19 ms·

Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations

699 points by beavershaw 3y ago

BLKNSLVR 3y ago
Good quality product reviews are the antithesis of Google's core business. Google has little to no motivation to solve this in any kind of long-lasting, committed way. Actually, advertising is kind of the antithesis to most quality, factual, well-researched, unbiased information.
tylerdurden91 3y ago
I think SEO has become a cat & mouse game between the engine & websites. As a product owner, I think its great that Google publishes how it ranks to maintain transparency, but that also allows the big companies to game the system. I almost wonder if they should be less transparent on how they rank. Further, as the big publishers as well as well known sites get more & more of Google's traffic, doesnt it create a negative feedback loop for Google? Most of these sites have their own internal search. If I know that I'll anyways go to CondeNast for travel, i'd rather go there directly & search & skip google entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it would be in Google's best interest to try & place new & unique websites towards top of the ranking much more frequently than they do. Not sure why they dont do it already.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
smusamashah 3y ago
This page is great at telling a list of popular websites we should simply block/remove from our search results (can use uBlock or uBlacklist). When you search for "Dotdash Meredith" or more specifically "is part of the Dotdash Meredith publishing family" you get a lot of widely known websites. I am removing all these via uBlacklist atm. Are there any other similar family of websites which we can lookup and block?
collaborative 3y ago
Ha! My anti-SEO search engine detected all the SEO junk when searching for "best air purifier for pet hair" that would otherwise show up in Google as per the article Feel free to give it a try, one search per day is free https://www.aisearch.vip/?q=best%20air%20purifier%20for%20pet%20hair https://www.aisearch.vip/?q=best%20air%20purifier%20for%20pe...
- iFreilicht 3y ago
  That's neat. But it still got fooled by them: > Best Splurge: Molekule Air Pro > This high-end purifier uses PECO technology to destroy airborne pollutants, including pet hair, > dander, and viruses. It's also effective at removing odors and VOCs. While it's one of the most > expensive options on the list, it's a good choice for those with severe allergies or asthma. This brand was specifically called out by the main article for being overpriced junk by a company currently in a lawsuit regarding false advertising.
  - collaborative 3y ago
    That's terrible! Yes, I can see one of the (general) summaries yielded that result. The SEO results were still thankfully down ranked. This Molekule manufacturer that went bankrupt has bankrupted my fun :'(
stefan003 3y ago
google SERP became very bad now may be.
nojvek 3y ago
Google Search is ripe for disruption, just as they disrupted Yahoo and AltaVista in 1990s. Nothing would make me happier than the trillion $ corps being disrupted by new players offering serious value to users. Trillion $ corps rent seeking their way into 100 markets and having law makers working for them isn't a great thing for the future of humanity.
Scot12345 3y ago
[dead]
guluarte 3y ago
Also, a lot of these publishers are used by spammers for link building, dont believe? just go to BHS marketplace
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  .... Barbershop Harmony Service? What is BHS marketplace?
  - dazc 3y ago
    Black Hat [Something]?
  - thimabi 3y ago
    Most likely “black hat SEO”
hsuduebc2 3y ago
I hope that paid search engines like Kagin would be used more frequently. Monopoles always bad.
- fatkam 3y ago
  *Kagi
ryandrake 3y ago
It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business with whom you have no formal business relationship. This is just a risk that one acknowledges when they decide to go for it. If I ran an eBay store, I'm totally dependent on the whims of eBay, and my business plan should include the risk that they can do anything they want--up to and including kicking me out. Same if I had a business that ran off of Facebook. Not taking sides here or saying anyone is right or wrong, but it's reality of operating on the Internet that small businesses probably just have to go into with both eyes open. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep.
- sneak 3y ago
  I agree with this, but then look at Uber: Without the cooperation and approval of Apple and Google via their respective developer programs and app stores, they wouldn't exist because you couldn't do notifications or location in webapps at the time. There are myriad examples like this of downright giant startups that would not exist if they refused to proceed just because Apple can veto them. Instagram is probably the largest example. Look what happened to Tumblr.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Depends on the size of the business. Apple/Google can screw over small businesses all day long, but once they start getting bigger there is some assumed risk on A/G's part in future anti trust lawsuits if they screw over companies with enough wealth to hurt them in court.
  - mbrumlow 3y ago
    These are inspite of. The moving fear is being vetoed only works for well funded startups. A small independent startup would have to consider this before betting the farm on a product that might get smashed by the feeling of the day Google and Apple app moderators have.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
rightbyte 3y ago
This article is really interesting. So, essentially each of the "top publishers" are some sort of SEO ring with different websites, linking each other I guess, or at least writing the same thing, to make Google's scraper believe it is high quality content? Or something similar. I don't understand the details really, but I have suspected something similar a long time.
- beavershaw 3y ago
  Yeah here's a very detailed report on what's been going on written by a friend of mine. https://detailed.com/google-control/ https://detailed.com/google-control/
- crazygringo 3y ago
  No, there's no SEO ring or anything like that. The top publishers are just genuinely the sites that people click on and link to the most. There's no objective definition of "high quality content", there are just the links that people click or don't click when presented with search results. Google puts the links people click the most at the top. And people tend to click on results from sites they recognize, because the internet is filled with a ton of crap, and publications whose names you recognize are at least usually indicative of some kind of minimal level of quality. That's all that's going on.
  - KTibow 3y ago
    It's worth noting it's not just "people preferring well known sites" it's "Google preferring well known sites as part of EEAT"
  - jacurtis 3y ago
    You are explaining one component of SEO, which is click-through rate. Google will A/B test certain sites one spot higher or one spot lower to see if click-thru rate is positively affected. So if SiteA gets 80% of clicks while in spot #2, but SiteB gets 84% of clicks while in spot 2, then SiteB moves up to spot #2. The cycle continues as sites move up and down a few spots for fine tuning. However click-through rate is only one component of SEO. The biggest and most significant component of SEO is backlinks, which are ranked by quantity and quality of the link. So if google trusts SiteA a lot and SiteA links to SiteB, then google starts to trust SiteB. If other trusted sites also link to SiteB then the domain reputation grows for that site. Then there is the same ranking on a per-page basis as well. So if one page in particular is very well-linked to, then Google starts to link that page higher and higher for relevant results. This is the largest and most significant aspect of SEO. The click-through rate is a fine-tuning algorithm once you get to the top, but it alone isn't going to help. Google will never test SiteA with SiteZZZZZZZ on page 12.
sharkweek 3y ago
I think there was plenty of junk in the "small sites" world when it came to affiliates that deserved algorithmic modification, but Google absolutely took a sledgehammer to that side of the industry killing small players over the last six months. Now the big content sites that invest in search-volume-heavy terms are feasting on the traffic (and affiliate payouts). But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again, hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce filtering they already show on a lot of terms). I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had. The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.
- airstrike 3y ago
  > But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty FWIW I read this level of certainty as "I am privy to specific information pertaining to it and in fact I'm one of the people in charge of making sure it happens"
  - sharkweek 3y ago
    To be clear, I have never nor will I ever likely work at Google or any of its competitors. I have spent an ungodly amount of time building (and breaking) affiliate sites / information sites / et al as side projects. Haven't done it in a few years (having kids has sucked my energy for side projects pretty dry), but at one point had like ~15 sites in my portfolio that I used to experiment with. Death, taxes, and an algo update fucking with a site's traffic at Google's whim.
    - codexon 3y ago
      Google has always preferred top domains for a very long time, allowing them to abuse the rankings for years. One relevant example I can remember, OVH is the top result for servers in Japan yet they don't have any in Japan. https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan https://web.archive.org/web/20240219200935/https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan https://web.archive.org/web/20240219200935/https://www.googl... This has been going on for many years now. And they never get punished unless there's a huge uproar about it on ycombinator like with expertsexchange.
codexon 3y ago
Google has been killing all but the most widely known domains for a very long time. I've mentioned this repeatedly on ycombinator multiple times, but only people who have made their own website 15 years ago and tried to grow it know what I mean. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675 My recommendation is to start moving to some other closed platform that is not part of Google search like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (yes I know Google owns it but its still not part of the search ecosystem). Tying your entire business to how high you rank on Google search is always going to eventually end up in disaster like this.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are. On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for. Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask jeeves at it's worst.
  - getlawgdon 3y ago
    Same. Done with Google search. In addition to the results having become useless, it's Google's frenetic sprint away from the "don't be evil" ethos, which turns out to have only been in Incognito mode all along.
  - nicbou 3y ago
    Even when the results are not sponsored, they're all generic answers from generic domains. I'm traveling at the moment and it's impossible to find anything written by someone in a 1000 km of the city I'm visiting. How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
  - i_love_cookies 3y ago
    [dead]
  - 3y ago
