Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations

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

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.

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.

Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing

I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.

The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).

The main problem with Kagi is that it's a paid service with no free tier.

I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense -- but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.

a big problem for their growth

But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable business, then it's a feature of their business model.

No I'm sorry. I don't mean "growth" as in infinite and unsustainable growth like VC-founded startups. I mean "growth" as in adopting a bigger market share.

But, again, do they need to? It seems to me like "market share" is a metric relevant to companies pursuing VC-founded, unicorn lottery-ticket scale. If they generate enough revenue to pay competive wages, cover their operating costs, and make a reasonable (real-world, not VC-world) return on investment, they're a gosh-darn success. It's only within tech, where valuations and evaluations sailed off into ZIRP-ified bizarro-world, that people think of that as a failure of ambition or execution. I think it's time to re-assess our mental models.

But, again, do they need to?

Why not? There are tens of millions of people who need/want a high quality search engine and can pay for it. Kagi deserves to be successful for having made a better search engine than Google. And their success can inspire other entrepreneurs to start delivering quality information products, so that maybe we can get out of this ad/scam fuelled quagmire once and for all.

Good products and ideas should be successful, that's progress.

That is a complete non-sequitur from the question of if Kagi will die if it doesn't grow.

This is orthogonal to questions of morality and justice.

This is orthogonal to questions of morality and justice.

What?

If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures. Nobody owes anybody to keep a business running. So yes, it would die.

Sorry If I wasn't clear. But I think the question is pretty clearly stated in the post you responded to.

The question is: Does Kagi needs to grow to be sustainable, and if so, how much.

If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures.

If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?

Companies need to make a profit or they go out of business. However, most businesses don't need to continually increase users/ revenue to stay afloat. The coffee shop down my street is 100 years old, and didn't need to double in size every year.

I agree that nobody is owed anything. I also think that Kagi is "owed" or "deserves" tells us nothing about how many users they need to keep staff paid and the lights on.

If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?

Yeah, I would. We have to remember that these are guys who beat Google at their own game. They beat a company of a monstrous size and revenue at their own game. With that kind of capacity, I don't expect them to be satisfied with a million a year in profit to share. I expect them to go as far as they can.

If you're nobody special doing nothing special, then you can be happy with just needing to pay staff and keep the lights on. Like the coffee shop down your street, or my day job. But Kagi is clearly in a different category as a business.

Last I heard Kagi needs to grow a little bit more from current user base to break even.

Well if their goal is to make money, they haven't beaten Google yet.

Also, if you have a business that makes a million dollars a year and that's not enough, the typical solution is to sell it to someone else for 20 million or so instead of Burning It to the Ground

do they need to?

I don’t know what Kagi’s minimum sustainable size might be, but it’s probably bigger than what it is now. Particularly if they want to stay competitive with LLMs.

I use Kagi for finding things and LLM for asking questions. Two different use cases. I want them stay separate but I am probably in the minority.

I suspect you're correct, and am rooting for them to hit sustainable, as soon as possible. I don't know what their maximum sustainable size is, either - that's equally important, though always a moving target. I only wanted to point out that neither inflection point, for a paid-service business model, has to do with "market share" - that's a VC thing, to which I'm increasingly allergic.

I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.

It's actually maybe ChatGPT et al. that have done most to warm me up to the idea. I've tried Plus for a few months, basically using it like better search. I don't think I'll stick with it mainly because it's a pretty steep cost (enough that I want to go back to not having it for a bit at least, see how much of a problem it really is) - but it does make me wonder if perhaps Kagi can get me a lot of the way for half the price (the non-LLM tier).

> I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.

A 'fact,' which, if true, makes little sense when you look at it from the PoV as a tool.

With real physical tools, if you only use it occasionally, get a cheap one. But when you use it all the time, it pays to invest in a quality model.

Considering the frequency even the n00best of tech normies of the world use a search engine it makes sense for everyone to obtain such "a quality model." Sadly, that doesn't mean everyone will do so.

[me: Kagi unlimited user since they did the pricing change a couple of months back]

that's also a big problem for their growth

I agree, but it’s a good early filter for conversion. The difference in quality, for me and everyone I’ve gifted a month to, is stark enough to make paying for search for the first time worth it. Given the absolute cost (for the cheapest tier, paid annually, less than $50) it’s a psychological hurdle more than a financial one for most Americans.

Also, drawing those eyeballs from the ad-driven engines has a disproportionate effect on their marginal ad prices (in the long run). So if you need a sense of vengeance to get you over the hill, there you go.

Regarding ad margins:

If kagi saturates the market of people that can afford to spend $50/year for a decent search engine, then Google ads will only reach people that cannot. This would greatly reduce the value of their ad inventory (far more than the percent market share they’d lose).

If they can keep is sustainable and profitable without eat-the-world "growth", that's not a bad thing.

There are few consumer products that have held up against the competing demands of billions users in thousands of different markets and cultures. I'd say there's maybe even been none.

The kind of "growth" you're talking about is a bad but understandable habit among founders and cold financiers, but it's not a requisite part of running a business and generally runs counter to having a good product that serves a specific need well.

I wouldn’t have paid for ad-free YouTube until the alternative became unbearable. So too with lousy search results.

I didn't think I would. Then I tried it. Then I paid for the cheapest option because I really liked it. Then I paid for unlimited plan because I can't go back to crappy search after I tried the non-crappy one. And, thinking about it, why not pay for a good service? It costs less than cofee+pastry per month, and it improves the quality of my life. I think it makes sense. Some people may disagree, but as long as the service itself works, why would I care?

Problem? No.

It’s a feature.

that's also a big problem for their growth.

Frankly, I see this as a good thing. Maybe someone else will come along and solve the universal-search-engine-that-stays-good problem, but Kagi's best hope at being useful for me into the future is for them to stay where they are: tiny and used only by a small cohort of extremely savvy and skeptical geeks that aren't worth the effort to SEO-jack.

They just need to be sustainable—growing large would actually be counterproductive.

That’s honestly their loss. As long as Kagi can sustain itself with its paying members then it can silently retain and grow its users forever.

I use kagi for better results few times a week and it’s always free.

I know very few people who would pay for a search engine

If Google Search continues its downward trajectory, people will start to pay for Kagi or some other similar search engine. 10-20$ per month for unlimited search is nothing, at least in the western world.

We just haven’t reached that point yet

Oddly as a Kagi user, it does have a fault.

It actually sucks at finding the low cost product.

