A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]
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I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable.
How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I want to see? Some combination of clicks and time-spent in a page through Google Analytics?
I would rather add a couple of buttons after each search result to provide feedback and the feedback I provide is valid just for my user (so it cannot be gamed). Two buttons with "this is crap" / "this is fine". Then Google can learn from that feedback instead of guessing through AI.
That, plus a "I'm not joe-six-pack" mode toggle, where Tools->Verbatim is enabled and finds exactly what I am looking for, without assuming I'm misspelling or confused.
Now Google thinks their last suggestion was obviously a success.
I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...
Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.
No results found for "...".
Results for ... (without quotes):
Actually, I'd prefer if each word I write would just default to being a hard requirement. I could then manually allow more creative interpretation with a specific syntax, like ~word, or exclude specific words alltogether with -word.
sample listing for laser printers: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=prl
Laser printer listing: https://hinta.fi/g28/tulostimet?l=1&fq=Laser&fg=1
Many product categories don't have an extensive filtering available tho.
Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.
Google just needs to invest more in stopping SEO.
A five years ago, I noticed most of the results were all paid ads, at the top and bottom of the page and in the right hand column. Then you'd have a long list of Amazon product links. By the time you finally found the company or product you wanted, you were five pages deep and wondering why it was so hard to find something that just a few years earlier would be in the first couple of results.
I just gave up using it - to me its become completely useless. Its a last ditch resource I use if I really need to find something.
Putting just one term / word in quotes makes it an non-optional search term btw.
They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.
The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.
The Kyocera KIP series printers are good examples of that technology.
There's a somewhat exotic technology used for sign and panel making - UV-cured inkjet printing. Here's a specialty flatbed printer for very thick (up to 10cm or so) stock. [1] This is often used for large advertising posters, because UV cured inks can survive bright sunlight. Hit hard by UV, the polymer strands crosslink and the liquid ink turns into a hard solid. (It doesn't "dry"; it's not solvent evaporation that's makes this work.)[2] Same concept as dental fillings and stereolithographic 3D printing.
Front Panel Express offers UV-cured inkjet printing on metal as a service. That may be overkill for a prop maker - it's used to make real front panels for heavy use. Front Panel Express preps the blank panels in a plasma furnace before printing for better ink adhesion. After printing, a clear coat can be applied.[3]
So, yes, there's an SEO problem here, but part of the problem is that printing technology has moved on and searching for "laser" is less useful.
(I used to make steampunk props. So I've faced similar problems of surface marking.[4])
[1] https://www.sackel.com/products/sackel-corporation-uv-led-sa...
[2] https://www.piworld.com/article/uv-curable-ink-works/
[3] https://www.frontpanelexpress.com/fpd-doc/en/index.htm?fpd_g...
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
A phone call is more useful than a search engine.
I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
Their website is absolutely awful though: https://www.cetronic.es/
And sadly, a lot of companies which have built up a stellar reputation over the years, at some point turn to cutting cost while milking their reputation into the ground.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
1) If they keep stock, what they have in stock
2) What the manufacturer promotion of the day is and/or if they need a push to get over the line with some manufacturer's targetsDepends what you're buying.
If its a highly commoditised product like an average PC then it basically doesn't matter. Most commodity PCs are (basically) identical and its largely a case of "you get what you pay for", so your budget will do most of the dictating on what your outcome will be.
If its something more niche or more expensive (e.g mid-range/high-end commodity servers), then you've got two alternatives:
1) If you've got a group of trustworthy friends who either work in tech or are "techies" then the old-school word-of-mouth to find yourself a trustworthy reseller (there are some truly independent resellers out there, but they are a rare species, especially in places like the US or Europe).
2) As you say, do your own homework via niche forums / reddit / youtube videos / slack channels / discord / whatever you prefer. Remember that the goal here is not necessarily to know exactly what you are buying, but to make yourself an "informed consumer" so at least you know broadly what your options are.
The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
These generated spam contents are indeed problematic, but if done correctly, should contain zero printer anyway.
Except it doesn't help any single bit because the top result it's exactly the same "smallbiztrends.com" that was mentioned in a rant.
Russian Yandex is not any different than Google because their primary income is exactly the same: ads.
I tried with "laser printer", and the results were simply PERFECT.
