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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

#261

Post by FabHK »

paconbork wrote: post #232
Y_Y wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I must say, PronunciationManual is one of the few YT channels that has me literally LOL frequently, and so did your story there. My enjoyment of those hilarious videos is just tempered a bit by pity with the innocent victims that fall for it.

FWIW, here's the link for Schadenfreude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo

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

#262

Post by lumost »

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.

Most affiliate spam sites that I see cover the page in intrusive advertisements to maximize revenue. Penalizing intrusive ads would certainly have some effect. This is also referring to penalizing rankings so that the entire page gets downranked rather than simply blocking ads in your browser.

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

#263

Post by FabHK »

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…

> 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.

Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge.

Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.

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

#264

Post by FabHK »

nwienert wrote: post #147
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…

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…

> acknowledging small communities curate the best content

Agreed. The problem is that Facebook and Google more or less successfully disintermediated those small communities of old, namely newspapers, magazines, websites based on region or interest which had a vested interest in their constituency. In doing so, the tech giants swallowed up the advertisement dollars going to those old media, and made a few people insanely rich while destroying the entire ecosystem.

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

#265

Post by mustacheemperor »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #74
mustacheemperor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result from DDG was some “excel-help” website that was actually just parroting common search terms as the headers on non-articles full of ads. The entire search space has apparently been hijacked by what is essentially a fake help site. I see results like that on goo…

Isn't the phenomenon you're describing (and I agree it's a real trend) more due to SEO efforts than to any defects in the search engine itself? It seems like there are millions of how-to informational articles now that are inherently designed to be clickbait. It's not that they don't have useful information, but they make you dig through a lot more verbiage than is necessary, because apparently some search engines th…

I think it is a failure on the part of the search engine if it falls for that SEO trickery.

I recall in the early 2000s it was popular to fill the bottom of a page with keywords in the same color as the background color, to trick the crawler into thinking the page was full of relevant content. After a little while that stopped working and would actually get your site penalized in ranking. The bad actors are never going to go away, they’re going to keep getting more clever and search engines like Google and Bing with billions in the corporate warchest ought to keep the edge in that arms race.

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

#266

Post by blendergeek »

SilkRoadie wrote: post #15

I would argue that google is being used incorrectly here. Google is specially being asked for a product list which meets a certain criteria. The user is asking Google to recommend the best bikes.. The user is actually looking for authoritative bicycle reviews to make a purchasing decision. Searching for “bicycle reviews” would give a far higher chance of finding what the user is after. They can then use the criteria…

I believe that I will create a new internet law: All "reviews" pages will eventually become a list of affiliate links.

For more information see this article on mattress reviews [0].

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

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

#267

Post by olyjohn »

kps wrote: post #113
thrower123 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit would need to fix their UI so that it isn't actively hostile to people trying to read content on their site.

old.reddit.com exists, for now. Reddit as a company is actively hostile to users, so they don't consider the new UI broken.

Half of the time when I click links on old.reddit.com, it just redirects me back to the home page. When I go to those same links, on the new site, it takes me to some image gallery page. They've definitely broke a good portion of the old site.

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

#268

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

JohnBooty wrote: post #190
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eve…

How many hairs do you need to remove from a man's head before you can call him bald?

Many chain restaurants follow this scheme: when they appear and need to make a good name for themselves, they are hell bent on the quality of food and the the customer experience. It's important for them to get the word of mouth marketing. But after they establish themselves firmly and start to grow, the bottom line becomes a priority, and they start cutting corners ever so slightly. The portions become smaller but the prices hike up. They start skimping on sauces. One day you discover that the garlic sauce is no longer made in house, but is of the same variety that is purchased in bulk for hot dogs at gas stations.

But the momentum is still going.

And many other chains in the same price range either don't make the same kind of food, or are worse still. So you have no choice until a new restaurant starts that needs to carve a niche and beat it's competition.

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

#269

Post by rightbyte »

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.

> They needed to help the less educated, too.

Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox?

Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it.

I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.

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

#270

Post by mikevin »

djoldman wrote: post #116

Does anyone have any tips/tricks on how to search using google to surface more relevant results besides appending site:reddit.com? I also remember the past magically search days fondly..

I'm starting to avoid Google search alltogether but my best trick is including a really specific term that SEO would avoid because it might not be familiar to the reader. 90% of the time it will ignore the term but somewhere on the page there will be a page where it says it didnt match that term and if i want to search for matches that do include that keyword. That sometimes improves the results. Note: the query will look the same as quoting the term but in my experience doing that initially is simply ignores. All the old dorking/google-fu operators have been ignored by Google for some time now.
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