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To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writ

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find. Instead you'll get a list of "Best TVs 2021" or whatever, with some blurb and an affiliate link, not an actual review. That's what people can make for free with a day's notice, so if you write a search engine that discards those sites, that's fine, you'll just return "no results" for every interesting query. I guess what I'm saying is that if you want better reviews, you probably want to start writing reviews and figuring out how to sell them for money. Many have tried, few have succeeded. But there probably isn't some Javascript that will fix this problem.

snth 5y ago
> If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find. That's not strictly true, given that reviewers are often sent pre-release versions of things in order to do that work before release day.
- loceng 5y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, as you're correct - however to point out there seems to be a trend where reviewers are only given pre-release versions if they practically always give favourable reviews to the products they list, especially if they're provided the product for free; there doesn't have to be an express relationship or contract between a reviewer and a company either, it's the reverse of how Bill Gates apparently has given $200 million+ to different news channels/media organizations - and so they're less likely going to as freely share negative news about him or perhaps his organizations, so then ; this makes me think, similarly to how stocks being sold by CEOs (etc) must be pre-planned to avoid shenanigans like market manipulation, that anyone giving large sums of money to any media/journalism organization must divide the amount up over 20-40+ years, so that organization at least has a runway and not dependant on larger "dopamine hits" at shorter intervals.
  - nradov 5y ago
    I trust DC Rainmaker's reviews of fitness tech products because he always returns products back to the manufacturers after writing reviews. So there's no conflict of interest based on free products. https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      If companies don't like his reviews, they'll stop sending review units. That hits both in the pocketbook and the race to be one of the earlier reviewers of a new product. Reduced conflict, perhaps, but not none.
      - tchvil 5y ago
        In DC Rainmaker's case it is probably the opposite. A fitness product not reviewed by him is a bad signal.
      - nradov 5y ago
        If companies don't send him review units then he just buys them retail. He has already done this for many products.
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Yes, I'm aware. That's less money in his pocket, and less ability to have the review be available on or before the product launch. There's still some conflict of interest, even if it's lessened. Only purchasing review units at retail would remove this conflict.
        bobthebuilders 5y ago
        Incorrect. He can then return them.
      - whakim 5y ago
        This presupposes that companies think their products are bad. If you have (what you believe to be) a good product, you definitely want DC Rainmaker to review it. I think this is a reasonably general point across industries - companies want to get their products into the hands of the most reputable reviewers.
loceng 5y ago
Developing common standards/protocols for everything required for a quality review vs. a "candy" or shallow hype review would be a good place to start, making it culture that everyone educated knows about to follow - and then they can only go to or support reviewers who list what testing protocols they follow. Industry has already done this with the "food pyramid" - influencing, capturing governments to make the food pyramid more based on economic reasons and much less on science - with the government putting it out and distributing it into schooling of different levels, giving it an unearned or undeserved authority which then people blindly trust/follow - not understanding that or when systems and their output or oversight have been captured; why the pandemic bringing the classroom home via Zoom, so parents could see/hear the learning material has outraged many parents - an example I've heard, where white children are being taught to feel guilty about their 'white privilege', or parents being upset their children are being taught at a very young age that they can decide what gender they are; I'm not stating what I believe here, just giving examples I've heard of. This capturing of the government is why I think ultimately the government should be developing and maintaining such platforms, as per law, and requiring individuals and organizations to in real-time add and update their data (simply example being restaurants, their menu's ingredients, their open hours) - in part to de-risk the government having an unnatural power as "the single arbiter" of truth, perhaps instead to de-risk capture that the government funds multiple independent organizations at the federal level - that States can decide which ones they follow, if necessary, part of why States exist - to de-risk the potential capture of the Federal umbrella; however the system is in an imbalanced, broken, captured state - with the duopoly evolving to be more extreme lead or formed by the establishment, with a broken voting system in arguably most countries of the world, and mainstream media being captured by for-profit industrial complexes that fund MSM through ad revenues - which further develop or mould our culture and narratives/talking points and beliefs, whether truthful or not; without fixing these the other platforms/systems excelling won't be possible.
frenchyatwork 5y ago
I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well. What's happened since then is that almost all the normal "people linking to things they like" has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Facebook), and vast majority of what remains on the open web are SEO spammers.
- dpeck 5y ago
  I agree very much with this. It seems that between the walled gardens and also people being so reluctant to have “their” audience leave their site/page/etc the discoverability of the web has dropped dramatically.
