5 ms·

> We find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. [...] We further observe

by pants2 3y ago

> We find that only a small portion of product reviews on the web uses affiliate marketing, but the majority of all search results do. [...] We further observe an inverse relationship between affiliate marketing use and content complexity, and that all search engines fall victim to large-scale affiliate link spam campaigns. I think this is an excellent methodology for testing the quality of search results. I would love to see a standard search engine test and scoring system based on this, maybe similar to some of the LLM scoring systems.

ryanisnan 3y ago
Forgive my naivety, but wouldn't a simple way for a search engine (like Kagi) to avoid falling victim here to detect affiliate link programs? There's got to be a small handful of patterns for affiliate link tracking: 1. Domain Interception & HTTP redirects 2. Tracking codes embedded in the URL directly
- pants2 3y ago
  It looks like Kagi does this[1]: > Kagi surfaces shopping results featuring unbiased reviews and no affiliate links to help you identify the best product across categories. Top results include discussions focused on helping you find the best item to purchase - you are not bombarded with affiliate links and ads. Continue to scroll and you will see product comparisons across multiple vendors so you can pick what best suites you. Kagi's shopping search will always return a detailed discussion of which product to buy not a competition amongst advertisers promoting where you should buy. Kagi is focused on providing you the best results to make an informed decision not polluted by affiliate links and advertisements. 1. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
    Kagi is better than Google, but just yesterday it returned the top link to Amazon-linking “check the price for this item on Amazon right now” affiliate spam. So it’s not perfect.
    - throwuxiytayq 3y ago
      Oh, OK. I thought it was perfect.
      - MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
        I think it’s pretty good. I understand sometimes we root for the good guys like Kagi and look at their work with rose tinted glasses and even think they’re perfect, like you did, but it’s not really feasible. A pattern I’ve noticed from people not working in tech, or more junior people in tech, is that they have a thinking that software can ever be perfect. If either of those categories describe you, I can tell you from experience no software is ever perfect!
        lanstin 3y ago
        In adversarial environments, this is true. In non-adversarial environments, software of a certain defined scope can at least get very close to perfection.
  - rapind 3y ago
    Ultimately a site can get around affiliate / referral detection with internal links that redirect though I suppose. So the crawler would need to follow and track all links to detect this. Also sites will surface different links / content based on user agents, so I don't know how effective this is.
    - szundi 3y ago
      Maybe there is room for one search engine that does this - for paying customers or as an investment to be better
      - daveguy 3y ago
        Kagi is a paid search engine to avoid the manipulation that Google welcomes. To avoid every trick and targeted tricks it may be cost prohibitive. Fortunately Kagi isn't popular enough yet for targeted manipulations to have a noticeable impact.
  - KomoD 3y ago
    I tried a search and found a site with amazon affiliate links in their featured "Shopping" snippet https://i.imgur.com/vPRpBYJ.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/vPRpBYJ.mp4 (yes the recording is very broken but you can still see)
    - amelius 3y ago
      Maybe the affiliate stuff is still there but ranked lower?
      - KomoD 3y ago
        Sure but it sounds to me like it shouldn't be featured in the "Shopping" widget when it has 9 affiliate links? When I hover over the "i" icon it says: > Information provided by Looria, Amazon, Reddit and other sources. Shop confidently with Kagi - our results have no affiliate links. The sites featured in the "Shopping" widget were: - Reddit - RTINGS: has 8 affiliate links (just from one article I picked, it was featured several times) - NYTimes: has 47 affiliate links (just from one article I picked, it was featured several times) - Techgearlab: has 9 affiliate links Even if you ignored the widget, the first result was a site with 7 amazon affiliate links.
        pants2 3y ago
        On second read, I think what the Kagi doc means is that they don't provide first-party affiliate links (i.e. if you click on an Amazon.com search result it's not using their affiliate). They will still show you search results that have affiliate links embedded (but presumably don't affect or negatively affect ranking).
- eek2121 3y ago
