3 ms·
I'll often find myself in a situation where I'm evaluating two competing products that I don't know much about. For example the other day, it was Logstash vs. F
by dcolkitt 6y ago
I'll often find myself in a situation where I'm evaluating two competing products that I don't know much about. For example the other day, it was Logstash vs. Fluentd.
What I've noticed compared to even 5 years ago, is that almost all the Google searches on a topic like that are content marketing. Which isn't wholly bad, at least I'm glad that marketing dollars are being spent on somewhat informative blog content instead of wild parties at trade shows.
But still, I don't really find these content marketing pages terribly informative. They all tend to come off as the same type of bland, inoffensive corporate-y just-the-facts ma'am. "Logstash supports [X]. Fluentd supports [Y]. They're both good in separate ways. By the way our SaaS product [Q] integrates with both."
That's not what I want. I want to know where the bodies are buried. I want to see flame wars, pig-headed opinions, comments saying "lolz, doing that is retarded". Content marketing, in addition to pushing its own agenda, is never going to give you that kind of opinion, because offending people is bad for business. But I want to see honest takes, even if flawed and opinionated.
So all too often with these types of searches, I'll just reflexively append "Fluentd vs. Logstash Reddit" or "Fluentd vs. Logstash HackerNews" because at least I feel like you're likely to get an honest discussion.
- necovek 6y agoI sometimes work around that by adding in a quoted "forum", but they are also going the way of the do-do a bit.
- NullPrefix 6y agoI like to add "shit", "scam" or some other negative term after the product name to find the negative reviews.
- bserge 6y agoPretty much. Google (and other) Search results have always been full of SEO optimized content made by marketers. It was rarely the best way to find honest opinions and reviews. 15 years ago, I'd search for people's blogs and read them and the comments, 10 years ago eBay and Amazon reviews were good (now Amazon is gamed, and eBay has decoupled feedback from listings for some unfathomable reason), now it's mega forums like Reddit. I don't actually want to read endless troll threads, but I do want actual opinions from actual people.
- mrighele 6y ago> So all too often with these types of searches, I'll just reflexively append "Fluentd vs. Logstash Reddit" or "Fluentd vs. Logstash HackerNews" because at least I feel like you're likely to get an honest discussion. To search HN I often use https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com. Compared to a Google search it is clearer how old are the submissions and the order of the result is more predictable (it's the score of the submission)
- Jommi 6y agoI do this too all the time and many people in my circle are always concerned that I "Listen too much to reddit". Which is just insane to me! Of course I would rather listen to an open, commentable discussion forum than the top search result which is there because of manifactured relevancy and heavy ad spend. Scarily whats been happening recently is that the black box turk vogon SEO machine is starting to pump out sites with random urls but that are riddled with the phrase "reddit" in the meta tags / seo texts. The machine is learning!