Want the cheapest esp32 c3... google is a better place to start. I can quickly find the "price to beat" and go deeper elsewhere.

Google and Kagi give the same top hit for “cheapest esp32 c3” for me ($2.50, ali express).

If I add a ? to the end of the query, Kagi additionally suggests an $11 reference board and a redit forum on the topic.

Did I know that without clicking? Who has the 2nd best price because shipping is part of cost...

Yes, the "cheapest" keyword incidentally gets me the answer in this case, but does it in every one?

Product spam has its upside when you're looking for product spam.

At $5/month for 300 searches

Wow, that's a lower search count than I would have thought. I am pretty sure I'd blow through that in a day or two...

I blew through it in three days and then happily signed up for the $10/unlimited plan!

You'd think so, and maybe that is indeed true for you. But I expected I would use several tens of searches per day, likely with some peaks over 100, but in the past 19 days I've only averaged ~15 per day, for a total of 291. The 300/mo plan wouldn't work for me either, but I don't blow past it as far as I would have expected.

Same, I finally gave up and tried it after Google just stopped being remotely useful, and DDG is just a reskinned bing. A week on Kagi and I signed up for an annual plan, and never looked back.

>Google search has become worthless for me.

Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the phone, not the thickest.

And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked through the other results lower on the page and nada, no correct answer.

So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.

Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test, but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but the easiest context searches where it works because it knows a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.

So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.

And the most annoying thing is, your phone will not. sit. flat. on a table, because the damn camera will always be unbalanced in height, which makes it an excellent attraction for feline companions. Tap on it and it wiggles. Tap harder, it wiggles more, and eventually the phone will fall to the floor, your feline will look at you with big round eyes and ask for f...ing treats.

I went today to a carrier showroom where they have the Pixel 8 on display to mess around with, and I though the reviewers were exaggerating, but that damn visor is nearly as thick as the phone itself. It almost doubles in height of the phone at that spot. The Pixel 7a next to it had a much much thinner visor despite sharing a similar design.

What the hell did Google put in that thing, lenses from the Hubble space telescope? It's not like they have a 100x zoom lens in that thing or a camera sensor so large it makes a Hasselblad wet itself. And that's before we get to the visible PCB screw heads poking through the OLED panel. On a phone that costs 600+ Euros.

I feel like Google is at least 5 years behind the competition when it comes to HW and industrial design. Or they just culturally as a company don't give a shit about HW, thinking their SW is gonna be the main selling point and the HW is treated like some last minute "who cares, just ship it, it's gonna sell anyway" afterthought.

It's still the only real option, all of the Chinese brands lock their bootloaders, and so does Samsung.

Samsung phones can still be rooted, at least outside of the US (the only place I see complaints about is when people buy Samsung phones in the US from a carrier). It is a bit annoying though that you have to link your phone to a Google and a Samsung account and keep it active and connected to the Internet for at least 7 consecutive days because of Samsung's anti-theft system.

It's quite difficult to obtain EU SKUs for Samsung phones in the US, even without buying through a carrier. (If anyone knows an easy way to get them, let me know!)

eBay?

The recent Pixels specifically don't rock, since the visor goes all the way across.

FWIW I just tried "thickness of the Pixel 8 including the camera visor", and got a snippet from Google:

The actual dimensions of the Google Pixel 8 are apparently 150.5 x 70.8 x 8.9mm, with the thickness rising to 12mm at the camera bar.

And nothing on Bing.

In Bing I get nothing in the results, although I do get the written Copilot answer on the side:

The Google Pixel 8, announced in October 2023, has the following dimensions:

Height: 150.5 mm (5.93 inches)

Width: 70.8 mm (2.79 inches)

Depth: 8.9 mm (0.35 inches)

However, if we include the thickness of the camera bump, the Pixel 8 measures approximately 12 mm3. The camera visor itself is notably thin compared to previous Pixel phones, but the overall thickness accounts for the camera bump and other components.

In summary, the Pixel 8 is a sleek device with a slim profile, and its camera visor adds a touch of functionality without significantly increasing its overall thickness.

This is honestly a terrible example even if it is completely valid. You can't even get Google to find the most basic possible content about, say, oranges, without it being some SEO ad-infested fandom.com page about fruit, let alone product specifications.

>This is honestly a terrible example

I know, I'm not saying it was scientific, I was just sharing an anecdotal mainstream search query which I though was very relevant today for me and maybe others as well and also not super difficult for Google.

I use an LLM for 80% of my queries now. Fighting Google isn't worthwhile, unless I need a trusted source.

How do you know when your LLM is bullshitting you

How do you know when a Google result is bullshitting you, or if their pre-LLM AI summaries of results were bullshitting you?

You don't, but at least you have one answer you need to verify vs 100 listings of random garbage to wade through.

What do you use?

I use the Azure GPT-4 offering. It's not always 100% correct, but for technical questions in areas I'm not very familiar with, it's close enough. I can get much more done in a given amount of time than I would have been able to reading docs and SO.

I know lots of people will point to examples where it's wrong, but I'd suggest trying it out yourself. If you're not intentionally trying to trip it up, it really works quite well.

I second this. The quality of google search has reached a point that's only good to search things that can't be bought.

... and uncontroversial.

Searches for "coronavirus" seem to be hard-coded, or interfered with. I get pages and pages of Covid-19 results, but that's not what I searched for. I even get a wikipedia link to its covid-19 page, but no wikipedia link to its coronavirus page within the first several pages of results.

In general, I find the same is true for all mainstream search engines, including DDG and Bing. You can't even search for things to buy anymore, ironically; it'll just dump you into Amazon or some "top 10" shitpost on CNN fake news or Forbes, much like the trash pit of websites shown in the header image of this article. Like others, I also find myself searching on Reddit or HN directly. What the point of a search engine is at that point, I don't know.

I subscribe to Kagi, and it’s great.

Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are.

Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...

Something as basic as: "2,5 cm to mm" won't show up the unit conversion widget if it's not formatted as "2.5 cm to mm", at least for me. WolframAlpha also fails at this query. However, ChatGPT understands it and gives the right answer.

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.

I use Bing, too. People are suprised when I recommend it, but for most general searches, it's quite a bit better.

I am a small business owner who started their site and SEO and within three months I was beating multi-million dollar competition on the most important keyword google search terms for our market and industry. I did this with no budget, no adspend, just basic SEO and good keyword research. It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.

Same. Numerous 1st page top results, and even snippets. Honestly no idea how... I do know SEO basics, but didn't know I knew them well enough for this. Within a year I had the first result for a very, very popular search term. Granted it was a lot of hard work (18 hour days, sometimes).

