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> but at the end of the day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than that.

Looked at Netflix clicked on a movie that I though may be interesting, it was overdubbed in English since it was a Korean movie. I watched maybe 5 minutes of it then exited. Go to YouTube and suddenly Korean videos are being suggested.

At a car dealership with my sister she asked me to be there for support when she leased a car. At home same day hours later YouTube again it is plastered with "how to buy a car" videos. I hadn't been looking for a car, never searched for anything like that in the previous days ever.

I've had my professional-subscription Wall Street Journal app run a full page ad for frozen jamaican hot beef patties (so good...) that I bought a box of at costco earlier that morning. Pretty amusing, just given how off-brand that is for ads that run on WSJ.

Not sure if guerrilla marketing or not. Nevertheless, it worked, sort of. Sounds like something right up my alley, but alas I'm nowhere near a costco.

> Pretty amusing

Went to a doctor over issues with my feet. Got spammed with ads covering various health issues. Patient data tends to be protected in most countries, no one should have access to when I visit what doctor and I find it insane that Google gets away with using that protected information to sell ads.

Fair guess would be that you leaked that information somewhere along the way - putting the address into google maps, pulling up the dr office phone number on google proper etc.

I have an Android phone, so I wasn't surprised that Googles spyware managed to get that information, I was surprised that they are allowed to collect and use medical information about me without ending on the wrong end of various related data protection laws.

There are no healthcare privacy laws the the USA that apply to Google. Indeed, "medical information" is not generally protected. HIPAA only prevents "healthcare providers and healthcare businesses" from providing that information without your consent. If you disclose or leak medical information to other companies, they are not required to maintain confidentiality and can sell or use that information perfectly legally.

You could do a test. Get someone to take your (locked) smartphone into a well-known dealership for something you aren't ordinarily interested in. Blind test, you don't know where they took the phone. Google tracks the physical location of your phone (don't know if it's possible to completely opt out of that)... trivial to match that to "dealership X" given that Google Maps already knows about those. If in the blind test you can tell your friend where they took the phone based on increased ad activity, then there's proof.

A day after I started using an Android device: I cycled to work, and my phone gives an alert and asks me to rate X. WTF? Oh right, I cycled by X on the way. I immediately turned off what I could; no more popups like that but do I really think Google doesn't track my location any more?

> I can’t help but think that Google is allowing this to happen because it pays the bills

Google is not that short sighted. They know that if people stop trusting it to give good results then they'll lose their market.

I suspect the problem is just harder than it seems.

At the end of the day being shortsighted doesnt matter. They are a publicly traded company that pays their top employees in options. If the problem of spam becomes too difficult they will focus on milking the cow until it dies just like every other massive company that came before it.

I think they are trying to cater to people who search using questions and in that process they are ruining a good search engine.

The problem is that no one is bothering to give you an alternative because they can't make money out of it.

Let's say I want to do a '10 best bikes for under $1,000' article. How am I going to do that well without actually going out and buying 10 bikes and being prepared to make hardly anything in return?

If Google deindexed the spam, that effort might actually be worth it for a bike shop to do an honest comparison. But so long as you’re just going to get buried by SEO spam, why bother?

While that would improve things I still think it's rather unlikely that a bike shop would be willing to give anything but a great rating for the bikes the are selling. And if they are their suppliers might not like it. There's still a dependency.

True, bike shops tend to hock one manufacturer. I still think reducing the SEO ‘reviews’ would create space for honest reviews though.

That kind of article is trash anyway, they should limit it to 3 or 5 bikes not 10. Many best "auto" reviews simply have a category so they dont piss off any one auto manufacture.

Even if you look for the top 10 trucks, they will end up showing all the major brands, because they will break it down for: 4x4, extended cab, full size, mid size, ...

Lists are mostly garbage because you dont care about the top 25, you really only need to know the best item and the next best at a certain budget

And just at this moment, we have hordes of affiliate marketers working 24/7 updating their "articles" to say "best _______ 2022".

I would be very surprised if there wasn't a Wordpress or similar plugin to automate this.

There is...

Just today, Google discover suggested me an article titled exactly

"Proton & Atom LT vs Nano Air: Key Points ([month_year])"

> the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced

This is a comment sentiment (I’ve already bought a fridge! Don’t need another!) and it is a bit of a failure mode. But, I think value on advertising around recent purchases to people is super high. A recent purchase, although often wrong, is one of the best signals you can get. So much purchasing happens in clusters (setting up a space, picking up a hobby, etc) that a specific person is in buying mode for a specific topic is crazy valuable. And there’s splash damage on the wrong ads. Maybe you don’t buy a second rice cooker, but the ad reminds you to get a toaster.

Not just that, the odds some one will return a product are non trivial.

Good point. I bought a wireless router, didn't like it, got another one a month later. I imagine the odds you'll buy a wireless router in the next month if you bought one in the last month are way higher than almost any other signal you could find.

> Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced.

This is a ten-year old talking point. Why people continue to insist on this falsehood is beyond me. Do you think these advertisers are stupid?

-> buy refrigerator. gets lost during transport / is damaged / “oh, I wanted the 550T, not 505T” / “works great, let’s also replace the one in the beach house” / etc.

You have to remember that these possibilities are competing with other ads that have extremely low rates of success.

>> Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days / weeks are drastically reduced.

> This is a ten-year old talking point. Why people continue to insist on this [...] is beyond me.

Because it continues to happen.

