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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

#201

Post by Karsteski »

zwaps wrote: post #71

Hm, this is not really news, but perhaps it's the first time I consciously think about it. The article is right. I used to search Google for what the best X is. At some point. Indeed, I also used to search amazon and read the reviews. Now, and for what feels like a while, I am not doing that anymore. Like, at all. And this is not a decision I consciously made. If I want to know what the best dishwasher is, I am not g…

Same here. When I need information on a product I want to buy, I will either go to a specific subreddit or, in the case of tech, a YouTuber that I trust to see if they have a review of it.

Amazon and Google are certainly not where I go to find credible information on products anymore. I advise my friends to do the same now

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

#202

Post by mwigdahl »

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.

Does it help the less educated to flat out ignore exclusion terms that are _explicitly_ provided?

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

#203

Post by Karsteski »

eddieh wrote: post #78
dageshi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is always going to be better. Niche subs are where actual experts who've tried entire ranges of products hang out, amazon is where one random guy bought their first crappy product and left a 5 star review because they don't actually know whether what they bought is good or not.

If consumers start relying on niche subs en masse, then it is only a matter of time until Reddit is overrun with shills and sock puppets.

And so we move on to other niche forums. It's going to be a very drawn out battle lol...

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

#204

Post by pb7 »

flenserboy wrote: post #156
wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if I told you that it is, but you’re not the target user? When you’re serving billions of users, there are going to be niche groups not worth catering to. I would bet most people are quite happy with the results.

Just like most people are happy with their experience at Apple Stores whereas I feel like they’re pandering and annoying because I know exactly what I’m looking for or what the problem is and they’re still asking me basic questions unintentionally wasting my time. I’m not the target demographic they’re catering to. It’s fine, I just deal with it.

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

#205

Post by newsclues »

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…

I don’t think there is a financial incentive to clean up the internet.

Too much money to be paid with shady practices that no one in power wants to do it.

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

#206

Post by navane »

jsnell wrote: post #177
donmcronald wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

The first hit he gets is a website plastered with ads. Boosting sales of ads is still a plausibele explanation.

"But I bet it has something to do with the fact that all of the bikes they review are sold on Amazon and that every link uses an Amazon affiliate tag. It goes quite well with the dozen or so ads plastered across the site (some of which are autoplaying videos with sound)."

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

#207

Post by SllX »

Server6 wrote: post #193
SllX wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, most of my searches still start at DuckDuckGo since I haven’t fully gotten back in the habit of putting the search redirection keyword back in yet.

If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all.

I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.

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

#208

Post by BrianOnHN »

mminer237 wrote: post #60
nuker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. But they do? IMHO some of the SEO techniques use direct payments to Google for keywords, results placement, etc.

You can buy an ad, but those are shown differently than actual results. You can't pay Google to improve your SEO.

But those ads can increase the number & frequency of pages crawled by Google.

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

#209

Post by luckylion »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #197
luckylion wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, but you do have internal links on your site as well, and they work just like external links, passing on "link juice". If you have a million important links pointing to / and zero external links pointing to /baz.html and you link from / to /baz.html, you'll still see /baz.html hike up the SERPs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27991322 this submission from today is exactly the same. Expired domains are the big business these days, and they can absolutely catapult you into the top 3 without any change in content, performance or layout.

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

#210

Post by jeffbee »

dylan604 wrote: post #182
admax88q wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ma…

The Google search results for wild turkey seem extremely reasonable to me. Did you try this example before using it?
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