Is Product Search Broken? Why Are We Still Stuck with Ads and Fake Reviews? | Hacker News Reader

Is Product Search Broken? Why Are We Still Stuck with Ads and Fake Reviews?

27 pointsnicola_alessi35 comments

Hi HN, I’ve been thinking a lot about how broken product search is today. You type in a query, and the first page is just ads, SEO-optimized blogs, or fake reviews. It feels like the system is designed to waste our time rather than help us.

For example, I was searching for a decent pair of wireless headphones under $200. After an hour of scrolling through Google, Amazon, and forums, I found a thread on Reddit from 2019. Guess what? The recommended model was discontinued.

This made me wonder:

Why are we still stuck with ads and fake reviews? Why hasn’t anyone built a better solution? What would your ideal product search engine look like?

I’ve been exploring some tools that claim to solve these issues, but I’m curious to hear how you handle it. Do you have any tips, tools, or tricks to share? Let’s discuss!

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There is no "business model" that will fix this. Yelp, The Wirecutter, Product Hunt, all these suffer from the principal-agent problem. You, the reader, are the principal looking for a solution to your problem. The app is the agent that solves the problem for you. But the agent has its own motives, and can behave in ways you don't want.

Yelp was great until it decided it needed to become a gatekeeper for restaurants and coerce vendors into paying for ads.

The Wirecutter was decent until it got acquired by NYT and changed its style, with a much heavier focus on affilliate revenue and positioning itself as a a "perk" for NYT subscribers.

Are you willing to pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription? $24 for 1 year.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/headph... seems like what you want, at least for this case.

If you are not willing to pay, then who pays to carry out the reviews, and who benefits from helping you find that review vs. helping you find an advertisement?

Who benefits from writing Amazon reviews? I've written them for years for products I purchased, for no other reason than to let other people know.

There are many companies that will pay people to write positive reviews on behalf of them or some third party (even though it's against the terms of service).

Even without that, Amazon itself (via the Vine program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Vine) will pay you in goods for writing reviews. I was a part of that program for a few years, and found my review quantity increasing and quality decreasing as I wrote more just to get more free crap from Amazon.

Many other marketplaces will also incentivize reviews in various ways. You personally might have more integrity, but the internet as a whole doesn't...

Those are clearly labeled. And Amazon Vine reviewers for the most part do make an honest effort to review the product. I tend to ig ore them in favour of those 3-4 line reviews in small caps and iffy grammar. That's a much better signal for reliability than a blog post length Vine review.

By labelling some reviews as paid reviews, readers are fooled to believe other reviews are not paid.

Some offer discounts and gifts and such for a review. They don't even say you have to give them a good review, and so they'll justify it as an anti-bias thing. But you have to show them the review, and it's a little odd to give someone a bad review right after they offer a free gift.

The big hint is that they'll have an overwhelming number of 5 star reviews compared to the competition and often average around 4.95. Some are actually quite mediocre. So I'll usually avoid anything above a 4.8.

Check your local library, ours give patrons access to consumer reports online for free.

Public libraries are awesome.

I would definitely pay for something like this if it was accurate. I go through plenty of bad headphones, and I once even paid for a piece of software that makes the headphones less bad (couldn't fix the battery life though).

But how do I know the reviews are reliable and not being manipulated by the brands in some way?

I did professional purchasing for 20 years. It was getting harder and harder to find products up to when I retired 5 years ago. The problem was not only search engines, but companies stopped listing specs for their products. The information about battery life, PC components, native screen resolution, power requirements, operating system requirements, what casings were made out of, warrantees, aspect ratios (think any modern monitor can handle 4:3 aspect ratio or 640x480? Think again) and more has been stripped from many product web sites. You don't know what you are going to get unless you buy one of them. Sometimes you buy one, order more and get something else. Business is putting itself out of business.

One trick to finding products is to use image search. Depending on what you are looking for, if you can see an image of what is being sold it can give you a good idea of whether it is actually what you want. Setting a time frame for a search (e.g., last month, last year) can help limit it to products that actually exist. Get clever with keywords, use technical keywords that you think will only be included with products you want to buy (for example when searching for stage lighting, add "DMX".) Avoid noname nobrand products because they have nosupport. Use quotes around keywords. Some search engines (eBay) have a NOT function (use -keyword on eBay) which can help get rid of a lot of noise. Use one search engine (say eBay) to find what you want, then use keywords like brand name from that to do a search for somewhere that will sell you the product new with a warranty. Using "site:reddit.com" still works to find actual people offering opinions on a product; do something similar for products in particular classes (e.g., looking for music gear, use site:reverb.com). Talk to a reference librarian about how to narrow searches, many of them are experts at this.

