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Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

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

#171

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

GoodJokes wrote: post #107
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #106

I'd like to note, donning my #2 at amzn hat again, that when the idea for affiliate sales originally came up, we certainly did imagine people creating pages with lists like "best bikes for under $500". However, I feel fairly confident in saying that nobody involved in that in the 95-96 timeframe was imagining that such pages would be created by anyone other than actual enthusiasts (probably a reflection of the state…

Failure of imagination of the bad things Amazon would go on to do seems like the hallmark of the early days. Great job. Did you also game out the exploitation of warehouse workers?

I left Amazon after 14 months because, indeed, the exploitation of warehouse workers was obviously a part of the company's future. Didn't want to be a part of that.

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

#172

Post by caskstrength »

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

I understand that google is constantly at war with SEO-people who are motivated to abuse the hell out of search, but why can't they un-fuck verbatim search and give me back the ability to completely remove particular domains from search results?

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

#173

Post by rchaud »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #153
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.

Many of the forums I used to visit in the 2000s are looong gone. I have a lot of respect for the ones that stuck around. For example I am have been on a soccer team's messageboard for over a decade, and seen it go from hundreds of daily posts to maybe a few dozen now.

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

#174

Post by admax88q »

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.

> that their algorithms assumed you wanted

What? That's the whole purpose of search algorithms isn't it? I'm not sure I understand your complaint.

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

#175

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

rchaud wrote: post #167
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…

Can humans recognize spam pages though? Back in the day, such pages would be created on blogspot or other spammy domains, so there was at least a visual signal of some sort. Now the spam is on Facebook groups, Whatsapp group chats, TikTok, Twitter, Medium, Linkedin.....the list goes on. Online misinformation would not be as destructive as it is if people could tell the difference between say a credible news site and…

> Now the spam is on Facebook groups, Whatsapp group chats, TikTok, Twitter, Medium, Linkedin.....the list goes on

Of that list, Medium is the only one I would ever expect/want a search engine to even consider returning results for searches on "how to buy a bicycle for under $500". If I was King, you'd need to add allow:social to any google search to get any results at all from anything remotely like a social media or messaging application. I'd include LinkedIn and Pinterest and similar sites in that exclusion. If you want that stuff, you need to ask for it.

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

#176

Post by dylan604 »

tomrod wrote: post #126
seoaeu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Regardless of actor causing the issue, Google is the party that serves the search results and thus are responsible for what they display.

Right. Google is the stage the actor gets to perform. Google built the stage. It's like the phrase "if you build, they will come" came to fruition.

The thing to remember as a Dev, no matter how well intended your project is, users will always find a way to use it in a manner you never thought about that is the most advantageous way for the user.

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

#177

Post by jsnell »

donmcronald wrote: post #161
jsnell wrote: post #38

> 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 hesitation. I don't understand the logic here. Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links from other sites? There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. And there's no long-…

> Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links I don’t think it’s specifically Amazon links, but if they’re mindlessly measuring metrics without thinking about “why” things happen, the affiliate link spam that dominates results might increase ad buys. Think about it. If you can’t rank on the first couple of pages due to affiliate marketing spammers, you might buy an ad. If you’…

So we've an "if", a "might", a "might", and one more "might" with no supporting evidence, and that's directly contradicted by the screenshots in the article. Specifically, if the goal here was to bury the good content so that people would be forced to buy ads for it *there should be some ads pointing to said good content*. There aren't in the screenshot.

I would suggest that you didn't really think this through. You've decided who the villain is, spent 10 seconds coming up with a illogical narrative where that is true, and then just state it as some obvious fact. Just like the author of the original article.

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

#178

Post by at_a_remove »

lumost wrote: post #134
baggy_trough wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An actual "best X for 202X" page is extremely useful; the problem is that there are no search signals to distinguish it from a trivially created spam mockery.

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…

Ah, the old "Step one: create a general purpose artificial intelligence."

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

#179

Post by mtoddsmith »

keanebean86 wrote: post #121
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #106

I'd like to note, donning my #2 at amzn hat again, that when the idea for affiliate sales originally came up, we certainly did imagine people creating pages with lists like "best bikes for under $500". However, I feel fairly confident in saying that nobody involved in that in the 95-96 timeframe was imagining that such pages would be created by anyone other than actual enthusiasts (probably a reflection of the state…

Are those sites generated by bots now? They always seem to just be the top x results if you search on Amazon directly.

The reviews are usually somewhat accurate but only include items found on Amazon. So I'm guessing they hire people to write the reviews.

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

#180

Post by luckylion »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

So here's a side-question. The original key idea behind Google's approach to search was page rank : how many, and what kinds, of other sites linked to this one (and potentially, in what context). Does anyone think that this can possibly be at the core of Google's page rank anymore? Most pages don't have any significant number of links any more, and if they do, they are presumably garbage most of the time. Who is out…

> Does anyone think that this can possibly be at the core of Google's page rank anymore?

Yes, it is, and it still makes up the super majority of factors. It's the reason why people buy expired domains (that have links pointing to them), it's the reason why they pay lots of money to rent a subdomain or folder on cnn.com. It's the links, and it's only the links. And it works great.

The actual content on the site has little to do with the ranking. Yeah, sure, you need to have the keywords in there, but you don't need quality content, you just need quality links.

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