Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations
housefresh.com
housefresh.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675
My recommendation is to start moving to some other closed platform that is not part of Google search like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (yes I know Google owns it but its still not part of the search ecosystem).
Tying your entire business to how high you rank on Google search is always going to eventually end up in disaster like this.
But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate links while avoiding the new requirements.
So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying to bring attention to this issue.
If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!
--
Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The original title was "How Google is killing independent sites like ours".
Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the authors.
The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.
I would happily believe that Google is corrupt in this manner, but the reason big domains have the advantage here is because they can afford to pay teams of people with the express purpose of gaming the system. this is true in all industries, everywhere, and it can only be fixed with society-wide change, which, short of a world war (or, more likely, two), isn't going to happen
To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.
> To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.
To rub salt into the wound, any forum will happily let anyone and everyone post in support of any big brand, but instantly spam-block some lone developer trying to showcase their product (HN is different in this regard).
Microsoft/Jetbrains/Apple releases a new paid product, available as a paid subscription only - dozens of people will get upvoted telling the forum about it.
Some lone indie dev releases a free-tier search tool with optional paid tier, and they're banned for spamming.
Now I understand why you'd want to block people who self-advertise, but there's gotta be a middle ground.
Why is advertising on behalf of a company that has a larger ad budget than all the current readers salaries combined okay, but advertising for your own product is a bannable offence?
There really should be a middle ground where (like on HN) the audience understands that someone who posts something that took them 6 months to create is not the same as someone selling love potions or stock tips.
Consider how bad the results would be if I could generate 100 scam sites in a day and outrank traditional media. Only to repeat it tomorrow. Now step it up and have tens of thousands of people doing the same thing. Every day. Trusting a 30 year old domain isn't lazy.
The Google spam team has always been underfunded, and understaffed, and when the choice was 'do the right thing about spam' vs 'do the thing that is profitable', they always choose profit.
but not on top 10 lists (that mentions some in-fact-fake testing).
So therefore the big companies publish loads of trashy top 10 lists
On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for.
Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask jeeves at it's worst.
Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the phone, not the thickest.
And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked through the other results lower on the page and nada, no correct answer.
So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test, but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but the easiest context searches where it works because it knows a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.
And the most annoying thing is, your phone will not. sit. flat. on a table, because the damn camera will always be unbalanced in height, which makes it an excellent attraction for feline companions. Tap on it and it wiggles. Tap harder, it wiggles more, and eventually the phone will fall to the floor, your feline will look at you with big round eyes and ask for f...ing treats.
What the hell did Google put in that thing, lenses from the Hubble space telescope? It's not like they have a 100x zoom lens in that thing or a camera sensor so large it makes a Hasselblad wet itself. And that's before we get to the visible PCB screw heads poking through the OLED panel. On a phone that costs 600+ Euros.
I feel like Google is at least 5 years behind the competition when it comes to HW and industrial design. Or they just culturally as a company don't give a shit about HW, thinking their SW is gonna be the main selling point and the HW is treated like some last minute "who cares, just ship it, it's gonna sell anyway" afterthought.
I know, I'm not saying it was scientific, I was just sharing an anecdotal mainstream search query which I though was very relevant today for me and maybe others as well and also not super difficult for Google.
> The actual dimensions of the Google Pixel 8 are apparently 150.5 x 70.8 x 8.9mm, with the thickness rising to 12mm at the camera bar.
And nothing on Bing.
The Google Pixel 8, announced in October 2023, has the following dimensions:
Height: 150.5 mm (5.93 inches)
Width: 70.8 mm (2.79 inches)
Depth: 8.9 mm (0.35 inches)
However, if we include the thickness of the camera bump, the Pixel 8 measures approximately 12 mm3. The camera visor itself is notably thin compared to previous Pixel phones, but the overall thickness accounts for the camera bump and other components.
In summary, the Pixel 8 is a sleek device with a slim profile, and its camera visor adds a touch of functionality without significantly increasing its overall thickness.
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).
I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense -- but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
I agree, but it’s a good early filter for conversion. The difference in quality, for me and everyone I’ve gifted a month to, is stark enough to make paying for search for the first time worth it. Given the absolute cost (for the cheapest tier, paid annually, less than $50) it’s a psychological hurdle more than a financial one for most Americans.
Also, drawing those eyeballs from the ad-driven engines has a disproportionate effect on their marginal ad prices (in the long run). So if you need a sense of vengeance to get you over the hill, there you go.
If kagi saturates the market of people that can afford to spend $50/year for a decent search engine, then Google ads will only reach people that cannot. This would greatly reduce the value of their ad inventory (far more than the percent market share they’d lose).