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Presented like this it really is an absolutely damning indictment.
ado__dev 3y ago
Finding trustworthy reviews and recommendations via Google is useless. The first few pages are always littered by the lowest quality, highest SEO-spam content, and the recommendations on these pages are so shallow and inauthentic that I know the person that wrote the article has never even looked at the product they're shilling. And so often these lists are literally the same list of 20 products slightly re-arranged. Reddit is also really hit and miss, depending on the community. TikTok has been ruined by TikTok Shop. Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products. There surely must be a better option.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  > Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products. The problem with smaller ones is, that it can be a good honest channel today, get an "offer they can't refuse" and promote some crap for a few thousand dollars/euros overnight. Dave from the eevblog, AvE, Great scott!, bigclive, and maybe a few others are the ones I'd trust, because they show the ugly details of most products. Project farm also does many item comparisons, but most of the brands are unavailable here. All of them pretty big and popular channels, but most go very deep into specifics. For random (mostly kitchen and as-seen-on-tv) items, "Freakin' reviews" seems to be pretty genuine (electronics are much closer to my area of expertise), but I seem to notice many failure points in random gadgets and the guy from this channel points them out directly, with all the problems associated with them. Again... i'm not affiliated with any of them, most of them show a lot of shitty items (even popular ones), and well.. call them shitty as they are, so maybe I'm biased because of the number of bad reviews they produce and very few good ones, but i've bought stuff they recommended and liked it a lot. You cannot compare this to eg. "unbox therapy" where almost every item is clearly sponsored and you can see it in the "very good" reviews they get, even if they're shitty things.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  It's called "Consumer Reports" / Consumers Union. That's what it look like. The only thing that could enhance or replace it would be official government testing of products.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
“Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the ‘small web.’ We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways…” https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
- 15457345234 3y ago
  Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet. The people most likely to benefit and have the time to enjoy small-web content are inquisitive children who don't have good sources of information at their disposal, i.e. the smart kids of dumber parents who don't have library cards. Kids who have infinite free time but zero chance of persuading their parents to pay for anything academic or 'nerdy'. There's a lot of them out there.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet That “true spirit of the internet” caused the ad-based cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn’t work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
    - 15457345234 3y ago
      > But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work. Free worked for much longer than it didn't work, and it will work again. There just needs to be a drastic adjustment in the amount of greed considered socially acceptable, and I can already see that pendulum swinging back.
      - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
        Those damned greedy servers needing electricity to run.
class3shock 3y ago
This isn't just product reviews. Try searching any question and more than likely multiple results on the first page will be "articles" with some title like "So you want to know about x?" and the same sort of, generic, possibly algorithm generated, useless content. I wish there was an extension where you could add to a communal blacklist of result url's to start trying to put a dent in the huge number of garbage results Google spits out.
- dankebitte 3y ago
  There's uBlacklist [1], but there's not much community activity on its subscription list [2] or awesome-ublacklist [3]. [1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist [2] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions [3] https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
lolinder 3y ago
Between the rise of fake "30 best X" articles that this discusses and the widely-documented problem of fake reviews on places like Amazon, I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand loyalty again. Picking based on brands I trust rarely gets me the "best value" item and certainly doesn't get me the absolute global maximum "best overall", but it's turned into the only reliable way to choose something in a finite amount of time that I will reliably not be disappointed with. There's obviously always the risk that just because a brand was good a year ago doesn't mean it's still good, but I've found that the rate of decline of most good brands is substantially lower than the SEO-spurred rate of decline of the quality of internet publications that purport to provide unbiased reviews.
- secretsatan 3y ago
  Yes this, I've found product reviews looking distinctly dodgy for quite a few years now, while the article is about something I would see as a bit niche, electronics reviews have been in a hole for a while. I noticed some sites have been using amazon reviews for a long time. I still prefer for the most part, to buy some electronics from brick and mortar shops, at least then I can see the products in action, and I will seek out and travel to specialist shops for things like audio gear, they'll usually match online prices and let you try things out.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand loyalty again You’re making me realize I too have been doing this for a while now. At least when satisficing instead of maximizing … and honestly I’m less and less interested in maximizing. These days when making a purchase I go to a friend group who knows their thing (podcaster friends when looking for a microphone, for example), ask what brand they use, then I go to that brand’s website and buy the highest-line product that I can afford. There’s little to no google searching involved and next to zero awareness of any ads. Ask a friend in the know and buy that. Done. If there are no friends in the know, I ask anyone who uses a thing that solves my problem “Hey do you like your <thing>? What do you like about it?”. If they say yes, I go buy that. Life is too short to spend in the quagmire of ecommerce and friends.
vdaea 3y ago
I searched for "Best Air Purifier for Pets" and I clicked on the first reddit result https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_purifiers_for_pet_dander_is_still_dyson/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur... That post is 4 months old but someone posted this just 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_purifiers_for_pet_dander_is_still_dyson/kq268jz/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur... Goes to show how little you can trust reddit comments these days, particularly for good google keywords This is mentioned in TFA: >Somehow the user has been banned from Reddit, but their comment is still at the top of the thread — we wonder how many other comments this user has published across different subreddits. This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment.
- cuckatoo 3y ago
  > This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment. If you are a reddit mod and not getting paid in 2024 you're doing it wrong.
duped 3y ago
If you wanted to make a search algorithm that displayed high quality results, you'd blacklist or downweight the big publishers because you know they're going to be dishonest. But when Google is also making money with their ad platform on those publishers' websites I don't think they'd ever do that.
- evilmusic 3y ago
  ^ this is it ^
crazygringo 3y ago
This has nothing to do with Google, but rather everything to do with brand-name journalism and what people click on. This article is criticizing Google for showing reviews and guides to consumer products from well-known publications that it argues are increasingly low-quality, instead of surfacing high-quality independent reviews from less popular sites. But this has nothing to do with Google. Google's search quality metrics are pretty simple -- Google is trying to list results in roughly the order of probability that people will click on them. Google is trying to get you to the information you're looking for the fastest. And the reality is that, if I'm looking for air purifiers, I am absolutely going to click on the links to well-known publications like Wirecutter, or Better Homes & Gardens, or Apartment Therapy -- or a forum like Reddit. I'm far less likely to click on some smaller site I've never heard of, because I trust it less. So Google is giving me what I want. And the idea that Google should somehow instead be analyzing the content of each product review site to try to determine whether the reviewers are actually independently testing the items or not, that it should be making some kind of determination of "real" quality separate from whether people click on it -- this seems both impossible and misguided. I don't want Google to be trying to pick which niche independent sites are high-quality or low-quality. I just want Google to avoid actual spam, and otherwise give me the results that lots of people link to and lots of people click on -- PageRank and all that -- which is, of course, going to be publications and sites with brand recognition. Google isn't killing small, independent sites. It's people -- users, consumers, people like me -- who generally aren't interested in small, independent sites because there's no reliable signal to determine which ones are good or trustworthy. If I'm looking for an air purifier, I don't have time to waste to look through 20 small, independent reviewers and try to figure out which ones are shills and which minority actually know what they're talking about. No -- I'm going to go to the major review sites, see which models keep popping up, check Reddit for some confirmation and Amazon for some sales rank figures, and make the purchase and get on with my day. Which sucks for small, independent review sites. But they're just in a tough business. And Google has nothing to do with that.
- ec109685 3y ago
  The article points out numerous examples where a site like people.com is ranking for pet air purifiers, with zero evidence that they actually tested the products in question. This tweet thread goes into more detail https://x.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1717291171473727719?s=20 https://x.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1717291171473727719?s=20
hx8 3y ago
Another bad aspect is that it's becoming harder to google for general information without being hit with production recommendations. For example, if you google an ambiguous term like "Indoor light" the entire front page is products. There is no information about how indoor light impacts sleep health, or comparing different technologies of light bulbs, or different styles of lighting a room, or showing how much energy we spend on indoor lighting. It's literally all products, on a topic which has a lot of nuisances to explore. Some search terms seem to trigger "medical information", "scholarly journals" or "technical documentation" subroutines and avoid products all together.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  Even Kagi is like that, since "lighting" is a product class. If I search "Indoor lighting science" on DDG almost all the product stuff is gone. I even get an NIH paper on lighting and health.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  That's because your search query isn't specific enough. Google doesn't read your mind to figure out what about "indoor light" you seek. So it defaults to commerce.
