algos, over time, this decision feeds back on itself and results in search results being spammier, less content rich, and less accurate.
Part of the problem is surely how Google's ad model influences the success or failure of various kinds of websites, but a deeper problem seems to me how anybody qualified to share medical information freely would be acting against their own interest.
When i started using DuckDuckGo, i somewhat frequently had to do a !g to find what i was looking for, but for the past couple of years DDG has been spot on, and Google returns mostly trash. Not that it matters when all the good answers are on Reddit or StackOverflow.
Sadly, DDG lacks behind in the (local) shopping category, at least if you're in the EU.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
And as I've stated, I will give you $500 if you do not like the demo of what we are building just to show you that I am not f*&%ing around with this. Our small team is growing very carefully in a well-defined niche for this.
Any other way of using google lets rankbrain swap your specific engineering jargon for high click-through kardashian news and rap lyrics.
Google is only good for finding stuff you already know exists. What ever happened to exploring the web?
To get the actual details I had to go register on a forum and ask people there. Feels like pre-google all over again.
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
The author seems to genuinely believe Google is not combatting it, but trying to generate revenue via showing lame results
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?
This is the key insight from the thread. Publicly traded companies get pulled into the short term thinking cycle and this is the inevitable outcome.
I could not reproduce their problems when I googled the same string.
So a startup would still need some secret sauce, otherwise they might gain a toehold just to get absolutely wrecked by Google tweaking their algorithms a small amount and regaining dominance.
Source ?
>The problem is that I have NEVER seen a good answer to a question about ANYTHING at Reddit. NEVER. I often use "-reddit" in my searches because of this problem.
Interesting ! I guess YMMV :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
We do affiliate marketing on ATTIC.city that we believe is honest and fair. We let every product on, from almost any vendor (that we can technically support), regardless of whether we have a commission agreement. Our search results always give the best match that we can for your query. Period.
Anecdotally, I googled "the oa wikipedia" last night and Google had no clue what I was talking about. This morning it's working as expected.
It was ironic to be confirmed with pop culture and a Hacker News post.
I've noticed a decline in the last 3 years, and a huge drop off in quality in the past few months.
Another example from a few months ago was searching for "milankovitch cycles" and Google had no clue. A few days later it was working again.
An often made mistake is thinking of yourself as a Google customer.... you are their product (to marketeers) not their customer.
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.
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.
Google / YouTube suggestion engine is now evil and corrupt to the bone.
We used to say that what is brought on the Web stay on the Web... Not anymore.
Marketing ruinned everything, as usual.
Bing is okay but getting worse over time.
Google image search is the worst. Bing is marginal but at least useful.
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.
I hear this argument a lot, and I think it is a cop out.
Google literally bills itself as being able to personalize itself to your interests and being able to learn based on your queries. On top of that, google used to work 7 years ago essentially perfectly. If there were really such a divergence between myself and "typical users" you'd have heard them all complain about google then, because they were using it also.
What's going on here is a misalignment of incentives between users and Google. They don't have an interest in being useful, they have an interest in herding eyes to the most profitable places and in using people to train their AI. They believe nobody can oust them as incumbent and so they no longer feel they have to deliver a good product if doing that hurts the bottom line.
I think what we need is a global micro payment system which enables good content creators to be funded for their work directly.
"I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either. I’m wondering if this isn’t really a tech problem but the influence of some suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases."
I'm pretty sure Google doesn't make enough money on third party sites to intentionally make its own search results worse.
What's happening here is the ever-growing battle between search algorithms and SEO. Most of sites that he is complaining about are likely doing an incredible amount of optimizations for search engines and human psychology to show on search results pages and get people to click on them. They A/B test, within singe sites as well as run the same or slightly modified content through site networks.
So sites optimize to get crappy filler content on Google, and Google changes to demote those sites and produce better results (which people still complain about).
This is also the reason that it's not so simple to do better than Google. A new search engine also has to have an algorithm and presumably it'll share many of the same approaches that Google has used and have been gamed by content farms. If a search engine does come up with a break-though mechanism to separate the bad from the good, then either sites will adapt to that, and/or Google and other engines will adopt similar mechanisms too.
And if a search engine somehow made an un-gamable algorithm, then that would be a pure good for humanity and go them.
But also in these types of discussions you really need to bring receipts. Otherwise it's hard to talk about what's even good or bad. What terms did he search for? Which results were bad? What should have been there instead?