There are few consumer products that have held up against the competing demands of billions users in thousands of different markets and cultures. I'd say there's maybe even been none.
The kind of "growth" you're talking about is a bad but understandable habit among founders and cold financiers, but it's not a requisite part of running a business and generally runs counter to having a good product that serves a specific need well.
Frankly, I see this as a good thing. Maybe someone else will come along and solve the universal-search-engine-that-stays-good problem, but Kagi's best hope at being useful for me into the future is for them to stay where they are: tiny and used only by a small cohort of extremely savvy and skeptical geeks that aren't worth the effort to SEO-jack.
They just need to be sustainable—growing large would actually be counterproductive.
It's actually maybe ChatGPT et al. that have done most to warm me up to the idea. I've tried Plus for a few months, basically using it like better search. I don't think I'll stick with it mainly because it's a pretty steep cost (enough that I want to go back to not having it for a bit at least, see how much of a problem it really is) - but it does make me wonder if perhaps Kagi can get me a lot of the way for half the price (the non-LLM tier).
A 'fact,' which, if true, makes little sense when you look at it from the PoV as a tool.
With real physical tools, if you only use it occasionally, get a cheap one. But when you use it all the time, it pays to invest in a quality model.
Considering the frequency even the n00best of tech normies of the world use a search engine it makes sense for everyone to obtain such "a quality model." Sadly, that doesn't mean everyone will do so.
[me: Kagi unlimited user since they did the pricing change a couple of months back]
But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable business, then it's a feature of their business model.
If Google Search continues its downward trajectory, people will start to pay for Kagi or some other similar search engine. 10-20$ per month for unlimited search is nothing, at least in the western world.
We just haven’t reached that point yet
It’s a feature.
Wow, that's a lower search count than I would have thought. I am pretty sure I'd blow through that in a day or two...
It actually sucks at finding the low cost product.
Want the cheapest esp32 c3... google is a better place to start. I can quickly find the "price to beat" and go deeper elsewhere.
If I add a ? to the end of the query, Kagi additionally suggests an $11 reference board and a redit forum on the topic.
Yes, the "cheapest" keyword incidentally gets me the answer in this case, but does it in every one?
Product spam has its upside when you're looking for product spam.
Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...
Searches for "coronavirus" seem to be hard-coded, or interfered with. I get pages and pages of Covid-19 results, but that's not what I searched for. I even get a wikipedia link to its covid-19 page, but no wikipedia link to its coronavirus page within the first several pages of results.
How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
I know lots of people will point to examples where it's wrong, but I'd suggest trying it out yourself. If you're not intentionally trying to trip it up, it really works quite well.
But yeah, this brought my site to having every article I write today to be listed on page 1 (top 5 results, at the very least) almost within a day, numerous snippets, etc.
> No, no. I spent 18 hour days posting on social media, writing articles,
Yes, yes. Based on my 10-years-ago contact with SEO, you just described it.
If this is really true, then you should be running your own SEO consulting business. You would undoubtedly make much more money than your existing (presumably not SEO consulting), small business
Comments like this are similar to people (ahem, Internet randos) talking about their investment portfolio returns, where they wildly exceed the very best professionally managed hedge funds. I always say: "If you are so good, why don't you run your own hedge fund? It will easy to get funding." <<crickets>>
WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's and not risk any controversy.
And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate links. We're 'trusted', after all."
It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least interesting results for everything using a small army of human and AI reviewers.
Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no appreciable reason.
The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more relevant than their organic search results -- because they actually care about the ad experience.
There are specific guidelines for rating results, especially for political and medical queries. This is probably a big part of the massive decline in search quality - authority is valued more over accuracy to the specific query.
1. https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...
Reddit is also really hit and miss, depending on the community. TikTok has been ruined by TikTok Shop.
Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
There surely must be a better option.
It took savvy SEO folk about .3 seconds to figure out that Google was ranking Reddit for almost any informational query and start trying to game the system there too.
I love using Reddit for information but be wary of any new Reddit thread ranking well in Google search that's only a few months old, in a small community, with very few other responses besides a strangely specific answer to the question.
In shopping for flashlights, the respective subreddit recommends only obscure AliExpress brands. The community are retiree collectors who obsess over specs and cannot possibly use them in the field.
Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations, for example. What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with; at a certain point you can't even see anything outside your own beam. They shit on all "American" brands (but Coast is shit).
It's hilarious watching them drive off clueless gift-givers seeking advice.
We do, in fact recommend lots of brands that don't pay for space in retail stores and haven't been around for decades. Isn't that the point of asking an enthusiast community for advice?
A while back, lights with lots of mix-and-match bits that could be assembled without tools were pretty popular, especially the Surefire P60 system. These have fallen out of favor for a number of reasons including the increasing popularity of electronic switches over mechanical and an increase in availability of build-to-order lights. DIY stuff is still popular for hobbyists, but usually involves soldering.
