6 ms·
Ask HN: Google useless for shopping / product reviews?
Whether searching for best dog scissors or hot sauces, I get a front page full of SEO’ed fake top 10 lists with affiliate links.
I can include site: to search a specific reviewer or Reddit, but that basically turns google into a local search. Has the time of google for product reviews now past? Is there a replacement that downranks these terrible SEO’ed fake recommendations?
- sourcecodeplz 4y agoTry Youtube. There are affiliate links there too but not as much.
- blobbers 4y agoYep! These days we just trust influencers... at least they've got some skin in the game (as in their reputation).
- throwawaysleep 4y agoReviews in general are not reliable. I have been paid about a dozen times/offered the item for free to write a positive Amazon review about some product.
- SanchoPanda 4y agoDo you mind sharing how much?
- bsuvc 4y agoYes, it's about as useless as relying on Amazon reviews. Affiliate marketing and SEO optimization have pretty much destroyed the usefulness of searching for product reviews. I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm searching. It's the only way to read what real, mostly-unincentivized people think about something. I wish Google had a way to "downvote" results. Sure they would have to mitigate artificial manipulation, but what they have currently doesn't work well.
- lawlorino 4y ago> I usually just add "reddit" to the end of whatever I'm searching. It's the only way to read what real, mostly-unincentivized people think about something I wish this was true, but I think companies are fairly wise to this now. It wouldnt take much effort to add fake positive comments about a brand or product. The technical word for it is “astroturfing” [0]. In my opinion there is no good unbiased source for consumer product reviews, maybe Which? in the Uk would be an exception though I’m not too familiar with it. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
- piaste 4y agoAt least on reddit it's a little easier to spot astroturfing, compared to Amazon reviews or Quora or other single-purpose sites. Just click on the profile of the user who wrote three paragraphs extolling the virtues of Brand® razors. Does it look like a man with a varied set of interests, or did it just spam reposts of funny memes for karma in large subs? I'm sure astroturfers will soon adopt text generation en masse to create human-looking profiles and add credibility to their recommendations, but I don't believe that's standard yet.
- dantyti 4y agoThis is not always that easy to notice, as some accounts will have huge gaps between promotional posts. A (very well known) company I briefly worked at had an entire department dedicated to 'web reputation management' – every employee there had dozens if not hundreds of aged reddit (and any other forum/site you can imagine) accounts registered from different locations (proxies) and using unique browser agents. They spent non-insignificant amounts of time (my impression was 10-20%) creating new accounts, karma whoring and posting/commenting on front page subs, until someone monitoring their target subreddits discovered anything even remotely related to the product they were promoting or the company itself. A complete side note: the way these reputation managers aligned themselves almost perfectly with the company's official statements/position was what made me disillusioned with SpaceX and Musk in general, since I saw exactly the same things happening there
- imissfirefox 4y agoThis is where "real life" is helpful. Ask other people who use these things which one they like. People at the dog park, salespeople at well-curated pet stores for the dog scissors and other people who like hot sauce or gourmet cooking stores for the same. Coworkers, friends of friends, etc. If you don't interact with others for whatever reason, look on large retailer sites for reviews - and read the bad ones. Sometimes a common problem with the product will be commented on a few times. Well known/established brands can be a guide (vs no name garbage from amazon/china). Search engines are pretty useless these days - any answer I'm looking for regarding anything is not found and instead I get AI/bot pulling non-answers/keyword driven paragraphs into a click seeking website. At some point what could have been a great tool was taken over by capitalism and adtech. It's a shame.
- bmitc 4y agoWith Google, I often struggle to even find the official manufacturer’s website.
- samhuk 4y agoReddit or (a very small number of) youtubers are pretty much the only sources of truthful and good-faith product reviews. Almost all of my recent purchases are due to recommendations by hobbyist subreddits like r/mechanicalkeyboards, r/photography, r/bifl, etc. Google automated ranking, using totally random pagerank algos, which was their downfall. Reddit and youtube, in general, rely on crowdsourced ranking, which is harder to game (not impossible).
- pyuser583 4y agoI have the impression many Reddit subs are overly commercialized. /r/mechanicalkeyboards being a good example - they’re kind of nice, but not worthy of the veneration they receive.
- blobbers 4y agoYeah, I tend to use a site:reddit.com in my searches. Does this imply there is some simple filtering methods that should be done on all google searches to provide a "filtered" internet that is better? If you're just indexing things that you trust, search might not be that hard.
- FranklinMaillot 4y agoI've been experimenting with https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/. For technical questions, they prioritize official documentation and SO. They don't serve you all those copy-pasta blogs that plague Google results. For product reviews, they prioritize reddit and other forums by default. It's still far from perfect, but at least they're trying.
- shyn3 4y agoI like your description but it has a login wall so hard no. Cool concept!
- vlmutolo 4y agoBehind that login wall is a free trial. Search is apparently pretty expensive, so I imagine they’re just trying to prevent spam.
- shyn3 4y agoFew free searches to show case your product is probably better. Chatgpt3 will fail if they close their free access. It takes money to make money.
- vlmutolo 4y agoBoth Kagi and OpenAI offer free limited access, and I believe both require an account to use the free tier.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoBot spam is a very big problem. Very hard to prevent, and if you're using cloud compute or SaaS APIs it can get very expensive.
- shyn3 4y agoHey I love when I see you post on here. Thanks for all you do.
- fxtentacle 4y agoYes, Google is just SPAM now. Kinda like Amazon. In Germany, there is test.de which is funded by its subscribers. They tend to do pretty objective reviews (but in German).
- OhNoNotAgain_99 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JustLurking2022 4y agoIt's a Catch-22 - Any service trusted by consumers will inevitably be targeted by malicious actors. The ones cited as potentially "better" are generally too small to matter, hence they have not yet been targeted in a significant way.
- Figurkapseln 4y ago[flagged]
- glaucon 4y agoI'm not sure what your point is. I thought at first that the "Die ersten.... zu Leben" text would appear on each of the referenced web pages but I tried five, two came up 404 and the text didn't appear on the others. So what is your point ?
- dazc 4y agoThere has to be an incentive for someone to write an authoritative and unbiased list in order for such a list to surface via web search. For the two examples you give, it's just not going to happen. For other products, I agree with the frustration but, again, who is going to provide this information for no reward? I'm no apologist for Google but I'd be willing to bet that if you wrote such a list and it was truly authoritative and unbiased then it would be very easy to find.
- blobbers 4y agoI think the original web did not have incentives such as the ones you give. Some people just want to be influencers, or get the word out. If you remember the first 10 years of the WWW before ecommerce, before big advertising, there was definitely people touting products without shame. Besides, some people do it just for their side hustle. You write a book on finance, you want people to buy it, so you publish financial information on an ongoing basis. There are plenty of ways to indirectly reap the benefits of being trusted.
- elessecream 4y ago[flagged]
- figurcapsule 4y ago[flagged]