Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#151

Post by blackbear_ » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

oneepic wrote: post #105

Slightly off-topic, but I have similar gripes with the Fandom wiki. I am frequently on the Fallout wiki there, but for most of the searches I run (e.g. for in-game characters or items) the first result is a link to a sponsor site. I keep seeing Amazon and Ebay among others. I can't adblock that as far as I know. (EDIT: Switched to uBlock Origin and this method does work on Chrome. Very happy now.)

> I can't adblock that as far as I know.

Yes you can. uBlock's element picker [1] allows you to hide arbitrary portions of a webpage, and I assume (?) other ad blockers also allow you to insert custom rules.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#152

Post by enumjorge » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

seoaeu wrote: post #84

flenserboy wrote: post #49

Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have , period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.

It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings

IMHO it’s both. Obviously people spend a lot of effort reverse engineering Google’s ranking algorithms because it’s profitable but some of it, at least from the outside, seems self-inflicted.

Image search has been useless for me for a long time because of Pinterest. Many times Pinterest will show you an image but when you click on it it takes you to a page with completely different content. Maybe Google has a good reason for not penalizing Pinterest, but it’s weird to me that they are not more aggressive in sanitizing the quality of their searches.

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#153

Post by TacticalCoder » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

iamben wrote: post #63

We're going to end up going back to community sites. Reddit is obviously the good example here, but you can guarantee if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing . Exactly the same as when I ask my friend who's passionate about wine for his recommendat…

> We're going to end up going back to community sites.

For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#154

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

namlem wrote: post #149

iamben wrote: post #63

We're going to end up going back to community sites. Reddit is obviously the good example here, but you can guarantee if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing . Exactly the same as when I ask my friend who's passionate about wine for his recommendat…

Going to? I've been including "reddit" in the majority of my google searches for years now.

It’s even in the search box autocomplete frequently.

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#155

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #139

antihero wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's consumer advocate sites like https://www.which.co.uk/ that are pretty cool. I'd be interesting in knowing other trustable sources, mind.

There is Consumer Reports in the US: http://cr.org They are a nonprofit that has been independent for decades and have strict policies against accepting gifts, sponsorships, ads, etc, and take other steps to remain free from influence. For example, when they review new cars they send an undercover individual to buy it at normal price from a random dealer so the company and the dealer don't know the buyer is CR (and m…

CR also tends to limit itself to middle-of-the-range items. If you're actually interested in the best, their surveys don't always cover it, since they prefer to review things that most people can/would purchase. This has changed a bit in the last few years, but it's still the case that if you want to find solid unbiased reviews of, for example, high end ranges or washing machines, CR is not always the most helpful.

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#156

Post by flenserboy » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #96

flenserboy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'm overstating things. Yes, the internet is useful, but consider how the ability to accurately search is the real key to the whole of it. As the original post points out, this hits us in day-to-day matters just as much as in trying to find/discover useful research on a particular topic. The simple fact is this: not only must nearly every link you click be viewed with suspicion, so must every search res…

When you say "most useful", I have to ask, most useful to whom?

Agreed — Google search is most useful to Google. I'd prefer it be most useful for the actual user of the service, but that makes me crazy, I guess.

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#157

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #112

I reject the author's conclusion. Either this is a non sequiter, or I'm missing a major piece of the puzzle. How is it that a search giant like Google, with thousands of brilliant minds, can’t help me find good products to buy? I think the answer is because it’s not in their best interest to do so. They like that most consumers will look at these reviews, click through to Amazon and make their purchase with little he…

> So as far as I can see it's definitely in Google's interest to provide good and useful search results.

A shame Google didn't get this memo, or buried it somewhere.

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#158

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #120

makecheck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type. And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first , for example. I…

It's possible in Chrome and Firefox (and I assume other browsers, though can't say for sure) to add search shortcuts for other websites. If I know I want the wikipedia link, rather than searching google for the thing, I type "wp ", and it takes me either directly to the wikipedia page, or to the search results. I think the default is the domain followed by a space, so "wikipedia.org ", but that can be changed.

this has always befuddled me. why use google at all to search a specific site rather than searching on the site directly? why give google the traffic? because lazy/convenience of google being the default page for new browsers and/or google the default search associated with the location bar?

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#159

Post by marlowe221 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #150

lumost wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a failure of imagination. In the early days of search engines and web crawling companies paid subject matter experts such as librarians and other experts to manually grade and categorize web pages. Spam pages tend to be filled with Ads and derivative content, owned by spam company domains, and do not provide unique information relative to other sources. If we as humans can recognize a spam page, why ca…

If we as humans can recognize a spam page, why can't the machines? I think that many of these automated aggregators have come a long way. On the better sites, it's not immediately obvious that the page is spam, until I've read some way into it and notice patterns in the language and a lack of "meat".

My dad can't seem to recognize spam pages 99% of the time...

Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

#160

Post by jurassic » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

I would love if sites containing too many affiliate links were de-ranked in google. Google doesn't get a cut of the affiliate revenue, so I don't understand their incentive to let this kind of spam proliferate.