- anon84873628 3y ago
  If type "indoor light sleep health" I get the results you would expect. Same for "indoor lights technology comparison" Do you really think it's unreasonable that "indoor lights" goes to e-commerce? What do you think most people who enter that term are looking for? I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow? Everyone complains that search results are deteriorating. What I think is really happening is that "the internet" isn't only targeted at nerds anymore. (And of course people are also strongly opposed to behavioral profiling which would be like reading your mind...)
  - hx8 3y ago
    > I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow? If there is any ambiguity Google defaults to commerce. I think the front page for such general queries should have room for science, history, art, culture. Google's default is to sell you something, and it is often the only thing it shows.
pmontra 3y ago
Web search is dead for that. When faced with a new product category I don't know anything about I go on YouTube and look for people explaining how to use those kind of products, then look for unboxing or reviews, finally I get a rough idea. Then I can search the web for the few products that seem to fit my needs and budget. The advantage of video is that it's (still?) easy to see if something is a genuine or a fabricated review. The disadvantage is that video takes a much longer time than text.
frabjoused 3y ago
I wonder if Google is internally acutely aware of how rapidly its reputation is tanking. I just haven't seen many public acknowledgements of flaws in its search engine, especially in relation to SEO. So I'm very curious if there is some ongoing code-red internally about this, or if it the problem just got lost in one of the hidden layers of corporate fog.
- ec109685 3y ago
  It’s acknowledged obliquely at the end of this tweet: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1716964371916800472 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1716964371916800472
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    Barely. With several follow-up tweets by them defending its bad behavior.
  - jacurtis 3y ago
    The reply post to that one [1] is a perfect example of what I see everyday on Google. You search for "Best Men's Wallet" and the top examples are from 1) Forbes, 2) BusinessInsider, 3) New York Times. These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can basically create any content they want and Google will reward them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the rest of us looking for useful content in this search category can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content by sites that honestly have no business writing about this stuff. [1] - https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629 https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      Just for funsies I'd like to see what would happen if google downranked sites with affiliate links. I know many small honest sites (and some big ones) do depend on affiliate links for their actual quality reviews, so probably would be unfair to implement it permanently, but man I would like to see what the results looked like without money involved.
partiallypro 3y ago
I tried to use Google to search for mattresses this way and found that 10/10 sites on the first page were all just affiliates of the mattress companies they were recommended. Even though they were reputable sites like the NYTimes, etc. I then appended "reddit" to my search and everyone in the comments essentially said to avoid those very brands that were the highest recommended from those sites. I hate that modern SEO is practically just build to create spam to game Google.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Good luck buying a mattress. The market is so intense that it is basically impossible to find honest information. Everything is affiliate links and the forums are flooded with shills. I ended up building my own mattress because the community around it doesn't really have a product to push.
pcdoodle 3y ago
Google results are trash, i still find myself appending "reddit" to get decent answers. Just stop paying Google. Stop using their services. Our company can't even reply to gmail users that ask us questions (hey gmail, if your user emails us, they probably want a response regardless of the hoops you want everyone to jump through with your "anti-spam" measures).
- fatkam 3y ago
  I find Yandex to give much better results than Google, but lately I haven't been able to solve Yandex's CAPTCHAs (the one where you have to click images in the right order). Pretty sure that I give the correct answers.
overstay8930 3y ago
This is the part of the analogy where everyone finds out the Golden Goose is actually dead and Google just started painting regular eggs gold and hoped nobody would notice.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  And the brief period where the Internet was a secret trick to get information that nobody else had, for free, is over
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    I for one welcome going back to libraries as a source of truth. Too bad no one else will realize that happened though and will continue reading the propaganda rags.
stevage 3y ago
Wow. This is super helpful. We have all noticed the enshittification of google search results, but this actually helps explain why.
muratsu 3y ago
From a regulatory perspective, implementing the ability to remove certain websites from search results (similar to twitter mute/block) would solve the problem for everyone. Motivated communities can maintain their lists and share amongst themselves.
codeulike 3y ago
This is a brilliant breakdown of whats been going on with review lists. Its been obvious for the last five years or so that whenever I googled 'best laser jet printer' or whatever that I was getting fed a load of bullshit but this really steps through exactly how Google and the seo crew are racing us all to the bottom, and to the opposite of useful info.
White_Wolf 3y ago
I'll be the unpopular voice here (not defending g for the,imho, monopoly though): - Google is not killing anything and don't owe you traffic; - You don't get traffic because your website is less algorithm oriented than other sites (among a ton of other things). if you want to unserstand how and why certain websites rank and all that sort of stuff just lurk on black hat SEO forums and see how they game system. I don't recomment their services but it's worth reading about the things they take into account. From keywords, density, headings all the way to domain age and server location.
- lolinder 3y ago
  This is the "don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" defense [0]. Google isn't killing anything because Google is just an algorithm. Your site fares poorly not because Google wants to hurt you but because you don't want to waste your life catering to an algorithm. It's not Google's fault that that you have other priorities like actually helping your readers live a better life! While it's strictly accurate, it's not a very useful way to look at the world. Google is killing independent sites that spend more time on the content than on SEO. It might be killing those sites in the same way that a volcanic eruption kills wildlife—as an unthinking, uncaring force of nature—but it's still killing them. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33m1s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33m1s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=...
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    It’s also a framing that ignores the fact that Google clearly wants to be able to filter out the garbage but can’t. It’s not bloggers’ fault for that. At some point, you can either decide to write for people or decide to write for the algorithm.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  It’s not about Google owing anyone traffic, people are upset that Google can’t tell the difference between inauthentic product recommendations and authentic ones. Google clearly wishes they could as well, but it doesn’t scale so they don’t solve the problem. > your website is less algorithm oriented Maybe we should refuse to accept Google’s framing. It’s content creators’ job to create great content as judged by people. It’s Google’s job to discover that content and rank it above procedurally generated garbage that is devouring the internet. The fact that Google’s results are dominated by trash isn’t because there’s a lack of good content.
MostlyStable 3y ago
One thing this made me think of is that it would be interesting to try and make a user curated list of these kinds of sites. Every once in a while, I'll come across a blog of either an individual or a very small organization that is, for whatever reason, extremely interested in a very particular product segment (for example: [0]), and get _way_ into the weeds on the product category. They are exactly the kinds of pages I would like to find when I'm researching a product and exactly the kinds of pages that searches either don't turn up at all or are are pretty far down the list. Having some kind of repository of these kinds of sites would be really useful. [0]https://gunsafereviewsguy.com/ https://gunsafereviewsguy.com/
- Avamander 3y ago
  It's a nice idea, but how do I find the lists that are actually legitimate? I've just resorted to RSS+bookmarking every small site with good content I see. The bookmarks get fed to YaCy, even though it kinda sucks. I just can't trust content aggregators and search engines to deliver good unique content.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ec109685 3y ago
This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI (i.e. sophisticated reading systems) will be able to address. If there was a human curator with infinite time, I think they could wade through this crap and find ten links to authoritative sites that would provide a much better experience. They would do the same type of research that this author did, see how well a site’s recommendations correlated with other review sites (and vice versa to problematic sites), look at the history of reviews and see if they correlated to when products where shipped, look at the authors experience in the review space, etc, etc. This has to be a direction Google will be going in.
- Solvency 3y ago
  "This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI will be able to address." LOL, no. Generative AI is literally taking over SEO spam and exponentially magnifying it. That's where the money is. And Google is here to make money.
  - ec109685 3y ago
    GenAI as in increasingly sophisticated reasoning engines, not writing fake product reviews.
    - cableshaft 3y ago
      GenAI does what its users tell them to do. And users are asking it to make fake product reviews. They don't even need it to be about an actual product just, tell it to 'create a product review for a toaster oven and include point 1 and point 2', and then the user can pop in some actual product names, model numbers, or a few other facts where needed.
lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
Can anyone tell where this screenshot comes from? https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-purifiers-for-pets-top10-1024x790.png https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-p...
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  https://ahrefs.com/serp-checker https://ahrefs.com/serp-checker
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bluish29 3y ago
> What do BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science, and Better Homes & Gardens have in common? They are all in my ublacklist personal block list. That was before going full time with Kagi where I blocked most of them too.
Veuxdo 3y ago
At this point it you are searching for the "best" anything on Google, that's on you.
jdpedrie 3y ago
Is there a list anywhere of trustworthy sites for product reviews? The article mentioned Tech Gear Lab, and though I haven't heard of House Fresh, that seems reasonable? Consumer Reports of course, but are there others?
- imp0cat 3y ago
  I don't think so. It depends on the product, ie. Digital Trends are good for stuff like TVs, Serious Eats have great kitchen-related stuff reviews, etc...
rahidz 3y ago
It feels like sometime in the past decade, Google search results went from "Here's what most people click on" to "Here's the most trusted sources, handpicked by Google". WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's and not risk any controversy. And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate links. We're 'trusted', after all."
- katuskoti 3y ago
  Yep, Google outsources search ratings to humans working for a third-party called Leapforce - see "The secret lives of Google raters"[1]. There are specific guidelines for rating results, especially for political and medical queries. This is probably a big part of the massive decline in search quality - authority is valued more over accuracy to the specific query. 1. https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of-google-raters/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...
- nicbou 3y ago
  Google indeed ranks brands much higher. It feels like all of my results are from generic brands, even if all of their content is copywritten drivel. This is especially obvious when you search for travel advice, and every answer is a generic blog post on a travel service website.
- nostromo 3y ago
  Yes, exactly -- Google is the new Yahoo. It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least interesting results for everything using a small army of human and AI reviewers. Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no appreciable reason. The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more relevant than their organic search results -- because they actually care about the ad experience.
ryukoposting 3y ago
Seeing PopSci mentioned here stings, but they're right. I loved that magazine as a kid.
Beijinger 3y ago
Well. They do affiliate and bigger Gorillas do affiliate. But they claim to do a more honest review. Well. Air cleaner. I do my review here without any affiliate link: Most DIY filters outclass commercial available filters: https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY-Portable-Air-Cleaners-083121.pdf https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY...
Animats 3y ago
Does someone have a browser add-on with a site blacklist for Google search results? Google won't let you do that in the Chrome store any more, but you can still do it for Firefox.
15kingben 3y ago
Do I have this right? 1. Google is overrun by low quality product reviews and comparisons 2. Google starts to weight highly sites with manual testing 3. All those sites shamelessly lie and say they have manual testing -> back to 1 Isn't this a problem that Pagerank is supposed to solve? Auditing content for quality is basically an intractable problem to scale
evilotto 3y ago
This isn't really about google search results. The underlying playbook is the same one that has been used by vulture capitalists for quite some time now. Find a company with some value, buy it, extract the value into cash for the hedge fund, screw the employees and the public, move on to the next target. Look at what Alden Global has been doing to newspapers for years, and more recently Greyhound bus terminals. Gordon Gecko was a character in a movie, but based on all-too-real people and behaviors.
kccqzy 3y ago
This is a genuinely difficult problem to solve. The article title is "How Google is killing independent sites like ours" but then (1) I have never heard of HouseFresh and I have no reason to trust them for their reviews; (2) even if the site was highly ranked on Google, I still wouldn't necessarily trust the brand because you know SEO and ranking manipulations exist and I cannot be assured that HouseFresh isn't just a site that hired some high powered SEO consultant. It all boils down to reputation: reputation of the manufacturer and reputation of the reviewer. But humans can't realistically remember the reputation of all the manufacturers and product reviewers online, so we naturally gravitate towards well-known brands and big media publishers.
api 3y ago
The long predicted LLM spam apocalypse is upon us. All open systems and forums will be rendered unusable, including probably eventually e-mail. The future is closed enclaves, private forums, and managed platforms that verify identity. It was kind of inevitable that some tech would eventually do this, even if it was as unsophisticated as click farms and content mills. If adding information is free and there is no gate, it gets trashed by spam. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.
reducesuffering 3y ago
I don't really have any large scale answers other than to just aggregate my own recommendations at starterpax.com and refer friends and family to that for various hobbies / categories.
Techbrunch 3y ago
Is there a ublock origin list that can be used to filter those websites ?
- smusamashah 3y ago
  There is uBlacklist you can use to remove all these sites from search results
buro9 3y ago
I run a forum platform, and the best recommendations for anything are within the small communities. It doesn't really matter what the community is for, only last week on a cycling forum someone asked for "What's the best alarm clock?"... two days of discussion later, and everyone has aligned on "Buy one of the Braun alarm clocks" with the only debate left about which particular model was best (it turns out, 3 models cover everyone, and all are still better than anything else). If you went to Google and asked the same question https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+the+best+alarm+clock%3F#ip=1 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+... you get a lot of "Best alarm clock" list (with the year meantioned)... but few to none recommend a Braun alarm clock. You can repeat this for virtually anything... the small communities won't have an instant answer unless someone already asked it, but will produce a better answer every time, and I agree with the article that what has happened to Google isn't great, the incentives have all aligned to produce the worst content, by some of the most trusted sources, and to have that ranked high regardless of whether it helps answer anyone's question.
- MaxikCZ 3y ago
  I think the main reason behind this is that small communities are not infested by bots yet. Once community grows it inherently attracts bots and they just game the system to theirs owner advantage.
cush 3y ago
I know when I need an air purifier, I look to Rolling Stone Magazine for an honest, accurate review
dkbrk 3y ago
This is an entirely predictable consequence of Goodhart's Law [0] and Google ought to have known better. I can believe that Google was genuinely trying to help their users by providing more useful search results, yet, due to Goodhart's law they have in fact accomplished the opposite. As a concrete example, previously references to "lab testing" actually meant something, but Google turned its immense power on that and similar keywords and destroyed their information content. It is irresponsible of Google to naively act in ignorance of the entirely predictable consequences of their actions. Yes, Goodhart's law is counterintuitive, but it's been a well-known principle for decades and Google ought to realize that they are powerful enough it applies to any action they take and take that into account when making decisions. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
cush 3y ago
Google spent at least a decade incentivizing spam while they dominated up the search market, tearing any semblance of humanity and authenticity from the web. By the time Reddit realized what they had, LLMs had scraped them dry, then tragically and ironically, their plan to lock LLMs out of their API backfired and users deleted half of Reddit's content. There's so much value in the Small Web right now - microblogs, IndieWeb, etc., but it's just so hard to find these kinds of sites if you don't know what you're looking for
userbinator 3y ago
My strategy is not to use search engines for product recommendations, but to go to the online shops directly, look for the 1-star and 2-star reviews, and read them carefully. Once narrowed down to a few products, I then research them specifically to find out the details. For the example of air purifiers, look on Ali if you don't want to DIY one with a box fan and HEPA filter. They're all going to be made by some Chinese OEM anyway, so you'll cut out some middlemen and reduce the price, and at least those listings often have far more technical information, and the reviews can have detailed pictures from buyers of the products' internals.
iteratethis 3y ago
Looks like these "reviews" never happened. But even reviews that you might see on YouTube are usually not reviews. They are demos. Unboxing a product and demonstrating that a product indeed does what the box says is not a true review.
rchaud 3y ago
When Google slashed payouts on Google Ads (then known as Adsense), blog networks went the route of "affilliate link infested product review posts" and haven't looked back. The web has lost so much personality since the 2000s. Every site covers the same topics with the same shallow posts, and everyone ignores that the only thing keeping the lights on are those "Best product for X" posts.
skhameneh 3y ago
Anecdotally, I've been shopping for a product with a substantial price tag. I thought I had a complete list of every brand and model I wanted to see. Eventually I found my favorite in a showroom from a manufacturer that's not well known and wasn't on my list. Online, there's hardly any comparisons or reviews that aren't affiliated with a seller or manufacturer.
chupchap 3y ago
What if google let us pick the version of their algo we want to use for search results? That makes it impossible for SEO companies to target all algos, while also letting us customers use the right algo for the right search? OpenAI does it with their LLMs albeit with a different intent.
whyenot 3y ago
I paid for a subscription to Consumer Reports, and while it’s not a perfect solution, it has been very helpful. To a lesser extent Wirecutter from the NYT has also been helpful.
natch 3y ago
Google is culpable here. But the actual people who work there seem to not care, or are gleefully unaware. But the publishers who sold out to the algorithm are also to blame. I don’t know how to break the vicious cycle here.
edmundsauto 3y ago
What I find interesting is the categories not clearly spammed but obviously in a high cost ecosystem at smallish scale. Rehab centers, front yard water features, etc.

