4 ms·

> a niche product that any site actually talking about it Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15

by x0x0 4y ago

> a niche product that any site actually talking about it Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content. Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.

chrischen 4y ago
When Pagerank was invented the internet was a lot nicer and less spammy. I think its showing its age and maybe Pagerank just doesn't work for commercial content. Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
- numpad0 4y ago
  It gets into a conspiracy theory territory a bit, but it makes more than zero sense if all the Google services ~2007 had been a civilian clone of an existing, "non-cooperative" library indexing system for spy agencies. There will be a huge accumulation of documents of unknown importance, and occasionally needs arise to extract information with a word or a phrase as a key. Google Search and Books does exactly that. And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.

by x0x0 4y ago

chrischen 4y ago

When Pagerank was invented the internet was a lot nicer and less spammy. I think its showing its age and maybe Pagerank just doesn't work for commercial content. Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.

numpad0 4y ago
It gets into a conspiracy theory territory a bit, but it makes more than zero sense if all the Google services ~2007 had been a civilian clone of an existing, "non-cooperative" library indexing system for spy agencies. There will be a huge accumulation of documents of unknown importance, and occasionally needs arise to extract information with a word or a phrase as a key. Google Search and Books does exactly that. And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.