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

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

#191

Post by pb7 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #169

andrenotgiant wrote: post #65

Earlier 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’s mentioned because Bing isn’t very good so you shouldn’t expect any different with DDG.

Also every time this comment is posted, someone tries to argue that it doesn’t come from Bing despite zero evidence so it’s a TIL for more than you think.

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

#192

Post by rchaud » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

gdsdfe wrote: post #186

I say it time and time again Google is an ad company not a search company they just happen to be doing search

Precisely. I imagine people in this thread have never opened Google Ads in their life. There has been plenty of improvement when it comes to their search ads tools.

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

#193

Post by Server6 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

SllX wrote: post #187

dylan604 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

DDG is fine for most things. It's made a lot inroads, not because its gotten better, but because Google has gotten worse.

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

#194

Post by lumost » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #178

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…

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

No general AI required. Simply count the number of ads in the text.

For a top ten site I’d also expect a certain degree of interesting vocabulary which loops in industry jargon. I’d also expect spam sites to use similar syntax/sentence structure for all products.

Lastly if I can follow the links and get references to the final products, then I can estimate how similar the product description is to the product. I’d expect most customers looking at top tens want something more than what they get from searching a retailers site.

Heck, many legit top lists include dedicated YouTube videos visually inspecting the products and reviewing them - cross referencing blogs to YouTube channels and validating that the YouTube video is of some production quality (likes/views/youtube Spam detection) could strip down a ton of spam.

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

#195

Post by pb7 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #133

squeaky-clean wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last week I was trying to Google something about earbuds (I don't even remember what exactly), and searching for ("earbuds" -headphones) still brings up headphones as a bolded result because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms. Edit: just remembered a better…

> because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms That's a double edged sword. One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example). They needed to help the less educated, too.

Bingo. In the past, you needed “Google-fu” to find what you were looking for. People that didn’t understand how the search was done under the hood (non-techies) would search with poor terms and get poor results. Nowadays, you can’t “game” the system with precise keywords but millions more people find what they’re looking for. Overall, it’s an improvement.

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

#196

Post by rchaud » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

jurassic wrote: post #160

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.

As long as the carousel of ads and products are shown at the top of the screen, it's all good. Google has monopoly mindshare, it doesn't care if the organic results suck. What are users going to do, go to Bing?

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

#197

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #180

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 li…

So you're saying that the page rank for http://foo.bar.com/baz.html is more a function of the link score for foorbar.com than the link score for baz.html or its contents?

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

#198

Post by newfonewhodis » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

Step 1: Go to a local store Step 2: ?? Step 3: Throw your computer in the trash

I recently did this with some badminton equipment I wanted to buy. Incentives online are terrible. I went to the pro-shop in my club, talked to a coach who's seen me play and he gave me a few options one of which I ended up buying from them.

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

#199

Post by jeltz » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

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.

I would guess most are written by humans. I know a lot of affiliates (mostly gambling but also finance and shopping) and most of their stuff is produced manually. There is some more automation these days but the industry is surprisingly manual.

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

#200

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:33 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…

I like how the show "Halt & Catch Fire" used this topic as a plot within the show. You had the Google-esque team of laborious devs unhappily stressed on coming up with the perfect algo, then you had the Yahoo-esque team of party atmosphere humans scanning the web for things to highlight/promote/scan/etc.