  I am working on a search engine that checks a site for affiliate links from known providers and demotes sites that have a large amount of them. In addition: * it demotes sites with popups (think newsletter sign ups) * it demotes sites that block (or complain about) ad blockers * it demotes sites with a high number of ads and favors sites with no ads * it demotes sites using certain sketchy ad companies. * It demotes sites that have paywalls * It detects possible link networks and flags them for human review/removal. * sites with RSS feeds get promoted. * There is a toggle to hide all sites with ads or external trackers, but it is still WIP (The whole project is). There are many other features. No idea if I am going to make it public, I created it to update my skillset. I actually thought about setting up a nonprofit and making it open source, but I haven’t decided.
  - AureliusMA 3y ago
    Very interested, any way to follow you?
    - miramba 3y ago
      Me too.
- gopher_space 3y ago
  What would be the difference between an affiliate link program and a web ring? I don't know if discovery is actually a bottleneck to be automated away. It might be the fun part. I'm thinking back to the Napster approach where you could browse other people's libraries for music ideas.
- g_p 3y ago
  Currently, Kagi has (if you hover/click the shield icon to the right of a result) an indication of the information it knows about a website (as well as a way for you to rank it higher or lower for yourself). One of these is "ads/trackers". I imagine that it would be feasible for this to include some of the more common affiliate URL types, or third party lead/affiliate tracking bounce hops like awin. Clearly there will always be some amount of ability to "defeat" this kind of measure by obfuscating links, but eventually the user needs forwarded to a link that has a referral parameter or a site that sets an affiliate cookie or similar. The "tracker category" also can give a bit of extra information - things like "invasive fingerprinting, advertising"
- schmorptron 3y ago
  I don't know if this would be a very long-term solution if the big ones (ok, google) did it. Advertisers would catch on very quickly, and some legitimate review sites which might get funding through affiliate links unrelated to the product being reviewed would lose out to straight-up paid for "reviews" that are funded wholly by the manufacturer and just don't use affiliate links.
gumby 3y ago
Then the search engines will game the benchmarks. A different definition of "Search Engine Optimization" I suppose.
- pants2 3y ago
  I know that tends to happen for LLMs but I don't know if Google/MS would care enough about some obscure benchmark system to try to game it.
  - calamari4065 3y ago
    Their entire business is gaming metrics. Most of those metrics are ones they invented for themselves, but if there's any advantage at all, they'll game it
autokad 3y ago
this is one way to do it, but I wouldn't say its sufficient. If I search for 'things to do in Seattle', you get many 'blogs' and such that a writer gets paid by sources to insert their place into the things to do list. I didn't word that well, so for example: I own a coffee shop, I pay them moneys, and the '25 things to do in Seattle' writer puts my coffee shop in the list. If I do an image search for the word 'strawberry', how many of those results are not stock images, images from a store, etc. of a strawberry? can you find an actual picture of a strawberry sitting in the wild? or just some picture of a strawberry a person uploaded without trying to sell you something?
oakashes 3y ago
This doesn't apply to the content complexity finding, but the finding that "product reviews which are in top search results are more likely to contain affiliate links than product reviews which are not" can also be explained by the fact that if and only I am getting a bunch of hits on my product reviews, I'm incentivized to monetize that with affiliate links.
- belval 3y ago
  We should also ask ourselves if affiliate links are really that bad. Someone could be making honest complete reviews and monetizing those with affiliate links, does that inherently mean that the search results are lower quality? That approach also misses all the copied-a-github-issue low-effort content that seem to crop up on Google.
  - thatoneguy 3y ago
    It's bad because most of the reviews will be for items you can only get on Amazon or another retailer with an affiliate link program and not for items available elsewhere. I've seen so many "Best $WHATEVER of $YEAR" and it's really "Best $WHATEVER $PRODUCED_BY_WEIRDLY_NAME_FLY_BY_NIGHT_COMPANY_ON_AMAZON $YEAR"
  - delichon 3y ago
    How can an affiliate link not be in conflict with an unbiased review? They don't get paid if they don't recommend the thing.
  - anticorporate 3y ago
    In theory, if we had truly open marketplaces that offered equal monetization of all links to all similar products in the same category regardless of the price offered to the consumer, sure. In practice, that is never the case. At best you're getting reviews that only compare products available in the same marketplace (say, for example, all the table saws you can buy on Amazon). At worst, you're getting reviews from vendors who offer the highest payout. Also, a heck of a lot of consumer products are absolute garbage. (IMHO, most of them, but others may feel differently.) Who is going to write an honest, scathing review of a product and then monetize the link to it? Why even bother?