Removable batteries are absolutely a consideration for most of the community. A flashlight with non-removable batteries is future e-waste and can't have spares. Lights without removable batteries only make my list when they're a weird form factor (usually very small) and low-priced without good removable battery alternatives. We almost always try to talk people out of routine use of disposable batteries, but many popular models have a disposable option as a backup.
I do not often see people steering beginners toward models with extreme outputs; the opposite is often true. We're constantly talking to people about sustained output versus peak output, color rendering, efficiency, and ultra-low modes.
As for brands that manufacture in the USA, very few people asking for advice come with the sort of budgets those brands usually require. Trying to talk someone looking to spend $60 on a light to walk their dog with into spending $300 on a Modlite or Surefire isn't helpful.
I can't say every post is legit, and I'm sure there's a fair share of marketing posts posing as real users, but there's good reason IMO to recommend the lights they do. There's a lot of stuff that comes out of China that's just as good if not better than the American brand for half the price, if not even less.
That being said, it's an enthusiast subreddit, as all such things are, so if you're looking for a "casual" recommendation it's likely to be more than you need XD
I've found flashlights to be one of the few product areas where "obscure AliExpress brands" actually outperform Western equivalents.
> Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations
That's because it's taken for granted that nearly every recommendation uses one of a few standard cylindrical battery sizes, which are trivially user replaceable. Only a few brands use non-standard or built-in batteries. Often the electronics or LED emitters can be modified or replaced, since most lights fit a simple "cylindrical tube" formula.
> What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with
I guess all those discussions about tint (subtle colours of the beam), CRI (how well colours are represented), beam shape, optics type, user interface, etc. were nothing then. ("Big number of lumens" is far from the only factor - sometimes not even the most significant one.)
Granted, not all that information is useful for a newcomer who just wants a decent light. But the buying guide on the wiki sums it up simply enough.
What is hilarious are the people selling those same AliExpress lights at huge markups (search "Goonbeam"). Quality and price are often linked, but far from the same.
The group who designed my extremely awesome Astrolux MF-01 might be a clone of them.
> YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product. Doesn't work for everything, but in a lot of cases the paid promotional reviewers aren't getting their hands on the product in question and instead they are putting up stock images and reading the marketing material.
The bigger the youtuber, the harder it is to know if it's a paid promotional thing.
IDK, there's a long tradition of shill reviewers being given free products "for testing" on the unspoken agreement that if the review is bad, they won't get more free products in the future.
Sometimes it just feels impossible though E.g. trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.
If you're wanting BIFL kitchen items for low use try looking for commercial foodservice versions. That stuff is generally priced between plastic throwaway versions and Williams Sonoma but if it's built to survive at least a month in a busy professional kitchen, it'll probably serve me for life.
Alternatively, head over to your nearest ethnic grocers. I have some Asian and Mexican grocery stores near me that have kitchen supply sections that stock no-frills but reasonable quality versions of kitchen tools. My nearby standard American grocery stores stock much lower quality items by comparison.
The problem with smaller ones is, that it can be a good honest channel today, get an "offer they can't refuse" and promote some crap for a few thousand dollars/euros overnight.
Dave from the eevblog, AvE, Great scott!, bigclive, and maybe a few others are the ones I'd trust, because they show the ugly details of most products. Project farm also does many item comparisons, but most of the brands are unavailable here. All of them pretty big and popular channels, but most go very deep into specifics. For random (mostly kitchen and as-seen-on-tv) items, "Freakin' reviews" seems to be pretty genuine (electronics are much closer to my area of expertise), but I seem to notice many failure points in random gadgets and the guy from this channel points them out directly, with all the problems associated with them.
Again... i'm not affiliated with any of them, most of them show a lot of shitty items (even popular ones), and well.. call them shitty as they are, so maybe I'm biased because of the number of bad reviews they produce and very few good ones, but i've bought stuff they recommended and liked it a lot. You cannot compare this to eg. "unbox therapy" where almost every item is clearly sponsored and you can see it in the "very good" reviews they get, even if they're shitty things.
That's what it look like.
The only thing that could enhance or replace it would be official government testing of products.
Critical internet/app browsing should be taught in school, like critical reading. I feel lucky to have been a nerd in the 2000s where people picked up this skill, but honestly I have no idea how kids, older folks just getting into tech and such are acquiring sources/skills trapped inside of Discord, YouTube, Facebook or whatever.