You spent 18 hours a day on SEO? Doing what??

No, no. I spent 18 hour days posting on social media, writing articles, designing cover images, researching, etc. I honestly didn't do much work in regards to SEO, at least I don't think so. (There were a few times I knew something was going to be released soon, so I wrote about it before anyone else did.) But I do believe all of this contributes to SEO.

But yeah, this brought my site to having every article I write today to be listed on page 1 (top 5 results, at the very least) almost within a day, numerous snippets, etc.

I wonder how easy this will continue to be in the chatgpt era. What takes you 18 hours can probably be generated in 18 seconds with enough fidelity to get traction.

Oh and doesn't that just define the problem so well

> You spent 18 hours a day on SEO? Doing what??

No, no. I spent 18 hour days posting on social media, writing articles,

Yes, yes. Based on my 10-years-ago contact with SEO, you just described it.

The only thing I did was everything google recommended I do, literally. Run PageSpeed, do everything suggested. Log in to search console, do everything recommended. Super hard. And the keywords I dominate are for such things like, jewelry repair, jewelry repair near me, jewelry repair Seattle. Not niche. The reason I am beating such big spending rivals is because they usually have sites that break a lot of SEO rules funny enough. They try so hard and pay so much to "SEO Experts" but their site is templated spaghetti and no one can fix it, seemingly.

It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.

If this is really true, then you should be running your own SEO consulting business. You would undoubtedly make much more money than your existing (presumably not SEO consulting), small business

Comments like this are similar to people (ahem, Internet randos) talking about their investment portfolio returns, where they wildly exceed the very best professionally managed hedge funds. I always say: "If you are so good, why don't you run your own hedge fund? It will easy to get funding." <<crickets>>

Knowledge of my SEO prowess comes only recently. I have hung my shingle as a proven SEO expert so we will see. If anyone wants to hire me please let me know. I come with proven metrics.

What's the site and what keywords are you targeting?

Parent poster is, I hope, wise enough to not answer.

I would guess you're working in a niche that has not been targeted by the big media sites alluded to here? Being halfway decent at SEO will come to nothing when you have 20 or so competing sites that can rank overnight for anything.

Same here. I'm right up there competing with billion dollar companies with decades of presence and I don't know how many backlinks. While my small business has no backlinks from others and only relies on content for ranking, being entirely dependent on Google to be honest.

Read past the provocative title, and Google actually seems to be doing the right things here. They cracked down on product reviews that aren’t actually testing the product in 2021, and the article says big media companies (presumably with lower quality review content) suffered as a result.

But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate links while avoiding the new requirements.

So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying to bring attention to this issue.

If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!

Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The original title was "How Google is killing independent sites like ours".

Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the authors.

I still believe the original title is warranted.

The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.

does it?

I would happily believe that Google is corrupt in this manner, but the reason big domains have the advantage here is because they can afford to pay teams of people with the express purpose of gaming the system. this is true in all industries, everywhere, and it can only be fixed with society-wide change, which, short of a world war (or, more likely, two), isn't going to happen

It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.

To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.

Big brand websites usually have decades of trust and backlinks to lean back upon. As a person working in SEO for 20 years, I'd argue calling search engines lazy is just lazy. It's a billion dollar industry. Whatever ranking factor they decide on, someone will abuse.

Consider how bad the results would be if I could generate 100 scam sites in a day and outrank traditional media. Only to repeat it tomorrow. Now step it up and have tens of thousands of people doing the same thing. Every day. Trusting a 30 year old domain isn't lazy.

Google's job is to fight abusers to give you good results. Is that not the point of a search engine? What else are they going to spend their time working on?

Putting the burden of SEO on everyone else is going to cause people to abandon making websites and seek other platforms like reddit, facebook, instagram, youtube etc... as they have been.

It also wasn't as heavily weighted to manually trusted domains before. I used to have a bunch of backlinks too, but all blogs/forums were manually downranked.

Now these "trusted" domains get free reign to do whatever they want like this.

It's not about being corrupt, it is about doing the lazy thing in order to fight spam. No one ever got fired for suggesting New York Times or Better Housekeeping.

To me it feels like a big brand website hardly needs to try in order to rank #1 even without doing a bunch of SEO.

To rub salt into the wound, any forum will happily let anyone and everyone post in support of any big brand, but instantly spam-block some lone developer trying to showcase their product (HN is different in this regard).

Microsoft/Jetbrains/Apple releases a new paid product, available as a paid subscription only - dozens of people will get upvoted telling the forum about it.

Some lone indie dev releases a free-tier search tool with optional paid tier, and they're banned for spamming.

Now I understand why you'd want to block people who self-advertise, but there's gotta be a middle ground.

Why is advertising on behalf of a company that has a larger ad budget than all the current readers salaries combined okay, but advertising for your own product is a bannable offence?

There really should be a middle ground where (like on HN) the audience understands that someone who posts something that took them 6 months to create is not the same as someone selling love potions or stock tips.

It's become bad to the point an indie dev can't even post to get feedback even when the thing he's poured his blood into completely matches the forum's topic. Extra minus points if he offers it for free (so suspicious!)

You are now expected to develop in the dark, without ever mentioning anywhere the thing you are working on and fully knowing that your "blog" gets completely ignored by Google

I personally refuse to host my blog on a "trusted" domain. I likewise refuse to use Twitter, Youtube, Tiktok, and whatever else works nowadays because search engines can't be arsed to tell the difference between legitimate content and spam AND because people's attention span have become smaller than a tadpole's

This is a sore point for me personally. That's why I went through the effort of creating my own personal search engine that filters out all this SEO spam and made it public for others to use https://www.aisearch.vip

Years ago Google banned BMW (I think) for their then very spammy tactics. Then they were forced to restore BMW because people searching for BMW expected to find BMW in the results.

The Google spam team has always been underfunded, and understaffed, and when the choice was 'do the right thing about spam' vs 'do the thing that is profitable', they always choose profit.

What is the loop hole?

The same issues you have with google search engine optimization are present in every other closed platform too. Welcome to the attention economy, you better learn how to go viral.

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.

This is a serious problem. Internet marketplaces are so big now that its really hard to even have a business without them at all.

I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties. That way the whims of the marketplace owner can't destroy thousands of prosperous businesses at the push of a button.

We have similar regulations for utilities. The power company can't kick you out on a whim. I think the same rationale applies here.