by pants2 3y ago

ryanisnan 3y ago

Forgive my naivety, but wouldn't a simple way for a search engine (like Kagi) to avoid falling victim here to detect affiliate link programs? There's got to be a small handful of patterns for affiliate link tracking: 1. Domain Interception & HTTP redirects 2. Tracking codes embedded in the URL directly

pants2 3y ago
It looks like Kagi does this[1]: > Kagi surfaces shopping results featuring unbiased reviews and no affiliate links to help you identify the best product across categories. Top results include discussions focused on helping you find the best item to purchase - you are not bombarded with affiliate links and ads. Continue to scroll and you will see product comparisons across multiple vendors so you can pick what best suites you. Kagi's shopping search will always return a detailed discussion of which product to buy not a competition amongst advertisers promoting where you should buy. Kagi is focused on providing you the best results to make an informed decision not polluted by affiliate links and advertisements. 1. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/shopping.html
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
  Kagi is better than Google, but just yesterday it returned the top link to Amazon-linking “check the price for this item on Amazon right now” affiliate spam. So it’s not perfect.
  - throwuxiytayq 3y ago
    Oh, OK. I thought it was perfect.
    - MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
      I think it’s pretty good. I understand sometimes we root for the good guys like Kagi and look at their work with rose tinted glasses and even think they’re perfect, like you did, but it’s not really feasible. A pattern I’ve noticed from people not working in tech, or more junior people in tech, is that they have a thinking that software can ever be perfect. If either of those categories describe you, I can tell you from experience no software is ever perfect!
      - lanstin 3y ago
        In adversarial environments, this is true. In non-adversarial environments, software of a certain defined scope can at least get very close to perfection.
- rapind 3y ago
  Ultimately a site can get around affiliate / referral detection with internal links that redirect though I suppose. So the crawler would need to follow and track all links to detect this. Also sites will surface different links / content based on user agents, so I don't know how effective this is.
  - szundi 3y ago
    Maybe there is room for one search engine that does this - for paying customers or as an investment to be better
    - daveguy 3y ago
      Kagi is a paid search engine to avoid the manipulation that Google welcomes. To avoid every trick and targeted tricks it may be cost prohibitive. Fortunately Kagi isn't popular enough yet for targeted manipulations to have a noticeable impact.
- KomoD 3y ago
  I tried a search and found a site with amazon affiliate links in their featured "Shopping" snippet https://i.imgur.com/vPRpBYJ.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/vPRpBYJ.mp4 (yes the recording is very broken but you can still see)
  - amelius 3y ago
    Maybe the affiliate stuff is still there but ranked lower?
    - KomoD 3y ago
      Sure but it sounds to me like it shouldn't be featured in the "Shopping" widget when it has 9 affiliate links? When I hover over the "i" icon it says: > Information provided by Looria, Amazon, Reddit and other sources. Shop confidently with Kagi - our results have no affiliate links. The sites featured in the "Shopping" widget were: - Reddit - RTINGS: has 8 affiliate links (just from one article I picked, it was featured several times) - NYTimes: has 47 affiliate links (just from one article I picked, it was featured several times) - Techgearlab: has 9 affiliate links Even if you ignored the widget, the first result was a site with 7 amazon affiliate links.
      - pants2 3y ago
        On second read, I think what the Kagi doc means is that they don't provide first-party affiliate links (i.e. if you click on an Amazon.com search result it's not using their affiliate). They will still show you search results that have affiliate links embedded (but presumably don't affect or negatively affect ranking).
eek2121 3y ago
I am working on a search engine that checks a site for affiliate links from known providers and demotes sites that have a large amount of them. In addition: * it demotes sites with popups (think newsletter sign ups) * it demotes sites that block (or complain about) ad blockers * it demotes sites with a high number of ads and favors sites with no ads * it demotes sites using certain sketchy ad companies. * It demotes sites that have paywalls * It detects possible link networks and flags them for human review/removal. * sites with RSS feeds get promoted. * There is a toggle to hide all sites with ads or external trackers, but it is still WIP (The whole project is). There are many other features. No idea if I am going to make it public, I created it to update my skillset. I actually thought about setting up a nonprofit and making it open source, but I haven’t decided.
- AureliusMA 3y ago
  Very interested, any way to follow you?
  - miramba 3y ago
    Me too.
gopher_space 3y ago
What would be the difference between an affiliate link program and a web ring? I don't know if discovery is actually a bottleneck to be automated away. It might be the fun part. I'm thinking back to the Napster approach where you could browse other people's libraries for music ideas.
g_p 3y ago
Currently, Kagi has (if you hover/click the shield icon to the right of a result) an indication of the information it knows about a website (as well as a way for you to rank it higher or lower for yourself). One of these is "ads/trackers". I imagine that it would be feasible for this to include some of the more common affiliate URL types, or third party lead/affiliate tracking bounce hops like awin. Clearly there will always be some amount of ability to "defeat" this kind of measure by obfuscating links, but eventually the user needs forwarded to a link that has a referral parameter or a site that sets an affiliate cookie or similar. The "tracker category" also can give a bit of extra information - things like "invasive fingerprinting, advertising"
schmorptron 3y ago
I don't know if this would be a very long-term solution if the big ones (ok, google) did it. Advertisers would catch on very quickly, and some legitimate review sites which might get funding through affiliate links unrelated to the product being reviewed would lose out to straight-up paid for "reviews" that are funded wholly by the manufacturer and just don't use affiliate links.