699 points by beavershaw 3y ago

Good quality product reviews are the antithesis of Google's core business. Google has little to no motivation to solve this in any kind of long-lasting, committed way. Actually, advertising is kind of the antithesis to most quality, factual, well-researched, unbiased information.

tylerdurden91 3y ago

I think SEO has become a cat & mouse game between the engine & websites. As a product owner, I think its great that Google publishes how it ranks to maintain transparency, but that also allows the big companies to game the system. I almost wonder if they should be less transparent on how they rank. Further, as the big publishers as well as well known sites get more & more of Google's traffic, doesnt it create a negative feedback loop for Google? Most of these sites have their own internal search. If I know that I'll anyways go to CondeNast for travel, i'd rather go there directly & search & skip google entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it would be in Google's best interest to try & place new & unique websites towards top of the ranking much more frequently than they do. Not sure why they dont do it already.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

smusamashah 3y ago

This page is great at telling a list of popular websites we should simply block/remove from our search results (can use uBlock or uBlacklist). When you search for "Dotdash Meredith" or more specifically "is part of the Dotdash Meredith publishing family" you get a lot of widely known websites. I am removing all these via uBlacklist atm. Are there any other similar family of websites which we can lookup and block?

collaborative 3y ago

Ha! My anti-SEO search engine detected all the SEO junk when searching for "best air purifier for pet hair" that would otherwise show up in Google as per the article Feel free to give it a try, one search per day is free https://www.aisearch.vip/?q=best%20air%20purifier%20for%20pet%20hair https://www.aisearch.vip/?q=best%20air%20purifier%20for%20pe...

iFreilicht 3y ago
That's neat. But it still got fooled by them: > Best Splurge: Molekule Air Pro > This high-end purifier uses PECO technology to destroy airborne pollutants, including pet hair, > dander, and viruses. It's also effective at removing odors and VOCs. While it's one of the most > expensive options on the list, it's a good choice for those with severe allergies or asthma. This brand was specifically called out by the main article for being overpriced junk by a company currently in a lawsuit regarding false advertising.
- collaborative 3y ago
  That's terrible! Yes, I can see one of the (general) summaries yielded that result. The SEO results were still thankfully down ranked. This Molekule manufacturer that went bankrupt has bankrupted my fun :'(

stefan003 3y ago

google SERP became very bad now may be.

nojvek 3y ago

Google Search is ripe for disruption, just as they disrupted Yahoo and AltaVista in 1990s. Nothing would make me happier than the trillion $ corps being disrupted by new players offering serious value to users. Trillion $ corps rent seeking their way into 100 markets and having law makers working for them isn't a great thing for the future of humanity.

Scot12345 3y ago

[dead]

guluarte 3y ago

Also, a lot of these publishers are used by spammers for link building, dont believe? just go to BHS marketplace

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
.... Barbershop Harmony Service? What is BHS marketplace?
- dazc 3y ago
  Black Hat [Something]?
- thimabi 3y ago
  Most likely “black hat SEO”

hsuduebc2 3y ago

I hope that paid search engines like Kagin would be used more frequently. Monopoles always bad.

fatkam 3y ago
*Kagi

ryandrake 3y ago

It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business with whom you have no formal business relationship. This is just a risk that one acknowledges when they decide to go for it. If I ran an eBay store, I'm totally dependent on the whims of eBay, and my business plan should include the risk that they can do anything they want--up to and including kicking me out. Same if I had a business that ran off of Facebook. Not taking sides here or saying anyone is right or wrong, but it's reality of operating on the Internet that small businesses probably just have to go into with both eyes open. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep.

sneak 3y ago
I agree with this, but then look at Uber: Without the cooperation and approval of Apple and Google via their respective developer programs and app stores, they wouldn't exist because you couldn't do notifications or location in webapps at the time. There are myriad examples like this of downright giant startups that would not exist if they refused to proceed just because Apple can veto them. Instagram is probably the largest example. Look what happened to Tumblr.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Depends on the size of the business. Apple/Google can screw over small businesses all day long, but once they start getting bigger there is some assumed risk on A/G's part in future anti trust lawsuits if they screw over companies with enough wealth to hurt them in court.
- mbrumlow 3y ago
  These are inspite of. The moving fear is being vetoed only works for well funded startups. A small independent startup would have to consider this before betting the farm on a product that might get smashed by the feeling of the day Google and Apple app moderators have.
- withinboredom 3y ago

rightbyte 3y ago

This article is really interesting. So, essentially each of the "top publishers" are some sort of SEO ring with different websites, linking each other I guess, or at least writing the same thing, to make Google's scraper believe it is high quality content? Or something similar. I don't understand the details really, but I have suspected something similar a long time.

beavershaw 3y ago
Yeah here's a very detailed report on what's been going on written by a friend of mine. https://detailed.com/google-control/ https://detailed.com/google-control/
crazygringo 3y ago
No, there's no SEO ring or anything like that. The top publishers are just genuinely the sites that people click on and link to the most. There's no objective definition of "high quality content", there are just the links that people click or don't click when presented with search results. Google puts the links people click the most at the top. And people tend to click on results from sites they recognize, because the internet is filled with a ton of crap, and publications whose names you recognize are at least usually indicative of some kind of minimal level of quality. That's all that's going on.
- KTibow 3y ago
  It's worth noting it's not just "people preferring well known sites" it's "Google preferring well known sites as part of EEAT"
- jacurtis 3y ago
  You are explaining one component of SEO, which is click-through rate. Google will A/B test certain sites one spot higher or one spot lower to see if click-thru rate is positively affected. So if SiteA gets 80% of clicks while in spot #2, but SiteB gets 84% of clicks while in spot 2, then SiteB moves up to spot #2. The cycle continues as sites move up and down a few spots for fine tuning. However click-through rate is only one component of SEO. The biggest and most significant component of SEO is backlinks, which are ranked by quantity and quality of the link. So if google trusts SiteA a lot and SiteA links to SiteB, then google starts to trust SiteB. If other trusted sites also link to SiteB then the domain reputation grows for that site. Then there is the same ranking on a per-page basis as well. So if one page in particular is very well-linked to, then Google starts to link that page higher and higher for relevant results. This is the largest and most significant aspect of SEO. The click-through rate is a fine-tuning algorithm once you get to the top, but it alone isn't going to help. Google will never test SiteA with SiteZZZZZZZ on page 12.

sharkweek 3y ago

I think there was plenty of junk in the "small sites" world when it came to affiliates that deserved algorithmic modification, but Google absolutely took a sledgehammer to that side of the industry killing small players over the last six months. Now the big content sites that invest in search-volume-heavy terms are feasting on the traffic (and affiliate payouts). But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again, hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce filtering they already show on a lot of terms). I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had. The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.

airstrike 3y ago
> But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty FWIW I read this level of certainty as "I am privy to specific information pertaining to it and in fact I'm one of the people in charge of making sure it happens"
- sharkweek 3y ago
  To be clear, I have never nor will I ever likely work at Google or any of its competitors. I have spent an ungodly amount of time building (and breaking) affiliate sites / information sites / et al as side projects. Haven't done it in a few years (having kids has sucked my energy for side projects pretty dry), but at one point had like ~15 sites in my portfolio that I used to experiment with. Death, taxes, and an algo update fucking with a site's traffic at Google's whim.
  - codexon 3y ago
    Google has always preferred top domains for a very long time, allowing them to abuse the rankings for years. One relevant example I can remember, OVH is the top result for servers in Japan yet they don't have any in Japan. https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan https://web.archive.org/web/20240219200935/https://www.google.com/search?q=dedicated+server+in+japan https://web.archive.org/web/20240219200935/https://www.googl... This has been going on for many years now. And they never get punished unless there's a huge uproar about it on ycombinator like with expertsexchange.

codexon 3y ago

Google has been killing all but the most widely known domains for a very long time. I've mentioned this repeatedly on ycombinator multiple times, but only people who have made their own website 15 years ago and tried to grow it know what I mean. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675 My recommendation is to start moving to some other closed platform that is not part of Google search like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (yes I know Google owns it but its still not part of the search ecosystem). Tying your entire business to how high you rank on Google search is always going to eventually end up in disaster like this.