I did a quick search for "hip replacement" and the results look great to me: top result from American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, a definition card, then Mayo Clinic, medlineplus.gov, Johns Hopkins, local MDs, new stories, images, WebMD, etc., and seemingly useful related searches like "What are the signs I need one"...
Maybe that's just not a monetizable enough term. "quit smoking" should maybe turn up crappy help articles, but it's also pretty good. Two ads at the top this time, then CDC, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, lung.org, local results, WebMD, etc..
Not that I don't believe the author, but he's certainly invested either directly or indirectly into companies working both sides of the SEO war, from search tech like Metaphor to algorithmic SEO like RankScience. So rather than trusting him that results are bad, it would help an honest discussion to point out examples.
Google 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.
I did do the hip replacement search and got no spam and all medical organizations.
I just tried "what are the signs I need a..." and chose the first completion of "pacemaker". That also had very high quality results from government health orgs, medical associations, Mayo and Cleveland clinics, healthgrades (looks ok), and a nice list pulled from Vein, Heart and Vascular Institute.
Do you have a specific search that has bad results?
let's all remember Clayton M. Christensen's lesson: a market can only d=be disrupted once it's overserved.
Guess search/google is due for disruption. DuckDuckGo is looking good, but maybe it's going to be a second-mover (second after DuckDuckGo).
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
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.
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.
It feels like we need a new kind of search engine with a radically different commercial/operating model to take over, with healthier underlying incentives driving the decision making. I don't see the likes of DDG or Bing as being good enough alternatives - they have many of the same problems and aren't significantly different enough from the "Google model".
Perhaps we need a not-for-profit structure for something as important as search. I know Mozilla and Wikimedia have their own problems, but perhaps something along the lines of how these organisations are structured.
Or, we remove the "indirection" baked into the commercial model and allow people to just pay directly for good quality search. Essentially have a model where the "product" is high quality, unbiased search results, as opposed to the product being the eyeballs of the customers using it. The revenue comes from people who can afford to pay for some premium features, where the search results fundamentally are the same for all, but the subscribers (or donors) get added benefits like bookmark syncing, cloud storage or other value-adds.
But, the subscribers effectively subsidise the otherwise completely free search engine for everyone else. The core search results are the same for everyone, paid or not, it has to be a fair, open and non-discriminatory in that respect.
I don't know whether this works commercially, without being pulled into the cesspit of "paid listings" and advertising, or whether it would have to be a not-for-profit/charity setup which also relies on external donors, but that has its own challenges.
As someone who relies on search as part of my day-to-day job, I would happily pay a monthly subscription for a good, clean search engine. Partly out of a moral conviction that an unbiased search engine with good underlying incentives is an important thing for the world, and partly from a more selfish perspective of wanting to improve the quality of a tool that I use and rely on.
I pay Google nothing currently. I considered signing up to YouTube Premium - which I'd be happy to do, if it didn't rely on a whole extra level of Google tracking then being turned on for me (ie. needing to be constantly signed in to YouTube - which then conveniently signs you in to all other Google properties). It feels like even when you pay for a Google service, you're still "the product" and not "the customer".
I occasionally see new search engine projects listed on HN. I wonder if anyone is working on something that may one day be able to knock Google off the top spot - a position which I believe it no longer deserves.
https://nitter.net/mwseibel/status/1477709354014887938#m:
"What would a paid version of Google Search results look like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible results and not be worried about generating revenue?"
Micheal Google sort of already does this, like tailspin2019 and I said YouTube Premium exists[1][2].
> Amazon no longer producing high quality products in significant categories
> Netflix no longer producing high quality movies search results in significant categories
> Facebook no longer producing high quality anything in significant categories
I just read the transcript of that podcast found here: file:///C:/Users/jccal/AppData/Local/Temp/Search_Off_the_Record_-_27th_episode_1.pdf and that is NOT what they claim they are doing.
It seems like what they are doing is basically using synonyms. From the transcript: "So if you search for something like fireman, it would automatically include the different versions, including websites that mention firewoman or fireperson." (most of their examples are French or other languages that have more genderded forms of words than english)
They also say, "we are not in a position to tell what people-- how people should write."
Wouldn't you do the same thing? (don't forget to toss billion-dollar scraps to competitors, to head off monopoly restrictions).
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.