A good example of the reddit bit is the robock s8 we bought. 95% of the reviews on reddits tell you to buy the big version with the huge dock... But then there was this one person in one thread who posted about how it was easy to just empty it without the station and that the station was known to rot or mold (not sure how you say that in english). So we bought the smallest s8 version we could and whoever that redditor was, they were absolutely right that it was so easy to maintain it without any of the addons. Roborock doesn't have a good youtube channel, they do have one, but it's really just advertisement.
Anyway, I agree with you. I don't even really use google anymore. I switched to ecosia (it also sucks) out of spite, but it's been as good as google for anything except for when I want to do site:blabla.com in which case I'll !g. Before you recommend it I've used the duck before and it doesn't work for me. Likely because I'm Danish.
I believe they started doing this because Reddit got really popular and all the normal usernames were eventually taken. I wouldn't be surprised if they implemented this after noticing that a significant number of signup attempts were aborted due to multiple attempted usernames already being taken.
Maybe Consumer Reports?
Only complaint I hear about them is Tesla fanboys complaining that the cars are not getting perfect scores and that its a conspiracy. Not sure if there is any truth to that(probably not). Other than that I haven't heard much bad to say but who knows, they could also be compromised.
In general, they capture much more information than most reviews, and make it possible to search and sort based on that information.
<https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#fatads>
> in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars. I don’t mean this to offend. I mean it as a job description. An advertiser's job is to convince you to do stuff you would not otherwise do.
Not taking sides here or saying anyone is right or wrong, but it's reality of operating on the Internet that small businesses probably just have to go into with both eyes open. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep.
I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties. That way the whims of the marketplace owner can't destroy thousands of prosperous businesses at the push of a button.
We have similar regulations for utilities. The power company can't kick you out on a whim. I think the same rationale applies here.
This situation where 100% of the taxi and food delivery profit from every small town in the world gets siphoned off back to a single office in California just isn't viable. Even from a within-US perspective it isn't viable.
The solution is not for them to be big and regulated, it's for them not to be so big.
The main thing that would help here is to inhibit vertical integration. For example, suppose people had a legal right to pricing information. Companies like Amazon and eBay would be encouraged to provide an API and have no right to stop anyone from scraping their site for anything it doesn't provide.
Now anyone can make a product search engine that will show you results from any site. You're not stuck with Amazon's gawdawful search. And since anyone can do this, it's easy to enter the market and none of them will have dominance. Conversely, if you want to start a new retailer, or sell your own products directly from your own site, you just submit your site for indexing to the popular product search engines and customers appear. But none of the search engines can destroy you because there are dozens of them and the biggest one is only 15% of the market.
We need more competition. The target of the rules should be to lower barriers to entry.
Right, but the "separate business" here -- in a real-world analogy -- is akin to a commercialised offshoot of the department of transport.
They may not make the roads, but they decide what goes on all the maps, they control most of the road signs, they benefit from the traffic monitoring data, and if you were to open up a shop selling only advice on where to shop, they determine whether your shop can be seen behind their signs. They profit from how they manage this, and the only way to get better management is to pay for it. Everyone pays for it, so the advantage dissipates until you pay more for your signs.
There is little to no way to do business without these people, short of setting up a stall at the local covered market or farmer's market (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Etsy) where you are beholden to another set of signage issues as well as the secondary knock-on effects of large-scale signage issues on the way to the market, over which you have even less influence.
Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
This is the key.
If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.
But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.
But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.
If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.
That is by having scammers feed of the keywords of your product and selling shitty bullshit/scams siphoning the people that were told 'word of mouth' yet use browsers like chrome.
eBay now sells promoted rankings. Funny when a vendor selling 1 product has it listed at several different prices, so you can save some money by finding the lowest priced one in their "other listings" that they don't promote.
eBay sells Google ads on its pages. (sad seller noises).
and eBay is one of the biggest ad buyers on Google.
Once you get to a product page, any further navigation of the form "similar/related products" is sponsored listings only these days.
They've narrowed a catalog that might have 1,000 relevant products into a pinball bouncing you between the same 12 sponsored listings. It's easy to figure "this is all they've got" and move on.
The model probably works okay for rebadged Alibaba tat with no meaningful differentiation; the 200 sellers with the same widget can be forced to bid against each other for visibility.
But for the classic line of "eBay as the world's garage sale", the last thing you want is to deliberately narrow your visible inventory. Customers are here for variety and the obscure, and restricting the market to "that which we can get placement revenue from" eventually drains them away.
One shouldn't have to make a youtube channel, constantly tweet, and manage a facebook group when a single website should have sufficed.
Make your own website. Link to others you like. Use old-school forums instead of modern social media. Rely on user-curated lists instead of algorithmic feeds. There is enough geuine content out there to last you a lifetime and plenty of people to interact with.