As always expected in the HN comments: "More government regulation". Depending on Google for your business might not be ideal, but before these free online marketplaces existed, you would only be able to have a business and compete if you had the right political contacts or were born into the right family.

Do you think a regulated online marketplace would let anybody set up shop like Google does? In order to be allowed a web domain you'd need 5 government certifications, a credit note for a million from the bank, membership in the local chamber of commerce, etc. The door would be locked and welded shut for everybody except those with the right contacts and financial backing. And those are not always the people who create the best businesses – as anybody on this particular forum should know.

destroy thousands of prosperous businesses

The marketplace owner created these thousands of prosperous businesses to begin with. Regulators did not.

Look we all know governments can do some crazy things and regulatory capture is awful, but you libertarian types really have some strange ideas about regulation.

Half of this forum would be out of a job if it wasn't for Google, but still they down vote my comment and demand government regulation. They have no clue what they're in for. While Google has it flaws – big flaws – at least for the most they give anybody a chance to compete in the results ranking. A government regulated search engine or web portal won't be anything like that.

Half of this forum would be out of a job if it wasn't for Google

Hahaha wat.

still they down vote my comment and demand government regulation. They have no clue what they're in for.

Oh, we do have a clue. We have close to two centuries [1] of data to draw from. Corporations and big companies will always go for the worst possible things and are only reigned in when the government steps in. Without fail.

at least for the most they give anybody a chance to compete in the results ranking.

No, they don't. And they haven't done this for a very long time now.

[1] Well, more. Government regulations are as old as governments, but let's take the last two centuries as something resembling more modern capitalism.

No, they don't. And they haven't done this for a very long time now.

They do. I've launched several projects in the past years from nothing, with no backlinks, that are ranking high on Google and making good money. Just by adding the pages to their index in the box they provide. That's just the truth, no matter how strongly you feel for your ideology.

Read the article linked. It has proof and receipts.

Sorry, my bad. Now I read the article and realised that my properties are not ranking high on Google, because they told me so in their article.

Sorry, my bad, your site (whichever it is) invalidates the findings in the article completely.

Half of this forum would be out of a job if it wasn't for Google

This is similar to the Great man theory. If there wasn't for google there would be something else. Maybe something similar maybe something totally different. The idea that half of us would be sitting on our ass doing nothing if it weren't for google is just nonsense.

If there wasn't for google there would be something else.

I absolutely agree with that, maybe even something better than Google. And hackers would want that regulated and/or shut down as well.

What I'm saying is that the current economy for IT would never exist if it wasn't for the free and unregulated Internet.

This is a Poe, right?

It would be probably better to just ban the «too big to fail» ones.

Regulations tend to only help them at the expense of smaller competitors.

That's exactly the thinking that led to the Digital Markets Act in the EU. Those marketplaces are effective monopolies or oligopolies in their space, so access to them needs to be regulated to ensure a level playing field.

I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties.

The solution is not for them to be big and regulated, it's for them not to be so big.

The main thing that would help here is to inhibit vertical integration. For example, suppose people had a legal right to pricing information. Companies like Amazon and eBay would be encouraged to provide an API and have no right to stop anyone from scraping their site for anything it doesn't provide.

Now anyone can make a product search engine that will show you results from any site. You're not stuck with Amazon's gawdawful search. And since anyone can do this, it's easy to enter the market and none of them will have dominance. Conversely, if you want to start a new retailer, or sell your own products directly from your own site, you just submit your site for indexing to the popular product search engines and customers appear. But none of the search engines can destroy you because there are dozens of them and the biggest one is only 15% of the market.

We need more competition. The target of the rules should be to lower barriers to entry.

I've argued this before; these companies have taken on a utility role and need utility-type regulation, i.e. an obligation to provide service fairly and universally, an ombudsman, viable oversight, physical presence, a local call center to provide local employment and to give back to the community, etc.

This situation where 100% of the taxi and food delivery profit from every small town in the world gets siphoned off back to a single office in California just isn't viable. Even from a within-US perspective it isn't viable.

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.

Uber could sell their own devices to users and drivers. The app is _that_ useful for millions (billions?) of people, that people would buy it. People used to buy separate GPS devices, so it's not something out of the ordinary.

Spotify tried this, did not go well for them. Amazon and Meta learned the same many years ago

Maybe Spotify didn't put enough effort into it? And besides, listening to music was nothing special, people had portable music players for decades before Spotify. Uber opened up a completely different way of transport. I don't doubt that they would have success with their own device.

Amazon have been extremely successful with their dedicated book reading device, the Kindle. So thank you for that example. That really shows that Uber could have had success with their own device, better than I can argue for it.

How is it «a completely different way of transport» when taxis existed for decades already ?

If you used taxis before Uber, you'd know. Taking taxis used to be dreadful, except for in a few cities, because taxi drivers were/are rouges, always looking to scam their customers in any way conceivable. On top of that it was insecure in other ways. In places were they were not scamming their customers, it would be very expensive. The person who has to take a taxi is generally a visitor to a new city, who is not familiar with public transit and doesn't have their own vehicles. Uber has been a blessing for taking a taxi in unfamiliar and unsafe locations.

But should those app stores even be the sole judge of whether or not those apps can exist?

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.

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.

What if eBay were the only way to sell your goods on the internet? Because that's what the problem is with search - if Google doesn't weight your page high enough in results you're screwed. There's no other game in town.

eBay already acts like it still is the only place to sell goods on the internet. But I'd say eBay was actually better back when it was the only mainstream way/place to sell many goods on the internet.

eBay now sells promoted rankings. Funny when a vendor selling 1 product has it listed at several different prices, so you can save some money by finding the lowest priced one in their "other listings" that they don't promote.

eBay sells Google ads on its pages. (sad seller noises).

and eBay is one of the biggest ad buyers on Google.

And that's why I utilized eBay's api to create a better, curated version of their site for personal use. On average my filters end up removing like 90% of the listings for various reasons. All I see is the stuff that is actually worth considering now. It's great.

I find eBay's optimizations have made it somewhat toxic.

Once you get to a product page, any further navigation of the form "similar/related products" is sponsored listings only these days.

They've narrowed a catalog that might have 1,000 relevant products into a pinball bouncing you between the same 12 sponsored listings. It's easy to figure "this is all they've got" and move on.

The model probably works okay for rebadged Alibaba tat with no meaningful differentiation; the 200 sellers with the same widget can be forced to bid against each other for visibility.

