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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

#251

Post by cratermoon »

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.

Even educated people don't have the ability to hold every possible taxonomic schema in their heads. Don't even get me started on multi-lingual, cross-culture, jargon, creole, and dialect differences.

A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music.

Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son

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

#252

Post by cratermoon »

acdha wrote: post #223
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

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this but Google is an enormously profitable company which also is a world-leader in software development and ML, which you would not know from looking at search results. It also seems relevant that Google has actively removed features like the ability to report SEO spam or block domains — if they cared about the user experience, you'd think there'd be an easy menu with advanced 1990s techn…

I wish there were a way to tell Google that I never, EVER want to see an image result from pinterest.

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

#253

Post by dylan604 »

pb7 wrote: post #191
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’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.

are people using DDG using it just because it's not Bing and/or G? I thought the whole premise of DDG was providing the ability to search anonymously by "proxying" your search to a different search engine altogther. I was aware of the switch away from G to Bing, and I was okay with that as now G no longer gets any search data from me even if it was made anon by DDG.

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

#254

Post by 6510 »

I use to make and search for pages like: "List of foo with bar" trying to make the list as complete as I could. A bit like a single page web directory. Google would then complain that I had to many links on the pages and de-list them.

When seriously researching anything at all you want the full picture of things out there. You cant work with random joe's top 10 affiliate links.

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

#255

Post by hedora »

sjg007 wrote: post #238
keanebean86 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they already have:

https://francescocolumbu.com/best-laptop-for-openbsd/

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

#256

Post by FabHK »

mtoddsmith wrote: post #179
keanebean86 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have the impression that they use ghostwriters that summarise a couple of Amazon reviews, gain some superficial familiarity with the subject (talking points), but have no real experience with it. I've seen many of such sites (mattresses, bike accessories, VPNs, certain apps, etc.) that seem superficially plausible, but here and there betray profound ignorance of the subject matter.

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

#257

Post by FabHK »

cratermoon wrote: post #245
lumost wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something served from double click or other major ad network

That does absolutely nothing to address the affiliate problem, nor does it catch advertorial or "native ads" as they sometimes called. Ignoring all content served by ad brokers is no more sufficient than browser ad blocking extensions. It helps, but you don't get an ad- and distraction-free result.

Plus, as soon as you make that a metric that is penalised by Google, how long do you think it'll take until ads are distributed from some rotating nondescript domains?

(See Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law )

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

#258

Post by FabHK »

antihero wrote: post #122
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.

There's consumer advocate sites like https://www.which.co.uk/ that are pretty cool. I'd be interesting in knowing other trustable sources, mind.

I found The Wirecutter quite useful. It's been purchased by the NYT, I hope they keep it going in the original form.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/

In Germany, there is the Stiftung Warentest, which has in depth tests of many household appliances and goods. According to Wikipedia, they cooperate with Which? in the UK and Consumers Union in the US.

https://www.test.de

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest

(For example, when they recently tested shaving blades, they had 23 testers shave their face half with one, half with a different shaver, randomised, then had each (half of each) shave assessed by the tester himself and an external expert blind (ie the tester did not know which shaver was used, or how the tester had judged the shave). Assessed where: quality of the shave; comfort; burning, reddening and irritations of the skin; cuts; how many shaves until the blades were blunt; ease of use & switching blades; cleaning of the blades; presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon and other chemicals in the handle; and more.)

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

#259

Post by sss111 »

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 never knew I could get pranked on HN. Kudos!

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

#260

Post by FabHK »

dfxm12 wrote: post #226
dylan604 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most importantly, searching through Google generally gets me to my intended destination faster than loading some site and doing a search. Like you say, the URL bar in any browser I use also defaults to searching in the default search engine, so if it's Google, it's faster just to type it in there. So, from a new tab, I can just type in "wiki handball" to find the wikipedia page for handball and click to get what I wa…

!w handball is enough (or !wde for the German version, !wes for Spanish, etc.)
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