If we compare to a small business on a highway and a company decides to move the highway so far away from them as to diminish their customer base effectively driving them out of business; this can't happen, since roads are governed as public resources. This is what the Internet needs.
They change more slowly than internet traffic and are less globally impacting than a gigacorp's shuffling though, of course.
There are myriad examples like this of downright giant startups that would not exist if they refused to proceed just because Apple can veto them. Instagram is probably the largest example. Look what happened to Tumblr.
The moving fear is being vetoed only works for well funded startups. A small independent startup would have to consider this before betting the farm on a product that might get smashed by the feeling of the day Google and Apple app moderators have.
Amazon have been extremely successful with their dedicated book reading device, the Kindle. So thank you for that example. That really shows that Uber could have had success with their own device, better than I can argue for it.
https://www.uber.com/blog/beacon-improving-pickups-with-bett...
Perhaps those protections should now be rescinded and they should be held liable for their conduct.
I can rank on every search engine except Google and it would still kill my business. They own 90% of all the traffic.
Your analogy isn't valid.
There's obviously always the risk that just because a brand was good a year ago doesn't mean it's still good, but I've found that the rate of decline of most good brands is substantially lower than the SEO-spurred rate of decline of the quality of internet publications that purport to provide unbiased reviews.
You’re making me realize I too have been doing this for a while now. At least when satisficing instead of maximizing … and honestly I’m less and less interested in maximizing.
These days when making a purchase I go to a friend group who knows their thing (podcaster friends when looking for a microphone, for example), ask what brand they use, then I go to that brand’s website and buy the highest-line product that I can afford. There’s little to no google searching involved and next to zero awareness of any ads.
Ask a friend in the know and buy that. Done.
If there are no friends in the know, I ask anyone who uses a thing that solves my problem “Hey do you like your <thing>? What do you like about it?”. If they say yes, I go buy that. Life is too short to spend in the quagmire of ecommerce and friends.
I still prefer for the most part, to buy some electronics from brick and mortar shops, at least then I can see the products in action, and I will seek out and travel to specialist shops for things like audio gear, they'll usually match online prices and let you try things out.
It doesn't really matter what the community is for, only last week on a cycling forum someone asked for "What's the best alarm clock?"... two days of discussion later, and everyone has aligned on "Buy one of the Braun alarm clocks" with the only debate left about which particular model was best (it turns out, 3 models cover everyone, and all are still better than anything else). If you went to Google and asked the same question https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+... you get a lot of "Best alarm clock" list (with the year meantioned)... but few to none recommend a Braun alarm clock.
You can repeat this for virtually anything... the small communities won't have an instant answer unless someone already asked it, but will produce a better answer every time, and I agree with the article that what has happened to Google isn't great, the incentives have all aligned to produce the worst content, by some of the most trusted sources, and to have that ranked high regardless of whether it helps answer anyone's question.
Some search terms seem to trigger "medical information", "scholarly journals" or "technical documentation" subroutines and avoid products all together.
If I search "Indoor lighting science" on DDG almost all the product stuff is gone. I even get an NIH paper on lighting and health.
Same for "indoor lights technology comparison"
Do you really think it's unreasonable that "indoor lights" goes to e-commerce? What do you think most people who enter that term are looking for?
I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow? Everyone complains that search results are deteriorating. What I think is really happening is that "the internet" isn't only targeted at nerds anymore.
(And of course people are also strongly opposed to behavioral profiling which would be like reading your mind...)
If there is any ambiguity Google defaults to commerce. I think the front page for such general queries should have room for science, history, art, culture. Google's default is to sell you something, and it is often the only thing it shows.
If Google silos queries into different top-level categories (i. e. research vs commerce) being able to clearly pick one of them, even if once you see the first results, solves the problem.
Giving users the feeling of control and the ability to improve their skills seem to be completely beyond modern software companies though. "It's all magic and algorithms beyond your understanding, mortal!"
But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again, hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce filtering they already show on a lot of terms).
I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had.
The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.
FWIW I read this level of certainty as "I am privy to specific information pertaining to it and in fact I'm one of the people in charge of making sure it happens"
Haven't done it in a few years (having kids has sucked my energy for side projects pretty dry), but at one point had like ~15 sites in my portfolio that I used to experiment with.
Death, taxes, and an algo update fucking with a site's traffic at Google's whim.
One relevant example I can remember, OVH is the top result for servers in Japan yet they don't have any in Japan.
https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan
https://web.archive.org/web/20240219200935/https://www.googl...
This has been going on for many years now. And they never get punished unless there's a huge uproar about it on ycombinator like with expertsexchange.
I don't understand the details really, but I have suspected something similar a long time.