gumby 3y ago

Then the search engines will game the benchmarks. A different definition of "Search Engine Optimization" I suppose.

pants2 3y ago
I know that tends to happen for LLMs but I don't know if Google/MS would care enough about some obscure benchmark system to try to game it.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  Their entire business is gaming metrics. Most of those metrics are ones they invented for themselves, but if there's any advantage at all, they'll game it

autokad 3y ago

this is one way to do it, but I wouldn't say its sufficient. If I search for 'things to do in Seattle', you get many 'blogs' and such that a writer gets paid by sources to insert their place into the things to do list. I didn't word that well, so for example: I own a coffee shop, I pay them moneys, and the '25 things to do in Seattle' writer puts my coffee shop in the list. If I do an image search for the word 'strawberry', how many of those results are not stock images, images from a store, etc. of a strawberry? can you find an actual picture of a strawberry sitting in the wild? or just some picture of a strawberry a person uploaded without trying to sell you something?

oakashes 3y ago

This doesn't apply to the content complexity finding, but the finding that "product reviews which are in top search results are more likely to contain affiliate links than product reviews which are not" can also be explained by the fact that if and only I am getting a bunch of hits on my product reviews, I'm incentivized to monetize that with affiliate links.

belval 3y ago
We should also ask ourselves if affiliate links are really that bad. Someone could be making honest complete reviews and monetizing those with affiliate links, does that inherently mean that the search results are lower quality? That approach also misses all the copied-a-github-issue low-effort content that seem to crop up on Google.
- thatoneguy 3y ago
  It's bad because most of the reviews will be for items you can only get on Amazon or another retailer with an affiliate link program and not for items available elsewhere. I've seen so many "Best $WHATEVER of $YEAR" and it's really "Best $WHATEVER $PRODUCED_BY_WEIRDLY_NAME_FLY_BY_NIGHT_COMPANY_ON_AMAZON $YEAR"
- delichon 3y ago
  How can an affiliate link not be in conflict with an unbiased review? They don't get paid if they don't recommend the thing.
- anticorporate 3y ago
  In theory, if we had truly open marketplaces that offered equal monetization of all links to all similar products in the same category regardless of the price offered to the consumer, sure. In practice, that is never the case. At best you're getting reviews that only compare products available in the same marketplace (say, for example, all the table saws you can buy on Amazon). At worst, you're getting reviews from vendors who offer the highest payout. Also, a heck of a lot of consumer products are absolute garbage. (IMHO, most of them, but others may feel differently.) Who is going to write an honest, scathing review of a product and then monetize the link to it? Why even bother?