But for the classic line of "eBay as the world's garage sale", the last thing you want is to deliberately narrow your visible inventory. Customers are here for variety and the obscure, and restricting the market to "that which we can get placement revenue from" eventually drains them away.

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.

Right, but the "separate business" here -- in a real-world analogy -- is akin to a commercialised offshoot of the department of transport.

They may not make the roads, but they decide what goes on all the maps, they control most of the road signs, they benefit from the traffic monitoring data, and if you were to open up a shop selling only advice on where to shop, they determine whether your shop can be seen behind their signs. They profit from how they manage this, and the only way to get better management is to pay for it. Everyone pays for it, so the advantage dissipates until you pay more for your signs.

There is little to no way to do business without these people, short of setting up a stall at the local covered market or farmer's market (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Etsy) where you are beholden to another set of signage issues as well as the secondary knock-on effects of large-scale signage issues on the way to the market, over which you have even less influence.

Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.

Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.

This is the key.

If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.

But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.

But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.

If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.

Google can still kill your site even if you're a word of mouth, pateron, liberapay funded site...

That is by having scammers feed of the keywords of your product and selling shitty bullshit/scams siphoning the people that were told 'word of mouth' yet use browsers like chrome.

Patreon has a similar issue : they've banned some people for political reasons.

How many businesses are utterly dependent on AWS?

As customers - which is different.

AWS has competition. I can run on 1000 other hosting providers and the users of the site won't be able to tell the difference.

I can rank on every search engine except Google and it would still kill my business. They own 90% of all the traffic.

Your analogy isn't valid.

It is very risky but making your own website and having it be easily found should be the way the internet is supposed to work.

One shouldn't have to make a youtube channel, constantly tweet, and manage a facebook group when a single website should have sufficed.

I miss that old Internet. Nowadays it's all social shit.

Do you have your own website? Because that old internet still exists, it's just hidden behind all the commercialized shit. You can participate if you want to:

Make your own website. Link to others you like. Use old-school forums instead of modern social media. Rely on user-curated lists instead of algorithmic feeds. There is enough geuine content out there to last you a lifetime and plenty of people to interact with.

Almost any site on the internet is going to depend on Google. It's too big and too important. They have a monopoly, I'm amazed it hasn't been broken up yet.

The question here is how to break out of it. If you go to Bing for example you fall under Microsoft hood, which isn't really solving the problem.

"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. "

If we compare to a small business on a highway and a company decides to move the highway so far away from them as to diminish their customer base effectively driving them out of business; this can't happen, since roads are governed as public resources. This is what the Internet needs.

Roads do in fact change, and traffic patterns and access costs change with them. Lots of small towns are intimately familiar with this, booming or busting because of a new major road nearby.

They change more slowly than internet traffic and are less globally impacting than a gigacorp's shuffling though, of course.

These companies enjoy special legal protections that shield them from the liabilities of their actions which they say are absolutely required for them to exist.

Perhaps those protections should now be rescinded and they should be held liable for their conduct.

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.

People like to shit on Nextdoor but once I embraced it as a homeowner it's my go-to for everything. Fuck Google/Yelp for reviews. It's refreshing getting local first-hand reviews and recommendations from neighbors about plumbers, roofers, electricians, solar panel experiences, tax stuff, home security camera questions, etc. Having a local authenticated community is so refreshing compared to the corporate bot infested internet.

Just don't ask for realtor suggestions. Your inbox will never be the same again. And everyone is a realtor or related to the one that does the best job...

It blows my mind why sellers would even need a realtor in hot markets. Your home will get a dozen offers in a week as soon as its put up for sale, you don’t need to burn 5% and do all the bullshit ritualism like staging or aerial photography that people are paying for.

Staging can certainly increase the offer amount by more than it costs

More than 5%?

Ah and there's the example of a service that's local, organic, home-grown, small business, crunchy, and also thoroughly paid-off. To complement my sibling comment that "local" is not the deciding factor

There's a couple Facebook groups for residents for the city I live in and I've found them useful for the same reason. I should also start checking NextDoor more, thanks for the mention.

Knowing there's an unpaid human writing the review is about the only thing that matters. I guess for repair services it has to be local, but the real point is, if I get a recommendation from friends or family, I can trust that they aren't affiliates, because they're staking the relationship on their review.

<https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#fatads>

in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars. I don’t mean this to offend. I mean it as a job description. An advertiser's job is to convince you to do stuff you would not otherwise do.

Reddit is also really hit and miss

It took savvy SEO folk about .3 seconds to figure out that Google was ranking Reddit for almost any informational query and start trying to game the system there too.

I love using Reddit for information but be wary of any new Reddit thread ranking well in Google search that's only a few months old, in a small community, with very few other responses besides a strangely specific answer to the question.

Reddit is highly subjective.

In shopping for flashlights, the respective subreddit recommends only obscure AliExpress brands. The community are retiree collectors who obsess over specs and cannot possibly use them in the field.

Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations, for example. What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with; at a certain point you can't even see anything outside your own beam. They shit on all "American" brands (but Coast is shit).

It's hilarious watching them drive off clueless gift-givers seeking advice.

Hi there! I am a moderator of said subreddit and the maintainer of its recommendation guide, so I think I'll speak up on behalf of the community. Addressing the points in order...

We do, in fact recommend lots of brands that don't pay for space in retail stores and haven't been around for decades. Isn't that the point of asking an enthusiast community for advice?

A while back, lights with lots of mix-and-match bits that could be assembled without tools were pretty popular, especially the Surefire P60 system. These have fallen out of favor for a number of reasons including the increasing popularity of electronic switches over mechanical and an increase in availability of build-to-order lights. DIY stuff is still popular for hobbyists, but usually involves soldering.

Removable batteries are absolutely a consideration for most of the community. A flashlight with non-removable batteries is future e-waste and can't have spares. Lights without removable batteries only make my list when they're a weird form factor (usually very small) and low-priced without good removable battery alternatives. We almost always try to talk people out of routine use of disposable batteries, but many popular models have a disposable option as a backup.

I do not often see people steering beginners toward models with extreme outputs; the opposite is often true. We're constantly talking to people about sustained output versus peak output, color rendering, efficiency, and ultra-low modes.

As for brands that manufacture in the USA, very few people asking for advice come with the sort of budgets those brands usually require. Trying to talk someone looking to spend $60 on a light to walk their dog with into spending $300 on a Modlite or Surefire isn't helpful.

The community are retiree collectors who obsess over specs

The group who designed my extremely awesome Astrolux MF-01 might be a clone of them.

