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Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

mdolon.com

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

#231

Post by notacoward »

I've been noticing this too. I don't even remember what I was researching, but I was looking for "best of" lists like OP and I kept finding affiliate-link farms in all sorts of weird places. One was a recipe site, I think, and I definitely wasn't looking for anything even remotely food related at the time.

The root of my problem IMO is that Google never came up with a proper way to search by time. Same problem if you want to search for "new video games" or new anything really. You can't specify it as a time constraint. You have to put the year in as a regular search term, which is super easy for the link farmers to game.

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

#232

Post by paconbork »

Y_Y wrote: post #117
SerLava wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly on Google and YouTube- nearly the entire search space for "how to pronounce xyz" has been taken over by videos of text to speech recordings that have absolutely no idea how to pronounce anything. There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.

Thank god for PronunciationManual, which seems to be the only channel taking things seriously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EekGFJhrg

I knew a student in a neighboring lab (very smart guy, postdocing at Stanford atm) who had to look up how to pronounce the word "schadenfreude". Sure enough he found the PronunciationManual video first, eventually leading to a hilarious conversation where his advisor was trying to figure out what he meant when he said "skoodenfruity".

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

#233

Post by luckylion »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #220
luckylion wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

This seems quite contrary to Brin & Page's original explanation of their (first) page rank algorithms, which was boosted as utilizing other people's linkage as the justification for a higher ranking. It also seems ripe (ruined, even!) for being completely weaponized. Another failure of the imagination, maybe.

It makes sense though, I believe. If you link to the home page of a website, what would that mean if you consider it a vote: "I endorse this precise document", or "I endorse what's on that website"? It would make sense to lessen the endorsement if you link to individual pages only, but not the home page / hub pages.

SEOs have, of course, gone to extreme lengths with that by doing "pagerank sculpting", i.e. making sure you mostly link to the pages you want to rank well with, and not your privacy policy. From my experience, they've stopped being overly sensitive about that now ("it has to look natural"), and it's just about raw power: who can buy the best expired domain (state entities being dumb and just letting their domains expired when they rename...), or who can rent a folder (and the links that come with it) on the strongest media platform.

It's a cat-and-mouse game, and google seems to not want to be a cat unless they can be a perfectly automated cat, and they can't.

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

#234

Post by Root_Denied »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #163
nwienert wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with much of this. I believe the antidote to this is simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content, so essentially marry many small decentralized communities on a searchable platform. Anonymous but karma/identity weighted profiles, curating and debating lists of their favorite things around a single topic. Aggregate them into a single master index with nice UI, then pay out equitably based on…

>... simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content This is true for some things. But for reliability reviews, for example, there's a certain power in large numbers. I'd much rather see reviews for common appliances from 200k people (or more) than the same from a group of 2000 appliance-centric folk. That's true even though the 2k set will likely know and care a lot more than many of the people in the…

Why not both? Rotten Tomatoes gives the critic score side by side with the audience score, as does Metacritic.

There's arguably value not just in both scores, but also both being presented side by side.

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

#235

Post by aparks517 »

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…

My impression back when Google really took off was that other search engines were basing their relevance scores on page content and getting lots of spam in their results from pages that gamed the relevance algorithm. Then here comes Google using human judgment via PageRank and getting great results, because who would link to garbage?

Of course the web has changed since then. And I think you're right on in thinking that the signal-to-noise ratio of links has gone way down. But it may not be fair to chastise Google for not getting good results just from page content. Has anyone ever done a good job of information retrieval in an adversarial environment without leaning on human judgment?

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

#236

Post by prepend »

ackbar03 wrote: post #13
prepend wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is little incentive for anyone to curate a list of 'best bikes under $500' for any reason other than this though? “Back in the olden days” people would write pages because they loved the subject area and wanted to share knowledge/show off/start conversations. So it was very common for people who were just really into bikes to spend some time sharing their thoughts on what the top 10 bikes under $500 were beca…

>There was no monetization, or at least direct monetization Maybe they can try affiliate links! I think that was how the "crappy" sites used to do it in the old days. I never really understood the whole seo game and if anyone actually made money or just pretended to make money so they can sell courses

I think some people like sharing knowledge. I keep a blog where I just write things that are interesting to me and maybe to others.

I used to have affiliate links because I was playing around with stuff, but don’t think any have worked in 10+ years.

I have no monetization plan or ever figure I’ll make money off the site. But it costs me nothing to run, so that’s ok.

There are many sites like this, but they are much harder to find because Google isn’t able to differentiate meaningful content from the facade of meaningful content (ie, SEO).

It’s like the degradation in academic papers where groups will reference each other like crazy to game rankings.

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

#237

Post by sjcoles »

dylan604 wrote: post #158
delecti wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Mediawiki's search sucks.

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

#238

Post by sjg007 »

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 imagine that once these "businesses" get a hold of GTP2 or GPT3 they will crank them out.

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

#239

Post by cratermoon »

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…

> Can humans recognize spam pages though?

Probably not, but they can recognize valuable non-spam. It's called by many names, but "reputation" is as good a term as any.

Yes, I'm saying that "Facebook groups, Whatsapp group chats, TikTok, Twitter, Medium, Linkedin" are all low reputation.

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

#240

Post by cratermoon »

lumost wrote: post #194
at_a_remove wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> Simply count the number of ads in the text.

What is an ad?

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