Also, ebay.
Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
181–190 of 289 posts
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#182Google 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.
not necessarily. the assumption part is the key. If I search wild turkey, I would accept listings on the bird or the specific whiskey. I would not accept listings of other brands of whiskey or scotch or other alcohol. I also would not accept listings on birds unless there was direct mention of wild turkey in it. Assuming I was interested in something other than what was requested is where it lost usefulness to me. Maybe others found it more useful, but when I search for a term I want that term in the results when I hit search. It's an entirely different concept when I hit Feeling Lucky. At that point, I'll accept any of the previous examples
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#183It gets even worse / weirder - I've found if you search for products that might not even exist, you get made up lists of products. A while ago, I wondered if there were such a thing as a microwave + toaster oven combo (there are several convection oven + microwave combos on the market, but none can toast like a toaster oven). Here's the top non-sponsered result: https://www.chefspencil.com/10-best-microwave-toaster-o…
I've even had this with mis-spelled words (i.e. "the best Bivycle of 2021" or something like that); I wonder how the f*ck those sites are being generated.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#184It's missing a (2020).
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#185I'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.
Some for sure are (i.e. some really just are stringed-together sentences comparing numbers), many probably are just really low quality manual work.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#186I say it time and time again Google is an ad company not a search company they just happen to be doing search
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of DuckDuckGo's "10-pack" of traditional search results come from Bing: https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1#:~:text...
Whenever DDG is mentioned, these "but it uses Bing" comments always pop up. Sure maybe somebody is in the lucky 10k with TIL moment, however these "but it uses Bing" comments leave out the fact that Bing doesn't know you made the search. That's kind of the point in DDG is to be able to search the web anonymously. I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lam…
It speaks more to the quality of the results you can expect receiving non-personalized Bing results.
From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#188Affiliate links are the reason anybody even makes a website anymore. The era of personal websites made for intellectual curiosity and expression are long gone.
It's not just websites though, Youtube and IG are filled with them as well. Basically, if you have any audience at all, it's time to cash in on them by polluting your online presence with these dumb links.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Reddit a lot for this. But this is an arms race with SEOs and bots. Eventually Reddit will probably be worthless for this.
What makes you think what you're reading on reddit is not already socially engineered advertisements and bot spam? People have been paying attractive people to "hang out" in bars and pitch gizmos and doo-dads for decades (citation needed); absolutely there are accounts on reddit shilling gizmos across relevant subs.
Oh sure, but there's still some use in it. Eventually, it'll be all bots and no use.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#190I 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.
It's so fundamental to their business though, right?
They are fundamentally a data mining and advertising operation and that only works if people find them useful and therefore use them so that they can be data-mined and advertised to.
I guess maybe Google just feels it's an unsolvable problem, or has a backdoor agreement with Amazon, or feels they are so synonymous with search that only a fraction of users would ever user another search engine even if the quality of their results has become awful