- prepend 5y ago
  I wish FB would be more open, but since they have all this walled garden info, are they well placed to start a competing search engine? Would be interesting if their activity could help filter out seo hackers.
  - kritiko 5y ago
    FB search seems to have gotten worse and worse. Unless I can remember the specific Group where I saw something, it's very unlikely that I can find it again. And they know which posts I've been highly engaged on...
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.
  - ufo 5y ago
    There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.
xondono 5y ago
There’s a lot of good quality reviews on YT on launch date of pretty much anything these days. It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.
- midasuni 5y ago
  There’s not much money in written reviews, and people can’t find them amongst the automatically written SEo/affiliate crap
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  Interesting. I never watch video reviews. They're painfully slow and impossible to search.
- basch 5y ago
  How do you compare 3 or 4 videos before watching them? Watching video reviews of the reviewers?
  - xondono 5y ago
    Like most things, it’s a reputation ladder. There’s top channels like LTT and if what you are looking for is out of their niche, you look for the biggest channels in that niche and go mostly by association (who they have made collaborations with,..). EDIT: of course the big win of video reviews is that you can see the thing working.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead. I'd say it's more that YouTube offers a clearer path to content monetization than text does. YT is a much more lucrative platform for the same level of effort as SEO for their text blogs.
mminer237 5y ago
There are still good reviews. For TVs, RTINGS produces high-quality reviews (although they're not listed super straightforwardly). For computer internals, AnandTech does even better. You don't have to talk about the absolute latest product out that same day for you to have quality reviews of other options in the meantime. Everyone just makes blogspam because its far less work than actually buying products and developing expertise and testing them and writing out a whole thorough review. Google's algorithms just can't tell a quality review from a surface-level, uneducated take.
mc32 5y ago
Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues: 1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.) 2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge. 3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands competing with you, the time demand may be overwhelming and not worth it. 4. If you are a trusted reviewer or site, you will get economic pressure to review a particular thing or brand you may not like very much but the money may be good. So you will begin to experience conflicts of interest. 5. If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers. 7. Some things are timeless (a pipewrench, let's say) and some are seasonal (consumer electronics, toys, etc). The former deserves a through review but the latter doesn't deserve as much but it may get the bulk of interest due to seasonal demand). Does it really matter if the latter's latest iteration has 2% increased battery life to discuss? I'm sure there is a lot I didn't think of. But it's a doomed category, unless people are willing to pay for professional reviews (Consumer Reports types and other independents).
- chongli 5y ago
  If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers. In my experience, the best reviewers are hobbyists. The thing is, it's not reviews that are their hobby. Rather, they review the products go along with their hobby. So, for my hobbies (espresso and aquariums), there are tons of easily accessible reviews on all kinds of aquarium gear and coffee machines, grinders, etc. On the other hand, nobody does plumbing or HVAC as a hobby (that I know of) so it's very difficult to find high quality reviews of water softeners or furnaces. It takes a very special rare sort of person who would install these things just to review them. The closest thing I could find was this video [1] on a DIY water filtration system by an RV/off the grid type hobbyist (from what I can tell). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCC4TOYYGF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCC4TOYYGF8
  - treis 5y ago
ColinHayhurst 5y ago
"SEO" spam is "Google SEO" problem. So SE ranking Optimization is not (yet) so much a problem for other Crawler/index SEs (Bing, Mojeek, Gigablast). You might say that Amazon (in eCommerce) and TRIP (in Travel) have cracked the problem of combining good/deep Content/Reviews and Category expertise with Search. We regularly see partnership opportunities with customers interested in our API [0]. I presume Bing see the same, though their terms are more fixed and require you sharing more data. Definitely big opportunities in other categories, which are often squandered through a naive, if understandable route, of choosing a Scrape and index route. [0] https://www.mojeek.com/support/api/ https://www.mojeek.com/support/api/
hubraumhugo 5y ago
Search engines are pretty good at solving the problem they were designed to solve, which is "finding pages which contain all the query words". But they are pretty bad at solving the much harder problem of rating the trustworthiness & authenticity, intentions of the owner, monetization of the site, etc. One possible solution to this could be: - Let the community vote on the most trusted sources - Include results from enthusiasts that have little incentive to write biased reviews (Reddit, HN, expert forums) - Look at the ownership of the site and how transparent they are about it - Regularly reassess these criteria This wouldn't scale for a generic search engine, but I'm working on a service that does this for many product verticals/niches.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  Agreed here, but in your second bullet, people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition etc. It just so happens that these "forums" have built in voting systems that they spend time preventing from being gamed so the search engine doesn't have to. Not sure if this is a good model for a search engine, but it does work to a small degree in those forums.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition Internet points are a terrible reason to write anything. They're completely meaningless. We should all judge comments on their own merit and not because the author has a lot of karma. Apart from mine, obvs.
