Hacker News Reader

Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

> The "general" Internet is not dead.

For some things it is. Good luck getting a non-sponsored/SEO-gamed review of a kitchen appliance or particular vacation mode such as a cruise. It's flabbergasting.

Most times I just stick "inurl:reddit.com" in my search and try to get discussion threads about the thing I'm researching, but even that's getting filled up with shills.

View on HN

I think search engines are broken, but the Internet itself is probably not "dead". It's just our accessibility to that information. That's not super helpful until we have better search engines (which steer us away from this SEO stuff), but the good news is that building a better search engine is easier than resurrecting the Internet. In particular, there's a good chance that a niche, naive search engine might be able to significantly improve accessibility (e.g., high rankings for pages that answer user queries in the fewest bytes).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

http://www.jitterbuzz.com/indmix.html

http://www.alaska.net/~akpassag/

These websites seem to be last updated decades ago, which is prehistoric to most casual browsers. There's no doubt there is great content on the general internet, but these examples I would classify as "legacy".

I can see why the website owners would be interested in getting traffic to recent websites, but why would you be interested in recently updated websites?

Stores typically stock recently manufactured products. Once the manufacturer discontinues a model and inventory is gone, that's a wrap. Sometimes the product was good and gets replaced by an inferior one (in the spirit of old burger king vs new post-acqusition burger king), other times it's just small tech refresh tweaks, and everything in between.

A real litter of inconsistency between unrelated external organizations and varying markets and skill sets.

Result #1 & #2 for kitchen appliance review (your personalised/local results might vary):

Google:

https://www.expertreviews.co.uk/home-garden/home-appliances

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/appliances/

Bing:

https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/fitted-kitchens/article/plan...

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/appliances/

DDG:

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/appliances/

https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/fitted-kitchens/article/plan...

Marginalia:

https://www.infiniteeureka.com/shop-markdowns-on-small-kitch...

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/essays/sarah.htm

Mojeek:

https://www.appliancesreviewed.net/

https://busybakers.co.uk/category/kitchen-appliance-reviews/

Most of these are spam. They contain affiliate links to Amazon to buy the product which is being reviewed, therefore the the review cannot be trusted.

"Which" looks to be the exception, but that is a paid-for service.

It's a sad state of affairs.

I understand your opinion about affiliate links - but I use several review websites that use such links for all products they review, and have both positive and negative reviews for products. So I wouldn’t say it necessarily follows that affiliate links = biased reviews.

How often do they give their best review score or opinion to a product without an affiliate link? Not every product will have an accessible affiliate link.

Isn’t Amazon commonly used for most affiliate links or has that changed in recent years? Amazon isn’t the cheapest all the time any more. Nor is its customer support the top any more

Also, I've noticed that the list of products reviewed is limited to only those that _have_ Amazon affiliate links. If a product is only available on not-Amazon stores, they don't even get mentioned. Which is a bias in itself.

Yeah that’s what I was thinking too. A big bias right there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com