cogman10 3y ago
Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are. On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for. Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask jeeves at it's worst.
- getlawgdon 3y ago
  Same. Done with Google search. In addition to the results having become useless, it's Google's frenetic sprint away from the "don't be evil" ethos, which turns out to have only been in Incognito mode all along.
- nicbou 3y ago
  Even when the results are not sponsored, they're all generic answers from generic domains. I'm traveling at the moment and it's impossible to find anything written by someone in a 1000 km of the city I'm visiting. How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
- i_love_cookies 3y ago
  [dead]
- 3y ago

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

Presented like this it really is an absolutely damning indictment.

ado__dev 3y ago

Finding trustworthy reviews and recommendations via Google is useless. The first few pages are always littered by the lowest quality, highest SEO-spam content, and the recommendations on these pages are so shallow and inauthentic that I know the person that wrote the article has never even looked at the product they're shilling. And so often these lists are literally the same list of 20 products slightly re-arranged. Reddit is also really hit and miss, depending on the community. TikTok has been ruined by TikTok Shop. Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products. There surely must be a better option.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
> Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products. The problem with smaller ones is, that it can be a good honest channel today, get an "offer they can't refuse" and promote some crap for a few thousand dollars/euros overnight. Dave from the eevblog, AvE, Great scott!, bigclive, and maybe a few others are the ones I'd trust, because they show the ugly details of most products. Project farm also does many item comparisons, but most of the brands are unavailable here. All of them pretty big and popular channels, but most go very deep into specifics. For random (mostly kitchen and as-seen-on-tv) items, "Freakin' reviews" seems to be pretty genuine (electronics are much closer to my area of expertise), but I seem to notice many failure points in random gadgets and the guy from this channel points them out directly, with all the problems associated with them. Again... i'm not affiliated with any of them, most of them show a lot of shitty items (even popular ones), and well.. call them shitty as they are, so maybe I'm biased because of the number of bad reviews they produce and very few good ones, but i've bought stuff they recommended and liked it a lot. You cannot compare this to eg. "unbox therapy" where almost every item is clearly sponsored and you can see it in the "very good" reviews they get, even if they're shitty things.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
It's called "Consumer Reports" / Consumers Union. That's what it look like. The only thing that could enhance or replace it would be official government testing of products.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

“Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the ‘small web.’ We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways…” https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

15457345234 3y ago
Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet. The people most likely to benefit and have the time to enjoy small-web content are inquisitive children who don't have good sources of information at their disposal, i.e. the smart kids of dumber parents who don't have library cards. Kids who have infinite free time but zero chance of persuading their parents to pay for anything academic or 'nerdy'. There's a lot of them out there.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet That “true spirit of the internet” caused the ad-based cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn’t work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    > But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work. Free worked for much longer than it didn't work, and it will work again. There just needs to be a drastic adjustment in the amount of greed considered socially acceptable, and I can already see that pendulum swinging back.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
      Those damned greedy servers needing electricity to run.

class3shock 3y ago

This isn't just product reviews. Try searching any question and more than likely multiple results on the first page will be "articles" with some title like "So you want to know about x?" and the same sort of, generic, possibly algorithm generated, useless content. I wish there was an extension where you could add to a communal blacklist of result url's to start trying to put a dent in the huge number of garbage results Google spits out.

dankebitte 3y ago
There's uBlacklist [1], but there's not much community activity on its subscription list [2] or awesome-ublacklist [3]. [1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist [2] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions [3] https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

lolinder 3y ago

Between the rise of fake "30 best X" articles that this discusses and the widely-documented problem of fake reviews on places like Amazon, I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand loyalty again. Picking based on brands I trust rarely gets me the "best value" item and certainly doesn't get me the absolute global maximum "best overall", but it's turned into the only reliable way to choose something in a finite amount of time that I will reliably not be disappointed with. There's obviously always the risk that just because a brand was good a year ago doesn't mean it's still good, but I've found that the rate of decline of most good brands is substantially lower than the SEO-spurred rate of decline of the quality of internet publications that purport to provide unbiased reviews.

secretsatan 3y ago
Yes this, I've found product reviews looking distinctly dodgy for quite a few years now, while the article is about something I would see as a bit niche, electronics reviews have been in a hole for a while. I noticed some sites have been using amazon reviews for a long time. I still prefer for the most part, to buy some electronics from brick and mortar shops, at least then I can see the products in action, and I will seek out and travel to specialist shops for things like audio gear, they'll usually match online prices and let you try things out.
Swizec 3y ago
> I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand loyalty again You’re making me realize I too have been doing this for a while now. At least when satisficing instead of maximizing … and honestly I’m less and less interested in maximizing. These days when making a purchase I go to a friend group who knows their thing (podcaster friends when looking for a microphone, for example), ask what brand they use, then I go to that brand’s website and buy the highest-line product that I can afford. There’s little to no google searching involved and next to zero awareness of any ads. Ask a friend in the know and buy that. Done. If there are no friends in the know, I ask anyone who uses a thing that solves my problem “Hey do you like your <thing>? What do you like about it?”. If they say yes, I go buy that. Life is too short to spend in the quagmire of ecommerce and friends.

vdaea 3y ago

I searched for "Best Air Purifier for Pets" and I clicked on the first reddit result https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_purifiers_for_pet_dander_is_still_dyson/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur... That post is 4 months old but someone posted this just 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_purifiers_for_pet_dander_is_still_dyson/kq268jz/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur... Goes to show how little you can trust reddit comments these days, particularly for good google keywords This is mentioned in TFA: >Somehow the user has been banned from Reddit, but their comment is still at the top of the thread — we wonder how many other comments this user has published across different subreddits. This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment.

cuckatoo 3y ago
> This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment. If you are a reddit mod and not getting paid in 2024 you're doing it wrong.

duped 3y ago

If you wanted to make a search algorithm that displayed high quality results, you'd blacklist or downweight the big publishers because you know they're going to be dishonest. But when Google is also making money with their ad platform on those publishers' websites I don't think they'd ever do that.

evilmusic 3y ago
^ this is it ^

crazygringo 3y ago

This has nothing to do with Google, but rather everything to do with brand-name journalism and what people click on. This article is criticizing Google for showing reviews and guides to consumer products from well-known publications that it argues are increasingly low-quality, instead of surfacing high-quality independent reviews from less popular sites. But this has nothing to do with Google. Google's search quality metrics are pretty simple -- Google is trying to list results in roughly the order of probability that people will click on them. Google is trying to get you to the information you're looking for the fastest. And the reality is that, if I'm looking for air purifiers, I am absolutely going to click on the links to well-known publications like Wirecutter, or Better Homes & Gardens, or Apartment Therapy -- or a forum like Reddit. I'm far less likely to click on some smaller site I've never heard of, because I trust it less. So Google is giving me what I want. And the idea that Google should somehow instead be analyzing the content of each product review site to try to determine whether the reviewers are actually independently testing the items or not, that it should be making some kind of determination of "real" quality separate from whether people click on it -- this seems both impossible and misguided. I don't want Google to be trying to pick which niche independent sites are high-quality or low-quality. I just want Google to avoid actual spam, and otherwise give me the results that lots of people link to and lots of people click on -- PageRank and all that -- which is, of course, going to be publications and sites with brand recognition. Google isn't killing small, independent sites. It's people -- users, consumers, people like me -- who generally aren't interested in small, independent sites because there's no reliable signal to determine which ones are good or trustworthy. If I'm looking for an air purifier, I don't have time to waste to look through 20 small, independent reviewers and try to figure out which ones are shills and which minority actually know what they're talking about. No -- I'm going to go to the major review sites, see which models keep popping up, check Reddit for some confirmation and Amazon for some sales rank figures, and make the purchase and get on with my day. Which sucks for small, independent review sites. But they're just in a tough business. And Google has nothing to do with that.

ec109685 3y ago
The article points out numerous examples where a site like people.com is ranking for pet air purifiers, with zero evidence that they actually tested the products in question. This tweet thread goes into more detail https://x.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1717291171473727719?s=20 https://x.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1717291171473727719?s=20

hx8 3y ago

Another bad aspect is that it's becoming harder to google for general information without being hit with production recommendations. For example, if you google an ambiguous term like "Indoor light" the entire front page is products. There is no information about how indoor light impacts sleep health, or comparing different technologies of light bulbs, or different styles of lighting a room, or showing how much energy we spend on indoor lighting. It's literally all products, on a topic which has a lot of nuisances to explore. Some search terms seem to trigger "medical information", "scholarly journals" or "technical documentation" subroutines and avoid products all together.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
Even Kagi is like that, since "lighting" is a product class. If I search "Indoor lighting science" on DDG almost all the product stuff is gone. I even get an NIH paper on lighting and health.
kccqzy 3y ago
That's because your search query isn't specific enough. Google doesn't read your mind to figure out what about "indoor light" you seek. So it defaults to commerce.
anon84873628 3y ago
If type "indoor light sleep health" I get the results you would expect. Same for "indoor lights technology comparison" Do you really think it's unreasonable that "indoor lights" goes to e-commerce? What do you think most people who enter that term are looking for? I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow? Everyone complains that search results are deteriorating. What I think is really happening is that "the internet" isn't only targeted at nerds anymore. (And of course people are also strongly opposed to behavioral profiling which would be like reading your mind...)
- hx8 3y ago
  > I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow? If there is any ambiguity Google defaults to commerce. I think the front page for such general queries should have room for science, history, art, culture. Google's default is to sell you something, and it is often the only thing it shows.