winternett 5y ago
The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. There are literally millions of Internet savvy people who would be able to survive on what we would consider barely anything profit-wise in adsense revenue, which also usually pays out in US dollars. In this currently terrible global economy, desperation turns the most intelligent minds bound into poverty into bootleg SEO engineers, online catfishers, scammers, and ransomware creators, and God bless their creativity... Instead of creating income opportunity and crowdsourcing people in foreign countries for common (more positive) good, companies rarely create opportunities for the people who would normally turn into spammers and scammers, and that's what creates an endless army of people that constantly destroy online communities like Soundcloud, FaceBook, Twitter, and TikTok with stolen content, trend scams, fake news, and spam messages. Google search has been invalidating and subverting their most accurate search results based on abstract SEO rules for quite some time now. It was likely done so that they could implant paid ads first into content, because that makes them the most profit. Doing that has destroyed their reliability and reputation as a search service leader, and they're never going to admit it, but payola is the undertone that is ruining their search results... There is a certain type of corruption that occurs when a company turns away from upholding customer service and value towards a monopolistic "profit-first economic stranglehold" business model... That strategy never ultimately works out well for both companies AND users in the long run. The next leader will likely be a search that avoids the same pitfalls until they themselves become a profit-driven monopoly. There is no algorithm that will usefully and fairly counter spam based on desperation, companies need to realize that creating opportunity for people to operate equally on their platforms is the best move, otherwise, spam will drive any community of rule abiding users away or into madness.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  >The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. Not quite right because cybercrime aka hacking, cracking, spamming etc. originated in US not in East Europe, Russia and third world countries which are dominating hacking and spamming scene today. Main motivation of cybercriminals is quick money and ease of getting away with it since you are not physically committing a crime but digitally/electronically.
NumberCruncher 5y ago
This resonates with my experience. A couple of years ago I invested more time than I proud of into buying the right bluetooth headset for me. I have found a site with pretty detailed reviews and tested their reviews standing in stores and trying dozens of headsets out. I also bought 3 headsets on Amazon and sent back all of them later. My impression was that the reviews on this particular site are 100% unbiased, where all other reviews I read just want to sell whatever product is in focus. I wonder how a search engine could distinguish between "honest & professional" and "fake & amateur" headset reviews without having a head and two ears?
fassssst 5y ago
Companies like Sweetwater do this right. They have “sales engineers” that help you find what you’re looking for over the phone or text message or email. It probably doesn’t scale but as a customer, I don’t care as it saves me so much research time and I consistently get what I’m looking for.
ALittleLight 5y ago
Maybe there's a hardware engineer out there with a decade of experience shipping and reviewing TVs publishing his thoughts to his blog. He's heard about the latest and greatest and he's offering his expectations based on the promotional material, his friends at the company, history from the brand - whatever. Maybe, if he's built a reputation of good reviews he's got a big audience. Big audience? TV brands give him an early review model. Modern Google actually makes the content problem worse. When our notional TV blogger is starting out in our world he publishes two or three essays, nobody reads them, he stops putting in do much effort, posts occasionally, dwindles off. In a world with a perfect search engine his early essays get some attention to encourage him to post more, a feedback loop starts, and before you know it he's a full time TV reviewer.
verve_rat 5y ago
This resonates with me a lot. A few months back I upgraded my desktop's insides. New motherboard, CPU, graphics card, etc. That was the first time in about seven years I've gone looking for review for that sort of stuff. I remember doing the exact same thing in the past and being overwhelmed with information. The detail and data in reviews would take a long time to collate and make sense of. But this time even the big name sites seem to be much shallower. Less models reviewed, less testing and benchmarking, more regurgitated press releases and other news. Last time it took me a while to sort out all of the information, this time all my time was spent trying to find any that wasn't 100% fluff.
sam0x17 5y ago
> If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find. I think in practice this is actually largely untrue -- with technology products, video games, movies, and just about anything I can think of, most well known reviewers are given early access to the product so that reviews can come out on or before day 1 of general availability. That said this does create a dirth of 100% trustworthy reviews on day 1 since companies are naturally disincentivized from giving early access to reviewers who they know are going to write a negative review.
thereddaikon 5y ago