Are we looking at the same subreddit? Perhaps it's changed since I last looked, but most recommended lights use a replaceable, rechargeable cylindrical lithium battery. A common requirement/desirable feature of lights is good light output controls (such as ramp firmwares), waterproofness, etc. There's plenty of recognition that different lights are not ideal for everyone, and if anything the brightest lights are seen as too much for some (given they can literally burn holes in your pocket..)

I can't say every post is legit, and I'm sure there's a fair share of marketing posts posing as real users, but there's good reason IMO to recommend the lights they do. There's a lot of stuff that comes out of China that's just as good if not better than the American brand for half the price, if not even less.

That being said, it's an enthusiast subreddit, as all such things are, so if you're looking for a "casual" recommendation it's likely to be more than you need XD

"American business-hating lumen chasers" is an incredibly shallow portrayal of that flashlight community.

I've found flashlights to be one of the few product areas where "obscure AliExpress brands" actually outperform Western equivalents.

Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations

That's because it's taken for granted that nearly every recommendation uses one of a few standard cylindrical battery sizes, which are trivially user replaceable. Only a few brands use non-standard or built-in batteries. Often the electronics or LED emitters can be modified or replaced, since most lights fit a simple "cylindrical tube" formula.

What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with

I guess all those discussions about tint (subtle colours of the beam), CRI (how well colours are represented), beam shape, optics type, user interface, etc. were nothing then. ("Big number of lumens" is far from the only factor - sometimes not even the most significant one.)

Granted, not all that information is useful for a newcomer who just wants a decent light. But the buying guide on the wiki sums it up simply enough.

What is hilarious are the people selling those same AliExpress lights at huge markups (search "Goonbeam"). Quality and price are often linked, but far from the same.

There surely must be a better option.

Maybe Consumer Reports?

Only complaint I hear about them is Tesla fanboys complaining that the cars are not getting perfect scores and that its a conspiracy. Not sure if there is any truth to that(probably not). Other than that I haven't heard much bad to say but who knows, they could also be compromised.

Or rtings for any categories they review.

rtings is really good and in-depth. I have used them as a gut check many times and they haven't let me down yet.

The original thing that grabbed me about their reviews was their analysis of monitor flicker: some monitors gave me a headache, some didn't, I'd just started realizing it was likely due to the use of PWM flickering for brightness, and then I found that rtings included that information with every monitor review so that I could select monitors that didn't flicker.

In general, they capture much more information than most reviews, and make it possible to search and sort based on that information.

I did actually buy a year long subscription of CR when I moved into my new house a few years ago and I found their reviews to be generally more helpful and have bought a few products based on their recommendations.

It depends on what you are looking for. I found looking at the BIFL subreddit, sites that cater more towards industry (McMaster Carr as an example), and companies based in Europe (Fjallraven as an example) can help find higher quality products faster (or finding items on there and then searching reddit/forums for "alternatives").

Sometimes it just feels impossible though E.g. trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.

Do you happen to know a McMaster-Carr equivalent based in Europe?

I do not but if you have a STEM club at a local school or a nearby university with a mechanical engineering program they would be able to tell you (assuming one exists).

trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.

If you're wanting BIFL kitchen items for low use try looking for commercial foodservice versions. That stuff is generally priced between plastic throwaway versions and Williams Sonoma but if it's built to survive at least a month in a busy professional kitchen, it'll probably serve me for life.

Alternatively, head over to your nearest ethnic grocers. I have some Asian and Mexican grocery stores near me that have kitchen supply sections that stock no-frills but reasonable quality versions of kitchen tools. My nearby standard American grocery stores stock much lower quality items by comparison.

+1 on buying from commercial suppliers for even home kitchen stuff. I’m a fan of webstaurantstore.com . Prices are good, and you can buy stuff that will last you forever in a home kitchen which usually isn’t available in normal stores (eg Cambro containers).

I've noticed that a large portion of reviews are literally just rehashing reviews on amazon. And, if I were to guess, a good number of them are just these review sites pumping in "top 10 x reviews from amazon" into chatgpt and having it write their review for them.

YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.

The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product. Doesn't work for everything, but in a lot of cases the paid promotional reviewers aren't getting their hands on the product in question and instead they are putting up stock images and reading the marketing material.

The bigger the youtuber, the harder it is to know if it's a paid promotional thing.

> The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product.

IDK, there's a long tradition of shill reviewers being given free products "for testing" on the unspoken agreement that if the review is bad, they won't get more free products in the future.

Yeah if they have no negative reviews, that's a bad sign. A particularly scrupled YouTuber I follow typically won't do a paid video if the product isn't good and instead does an unpaid tear down video. That probably limits his opportunities to brave marketing teams with high quality products, but it also makes his reviews quite valuable.

What Youtuber is that?

I know I buy sort of expensive products, but most of the things I've bought recently like my christiania bike all have youtube channels detailing their products. I think that is frankly the only real way for brands to advertise to people like me who'll maybe look at reddit threads or similar, but these days you can barely even trust many of those. We bought a Baby Brezza based on recomendations, they have a semi decent youtube with a mix of useful information and advertisement.

A good example of the reddit bit is the robock s8 we bought. 95% of the reviews on reddits tell you to buy the big version with the huge dock... But then there was this one person in one thread who posted about how it was easy to just empty it without the station and that the station was known to rot or mold (not sure how you say that in english). So we bought the smallest s8 version we could and whoever that redditor was, they were absolutely right that it was so easy to maintain it without any of the addons. Roborock doesn't have a good youtube channel, they do have one, but it's really just advertisement.

Anyway, I agree with you. I don't even really use google anymore. I switched to ecosia (it also sucks) out of spite, but it's been as good as google for anything except for when I want to do site:blabla.com in which case I'll !g. Before you recommend it I've used the duck before and it doesn't work for me. Likely because I'm Danish.

Reddit is 99% schill bots. Heaven help you if you're researching baby products. The entire scandalous baby product market has commandeered Reddit with accounts like this one that I found just because I kept seeing the name pop up relentlessly hawking the same products:

https://www.reddit.com/user/ErinElizabeth1187/

99,9% of the time, a username in the format NameNameNumber is a bot. The probability goes up as the value of Number increases.

This used to be the case, but at some point in the last few years Reddit started suggesting usernames like that to new human users. It'll generate stuff like "Fine_Ad6357", "Unhappy-Benefit8521", and "SuccessfulShape2454".

