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The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides co
by hajile 6y ago
The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon.
Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get a subscription search engine that’s actually good? I’d pay for that.
- majani 6y agoSubscription services' weak spot is that they are incentivized to pander to you hard and reinforce your biases. A subscription search engine would just create the ultimate echo chamber
- freediver 6y agoYes, building one. Details in my profile.
- christophilus 6y agoBrave is releasing one soon.
- selfhoster11 6y agoI literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for open-ended searches it's a lost war.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoBut why aren't you using reddit's own search engine directly ?
- tolbish 6y agoGoogle modified the algorithm a while back to ignore such flags at times.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoThankfully, using a WorldWideWeb search engine for this is only necessary for the somewhat rare websites whose own search engines suck.
- emptyfile 6y agoThey did a bad job then, since they still work.
- tolbish 6y agoThey still use the flags, just not in every instance. I recall the quotes for inclusion of strings and the "-site" flag failing for me as early as last year.
- gpvos 6y agoI thought that was several years ago already? Anyway, on Duckduckgo it still works.
- edgyquant 6y agoYes they do ignore those but at this moment they don’t ignore site: queries. Google also suffers heavily from old content, and even changing the date under the tools section doesn’t work for some reason. I think because it goes by when the page was last updated and sites like Reddit update them automatically very frequently
- ghostbrainalpha 6y agoThat worked for awhile. But even Reddit has been overrun with coordinated marketing efforts to make sure you can't really get an honest review without checking every comments post history.
- arbitrage 6y ago> even Reddit no, reddit? i'm shocked /s your implication seems to be that reddit should somehow be resistant to parasitic capitalism. reddit has been compromised and on the side of the advertisers since the beginning.
- cptskippy 6y ago> reddit has been compromised and on the side of the advertisers since the beginning. reddit today is very different from reddit of early days, its practically unrecognizable.
- IggleSniggle 6y agoExactly. HN of today is a very similar experience to what Reddit used to be. The King is dead. Long live the King!
- PoignardAzur 6y ago> I literally append "site:reddit.com" Stop saying that! The more people repeat that on HN, the more we risk advertisers realizing it and doing reddit-targeted SEO and reddit will be useless too! (I'm only half joking) Also, it's funny, I was just reading the thread about malaria eradication and DDT-resistant mosquitoes; the problem of SEO is eerily similar (any countermeasure is eventually defeated by evolution).
- matheusmoreira 6y agoEvolutionary arms races are extremely common, especially between parasites and their hosts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race The same thing happens in our societies. It's a constant never-ending struggle.
- kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 6y agoThe majority of popular reddit posts are already SEO optimized marketing campaigns anyway.
- the_lonely_road 6y agoYou are 10 years too late for that concern. I often wonder if there are any real people commenting, submitting, or upvoting left on Reddit.
- shrimpx 6y agoI spend a lot of time on reddit and do not identify with your comment at all.
- selfhoster11 6y agoThis is emphatically not the case in my experience.
- edgyquant 6y agoThere’s real people for sure, but most of them are children and teenagers who are easily susceptible to corporate propaganda. I often wonder when a competitor will arise so that I can leave Reddit, and it’s rolling release of bad UX, for something better. At this point I would pay a monthly fee for a decent Reddit.
- esailija 6y agoAlso try appending: inurl:forum|viewthread|showthread|viewtopic|showtopic|"index.php?topic" | intext:"reading this topic"|"next thread"|"next topic"|"send private message"
- ihnorton 6y agoEven for programming topics, sites like gitmemory routinely rank higher than the original GitHub repos and StackOverflow answers that they are "mirroring", or the mirror page gets full result billing while the original StackOverflow answer only gets a single title line in the "other results from site" format.
- fsflover 6y agoHow about p2p FLOSS search engine: https://yacy.net https://yacy.net?
- BlueTemplar 6y agoThank, I was despairing about DuckDuckGo not having their own crawlers and the many issues with Qwant. This looks promising !
- megamix 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652151 :) subscription service on the rise!
- hnnameblah365 6y agoGoogle could easily lower pagerank for blogspam by measuring density of affiliate links. They don't, because low quality consumerist search results make the ads fit right in. Also those sites are more likely to contain Google Ads themselves. The search engine is fully optimized for consumerism, not finding the most relevant result.
- bun_at_work 6y agoJust curious - how much would you pay for that? $20/mo? $30/mo? One one hand I completely agree, and hope for paid service alternatives to all these "free" products. On the other hand, I can find everything I need through Google, as is, so why pay for an alternative?
- anticristi 6y agoI ended up with "site:bbc.com" and "site:svt.se" to get to actual news instead of click-baits. Why the search function of these sites is crap, to the point where it's easier to hack Google, is beyond me.