3 ms·

Ah, "the words are what I mean them to be". Can't argue anymore then.

jasode 9y ago
There's no need to play semantic games. Let's say I'm looking for a Seagate 10 TB harddrive. The Google Shopping results would look something like this: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?prds=scoring:tp https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?... That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers". Seriously, without playing the game of "words are anything I want them to mean just to win an argument"... what would _you_ call the mechanism of those Google Shopping results? <Genuinely confused here.>
- yorwba 9y ago
  > That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers". But did you want to be connected to the advertisers, i.e. those who paid Google to give their product a better placement, or did you want to be connected to the sellers, ranked by how desirable their product is to you?
  - jasode 9y ago
    I see your differentiation of advertisers-vs-sellers but it doesn't apply because, yes, I do wanted to be connected to those advertisers. The Google Shopping page clearly shows the message "Sponsored (i)" at the top of the results. Click on the "(i)" for more info and it says: "Products and offers that match your query. Google is compensated by these merchants." I'm using the Google Shopping as it's deliberately designed: connect me to the advertisers. I think the confusion is that regular search results (e.g. search for "how to concatenate a string in PHP?") is a "pull" mechanism in which Google spiders webcrawls and scrapes from pages like StackOverflow. You expect some sort of pagerank curation without requiring StackOverflow paying money to Google. Nevertheless, Stackoverflow answers often show up at the top. On the other hand, the Google Shopping is a "push" mechanism where the advertisers pay to place their links there. The advertiser/sponsor model is basically how all the major comparison shopping sites work. I don't know of any reputable/reliable price comparison site that uses a "pull" mechanism to scrape prices across multiple retailers that covers most products. If it does "pull" price data, it tries to derive income via techniques like affiliate url links for commissions. Camelcamelcamel uses a pull mechanism but it only scrapes Amazon and not the other retailers like Best Buy, Newegg, etc. To turn this around, let me ask you... what price comparison website connects me to sellers instead of advertisers? (A site like Ebay connects me to "sellers" but doesn't include results from multiple major retailers such as Amazon.)

There's no need to play semantic games. Let's say I'm looking for a Seagate 10 TB harddrive. The Google Shopping results would look something like this: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?prds=scoring:tp https://www.google.com/shopping/product/3954751729784172026?... That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers". Seriously, without playing the game of "words are anything I want them to mean just to win an argument"... what would _you_ call the mechanism of those Google Shopping results? <Genuinely confused here.>

yorwba 9y ago
> That example "connects me, the user, to the advertisers". But did you want to be connected to the advertisers, i.e. those who paid Google to give their product a better placement, or did you want to be connected to the sellers, ranked by how desirable their product is to you?
- jasode 9y ago
  I see your differentiation of advertisers-vs-sellers but it doesn't apply because, yes, I do wanted to be connected to those advertisers. The Google Shopping page clearly shows the message "Sponsored (i)" at the top of the results. Click on the "(i)" for more info and it says: "Products and offers that match your query. Google is compensated by these merchants." I'm using the Google Shopping as it's deliberately designed: connect me to the advertisers. I think the confusion is that regular search results (e.g. search for "how to concatenate a string in PHP?") is a "pull" mechanism in which Google spiders webcrawls and scrapes from pages like StackOverflow. You expect some sort of pagerank curation without requiring StackOverflow paying money to Google. Nevertheless, Stackoverflow answers often show up at the top. On the other hand, the Google Shopping is a "push" mechanism where the advertisers pay to place their links there. The advertiser/sponsor model is basically how all the major comparison shopping sites work. I don't know of any reputable/reliable price comparison site that uses a "pull" mechanism to scrape prices across multiple retailers that covers most products. If it does "pull" price data, it tries to derive income via techniques like affiliate url links for commissions. Camelcamelcamel uses a pull mechanism but it only scrapes Amazon and not the other retailers like Best Buy, Newegg, etc. To turn this around, let me ask you... what price comparison website connects me to sellers instead of advertisers? (A site like Ebay connects me to "sellers" but doesn't include results from multiple major retailers such as Amazon.)