Its a double edged sword. Reviews take effort so you want to make them easier for customers to write. But making them easier for your users also makes them easier for those trying to game the system. This is why Amazon's product reviews are useless as well as pretty much any other community based review system. But on top of that you do have the problem of whether or not someone is really qualified to write a review. So Joe User thinks product X is good. What is their metric for good? It reminds me of an LTT review of the Amazon TV from a few months ago. They gave it an awful rating but noted that the reviews on the product page were generally very positive. And their reasoning was that the people buying these TVs and reviewing them didn't have a good comparison point for what a good TV actually is. They are probably comparing it to a much older and less advanced product not to a contemporary one. So then you think the answer must be get reviews from industry related media. But then you fall into the classic problems of unethical journalists or simply ones that are out of touch.
- Spivak 5y ago
  It's not a question of whether someone is qualified or not, everybody is more than qualified to write about their own feelings toward a product they bought or service they used. In fact no one is more qualified to talk about their own feelings and experience. How useful that review is to you is a combination of the writing quality and depth, and how similar the reviewer is to your own experience and preferences. Professional critics usually try to distinguish themselves by producing well written in-depth reviews but not from their own perspective but that of a hypothetical everyman who, ideally, is similar enough to a critical mass of their audience. So it always interests me when people complain about popular gaming review sites being out of touch because almost always it's the reader that's out of touch but doesn't realize their bubble. It's not an absolute rule but I'm in enough niche hobbies to realize that my desires for products are way out of whack.
mikeryan 5y ago
I always liked the wire cutter for just kind of cutting through the crap and saying “this is the one”. I wonder if we need some sort of thing for reviews where humans filter out the sites that are credible. It’s a bit funny because this we sort of done by Jason Calcanis’ Mahalo back in the day - but maybe he was just ahead of the SEO curve.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Jason Calacanis was never ahead of anything, except a few more recent idiots. "Obvious, unactionable, or wrong" is a term of art created specifically to talk about Calacanis' advice. "Mahalo", a Hawaiian term loosely translated as "who is this freak and why does he think our language is there to promote his shitty startup?" was the answer to the single most terrible thing VCs could identify at the time: that someone would create Wikipedia without a plan to monetize every aspect of it. And yet Calacanis did a worse job than the "original fool", Jimmy Wales, whose similar attempt at least didn't end up as a parked domain of SEO spammers.
grvdrm 5y ago
Well said - it is among my biggest annoyances with the web. Reviews are almost always packaged into best-of or top-X lists. The quality of the Wirecutter is gradually trending down but it is still the website I use to find the "best" of something. I don't have to waste time sorting through hundreds of list-spam sites.
amelius 5y ago
Regarding finding reviews, I think we have to look at the problem in a different way. Instead of having 1 search engine which returns the same results for everyone (depending on interests, etc, like Google does), we could have trust networks. E.g. you trust a few people, those people trust other people. From this network you could build something like PageRank, which computes some kind of transitive closure of trust for one given person. This will then determine the search ordering for that person.
lucasyvas 5y ago
To address your issue, we can simply accept that certain information cannot ever be available day and date. The best results I've ever got from Google is by doing > site:reddit.com <QUERY> If I want to know about headphones, or TVs, I'll find better answers in the sidebar than anywhere else on the Internet. But, I will not be able to find those quality answers until a reasonable period of time has passed where products can be tried and reviewed by real people. The issue is the immediacy. We want answers now, but we won't ever have them until later. This requires a cultural shift in consumerism that companies will not like: "Wait and see." The same problem happens for people pre-ordering video games that end up releasing in a state of complete trash. You can only get reliable information once the early adopters have tested it. If you are an early adopter, you are shit out of luck, but you are doing the rest of us a service that we appreciate greatly.
- nucleardog 5y ago
  I do the same reddit.com trick, but for TVs and headphones (and anything else they cover), I can wholeheartedly recommend rtings.com. They're in Montreal. They buy their products retail. They get their funding through subscriptions and affiliate links. Overall ratings are formulaic based on measurements applicable to the category. The formulas are available on the site. So are all the test designs. They're surprisingly thorough too--when I was shopping for some over-ear headphones I really appreciated that they measured the clamping force (when you wear glasses, something that clamps onto the arms too hard gets really uncomfortable pretty quickly) and breathability (temperature differential between your ears and ambient when wearing the headphones). These are pretty important for all-day comfort but don't really factor in most of the time. Their methodology is all available: Breathability: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/breathability https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/breathability Clamping Force: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/comfort#comparison_7849 https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/comfort#compa...
quickthrower2 5y ago
I mentioned subreddit searching in another post - this is a good way to find reviews. I often have other forums I will google search inside for opinions on something. It's more effort than a review site, but it is due-diligence. Since there is money in it for someone lying to you, unfortunately its a "why we can't have nice things" scenario. It is why you can't ask the car dealer what the best car is for you. If you want a good understanding of something, you need to dig. If I see a site with Amazon links, I close it in < 500ms.