I believe they started doing this because Reddit got really popular and all the normal usernames were eventually taken. I wouldn't be surprised if they implemented this after noticing that a significant number of signup attempts were aborted due to multiple attempted usernames already being taken.

Every review on youtube is paid placement for the most part. The exception is if you find a real user who will post some crappily shot video and never step in frame themselves, those are always the highest quality reviews yet its rare and below the fold because people do it out of their own freetime and goodwill and aren’t trying to make a hustle out of it (which means accepting paid review offers).

Yeah, YouTube is absolutely dominated by paid product placement, especially for stuff like power tools. That said, YouTube reviews at least tend to be real in the sense that at least the reviewer is actually using and demonstrating the product, which is a huge step up from the "we summarized some Amazon reviews for you" SEO spam.

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.

But people need to use it.

Critical internet/app browsing should be taught in school, like critical reading. I feel lucky to have been a nerd in the 2000s where people picked up this skill, but honestly I have no idea how kids, older folks just getting into tech and such are acquiring sources/skills trapped inside of Discord, YouTube, Facebook or whatever.

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.

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.

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

Yes but it's unreasonable to expect Google to figure out whether people.com is actually testing the products it reviews or not.

All Google can figure out is whether people click on links to people.com when they search for air purifiers (they do), and whether the page in question is outright spam or has its content stolen from another site (it's not).

The idea that Google should be trying to independently figure out some level of objective "content quality" doesn't make any sense to me. It's fine that it builds a knowledge base up out of objective facts to show in cards and whatnot, but I don't want Google trying to decide which review sites are more trustworthy -- I just want it to show me the review sites that other people are clicking on and linking to. For Google to insert "editorial control" over its search results would be an abuse of its power, to me.

When I search Google, I want popular results to come up -- the "democratically elected" results, in effect, from PageRank and clickthrough rates. I don't want Google trying to make assessments of the accuracy of content when it comes to opinion, and review sites are nothing but opinion.

A site that is excellent at SEO spam isn’t the same as a “democratically elected” result.

The list of sites for that term are utter crap, recommending the purifiers paying the top commission. Why would you want Google to perpetuate that ranking just because other users are getting duped to click on them?

What "SEO spam" you talking about? I'm searching for "air purifier" right now and my results are:

1) "The Best Air Purifier - The New York Times" (makes sense)

2-4) Links to "air purifier" category on Amazon, Home Depot, and Best Buy (makes sense)

Then a "discussions and forums" section with a couple of links to Reddit (makes sense)

Then a Google buying guide full of common Q&A about air purifiers (interesting), a list of shopping links to popular air purifier models (makes sense), and YouTube review videos (makes sense), all interspersed with some more top stores, brands, and review sites (Costco, Blueair, Levoit, Consumer Reports, Better Homes & Gardens -- all totally fine).

All of this seems perfectly reasonable and, indeed, exactly what I'm looking for. I have zero complaints. I can't find any SEO spam whatsoever. Literally all of this in the first couple of pages seems entirely legit.

The example from the article was “pet air purifier”, with fortune.com leading the ranking.

Oh my god, does Twitter now redirect to X for some users?

I've seen more and more links that start with x.com, but my browser still redirects me back to twitter.com

The Stupid burns slowly, but it burns like white phosphorus, through everything.

Using the 'share/copy link' button has been pointing to x.com since they did the whole x.com change but afaik going to x.com will redirect to twitter.com. No clue what they're on about using one domain but redirecting to the other.

Your way of browsing the web isn't what most users do. Most users click on the first link. Many of them don't know what reference websites are. A Spanish woman in her 20s has no idea what the wirecutter is.

First of all, users are more sophisticated than you think. And why you're bringing nationalities into this, I have no idea. And obviously Google isn't going to be surfacing English content like Wirecutter in Spain -- it will surface well-known publications in Spain.

But secondly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. Users who click on the first link for everything don't change the relative clickthrough rates. The people who actively choose which links to click on would still be the ones influencing the ranking. Google is smart enough to control for clickthrough rates by their listing in results and knowing how far the user has scrolled.

I've had the opportunity to analyze click behavior for some pages, and there's a huge bias for people to click things at the top.

Let's say for example 90% of users are unsophisticated and 10% are sophisticated. Even if the #2 link is preferred 100% of the time by sophisticated users, you're still going to see 90% of people clicking the first link.

But in your example, Google would almost immediately learn that sophisticated users click on the current #2 link, and then make that the #1 link for everyone. It's really easy to do statistically. The bias for the top link gets removed, that's always the first step.

Unsophisticated users are not negatively affecting the quality of results.

How exactly do you know that people are clicking on the #2 link because they are "sophisticated" and not because they simply prefer #2 for personal reasons?

I don't even understand your question. They're the same, by your own definition. You said unsophisticated people will just click the top link, and I'm assuming that means some of them will click the #2 link as well just because it's there -- since people often open the top n links. But if they're making a choice based on the link description, rather than just because it's there, then by your definition they're "sophisticated". They're clicking it for personal reasons, because they personally evaluated the quality of the link description.

I'm talking about "personal" reasons like you work for the company behind link #2 and not because #2 is actually better than #1.

I think there will be tons of signals google could use to rank up a high quality independent site like this one. They just choose not to.

First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there that can't be gamed?

And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on? What if users are so overwhelmed by the number of sites and figuring out whether or not they're trustworthy, that they just want to stick to publications they recognize?

First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there that can't be gamed?

Probably the ones the author refer to would be a good start.

And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on?

It's an interesting question, but the premise of your question is even more interesting: that serving shitty web results is somehow what a search engine is meant to be doing, because that's what users "want". I'm very skeptical of it.

People clicking on known brands most of the time now is a behavior that was reinforced by google.

I used to find good high quality results from domains other than the big brands through Google, now it is never the case. Now that smaller domains haven't been getting that search engine traffic, people wanting to make a sustainable business being a content creator have moved to other platforms for a long time now.

It sounds like the 2021 Products Review Update did help rank up high quality sites, but the media companies doing affiliate spam found a workaround with "Best of X" lists.

Google has such an extreme bias for popular websites that they now routinely ignore words used in your query if it means recommending a popular website or recommending the results of the closest-sounding search if it's a popular search result.

It's extremely obnoxious. I have to do literal word searches in almost every Google search query I perform now.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying regarding brand recognition and trust, but if that is how Google works, then they should stop publishing documentation + doing presentations + going on webinars + presenting in panels + discussing on Twitter how much they actually do assess the quality of the content and how much they do care about real product reviews.