Because buyers are many, poor and disorganised, while sellers are few, rich and organised.

There's companies like Unilever, P&G, etc that are rich and organized but they don't need to play this game. Everything on the shelves is theirs.

The game is played for things that are not on shelves. Those players, compared to Unilever, appear to be many and poor as well.

For those who haven't seen this before:

"These 10 Companies Control Enormous Number Of Consumer Brands"

https://i.huffpost.com/gen/585370/original.jpg

You just described most political systems, or any system where a few try to control/manipulate/govern the many :)

I sell a B2B SAAS and Google search is mostly gamed by these so called "Sponsored" ads/posts. However, I have noticed a very interesting trend. A few prospects told me that they are now just asking AI tools like ChatGPT with their questions and getting recommendations directly. The numbers are small for now but I think this is going to be the new search trend.

I honestly think that after almost 20 years. Google's monopoly on search may come to an end in next 3-5 years. At least, a serious damage to their search revenue which is what made them the giant they are today.

I guess. I mean my own services get fake reviews without my involvement. I have a B2B software business for which I know all customers personally and still there is a product page on G2 reviews (which I didn't create) full of fake reviews, and I haven't been able to take them down (though I haven't tried too hard to be honest). I don't know what's the deal with that, I guess it's just about warming up fake reviewer accounts by writing reviews for products where it's unlikely that they will get flagged. They are all glowing reviews too, which I guess makes sense as writing a bad review would surely prompt a response from the affected company.

I’m being serious - what do you want other than ads and fake reviews?

Do you want to use a search engine and get something other than ads? The search engine is free. Use it like a yellow pages and look up ads with it, you’ll be happy. Use it for anything else, be disappointed.

Looking up ads is not as worthless as it sounds. If you see a big ad, it means that company can afford a big ad. That can be a worthwhile signal.

You can pay up and get something different that’s not ads and fake stuff. Pay Consumer Reports, pay America’s Test Kitchen for kitchen gizmo and food reviews, Checkbook for local services, etc.

Everyone uses A/B testing to optimize ad click metrics. If the search results come up with better recommendations than the ads, the metrics will prevent the use of that search algorithm.

Business-to-buisiness suppliers, like Digi-Key and McMaster Carr have good product search engines, because their existence depends on users actually finding what they are looking for.

My buddy from Germany showed me a site once where they had honest reviews. I just have not seen anything like this in the US. There is this incentive to make money with affiliate ads or to pump sales.

It is a very hard problem to solve.

>> ads

When you search for a product on Google or Facebook you're going to see ads. That's literally their business model.

Frankly if I'm researching a new area then I welcome that. It gives me a place to start.

Ads exist because, as a consumer, you have options. Lots of options. Ads are how suppliers reach consumers.

>> reviews

Happy customers are great marketing. Social proof is a primary measure by which we have confidence in what we are buying.

Of course, intrinsically, there's no distinction between a "real" review and a "fake" review. I can write a review about anything, for any reason. Did I use the product? Who knows...

Fundamentally reviews aren't really worth anything. The motivations of the reviewer are unknown. In lots of cases your experience will likely be better or worse than the reviewers.

So, to answer your question, you're stuck with ads and reviews because you are choosing to use platforms that are built on ads and reviews. If you want something different you may want to consider the platform you choose.

As a complete aside; what were you hoping the product search to deliver? I mean, there are lots of offerings in your search. Were you looking for the one with the best web site?

I just look up the product name + reddit. You have to do research yourself there's no way around it because people want different things from the same product.

Reddit is heavily astroturfed and product placed.

Check also for product name + accident (depending on the item), product name + scandal.

Have you seen unfluence? https://unfluence.app

I actually think Reddit is decent for that purpose.

It used to be. Hasn't been for a long time though. Too many bots. Old and New posts are flooded with accounts that post only once or only in support of the product their hawking, and reddit makes it too hard to detect this.

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