snth 5y ago

> If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find. That's not strictly true, given that reviewers are often sent pre-release versions of things in order to do that work before release day.

loceng 5y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted, as you're correct - however to point out there seems to be a trend where reviewers are only given pre-release versions if they practically always give favourable reviews to the products they list, especially if they're provided the product for free; there doesn't have to be an express relationship or contract between a reviewer and a company either, it's the reverse of how Bill Gates apparently has given $200 million+ to different news channels/media organizations - and so they're less likely going to as freely share negative news about him or perhaps his organizations, so then ; this makes me think, similarly to how stocks being sold by CEOs (etc) must be pre-planned to avoid shenanigans like market manipulation, that anyone giving large sums of money to any media/journalism organization must divide the amount up over 20-40+ years, so that organization at least has a runway and not dependant on larger "dopamine hits" at shorter intervals.
- nradov 5y ago
  I trust DC Rainmaker's reviews of fitness tech products because he always returns products back to the manufacturers after writing reviews. So there's no conflict of interest based on free products. https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    If companies don't like his reviews, they'll stop sending review units. That hits both in the pocketbook and the race to be one of the earlier reviewers of a new product. Reduced conflict, perhaps, but not none.
    - tchvil 5y ago
      In DC Rainmaker's case it is probably the opposite. A fitness product not reviewed by him is a bad signal.
    - nradov 5y ago
      If companies don't send him review units then he just buys them retail. He has already done this for many products.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Yes, I'm aware. That's less money in his pocket, and less ability to have the review be available on or before the product launch. There's still some conflict of interest, even if it's lessened. Only purchasing review units at retail would remove this conflict.
        bobthebuilders 5y ago
        Incorrect. He can then return them.
    - whakim 5y ago
      This presupposes that companies think their products are bad. If you have (what you believe to be) a good product, you definitely want DC Rainmaker to review it. I think this is a reasonably general point across industries - companies want to get their products into the hands of the most reputable reviewers.

loceng 5y ago

Developing common standards/protocols for everything required for a quality review vs. a "candy" or shallow hype review would be a good place to start, making it culture that everyone educated knows about to follow - and then they can only go to or support reviewers who list what testing protocols they follow. Industry has already done this with the "food pyramid" - influencing, capturing governments to make the food pyramid more based on economic reasons and much less on science - with the government putting it out and distributing it into schooling of different levels, giving it an unearned or undeserved authority which then people blindly trust/follow - not understanding that or when systems and their output or oversight have been captured; why the pandemic bringing the classroom home via Zoom, so parents could see/hear the learning material has outraged many parents - an example I've heard, where white children are being taught to feel guilty about their 'white privilege', or parents being upset their children are being taught at a very young age that they can decide what gender they are; I'm not stating what I believe here, just giving examples I've heard of. This capturing of the government is why I think ultimately the government should be developing and maintaining such platforms, as per law, and requiring individuals and organizations to in real-time add and update their data (simply example being restaurants, their menu's ingredients, their open hours) - in part to de-risk the government having an unnatural power as "the single arbiter" of truth, perhaps instead to de-risk capture that the government funds multiple independent organizations at the federal level - that States can decide which ones they follow, if necessary, part of why States exist - to de-risk the potential capture of the Federal umbrella; however the system is in an imbalanced, broken, captured state - with the duopoly evolving to be more extreme lead or formed by the establishment, with a broken voting system in arguably most countries of the world, and mainstream media being captured by for-profit industrial complexes that fund MSM through ad revenues - which further develop or mould our culture and narratives/talking points and beliefs, whether truthful or not; without fixing these the other platforms/systems excelling won't be possible.

frenchyatwork 5y ago

I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well. What's happened since then is that almost all the normal "people linking to things they like" has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Facebook), and vast majority of what remains on the open web are SEO spammers.

dpeck 5y ago
I agree very much with this. It seems that between the walled gardens and also people being so reluctant to have “their” audience leave their site/page/etc the discoverability of the web has dropped dramatically.
prepend 5y ago
I wish FB would be more open, but since they have all this walled garden info, are they well placed to start a competing search engine? Would be interesting if their activity could help filter out seo hackers.
- kritiko 5y ago
  FB search seems to have gotten worse and worse. Unless I can remember the specific Group where I saw something, it's very unlikely that I can find it again. And they know which posts I've been highly engaged on...
wodenokoto 5y ago
Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.
- ufo 5y ago
  There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.