Also, putting the Wirecutter in the same bag as Apartment Therapy and Better Homes & Gardens is misguided… looking through the examples on the article, it becomes clear that the majority of those lifestyle magazines are just recommending expensive products and popular devices on Amazon.

I would just go to Wirecutter and Consumer Reports.

It was always hard to compete for generic keywords like "air purifiers". Wirecutter or whatever with its ton of backlinks would win unless you're doing really shady SEO.

What's been lost is the niche side of independent sites. You used to be able to write a review about Air Purifier Model 5643563453 and you would rank on the first page for any searches for it if nobody else wrote a review about it.

Now you just won't get that traction and will get generic corp results or at best, independent reviews on social media platforms.

Google at least used to include a sprinkling of different types of results, a store, a wiki, a forum, a review site, a blog... Now you can do a search and get 10 results from the same .com for the brand name.

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.

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.

Amazon always shows me the best household brands, classics like FINDYURT and ZUKESEYAKAMERICAUSA. They list classic product models like 'Kitchen Knife 8" Chef Kitchen 9" For Cutting For Vegetables for Fruits For Meats Pro Knife Shank With Accessories Blade Kitchen Knife.' <3

Reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube videos, possibly of all time:

https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?si=QHThBTZs3bvz5oFP

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.

Brand loyalty also goes for review sites itself. Sure I find myselfnsometimes getting frustrated if I look into a new product category (like best CD Ripping drive as of 2024 until I find the related forum post ). But I typically I rather first skim through the URL to see some sites I remember (notebookcheck, tomshardware, Chinagadgets.de, or whatever ) that I am loyal to until I get disappointed. This works because they are testing different products and I am kind of loyal. How loyal can I ever be to a site that only sells air purifier tests. How many times in my life do I need this test? I agree in this case it is even easier to be more loyal to brand because they probably sell more things than just air purifiers.

This is why I bought a Brother printer when I needed a color inkjet. Brother is known for no-nonsense laser printers, but not inkjet. I bought it anyway because I just trust the brand for keeping things simple feature wise. There are better inkjet options from Canon and Epson, but they both nickel and dime you on the ink, have DRMed ink cartridges and what not. I traded off better quality prints for peace of mind.

Yup, it's why I shop at Costco. They do a good job of making sure everything on the shelf is actually decent, so I don't have to google "<product> reddit" in store.

“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

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.

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.

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.

"Free" only worked when there was little to no economic interest in the web.

So all we need to do is change our economic model, social norms, and human nature.

Easy peasy.

It didn't work because it was free, it worked because you had to pay something more like dollars per page you published to host content than like pennies per thousands of pages.

For quite a long time, other than exceptions like geocities, you had to pay to publish your own content.

People who had an axe to grind or a hobby to share were "pamphleteering" and it was great.

Those damned greedy servers needing electricity to run.

The reason Kagi isn't like Google is because it is paid.

Contrary to popular belief: servers aren't free to run or buy or maintain. Software developers also don't work for charity therefore they require paychecks. Both of these things require money.

So if you have to pay the bills somehow then you either get users to pay for it (what Kagi currently does) or you get someone else to pay for it so it can be free to users (what Google currently does).

So if Kagi makes it "free" then they need to start advertising, which then breaks the model because their customers are no longer the search users, but the advertisers. Now motivations and incentives shift and before you know it, you rebuilt Google with a different name and we are back where we started.

The point is, that the fact that it is user-funded is exactly why its different. If you pick up the ad model then you will slowly evolve (devolve?) into what all the other search engines already are.

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.

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.

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.

It's worth noting it's not just "people preferring well known sites" it's "Google preferring well known sites as part of EEAT"

Basically yes. I used to write regularly for a large finance site. You've read articles from this site, they show up on HN regularly and its one of the top 100 sites in the world and bounces around in place among the top 3 finance sites.

Anyway, point is when I wrote for them, we had a list of places we could link to and places we couldn't. A lot of them where other sister sites the parent company owned. If we needed a source we first had to try to find it there. If it wasn't available there then there were another list of sites we were allowed to link to, which was basically top 100 sites.

Then there were sites we were NEVER allowed to link to. I remember one of those sites was Reddit. But there were many others. Then anything that fell in the middle was something we linked to if it was critical for the article, otherwise we wouldn't link at all.

So yes, its basically an SEO circle jerk at the top. Which is why you see the same 100 sites in all search results.

Do you have any theory of why Reddit was banned? To prevent some "astroturfing" blackbox algorithm to flag the site?

Yeah here's a very detailed report on what's been going on written by a friend of mine.

https://detailed.com/google-control/

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.

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...)

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.

A Wikipedia style "disambiguator" might help.

If Google silos queries into different top-level categories (i. e. research vs commerce) being able to clearly pick one of them, even if once you see the first results, solves the problem.

Giving users the feeling of control and the ability to improve their skills seem to be completely beyond modern software companies though. "It's all magic and algorithms beyond your understanding, mortal!"

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.

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.

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.

It’s acknowledged obliquely at the end of this tweet: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1716964371916800472

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

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.

I'm more interested in them downranking sites obviously written to game SEO. Like when an article takes 5 paragraphs to answer the one line asked in the H1, or regurgitates the same content as written in 10 other SEO spam articles, just reworded.

I kind of wish the internet was just a lot more terse.

Barely. With several follow-up tweets by them defending its bad behavior.

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.

> 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"

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.

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://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.

Certainty can also come from experience of previous actions when such exploits become commonplace.

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.

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=...

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.

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.

Not everyone has the time and resources to do SEO to beat big media companies at this game. Buying an old domain is a prime example.

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

.... Barbershop Harmony Service?

What is BHS marketplace?

Most likely “black hat SEO”

Black Hat [Something]?

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.

"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.

GenAI as in increasingly sophisticated reasoning engines, not writing fake product reviews.

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.

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."

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.

What? Malware ads masquerading as legitimate websites are common and Google hasn't visibly done much to combat them.

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.

And the brief period where the Internet was a secret trick to get information that nobody else had, for free, is over

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.

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%20pe...

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.

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 :'(

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_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_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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Can anyone tell where this screenshot comes from?

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-p...

https://ahrefs.com/serp-checker

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?

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...

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

*Kagi

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.

^ this is it ^

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.

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

[2] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions

[3] https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist

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+... 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.

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.

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

There is uBlacklist you can use to remove all these sites from search results

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

google SERP became very bad now may be.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Presented like this it really is an absolutely damning indictment.

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.

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

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://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY...

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.

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.

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