Anyway, point is when I wrote for them, we had a list of places we could link to and places we couldn't. A lot of them where other sister sites the parent company owned. If we needed a source we first had to try to find it there. If it wasn't available there then there were another list of sites we were allowed to link to, which was basically top 100 sites.
Then there were sites we were NEVER allowed to link to. I remember one of those sites was Reddit. But there were many others. Then anything that fell in the middle was something we linked to if it was critical for the article, otherwise we wouldn't link at all.
So yes, its basically an SEO circle jerk at the top. Which is why you see the same 100 sites in all search results.
The top publishers are just genuinely the sites that people click on and link to the most. There's no objective definition of "high quality content", there are just the links that people click or don't click when presented with search results.
Google puts the links people click the most at the top. And people tend to click on results from sites they recognize, because the internet is filled with a ton of crap, and publications whose names you recognize are at least usually indicative of some kind of minimal level of quality.
That's all that's going on.
However click-through rate is only one component of SEO. The biggest and most significant component of SEO is backlinks, which are ranked by quantity and quality of the link. So if google trusts SiteA a lot and SiteA links to SiteB, then google starts to trust SiteB. If other trusted sites also link to SiteB then the domain reputation grows for that site. Then there is the same ranking on a per-page basis as well. So if one page in particular is very well-linked to, then Google starts to link that page higher and higher for relevant results. This is the largest and most significant aspect of SEO. The click-through rate is a fine-tuning algorithm once you get to the top, but it alone isn't going to help. Google will never test SiteA with SiteZZZZZZZ on page 12.
This article is criticizing Google for showing reviews and guides to consumer products from well-known publications that it argues are increasingly low-quality, instead of surfacing high-quality independent reviews from less popular sites.
But this has nothing to do with Google. Google's search quality metrics are pretty simple -- Google is trying to list results in roughly the order of probability that people will click on them. Google is trying to get you to the information you're looking for the fastest.
And the reality is that, if I'm looking for air purifiers, I am absolutely going to click on the links to well-known publications like Wirecutter, or Better Homes & Gardens, or Apartment Therapy -- or a forum like Reddit. I'm far less likely to click on some smaller site I've never heard of, because I trust it less. So Google is giving me what I want.
And the idea that Google should somehow instead be analyzing the content of each product review site to try to determine whether the reviewers are actually independently testing the items or not, that it should be making some kind of determination of "real" quality separate from whether people click on it -- this seems both impossible and misguided.
I don't want Google to be trying to pick which niche independent sites are high-quality or low-quality. I just want Google to avoid actual spam, and otherwise give me the results that lots of people link to and lots of people click on -- PageRank and all that -- which is, of course, going to be publications and sites with brand recognition.
Google isn't killing small, independent sites. It's people -- users, consumers, people like me -- who generally aren't interested in small, independent sites because there's no reliable signal to determine which ones are good or trustworthy.
If I'm looking for an air purifier, I don't have time to waste to look through 20 small, independent reviewers and try to figure out which ones are shills and which minority actually know what they're talking about. No -- I'm going to go to the major review sites, see which models keep popping up, check Reddit for some confirmation and Amazon for some sales rank figures, and make the purchase and get on with my day. Which sucks for small, independent review sites. But they're just in a tough business. And Google has nothing to do with that.
This tweet thread goes into more detail https://x.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1717291171473727719?s=20
All Google can figure out is whether people click on links to people.com when they search for air purifiers (they do), and whether the page in question is outright spam or has its content stolen from another site (it's not).
The idea that Google should be trying to independently figure out some level of objective "content quality" doesn't make any sense to me. It's fine that it builds a knowledge base up out of objective facts to show in cards and whatnot, but I don't want Google trying to decide which review sites are more trustworthy -- I just want it to show me the review sites that other people are clicking on and linking to. For Google to insert "editorial control" over its search results would be an abuse of its power, to me.
When I search Google, I want popular results to come up -- the "democratically elected" results, in effect, from PageRank and clickthrough rates. I don't want Google trying to make assessments of the accuracy of content when it comes to opinion, and review sites are nothing but opinion.
The list of sites for that term are utter crap, recommending the purifiers paying the top commission. Why would you want Google to perpetuate that ranking just because other users are getting duped to click on them?
1) "The Best Air Purifier - The New York Times" (makes sense)
2-4) Links to "air purifier" category on Amazon, Home Depot, and Best Buy (makes sense)
Then a "discussions and forums" section with a couple of links to Reddit (makes sense)
Then a Google buying guide full of common Q&A about air purifiers (interesting), a list of shopping links to popular air purifier models (makes sense), and YouTube review videos (makes sense), all interspersed with some more top stores, brands, and review sites (Costco, Blueair, Levoit, Consumer Reports, Better Homes & Gardens -- all totally fine).