> falsehood

The only falsehood here is your claim that this is a falsehood.

> Do you think these advertisers are stupid?

Yes, apparently they are.

Dcrainmaker has been "pay for play" for at least the past 10 years. He's very thorough, but not altruistic. There was a guy on Slowtwich that shared a conversation with him that was enlightening to that fact.

Someone has to pay the bills. I don’t think receiving money to do a review is inherently wrong, there are just too many products to afford to review, but having a rigorous process to eliminate or expose bias is important. However, it does suck looking for reviews of a product which is not a main player in the market or category.

I agree. He uses statements like "this was a test unit and I'm sending it back at the end. I will purchase one with my own money" to make it seem like he wasn't compensated. Be really needs to start it off saying he was, but not with the unit.

Can you share a link to this ?

> Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than that

This also seems to be what Amazon is also devolving into. Amazon ads is the fastest growing part of amazon!

Yes. Just searched for "cholimex soy sauce". 80% of the search results page was covered by an ad for mayonnaise...

I never had problems with fake products on Amazon until I looked for a usb thumb drive for the Arlo camera base station.

There’s a dramatic difference in price for 1T sizes. Some at $30. Others at $150. I couldn’t understand it.

One of the 0 star reviews said it was actually a 32Gb drive that somehow fools the OS to think it is bigger. Not sure how that happens but it steered me away from any of the cheaper options as I don’t need a headache.

SoundOnSound is great, especially since they still host their entire review history. They tend to show up in my top Google results, when searching for older audio equipment at least. For things like mixers and audio interfaces, they've tested quite a few things.

If Google really cared, dropping all pages with affiliate links, would get rid of 99.9999% of the junk.

And no, I don't care about the tiny, tiny number of legit reviews with links. I doubt I'd see them anyhow.

I frequently dream of building a search engine that for this very reason penalizes any type of advertisement. This problem goes way beyond product searches. Every time I look up a how-to for pretty much anything, programming, video games, fixing house stuff, all search results that aren't user provided like Stackoverflow or Reddit, it's always stuffed with useless info that anyone having the problem already knows about ant that's clearly just there for SEO or to create more space for ads. Non-verbatim example from yesterday: search: "Outer Wilds Echoes of the Eye underground lake stuck bell" result: "Echoes of the Eye is the first DLC for Outer Wilds...blah...find artifact to enter the dream world...blah". The top, ideal answer should be a single sentence and maybe a screenshot.

Of course disincentivizing ads would never fly at google and an ad-free search engine would have a hard time being economically viable.

If you would literally pay for an amazon filter, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy from dedicated shops?

Initially because I hate monopoly but also because looking for something decent on amazon is a major PITA I avoid amazon for nearly everything. If I need a computer, I buy direct to the vendor or to a computer shop. If I need new bicycle parts I go to an online bikeshop, if I want a new sampler groovebox, I go to a store selling home studio gears. Well this isn't totally true as I now favor second hand stuff but the reality is Amazon is not very effective at offering you the best things, and not even at the best price. Most online shops nowadays offer shipping time on par with what you get on Amazon.

In then end I don't see any good incentive to use Amazon. Some people will say centralized market place but if searching a decent product takes much more time than finding a good specialized store and getting decent product quickly you haven't really gained anything. Single account for all your shopping? Many shops offer buying without creating an account. Others will allow you to seamlessly create the account at ordering time and password managers make it easy to manage multiple accounts.

Dedicated shops don't help themselves by having a convoluted check-out process that nearly always involves creating an account, figuring out whether ticking the box or not ticking the box will unleash an avalanche of marketing emails, then entering your payment details via some obscure 3rd party payment system, etc.

Nearly all of them allows Paypal/Google/Apple pay among other. This is definitely not what I would call obscure 3rd party. Figuring out wether ticking or not ticking the box usually involve knowing how to read. And as I said many of them allow for guest access without any account creation.

Figuring out wether ticking or not ticking the box usually involve knowing how to read.

I see what you did there.

Snark aside, making the correct check/uncheck often still results in spam emails anyway, such asking for feedback or once a year sales promo. I’ve noticed the majority of independent online retailers do this. I guess it works or they wouldn’t, just like physical spam mail.

Not surprising. It's incomparably quicker and more profitable to list a few top selling products with affiliate links and a bunch of relevant keywords, than to spend significant time and money actually researching and comparing these products in a meaningful way.

> They seem to be totally missing this signal

Ok, but how would they know that you already bought the product? As advanced as ads are, they still don't have the Amazon confirmation telling them you already completed the purchase.

Google partners with at least one major credit card company[1] so their ad network should be aware of purchases if a particular payment system were used. I expect this is far more widespread than we realise (unfortunately) but using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers would harm revenue, so they remain visible.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45368040

I imagine that Google does in fact use credit card data, but there is no way to tell if you already bought everything you want.

>but using that data to not show ads to recent purchasers would harm revenue, so they remain visible.

that doesn't make any sense. By that logic they wouldn't want to do targeting at all, because targeting by definition reduces the amount of people you can show ads to.

Is there some aggregation of these domain-specific review sites anywhere?

Wirecutter has been pretty hit-and-miss for me recently. I have found my best product recommendations through a bunch of random blogs who have some particular expertise.

time for a community maintained Programmable Search https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/

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.

Isn’t the obvious solution to include the age (or the number of sales) of a product into its rating? This way they can’t just rotate the product/brand names.

> trying to be more than that

Citation needed ;)