pmontra 3y ago

Web search is dead for that. When faced with a new product category I don't know anything about I go on YouTube and look for people explaining how to use those kind of products, then look for unboxing or reviews, finally I get a rough idea. Then I can search the web for the few products that seem to fit my needs and budget. The advantage of video is that it's (still?) easy to see if something is a genuine or a fabricated review. The disadvantage is that video takes a much longer time than text.

frabjoused 3y ago

I wonder if Google is internally acutely aware of how rapidly its reputation is tanking. I just haven't seen many public acknowledgements of flaws in its search engine, especially in relation to SEO. So I'm very curious if there is some ongoing code-red internally about this, or if it the problem just got lost in one of the hidden layers of corporate fog.

ec109685 3y ago
It’s acknowledged obliquely at the end of this tweet: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1716964371916800472 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1716964371916800472
- cableshaft 3y ago
  Barely. With several follow-up tweets by them defending its bad behavior.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  The reply post to that one [1] is a perfect example of what I see everyday on Google. You search for "Best Men's Wallet" and the top examples are from 1) Forbes, 2) BusinessInsider, 3) New York Times. These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can basically create any content they want and Google will reward them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the rest of us looking for useful content in this search category can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content by sites that honestly have no business writing about this stuff. [1] - https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629 https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Just for funsies I'd like to see what would happen if google downranked sites with affiliate links. I know many small honest sites (and some big ones) do depend on affiliate links for their actual quality reviews, so probably would be unfair to implement it permanently, but man I would like to see what the results looked like without money involved.

partiallypro 3y ago

I tried to use Google to search for mattresses this way and found that 10/10 sites on the first page were all just affiliates of the mattress companies they were recommended. Even though they were reputable sites like the NYTimes, etc. I then appended "reddit" to my search and everyone in the comments essentially said to avoid those very brands that were the highest recommended from those sites. I hate that modern SEO is practically just build to create spam to game Google.

Workaccount2 3y ago
Good luck buying a mattress. The market is so intense that it is basically impossible to find honest information. Everything is affiliate links and the forums are flooded with shills. I ended up building my own mattress because the community around it doesn't really have a product to push.

pcdoodle 3y ago

Google results are trash, i still find myself appending "reddit" to get decent answers. Just stop paying Google. Stop using their services. Our company can't even reply to gmail users that ask us questions (hey gmail, if your user emails us, they probably want a response regardless of the hoops you want everyone to jump through with your "anti-spam" measures).

fatkam 3y ago
I find Yandex to give much better results than Google, but lately I haven't been able to solve Yandex's CAPTCHAs (the one where you have to click images in the right order). Pretty sure that I give the correct answers.

overstay8930 3y ago

This is the part of the analogy where everyone finds out the Golden Goose is actually dead and Google just started painting regular eggs gold and hoped nobody would notice.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
And the brief period where the Internet was a secret trick to get information that nobody else had, for free, is over
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  I for one welcome going back to libraries as a source of truth. Too bad no one else will realize that happened though and will continue reading the propaganda rags.

stevage 3y ago

Wow. This is super helpful. We have all noticed the enshittification of google search results, but this actually helps explain why.

muratsu 3y ago

From a regulatory perspective, implementing the ability to remove certain websites from search results (similar to twitter mute/block) would solve the problem for everyone. Motivated communities can maintain their lists and share amongst themselves.

codeulike 3y ago

This is a brilliant breakdown of whats been going on with review lists. Its been obvious for the last five years or so that whenever I googled 'best laser jet printer' or whatever that I was getting fed a load of bullshit but this really steps through exactly how Google and the seo crew are racing us all to the bottom, and to the opposite of useful info.

White_Wolf 3y ago

I'll be the unpopular voice here (not defending g for the,imho, monopoly though): - Google is not killing anything and don't owe you traffic; - You don't get traffic because your website is less algorithm oriented than other sites (among a ton of other things). if you want to unserstand how and why certain websites rank and all that sort of stuff just lurk on black hat SEO forums and see how they game system. I don't recomment their services but it's worth reading about the things they take into account. From keywords, density, headings all the way to domain age and server location.

lolinder 3y ago
This is the "don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" defense [0]. Google isn't killing anything because Google is just an algorithm. Your site fares poorly not because Google wants to hurt you but because you don't want to waste your life catering to an algorithm. It's not Google's fault that that you have other priorities like actually helping your readers live a better life! While it's strictly accurate, it's not a very useful way to look at the world. Google is killing independent sites that spend more time on the content than on SEO. It might be killing those sites in the same way that a volcanic eruption kills wildlife—as an unthinking, uncaring force of nature—but it's still killing them. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33m1s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33m1s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=...
- janalsncm 3y ago
  It’s also a framing that ignores the fact that Google clearly wants to be able to filter out the garbage but can’t. It’s not bloggers’ fault for that. At some point, you can either decide to write for people or decide to write for the algorithm.
janalsncm 3y ago
It’s not about Google owing anyone traffic, people are upset that Google can’t tell the difference between inauthentic product recommendations and authentic ones. Google clearly wishes they could as well, but it doesn’t scale so they don’t solve the problem. > your website is less algorithm oriented Maybe we should refuse to accept Google’s framing. It’s content creators’ job to create great content as judged by people. It’s Google’s job to discover that content and rank it above procedurally generated garbage that is devouring the internet. The fact that Google’s results are dominated by trash isn’t because there’s a lack of good content.

MostlyStable 3y ago

One thing this made me think of is that it would be interesting to try and make a user curated list of these kinds of sites. Every once in a while, I'll come across a blog of either an individual or a very small organization that is, for whatever reason, extremely interested in a very particular product segment (for example: [0]), and get _way_ into the weeds on the product category. They are exactly the kinds of pages I would like to find when I'm researching a product and exactly the kinds of pages that searches either don't turn up at all or are are pretty far down the list. Having some kind of repository of these kinds of sites would be really useful. [0]https://gunsafereviewsguy.com/ https://gunsafereviewsguy.com/

Avamander 3y ago
It's a nice idea, but how do I find the lists that are actually legitimate? I've just resorted to RSS+bookmarking every small site with good content I see. The bookmarks get fed to YaCy, even though it kinda sucks. I just can't trust content aggregators and search engines to deliver good unique content.

deleted 3y ago

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ec109685 3y ago

This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI (i.e. sophisticated reading systems) will be able to address. If there was a human curator with infinite time, I think they could wade through this crap and find ten links to authoritative sites that would provide a much better experience. They would do the same type of research that this author did, see how well a site’s recommendations correlated with other review sites (and vice versa to problematic sites), look at the history of reviews and see if they correlated to when products where shipped, look at the authors experience in the review space, etc, etc. This has to be a direction Google will be going in.

Solvency 3y ago
"This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI will be able to address." LOL, no. Generative AI is literally taking over SEO spam and exponentially magnifying it. That's where the money is. And Google is here to make money.
- ec109685 3y ago
  GenAI as in increasingly sophisticated reasoning engines, not writing fake product reviews.
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    GenAI does what its users tell them to do. And users are asking it to make fake product reviews. They don't even need it to be about an actual product just, tell it to 'create a product review for a toaster oven and include point 1 and point 2', and then the user can pop in some actual product names, model numbers, or a few other facts where needed.

lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago

Can anyone tell where this screenshot comes from? https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-purifiers-for-pets-top10-1024x790.png https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-p...

SushiHippie 3y ago
https://ahrefs.com/serp-checker https://ahrefs.com/serp-checker
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bluish29 3y ago

> What do BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science, and Better Homes & Gardens have in common? They are all in my ublacklist personal block list. That was before going full time with Kagi where I blocked most of them too.