All of this seems perfectly reasonable and, indeed, exactly what I'm looking for. I have zero complaints. I can't find any SEO spam whatsoever. Literally all of this in the first couple of pages seems entirely legit.
I've seen more and more links that start with x.com, but my browser still redirects me back to twitter.com
What's been lost is the niche side of independent sites. You used to be able to write a review about Air Purifier Model 5643563453 and you would rank on the first page for any searches for it if nobody else wrote a review about it.
Now you just won't get that traction and will get generic corp results or at best, independent reviews on social media platforms.
Google at least used to include a sprinkling of different types of results, a store, a wiki, a forum, a review site, a blog... Now you can do a search and get 10 results from the same .com for the brand name.
It's extremely obnoxious. I have to do literal word searches in almost every Google search query I perform now.
Also, putting the Wirecutter in the same bag as Apartment Therapy and Better Homes & Gardens is misguided… looking through the examples on the article, it becomes clear that the majority of those lifestyle magazines are just recommending expensive products and popular devices on Amazon.
I would just go to Wirecutter and Consumer Reports.
And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on? What if users are so overwhelmed by the number of sites and figuring out whether or not they're trustworthy, that they just want to stick to publications they recognize?
I used to find good high quality results from domains other than the big brands through Google, now it is never the case. Now that smaller domains haven't been getting that search engine traffic, people wanting to make a sustainable business being a content creator have moved to other platforms for a long time now.
Probably the ones the author refer to would be a good start.
>And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on?
It's an interesting question, but the premise of your question is even more interesting: that serving shitty web results is somehow what a search engine is meant to be doing, because that's what users "want". I'm very skeptical of it.
But secondly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. Users who click on the first link for everything don't change the relative clickthrough rates. The people who actively choose which links to click on would still be the ones influencing the ranking. Google is smart enough to control for clickthrough rates by their listing in results and knowing how far the user has scrolled.
Let's say for example 90% of users are unsophisticated and 10% are sophisticated. Even if the #2 link is preferred 100% of the time by sophisticated users, you're still going to see 90% of people clicking the first link.
Unsophisticated users are not negatively affecting the quality of results.
Having some kind of repository of these kinds of sites would be really useful.
I've just resorted to RSS+bookmarking every small site with good content I see. The bookmarks get fed to YaCy, even though it kinda sucks. I just can't trust content aggregators and search engines to deliver good unique content.
[1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can basically create any content they want and Google will reward them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the rest of us looking for useful content in this search category can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content by sites that honestly have no business writing about this stuff.
[1] - https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629
I know many small honest sites (and some big ones) do depend on affiliate links for their actual quality reviews, so probably would be unfair to implement it permanently, but man I would like to see what the results looked like without money involved.
I kind of wish the internet was just a lot more terse.
The people most likely to benefit and have the time to enjoy small-web content are inquisitive children who don't have good sources of information at their disposal, i.e. the smart kids of dumber parents who don't have library cards. Kids who have infinite free time but zero chance of persuading their parents to pay for anything academic or 'nerdy'. There's a lot of them out there.
Contrary to popular belief: servers aren't free to run or buy or maintain. Software developers also don't work for charity therefore they require paychecks. Both of these things require money.
So if you have to pay the bills somehow then you either get users to pay for it (what Kagi currently does) or you get someone else to pay for it so it can be free to users (what Google currently does).
So if Kagi makes it "free" then they need to start advertising, which then breaks the model because their customers are no longer the search users, but the advertisers. Now motivations and incentives shift and before you know it, you rebuilt Google with a different name and we are back where we started.
The point is, that the fact that it is user-funded is exactly why its different. If you pick up the ad model then you will slowly evolve (devolve?) into what all the other search engines already are.
That “true spirit of the internet” caused the ad-based cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn’t work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
Free worked for much longer than it didn't work, and it will work again. There just needs to be a drastic adjustment in the amount of greed considered socially acceptable, and I can already see that pendulum swinging back.
For quite a long time, other than exceptions like geocities, you had to pay to publish your own content.
People who had an axe to grind or a hobby to share were "pamphleteering" and it was great.
So all we need to do is change our economic model, social norms, and human nature.
Easy peasy.
I do my review here without any affiliate link: Most DIY filters outclass commercial available filters: https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html
https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY...
They are all in my ublacklist personal block list. That was before going full time with Kagi where I blocked most of them too.
I hate that modern SEO is practically just build to create spam to game Google.
I ended up building my own mattress because the community around it doesn't really have a product to push.
https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-p...
For the example of air purifiers, look on Ali if you don't want to DIY one with a box fan and HEPA filter. They're all going to be made by some Chinese OEM anyway, so you'll cut out some middlemen and reduce the price, and at least those listings often have far more technical information, and the reviews can have detailed pictures from buyers of the products' internals.
