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Same. When I search for a product I always append reddit e.g. "what video card 4k 120hz reddit" because otherwise the search results are flooded with fake compa

Same. When I search for a product I always append reddit e.g. "what video card 4k 120hz reddit" because otherwise the search results are flooded with fake comparison pages spamming Amazon referral links

throwaway2048 7y ago
I'm sure the fake subreddits with amazon referral links are a work in progress as we speak.
- zamubafoo 7y ago
  They are. If you look at /r/suggestalaptop they already have people who suggesting laptops and link with Amazon referral links. I'm half convinced that they are just bots.
- shostack 7y ago
  Sure, but presumably you hone your senses as to which subs are trustworthy and which are not. For many classes of queries, there are some well-established subs already. Then it is a simple matter of parsing the comments, and the signal-to-noise ratio tends to be fairly decent for lots of things still.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    Thats not really the issue, its obvious these crap sites are crap, the problem is them polluting google results.
- Agenttin 7y ago
  Most subs ban Amazon referral links for this reason.
trevor-e 7y ago
FWIW, in this case it might be better to use `site:reddit.com` for more accurate results. I tried your example and it narrowed down 264k results -> 12k results, although I'm not sure how much stock should be put into that figure because after reloading the first page it went down to 93k results. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾ For both searches, the first page was largely the same just in a different order. The big difference comes on the later pages of results.
int_19h 7y ago
I do a lot of product research on Google, and in the past few months I have noticed a significant and worrying reduction in quality of search results for detailed queries, for two reasons. Firstly, Google seems to be far more aggressive about using synonyms, and it's almost always done in a way that broadens a query. So, for example, if you search for a particular brand of some kind of product, the results that come up are often about such products in general (you can see which word got substituted, because they highlight the found keywords in bold). Worse yet, it's also aggressively dropping specific words from the query (they show up stricken through under the result links). It used to be that it would do that when your search wouldn't even get a pageful of results - but now it gets to a ridiculous point where I make a two-word query, and the top result has one of those two dropped! And yet if you quote the word, forcing it to be there, there's no shortage of results for the more detailed query. In practice, this means that most of my detailed Google queries end up quoting all or almost all words in them, because that's the only way I get results that I actually want, rather than a bunch of random vaguely related links. Even that doesn't seem to be 100% reliable, because it seems to sometimes ignore even the quoted words... While I have no idea why this is going on, it's clearly not to improve search result quality. Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. I don't know if it's about paid search results, or preferentially treating websites that have Google ads on them, or just generally steering me towards online stores rather than e.g. forums (where the quote-forced detailed queries usually lead). But either way, this is worrying, because search has always been so fundamental to what Google is - and if that is being twisted so badly now, what can I expect from other products?
- type0 7y ago
  > Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. Of course it is, they'll earn more if it takes you longer to search and you are more likely to click on one of the ads. I think it's as simple as that.

throwaway2048 7y ago

I'm sure the fake subreddits with amazon referral links are a work in progress as we speak.

zamubafoo 7y ago
They are. If you look at /r/suggestalaptop they already have people who suggesting laptops and link with Amazon referral links. I'm half convinced that they are just bots.
shostack 7y ago
Sure, but presumably you hone your senses as to which subs are trustworthy and which are not. For many classes of queries, there are some well-established subs already. Then it is a simple matter of parsing the comments, and the signal-to-noise ratio tends to be fairly decent for lots of things still.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Thats not really the issue, its obvious these crap sites are crap, the problem is them polluting google results.
Agenttin 7y ago
Most subs ban Amazon referral links for this reason.

trevor-e 7y ago

FWIW, in this case it might be better to use `site:reddit.com` for more accurate results. I tried your example and it narrowed down 264k results -> 12k results, although I'm not sure how much stock should be put into that figure because after reloading the first page it went down to 93k results. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾ For both searches, the first page was largely the same just in a different order. The big difference comes on the later pages of results.

int_19h 7y ago

I do a lot of product research on Google, and in the past few months I have noticed a significant and worrying reduction in quality of search results for detailed queries, for two reasons. Firstly, Google seems to be far more aggressive about using synonyms, and it's almost always done in a way that broadens a query. So, for example, if you search for a particular brand of some kind of product, the results that come up are often about such products in general (you can see which word got substituted, because they highlight the found keywords in bold). Worse yet, it's also aggressively dropping specific words from the query (they show up stricken through under the result links). It used to be that it would do that when your search wouldn't even get a pageful of results - but now it gets to a ridiculous point where I make a two-word query, and the top result has one of those two dropped! And yet if you quote the word, forcing it to be there, there's no shortage of results for the more detailed query. In practice, this means that most of my detailed Google queries end up quoting all or almost all words in them, because that's the only way I get results that I actually want, rather than a bunch of random vaguely related links. Even that doesn't seem to be 100% reliable, because it seems to sometimes ignore even the quoted words... While I have no idea why this is going on, it's clearly not to improve search result quality. Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. I don't know if it's about paid search results, or preferentially treating websites that have Google ads on them, or just generally steering me towards online stores rather than e.g. forums (where the quote-forced detailed queries usually lead). But either way, this is worrying, because search has always been so fundamental to what Google is - and if that is being twisted so badly now, what can I expect from other products?

type0 7y ago
> Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. Of course it is, they'll earn more if it takes you longer to search and you are more likely to click on one of the ads. I think it's as simple as that.