Now, this may depend on one's location, but for me (here in Europe) it works perfectly well (and I'm not Russian), I just ignore the site language, since the results are mostly English anyway.
I got (for UK/English settings)
Google: 5 Ads followed by https://smallbiztrends.com https://www.printerland.co.uk
DDG: 1 Ads followed by: https://plumbaroakland.com https://smallbiztrends.com
>top result is for https://foodisforfuel.com
Just looking at the domain it already looks like a massive failure in results. Clicking into the site it looks like a content farm. The top articles are:
Do Justin Boots Run True to Size?
Air Duct Cleaning Services in San Antonio
Where to Find a Fireworks Store in Chicago
The Advantages of Being a Social Entrepreneur
Why You Should Choose a Cannabis SEO Agency
(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
For example, it could be linked to accounts, and dishonest accounts get removed, together with all their votes. Or the votes are kept, but because they're so different from real people's votes, they only count for the search results shown to other bots and spammers.
And at the very least, your own votes should override anyone else's votes, so for regular users who actively vote, the search results will still be close to what they want.
I'm also thinking about classifying results by different contexts. A page might be very relevant in one context, and not at all in another. But do let users control those contexts.
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
Anything "non banal" and I'm more likely to go read a book or consult a professional. Tradesmen on reddit don't owe me answers for my hard to google DIY question.
It is frustrating navigating the sea of people who want to help but are also just googling, but you get an eye for that after a while.
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
Google Search and Books does exactly that.
And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.
Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.
On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.
Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
Out of the list on Wikipedia [1], the utter majority of banned popular subreddits were far-right, terrorist, violence-oriented or dealt with questionably or outright illegal sexual material (jailbait, fappening).
As for r/consumeproduct, there's a Google doc floating around detailing its links to the far-right and transphobes [2]. Doesn't sound surprising to me that they got banned.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IdBsrh8FS6k85XsrpqDjmqPe...
I feel like this is a product of Reddit's built-in recency bias, where unless a thread is sticky then no one really sees or uses older threads. Classic web forums were a lot better at this; old threads with in-depth technical info and discussions would keep rising to the top, where "hey look at this keyboard I just bought" threads would get one or two replies and be quickly forgotten.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
Of all the companies in the world google will be the last to employ real humans to verify anything. Look online for the shear amount of forum threads full of people disgrunted with the their poor support response and lack of humans in the loop.
And, yes, allow the user to permanently filter out domains from their search results.
There's a great talk by Anil Dash that I like titled "The Web We Lost" that centers around on this topic - https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/
And Google already has a pretty good metric in the bounce rate without the need to add a "flag" option. That is, if you go back to the search page shortly after clicking a link, that link is probably irrelevant. I guess that SEO spammers found a way around that.
If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
Google is super rich, they probably can if they want to dedicate a huge amount of resources to that. It is hard for humans to win against bots in this game.
> If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
It is something spammers do. They make the page attractive using psychological tricks (like typical clickbait). They make it informative by copying parts of Wikipedia or StackOverflow. It does not make the world a better place, and it is something Google fights against, with mixed success.
But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)
It’s not surprising that searching using a specific industry term that’s different from your understanding of it would bring results for that larger-than-you-thought category of product.
Further, the smallbiztrends article that comes up first for me, that Adam claims “not a single one is an actual laser printer”, contains several printers that use the same dry toner, electrostatic process as laser printers and that most people outside of printing, if asked to name the printing tech, would call a “laser printer” (because they’ve never heard of an LED printer). The print quality issues that started his search were likely fuser-related not laser-related, meaning these colloquially incorrectly called laser printers would have been fine.
Search engines have problems, but this video isn’t hitting on them for me.
Maybe `a3 laser` or `wide format laser` ?
I've never heard of a true wide format laser (A2 and larger), and I suspect the technology doesn't exist to make an affordable one. You'd need super-precise optics, an absolutely huge toner/fuser system, and a supply chain for all of the above.
And there would be limited sales. Wide format printers are used for high quality art/photo printing, signage and ads, and sometimes for fabric printing.
Lasers are optimised for office document printing. You don't often need an A2 or larger office document. And when you do - cartography and blueprints - you're probably going to use a plotter.
I work in this space (as a consumer of this equipment); all opinions here are my own, not my employer’s. For that reason, I’m reluctant to link to any specific vendor products, but if you’re interested, googling/YouTubing “b2 digital press” will give you some cool “how it works” videos.