Just stop paying Google. Stop using their services.
Our company can't even reply to gmail users that ask us questions (hey gmail, if your user emails us, they probably want a response regardless of the hoops you want everyone to jump through with your "anti-spam" measures).
Further, as the big publishers as well as well known sites get more & more of Google's traffic, doesnt it create a negative feedback loop for Google? Most of these sites have their own internal search. If I know that I'll anyways go to CondeNast for travel, i'd rather go there directly & search & skip google entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it would be in Google's best interest to try & place new & unique websites towards top of the ranking much more frequently than they do. Not sure why they dont do it already.
But when Google is also making money with their ad platform on those publishers' websites I don't think they'd ever do that.
1. Google is overrun by low quality product reviews and comparisons
2. Google starts to weight highly sites with manual testing
3. All those sites shamelessly lie and say they have manual testing -> back to 1
Isn't this a problem that Pagerank is supposed to solve? Auditing content for quality is basically an intractable problem to scale
If there was a human curator with infinite time, I think they could wade through this crap and find ten links to authoritative sites that would provide a much better experience. They would do the same type of research that this author did, see how well a site’s recommendations correlated with other review sites (and vice versa to problematic sites), look at the history of reviews and see if they correlated to when products where shipped, look at the authors experience in the review space, etc, etc.
This has to be a direction Google will be going in.
LOL, no. Generative AI is literally taking over SEO spam and exponentially magnifying it. That's where the money is. And Google is here to make money.
It was kind of inevitable that some tech would eventually do this, even if it was as unsophisticated as click farms and content mills. If adding information is free and there is no gate, it gets trashed by spam. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.
Are there any other similar family of websites which we can lookup and block?
Feel free to give it a try, one search per day is free
https://www.aisearch.vip/?q=best%20air%20purifier%20for%20pe...
> Best Splurge: Molekule Air Pro
> This high-end purifier uses PECO technology to destroy airborne pollutants, including pet hair, > dander, and viruses. It's also effective at removing odors and VOCs. While it's one of the most > expensive options on the list, it's a good choice for those with severe allergies or asthma.
This brand was specifically called out by the main article for being overpriced junk by a company currently in a lawsuit regarding false advertising.
The web has lost so much personality since the 2000s. Every site covers the same topics with the same shallow posts, and everyone ignores that the only thing keeping the lights on are those "Best product for X" posts.
Nothing would make me happier than the trillion $ corps being disrupted by new players offering serious value to users.
Trillion $ corps rent seeking their way into 100 markets and having law makers working for them isn't a great thing for the future of humanity.
Actually, advertising is kind of the antithesis to most quality, factual, well-researched, unbiased information.
OpenAI does it with their LLMs albeit with a different intent.
But even reviews that you might see on YouTube are usually not reviews. They are demos. Unboxing a product and demonstrating that a product indeed does what the box says is not a true review.
But the publishers who sold out to the algorithm are also to blame. I don’t know how to break the vicious cycle here.
What is BHS marketplace?
I can believe that Google was genuinely trying to help their users by providing more useful search results, yet, due to Goodhart's law they have in fact accomplished the opposite. As a concrete example, previously references to "lab testing" actually meant something, but Google turned its immense power on that and similar keywords and destroyed their information content.
It is irresponsible of Google to naively act in ignorance of the entirely predictable consequences of their actions. Yes, Goodhart's law is counterintuitive, but it's been a well-known principle for decades and Google ought to realize that they are powerful enough it applies to any action they take and take that into account when making decisions.
That post is 4 months old but someone posted this just 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
Goes to show how little you can trust reddit comments these days, particularly for good google keywords
This is mentioned in TFA:
>Somehow the user has been banned from Reddit, but their comment is still at the top of the thread — we wonder how many other comments this user has published across different subreddits.
This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment.
If you are a reddit mod and not getting paid in 2024 you're doing it wrong.
if you want to unserstand how and why certain websites rank and all that sort of stuff just lurk on black hat SEO forums and see how they game system. I don't recomment their services but it's worth reading about the things they take into account. From keywords, density, headings all the way to domain age and server location.
While it's strictly accurate, it's not a very useful way to look at the world. Google is killing independent sites that spend more time on the content than on SEO. It might be killing those sites in the same way that a volcanic eruption kills wildlife—as an unthinking, uncaring force of nature—but it's still killing them.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33m1s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=...
> your website is less algorithm oriented
Maybe we should refuse to accept Google’s framing. It’s content creators’ job to create great content as judged by people. It’s Google’s job to discover that content and rank it above procedurally generated garbage that is devouring the internet. The fact that Google’s results are dominated by trash isn’t because there’s a lack of good content.