xondono 5y ago

There’s a lot of good quality reviews on YT on launch date of pretty much anything these days. It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.

midasuni 5y ago
There’s not much money in written reviews, and people can’t find them amongst the automatically written SEo/affiliate crap
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
Interesting. I never watch video reviews. They're painfully slow and impossible to search.
basch 5y ago
How do you compare 3 or 4 videos before watching them? Watching video reviews of the reviewers?
- xondono 5y ago
  Like most things, it’s a reputation ladder. There’s top channels like LTT and if what you are looking for is out of their niche, you look for the biggest channels in that niche and go mostly by association (who they have made collaborations with,..). EDIT: of course the big win of video reviews is that you can see the thing working.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead. I'd say it's more that YouTube offers a clearer path to content monetization than text does. YT is a much more lucrative platform for the same level of effort as SEO for their text blogs.

mminer237 5y ago

There are still good reviews. For TVs, RTINGS produces high-quality reviews (although they're not listed super straightforwardly). For computer internals, AnandTech does even better. You don't have to talk about the absolute latest product out that same day for you to have quality reviews of other options in the meantime. Everyone just makes blogspam because its far less work than actually buying products and developing expertise and testing them and writing out a whole thorough review. Google's algorithms just can't tell a quality review from a surface-level, uneducated take.

mc32 5y ago

Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues: 1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.) 2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge. 3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands competing with you, the time demand may be overwhelming and not worth it. 4. If you are a trusted reviewer or site, you will get economic pressure to review a particular thing or brand you may not like very much but the money may be good. So you will begin to experience conflicts of interest. 5. If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers. 7. Some things are timeless (a pipewrench, let's say) and some are seasonal (consumer electronics, toys, etc). The former deserves a through review but the latter doesn't deserve as much but it may get the bulk of interest due to seasonal demand). Does it really matter if the latter's latest iteration has 2% increased battery life to discuss? I'm sure there is a lot I didn't think of. But it's a doomed category, unless people are willing to pay for professional reviews (Consumer Reports types and other independents).

chongli 5y ago
If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers. In my experience, the best reviewers are hobbyists. The thing is, it's not reviews that are their hobby. Rather, they review the products go along with their hobby. So, for my hobbies (espresso and aquariums), there are tons of easily accessible reviews on all kinds of aquarium gear and coffee machines, grinders, etc. On the other hand, nobody does plumbing or HVAC as a hobby (that I know of) so it's very difficult to find high quality reviews of water softeners or furnaces. It takes a very special rare sort of person who would install these things just to review them. The closest thing I could find was this video [1] on a DIY water filtration system by an RV/off the grid type hobbyist (from what I can tell). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCC4TOYYGF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCC4TOYYGF8
- treis 5y ago

ColinHayhurst 5y ago

"SEO" spam is "Google SEO" problem. So SE ranking Optimization is not (yet) so much a problem for other Crawler/index SEs (Bing, Mojeek, Gigablast). You might say that Amazon (in eCommerce) and TRIP (in Travel) have cracked the problem of combining good/deep Content/Reviews and Category expertise with Search. We regularly see partnership opportunities with customers interested in our API [0]. I presume Bing see the same, though their terms are more fixed and require you sharing more data. Definitely big opportunities in other categories, which are often squandered through a naive, if understandable route, of choosing a Scrape and index route. [0] https://www.mojeek.com/support/api/ https://www.mojeek.com/support/api/

hubraumhugo 5y ago

Search engines are pretty good at solving the problem they were designed to solve, which is "finding pages which contain all the query words". But they are pretty bad at solving the much harder problem of rating the trustworthiness & authenticity, intentions of the owner, monetization of the site, etc. One possible solution to this could be: - Let the community vote on the most trusted sources - Include results from enthusiasts that have little incentive to write biased reviews (Reddit, HN, expert forums) - Look at the ownership of the site and how transparent they are about it - Regularly reassess these criteria This wouldn't scale for a generic search engine, but I'm working on a service that does this for many product verticals/niches.

darkwizard42 5y ago
Agreed here, but in your second bullet, people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition etc. It just so happens that these "forums" have built in voting systems that they spend time preventing from being gamed so the search engine doesn't have to. Not sure if this is a good model for a search engine, but it does work to a small degree in those forums.
- onion2k 5y ago
  people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition Internet points are a terrible reason to write anything. They're completely meaningless. We should all judge comments on their own merit and not because the author has a lot of karma. Apart from mine, obvs.