Veuxdo 3y ago

At this point it you are searching for the "best" anything on Google, that's on you.

jdpedrie 3y ago

Is there a list anywhere of trustworthy sites for product reviews? The article mentioned Tech Gear Lab, and though I haven't heard of House Fresh, that seems reasonable? Consumer Reports of course, but are there others?

imp0cat 3y ago
I don't think so. It depends on the product, ie. Digital Trends are good for stuff like TVs, Serious Eats have great kitchen-related stuff reviews, etc...

rahidz 3y ago

It feels like sometime in the past decade, Google search results went from "Here's what most people click on" to "Here's the most trusted sources, handpicked by Google". WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's and not risk any controversy. And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate links. We're 'trusted', after all."

katuskoti 3y ago
Yep, Google outsources search ratings to humans working for a third-party called Leapforce - see "The secret lives of Google raters"[1]. There are specific guidelines for rating results, especially for political and medical queries. This is probably a big part of the massive decline in search quality - authority is valued more over accuracy to the specific query. 1. https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of-google-raters/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...
nicbou 3y ago
Google indeed ranks brands much higher. It feels like all of my results are from generic brands, even if all of their content is copywritten drivel. This is especially obvious when you search for travel advice, and every answer is a generic blog post on a travel service website.
nostromo 3y ago
Yes, exactly -- Google is the new Yahoo. It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least interesting results for everything using a small army of human and AI reviewers. Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no appreciable reason. The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more relevant than their organic search results -- because they actually care about the ad experience.

ryukoposting 3y ago

Seeing PopSci mentioned here stings, but they're right. I loved that magazine as a kid.

Beijinger 3y ago

Well. They do affiliate and bigger Gorillas do affiliate. But they claim to do a more honest review. Well. Air cleaner. I do my review here without any affiliate link: Most DIY filters outclass commercial available filters: https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY-Portable-Air-Cleaners-083121.pdf https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY...

Animats 3y ago

Does someone have a browser add-on with a site blacklist for Google search results? Google won't let you do that in the Chrome store any more, but you can still do it for Firefox.

15kingben 3y ago

Do I have this right? 1. Google is overrun by low quality product reviews and comparisons 2. Google starts to weight highly sites with manual testing 3. All those sites shamelessly lie and say they have manual testing -> back to 1 Isn't this a problem that Pagerank is supposed to solve? Auditing content for quality is basically an intractable problem to scale

evilotto 3y ago

This isn't really about google search results. The underlying playbook is the same one that has been used by vulture capitalists for quite some time now. Find a company with some value, buy it, extract the value into cash for the hedge fund, screw the employees and the public, move on to the next target. Look at what Alden Global has been doing to newspapers for years, and more recently Greyhound bus terminals. Gordon Gecko was a character in a movie, but based on all-too-real people and behaviors.

kccqzy 3y ago

This is a genuinely difficult problem to solve. The article title is "How Google is killing independent sites like ours" but then (1) I have never heard of HouseFresh and I have no reason to trust them for their reviews; (2) even if the site was highly ranked on Google, I still wouldn't necessarily trust the brand because you know SEO and ranking manipulations exist and I cannot be assured that HouseFresh isn't just a site that hired some high powered SEO consultant. It all boils down to reputation: reputation of the manufacturer and reputation of the reviewer. But humans can't realistically remember the reputation of all the manufacturers and product reviewers online, so we naturally gravitate towards well-known brands and big media publishers.

api 3y ago

The long predicted LLM spam apocalypse is upon us. All open systems and forums will be rendered unusable, including probably eventually e-mail. The future is closed enclaves, private forums, and managed platforms that verify identity. It was kind of inevitable that some tech would eventually do this, even if it was as unsophisticated as click farms and content mills. If adding information is free and there is no gate, it gets trashed by spam. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.

reducesuffering 3y ago

I don't really have any large scale answers other than to just aggregate my own recommendations at starterpax.com and refer friends and family to that for various hobbies / categories.

Techbrunch 3y ago

Is there a ublock origin list that can be used to filter those websites ?

smusamashah 3y ago
There is uBlacklist you can use to remove all these sites from search results

buro9 3y ago

I run a forum platform, and the best recommendations for anything are within the small communities. It doesn't really matter what the community is for, only last week on a cycling forum someone asked for "What's the best alarm clock?"... two days of discussion later, and everyone has aligned on "Buy one of the Braun alarm clocks" with the only debate left about which particular model was best (it turns out, 3 models cover everyone, and all are still better than anything else). If you went to Google and asked the same question https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+the+best+alarm+clock%3F#ip=1 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+... you get a lot of "Best alarm clock" list (with the year meantioned)... but few to none recommend a Braun alarm clock. You can repeat this for virtually anything... the small communities won't have an instant answer unless someone already asked it, but will produce a better answer every time, and I agree with the article that what has happened to Google isn't great, the incentives have all aligned to produce the worst content, by some of the most trusted sources, and to have that ranked high regardless of whether it helps answer anyone's question.

MaxikCZ 3y ago
I think the main reason behind this is that small communities are not infested by bots yet. Once community grows it inherently attracts bots and they just game the system to theirs owner advantage.

cush 3y ago

I know when I need an air purifier, I look to Rolling Stone Magazine for an honest, accurate review

dkbrk 3y ago

This is an entirely predictable consequence of Goodhart's Law [0] and Google ought to have known better. I can believe that Google was genuinely trying to help their users by providing more useful search results, yet, due to Goodhart's law they have in fact accomplished the opposite. As a concrete example, previously references to "lab testing" actually meant something, but Google turned its immense power on that and similar keywords and destroyed their information content. It is irresponsible of Google to naively act in ignorance of the entirely predictable consequences of their actions. Yes, Goodhart's law is counterintuitive, but it's been a well-known principle for decades and Google ought to realize that they are powerful enough it applies to any action they take and take that into account when making decisions. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

cush 3y ago

Google spent at least a decade incentivizing spam while they dominated up the search market, tearing any semblance of humanity and authenticity from the web. By the time Reddit realized what they had, LLMs had scraped them dry, then tragically and ironically, their plan to lock LLMs out of their API backfired and users deleted half of Reddit's content. There's so much value in the Small Web right now - microblogs, IndieWeb, etc., but it's just so hard to find these kinds of sites if you don't know what you're looking for

userbinator 3y ago

My strategy is not to use search engines for product recommendations, but to go to the online shops directly, look for the 1-star and 2-star reviews, and read them carefully. Once narrowed down to a few products, I then research them specifically to find out the details. For the example of air purifiers, look on Ali if you don't want to DIY one with a box fan and HEPA filter. They're all going to be made by some Chinese OEM anyway, so you'll cut out some middlemen and reduce the price, and at least those listings often have far more technical information, and the reviews can have detailed pictures from buyers of the products' internals.

iteratethis 3y ago

Looks like these "reviews" never happened. But even reviews that you might see on YouTube are usually not reviews. They are demos. Unboxing a product and demonstrating that a product indeed does what the box says is not a true review.

rchaud 3y ago

When Google slashed payouts on Google Ads (then known as Adsense), blog networks went the route of "affilliate link infested product review posts" and haven't looked back. The web has lost so much personality since the 2000s. Every site covers the same topics with the same shallow posts, and everyone ignores that the only thing keeping the lights on are those "Best product for X" posts.

skhameneh 3y ago

Anecdotally, I've been shopping for a product with a substantial price tag. I thought I had a complete list of every brand and model I wanted to see. Eventually I found my favorite in a showroom from a manufacturer that's not well known and wasn't on my list. Online, there's hardly any comparisons or reviews that aren't affiliated with a seller or manufacturer.

chupchap 3y ago

What if google let us pick the version of their algo we want to use for search results? That makes it impossible for SEO companies to target all algos, while also letting us customers use the right algo for the right search? OpenAI does it with their LLMs albeit with a different intent.

whyenot 3y ago

I paid for a subscription to Consumer Reports, and while it’s not a perfect solution, it has been very helpful. To a lesser extent Wirecutter from the NYT has also been helpful.

natch 3y ago

Google is culpable here. But the actual people who work there seem to not care, or are gleefully unaware. But the publishers who sold out to the algorithm are also to blame. I don’t know how to break the vicious cycle here.

edmundsauto 3y ago

What I find interesting is the categories not clearly spammed but obviously in a high cost ecosystem at smallish scale. Rehab centers, front yard water features, etc.