Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

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In the German market for any product related query where you want a product comparison or test, you get results from 2 companies, which are in the business to place multiple very well SEO optimized pages on popular high quality websites (mostly newspapers).

i.e.: https://www.welt.de/vergleich/stabstaubsauger/ https://www.krone.at/vergleich/staubsauger-test/ https://www.stern.de/vergleich/staubsauger/

These pages are in all regards very well created, they strike all SEO best practices, have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript) and fulfil all SEO content quality guidelines. And are constantly updated.

And they are in all regards, SPAM. Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".

They are so widespread and this is going on for years, as Google clearly must know about this. But they choose to do nothing about them. Probably as they are looking for an algorithmic solution. Well, it does not work.

And Product search for popular every day technical products has become unusable for years now.

Google must have become a deeply dysfunctional company to let this go on for so long.

Google knows, has commented on it that it's fine "but you should be careful who you let publish on your domain" and they won't do anything about it. It was a somewhat big topic two or so years ago, and since then everyone has understood that you just need to buy in on media company sites to get ranked.

Hey, maybe it's Google's gift to media companies to allow them to monetize, because they surely are making money with it.

> have zero affiliate links (as they are hidden behind javascript)

We have different definitions of zero I think...

Zero as far as the Google spider is concerned

Not true for very long, their scrapers do use js now and read the dom.

yeah, but they do bot execute user interactions. so its easy to hide links with JS if intended

And the number of ordinary people that try to gas light me for stating that Google has failed in their most basic mission. It's been years, and unless you work in tech or marketing, you're apparently obvious to the situation, and still think of Google as one may have during the 90's.

A lot of people are using this term incorrectly lately. Gaslighting isn't simply telling someone that they are wrong about something. It's a specific, sustained, and intentional form of psychological abuse, most often found in a domestic setting. The origin is the play Gas Light and the plot revolves around a man trying to steal from his wife by making her think she is going insane.

I know what gaslighting is, and I am using the term correctly. When I tell people Google Search is not just bad, it is overt manipulation of your search to waste one's time sifting through prose nonsense because Google promote prose over facts, they often don't just disagree, they overtly over time try to change my mind, they can't let it lie, they have to change my thinking. And they use shallow, obvious insulting language, as they is all they know. It is the duration of time they spend on this mind changing aggression. That's gaslighting

For this to be gaslighting the person would have to believe google search is terrible, but be engaging in a concerted effort to convince you otherwise. That doesn't seem like the case?

How's about the person's personality is such that whatever it is they use to gaslight does not matter, they take the opposite stance just to be aggressive, as that is their personality. They probably have no opinion on the matter at all, just like to ride me with aggression. That is gaslighting too.

I'm totally with you on that, but who, besides us, knows about this and understands the inner workings?

Ask your parents or whomever and they'll probably tell you that they are glad, that stern.de is doing all those recommendations and tests.

They'll trust them, be it out of naivety of lack of alternatives or the "glory" those newspapers might have had in "the old times" (or still have today).

I'm not sure how to solve this, to be honest.

> Always the same rotation of products get recommended, and win these "tests".

Wouldn't this be expected for product comparison sites? How many winning vacuum cleaners can there possibly be? Is the expected state that the best white goods in any category are experiencing constant churn?

I mean, your criticism seems to be that this content is "very well created" but spam because you don't believe the recommendations are the result of some genuine comparison process. How could Google or really anyone know that, or decide if you're right/wrong? The data is all there, it seems useful, and on stern.de they even have a page that explains how they select products and rank them. In fact the Stern carousel doesn't even appear to be from the same source. The first two use the same icons and such but the third doesn't.

It is now easier to get Saturn and Media Market ads than technical sites when looking for hardware specifications.

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