winternett 5y ago

The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. There are literally millions of Internet savvy people who would be able to survive on what we would consider barely anything profit-wise in adsense revenue, which also usually pays out in US dollars. In this currently terrible global economy, desperation turns the most intelligent minds bound into poverty into bootleg SEO engineers, online catfishers, scammers, and ransomware creators, and God bless their creativity... Instead of creating income opportunity and crowdsourcing people in foreign countries for common (more positive) good, companies rarely create opportunities for the people who would normally turn into spammers and scammers, and that's what creates an endless army of people that constantly destroy online communities like Soundcloud, FaceBook, Twitter, and TikTok with stolen content, trend scams, fake news, and spam messages. Google search has been invalidating and subverting their most accurate search results based on abstract SEO rules for quite some time now. It was likely done so that they could implant paid ads first into content, because that makes them the most profit. Doing that has destroyed their reliability and reputation as a search service leader, and they're never going to admit it, but payola is the undertone that is ruining their search results... There is a certain type of corruption that occurs when a company turns away from upholding customer service and value towards a monopolistic "profit-first economic stranglehold" business model... That strategy never ultimately works out well for both companies AND users in the long run. The next leader will likely be a search that avoids the same pitfalls until they themselves become a profit-driven monopoly. There is no algorithm that will usefully and fairly counter spam based on desperation, companies need to realize that creating opportunity for people to operate equally on their platforms is the best move, otherwise, spam will drive any community of rule abiding users away or into madness.

mrkramer 5y ago
>The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. Not quite right because cybercrime aka hacking, cracking, spamming etc. originated in US not in East Europe, Russia and third world countries which are dominating hacking and spamming scene today. Main motivation of cybercriminals is quick money and ease of getting away with it since you are not physically committing a crime but digitally/electronically.

NumberCruncher 5y ago

This resonates with my experience. A couple of years ago I invested more time than I proud of into buying the right bluetooth headset for me. I have found a site with pretty detailed reviews and tested their reviews standing in stores and trying dozens of headsets out. I also bought 3 headsets on Amazon and sent back all of them later. My impression was that the reviews on this particular site are 100% unbiased, where all other reviews I read just want to sell whatever product is in focus. I wonder how a search engine could distinguish between "honest & professional" and "fake & amateur" headset reviews without having a head and two ears?

fassssst 5y ago

Companies like Sweetwater do this right. They have “sales engineers” that help you find what you’re looking for over the phone or text message or email. It probably doesn’t scale but as a customer, I don’t care as it saves me so much research time and I consistently get what I’m looking for.

ALittleLight 5y ago

Maybe there's a hardware engineer out there with a decade of experience shipping and reviewing TVs publishing his thoughts to his blog. He's heard about the latest and greatest and he's offering his expectations based on the promotional material, his friends at the company, history from the brand - whatever. Maybe, if he's built a reputation of good reviews he's got a big audience. Big audience? TV brands give him an early review model. Modern Google actually makes the content problem worse. When our notional TV blogger is starting out in our world he publishes two or three essays, nobody reads them, he stops putting in do much effort, posts occasionally, dwindles off. In a world with a perfect search engine his early essays get some attention to encourage him to post more, a feedback loop starts, and before you know it he's a full time TV reviewer.

verve_rat 5y ago

This resonates with me a lot. A few months back I upgraded my desktop's insides. New motherboard, CPU, graphics card, etc. That was the first time in about seven years I've gone looking for review for that sort of stuff. I remember doing the exact same thing in the past and being overwhelmed with information. The detail and data in reviews would take a long time to collate and make sense of. But this time even the big name sites seem to be much shallower. Less models reviewed, less testing and benchmarking, more regurgitated press releases and other news. Last time it took me a while to sort out all of the information, this time all my time was spent trying to find any that wasn't 100% fluff.

sam0x17 5y ago

> If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find. I think in practice this is actually largely untrue -- with technology products, video games, movies, and just about anything I can think of, most well known reviewers are given early access to the product so that reviews can come out on or before day 1 of general availability. That said this does create a dirth of 100% trustworthy reviews on day 1 since companies are naturally disincentivized from giving early access to reviewers who they know are going to write a negative review.

thereddaikon 5y ago

Its a double edged sword. Reviews take effort so you want to make them easier for customers to write. But making them easier for your users also makes them easier for those trying to game the system. This is why Amazon's product reviews are useless as well as pretty much any other community based review system. But on top of that you do have the problem of whether or not someone is really qualified to write a review. So Joe User thinks product X is good. What is their metric for good? It reminds me of an LTT review of the Amazon TV from a few months ago. They gave it an awful rating but noted that the reviews on the product page were generally very positive. And their reasoning was that the people buying these TVs and reviewing them didn't have a good comparison point for what a good TV actually is. They are probably comparing it to a much older and less advanced product not to a contemporary one. So then you think the answer must be get reviews from industry related media. But then you fall into the classic problems of unethical journalists or simply ones that are out of touch.