Clearly the problem here isn’t Adam’s lack of industry knowledge. Had he been served the correct results for his query he would have instantly learned what large format means in the industry and would have adjusted his query accordingly. The problem is that Google helps scammers and spammers at the expense of legitimate creators. Just like removing the like/dislike ratio on YouTube, which of course has caused a big increase in generated spam.
Take this blurb for example:
> HP Designjet Z9+ PS Large Format Color Inkjet Printer As one of the most expensive printers on the market, this HP DesignJet Z9+PS provides exceptional color control with a secure wireless connection and fast printing. Without a doubt this is a large format laser printer of the highest quality which can produce prints up to 44 inches wide.
It's literally written in a way that is completely lying and designed to mislead and keyword stuff. It's not even trying to hide the fact that it's lying to a human reader since it contradicts itself immediately by calling it an Inkjet printer (which it is). It makes more sense when you realize it's not trying to trick the human reader at all! It's trying to trick Google bot!
The title of the article implies it is about laser printers or at the least laser-like printers, but the list contains inkjet printers, making it somewhat useless even if some of the results are in fact laser-like printers because it forces the person to continue to sift through the spam for what they need.
The whole article is garbage information and just because it accidentally actually included one or two laser printers does not mean it is a relevant result! Why are you nit-picking on Adam Savage being wrong about how there is indeed a laser printer when the literal whole article is mostly lies.
> True large format would be called a plotter
No, plotters are devices with pens. Layman may occasionally refer to a large format printer as a "plotter" because of its resemblance and it's faster to say, but nobody in the industry refers to them as plotters.
> will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce
You're describing large-format photocopiers. They operate exactly like an old-school optical-only photocopier which photographically exposes the drum (versus printers and digital copiers which image the drum via LEDs or a laser.) They are often called "plan copiers." Said friend's print shop has one and it is in fact made by Oce.
> Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18"
Many, many copiers can handle 12x18 paper. "Digital press" usually refers to enhanced paper storage, speed/volume, and finisher capabilities beyond what a typical office copier/MFC offers, often coupled with some sort of software and workstation for managing the print jobs. Often a "digital press" is indistinguishable from a heavy-duty copier with finisher units
> Now what's interesting is the building industry has the same problem that Adam Savage has, the prints (plan sets) must be able to get wet without the ink/toner bleeding.
Toner does not bleed.
> That has been solved with ink jet technology that uses a wax based ink. Cartridges full of wax balls in the standard process colors, an example would be a Canon colorwave.
Colorwave uses melted 'toner' and sprays it, like an inkjet, onto a page.
You're confusing Colorwave with the Phaser printers made by Xerox, which use dyed wax. Phaser prints used to be cutting edge back in the 90's for proofing work, but have long since been eclipsed by every other printing technology. The wax can be scraped off the page. If the page is bent too much, it crinkles. It's easily damaged by even slight heat. It's dye based not pigment based, so the prints fade and color shift very quickly. The technology is such garbage that Xerox has tried renmaing it - they now call it "colorcube" or something similarly stupid. They push per-page figures, while ignoring the machine's horrific TCO (they consume massive amounts of electricity and require a lot of service work; if disturbed too much while at operating temperature, molten wax gets into places it shouldn't be and requires an expensive service call. Etc.)
They currently use Radiant Fusing technology: https://www.tavco.net/articles/bid/57020/see-the-advantages-...
"Toner does not bleed." I know but I was describing the needs not that toner bleeds. I have worked in printing plan sets and the old way for color was ink jet usually the HP 5000 series. The industry moved to the colorwave because the ink jet prints would bleed when wet.
Yes, the colorwave uses toner but I was told it was in a wax medium. The toner balls certainly felt like wax if you handled them...
Seems like you are being a tad pedantic and not entirely correct...
Plotter is a pen moving over paper drawing continuous lines.
edit: well, when i think about it, it does change definition of word if everyone starts calling plotters "cars", but there has to be a majority.
"Get great looking technical documents with the black and white plotters"
The B&W machines are plotters. The color machines are printers and I don't see anything pen based at all...
I say this as someone with a Draftmaster II in the spare bedroom...
This is a garbage-in, garbage-out situation where both the web and the query are garbage and Google is doing what it can.
While traditional plotters used pens (aka pen plotters), I think a more accurate definition might be something that uses a set of motors to move a printing toolhead (be it pen, ink jet, knife, laser, router or whatever) along a medium (paper, vinyl, wood, etc) in a continuous line in the x and/or y direction. Where a traditional printer only moves the paper through in one direction and realizes the image 'line by line' across the perpendicular dimension.
Owning several vintage plotters (mostly pen) and a couple of modern pen plotters (axidraw, custom built). I have no problem imagining the same general mechanism driving any toolhead.
The HP7580, HP7475a, AxiDraw, every laser cutter i've seen, shopbots, modern hp designjets, etc .. All plotters.
Obviously if you use a roll of paper you need to run the paper itself back and forth unless you want to build something as big as a shopbot style table. I think the design for the 'roll-paper' plotters drove the design of much smaller plotters like the 7475a (which also moves the paper on one axis). Perhaps HP had a patent on that 'paper moves on one axis, pen moves on another?
Regardless, both designs were present in the 80s.
But it sounds like he doesn't actually want what's called "large format" in the industry, he just wants an A3/tabloid size printer that doesn't suck. A3/tabloid is not "large format" in the printing industry. Large format means like A1 or A0 sized paper, usually on a roll.
Probably the best way to get a cost effective high quality A3/tabloid size printer is going to be to buy a used commercial machine that's roughly 10-15 years old. You'll still be able to get parts and toner for it, these things normally last a few decades. But it won't be small and it won't be electrically efficient.
I've suggested that people try Bing or DDG rather than Google for some searches, but it seems it's more a question of luck rather than anything else nowadays.
Google do have a lot of headstart over other search engines. Maybe what we need is a Developers search engine which weights results towards programming sites and also downgrades those drivereasy type posts which have a lot of fluff followed by "download drivereasy to sort all your problems".
For me the quality of result on Google have been constantly going down. I sometimes find that among the first 3 results there is nothing that answer what I am looking for.
I know for sure that around 2008 Google had humans evaluating both the quality of a website and how well it was satisfying the query. As far a as I know, they stopped doing that a while back. Maybe it's time to resume that practice?
Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
> Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
Those of us old enough remember, there was a time when online search existed in a goldilocks zone [0] of accuracy, productivity, and reliability.
And then dark SEO found its way around it again. And now we have a new cesspit, but it looks like Google doesn’t give a shit anymore. They only change the number of ads interspersed among search results.
Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess.
It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
I think a regular, non-adblocked google search may result in almost the entire first page being ads. At this point, the ads are probably more relevant to the average user than whatever seo-spam "top x of y" would have been there on the first page.
At least ads lead you to the product directly rather than make you visit another shady ad-infested site in the interim.
There are uBlock filter lists that help filter out generated content from search results, such as https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well).
I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure.
Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.
It feels like they drown out all the useful information when I'm searching for stuff. I usually resort to constraining searches to forum sites but that rejects a lot of blogs and other useful sources of information.
I am far from being a Google fan boy - quite the opposite - but I can also be pragmatic and understand that this may be an unfixable problem.
The lesson here is that retailers of such products should be optimising for these kind of search terms. Of course there is going to be some bias but they will have at least some understanding of what they are talking about.
And, people using such terms also ought to expect a lot of SEO junk. I mean, when has anyone ever gotten a result that is anything other?
Seriously though, who is going to take the time and trouble to curate a list of the best laser printers who doesn't have a financial interest in doing so?
I just threw a laser out of the window because it got to the point where it would only print one page before jamming. I bought a Canon inkjet and that has lasted a couple of months, but now you have to push each piece of paper in to get it started, and a couple of weeks ago it stopped printing the left side of the paper, so I have to make sure everything I print is only on the right. So, this printer is going out the window as soon as the cartridge runs dry.
They do 12,000+ pages on a cheap toner and are built like tanks.
They use Postscript so drivers are reliable and have wired ethernet just works.
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&q=large+format+laser+...
Surely those are orthogonal requirements, the size of the sheets and the ability to successfully fuse the toner? Can’t we in all fairness take him at his word that he sometimes wants to print at a larger size?
I know Adam Savage is an ex-ILM professional propmaker and legendary Mythbusters host, but if he by million to one chance would call me to procure an A0 laser printer to print on special plastic sheets, I'd ask him if he mean it.
Then I realised the irony.