Spivak 5y ago
It's not a question of whether someone is qualified or not, everybody is more than qualified to write about their own feelings toward a product they bought or service they used. In fact no one is more qualified to talk about their own feelings and experience. How useful that review is to you is a combination of the writing quality and depth, and how similar the reviewer is to your own experience and preferences. Professional critics usually try to distinguish themselves by producing well written in-depth reviews but not from their own perspective but that of a hypothetical everyman who, ideally, is similar enough to a critical mass of their audience. So it always interests me when people complain about popular gaming review sites being out of touch because almost always it's the reader that's out of touch but doesn't realize their bubble. It's not an absolute rule but I'm in enough niche hobbies to realize that my desires for products are way out of whack.

mikeryan 5y ago

I always liked the wire cutter for just kind of cutting through the crap and saying “this is the one”. I wonder if we need some sort of thing for reviews where humans filter out the sites that are credible. It’s a bit funny because this we sort of done by Jason Calcanis’ Mahalo back in the day - but maybe he was just ahead of the SEO curve.

KarlKemp 5y ago
Jason Calacanis was never ahead of anything, except a few more recent idiots. "Obvious, unactionable, or wrong" is a term of art created specifically to talk about Calacanis' advice. "Mahalo", a Hawaiian term loosely translated as "who is this freak and why does he think our language is there to promote his shitty startup?" was the answer to the single most terrible thing VCs could identify at the time: that someone would create Wikipedia without a plan to monetize every aspect of it. And yet Calacanis did a worse job than the "original fool", Jimmy Wales, whose similar attempt at least didn't end up as a parked domain of SEO spammers.

grvdrm 5y ago

Well said - it is among my biggest annoyances with the web. Reviews are almost always packaged into best-of or top-X lists. The quality of the Wirecutter is gradually trending down but it is still the website I use to find the "best" of something. I don't have to waste time sorting through hundreds of list-spam sites.

amelius 5y ago

Regarding finding reviews, I think we have to look at the problem in a different way. Instead of having 1 search engine which returns the same results for everyone (depending on interests, etc, like Google does), we could have trust networks. E.g. you trust a few people, those people trust other people. From this network you could build something like PageRank, which computes some kind of transitive closure of trust for one given person. This will then determine the search ordering for that person.

lucasyvas 5y ago

To address your issue, we can simply accept that certain information cannot ever be available day and date. The best results I've ever got from Google is by doing > site:reddit.com <QUERY> If I want to know about headphones, or TVs, I'll find better answers in the sidebar than anywhere else on the Internet. But, I will not be able to find those quality answers until a reasonable period of time has passed where products can be tried and reviewed by real people. The issue is the immediacy. We want answers now, but we won't ever have them until later. This requires a cultural shift in consumerism that companies will not like: "Wait and see." The same problem happens for people pre-ordering video games that end up releasing in a state of complete trash. You can only get reliable information once the early adopters have tested it. If you are an early adopter, you are shit out of luck, but you are doing the rest of us a service that we appreciate greatly.

nucleardog 5y ago
I do the same reddit.com trick, but for TVs and headphones (and anything else they cover), I can wholeheartedly recommend rtings.com. They're in Montreal. They buy their products retail. They get their funding through subscriptions and affiliate links. Overall ratings are formulaic based on measurements applicable to the category. The formulas are available on the site. So are all the test designs. They're surprisingly thorough too--when I was shopping for some over-ear headphones I really appreciated that they measured the clamping force (when you wear glasses, something that clamps onto the arms too hard gets really uncomfortable pretty quickly) and breathability (temperature differential between your ears and ambient when wearing the headphones). These are pretty important for all-day comfort but don't really factor in most of the time. Their methodology is all available: Breathability: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/breathability https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/breathability Clamping Force: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/comfort#comparison_7849 https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/comfort#compa...

quickthrower2 5y ago

I mentioned subreddit searching in another post - this is a good way to find reviews. I often have other forums I will google search inside for opinions on something. It's more effort than a review site, but it is due-diligence. Since there is money in it for someone lying to you, unfortunately its a "why we can't have nice things" scenario. It is why you can't ask the car dealer what the best car is for you. If you want a good understanding of something, you need to dig. If I see a site with Amazon links, I close it in < 500ms.