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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

#271

Post by bjowen »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #150
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…

If we as humans can recognize a spam page, why can't the machines? I think that many of these automated aggregators have come a long way. On the better sites, it's not immediately obvious that the page is spam, until I've read some way into it and notice patterns in the language and a lack of "meat".

I find the advertising to content ratio is a decent clue as well.

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

#272

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

8note wrote: post #216
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want you to be right but the GME and AMC nonsense doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that Reddit isn’t being gamed already by automated accounts. I’ve had my own comment altered a little and regurgitated by a bot before, which was extremely creepy. But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.

The GME nonsense was a guy posting that he bought a lot of options and why. Then he kept posting updates

Sure but then it kept going with millions of posts with diamond hand emojis that had me deeply in the uncanny valley.

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

#273

Post by cratermoon »

FabHK wrote: post #257
cratermoon wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

Don't spammers already do a lot of domain cycling? Doesn't NextDNS already ignore domains less than 30 days old, for exactly this reason?

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

#274

Post by cratermoon »

lumost wrote: post #262
cratermoon wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It still wouldn't do much because as soon as Google starts to try to identify sites full of ads by some criteria, shady sites are going to start serving ads in some other way. It's already hard enough to distinguish ads in some sites that have gone with native ads or advertorials.

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

#275

Post by spronkey »

SllX wrote: post #207
Server6 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1…

I find DDG is generally good or at least good enough when the data you need is relative popular and relative well distributed around the internet. DDG falls very, very flat when it comes to needing to scour the depths of the internet for something very specific.

Case in point is car parts - find an obscure part from a Japanese Honda, for example, and attempt to find it in DDG. I'll wait. :P

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

#276

Post by rland »

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.

They're written by humans. I know someone who did this, she was paid by the word and would write "best 5 [product]" lists several times a month.

Obviously, you only have time to basically summarize points made on the listing and in the reviews for the product for it to be worthwhile.

This was pre GPT-2, though.

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

#277

Post by spronkey »

Root_Denied wrote: post #234
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... 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.

Rotten Tomatoes is the epitome of why trusting expert ratings on their own is a bad idea. The number of times that the tomatometer is wildly off the general perception is insane, enough to make the tomatometer largely useless for myself at lease.

It certainly does seem, though, that a company with Google's prowess in search, NLP, ML, algorithms, categorisation and the like should be able to do a lot better, even if the problem is incredibly difficult.

My only explanation is that it doesn't suit the business needs of Google to do so.

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

#278

Post by Valdy »

SerLava wrote: post #82
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…

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.

I also had the same issue with these. So i started using these AI narrator platforms. These are generally used to convert ebooks into audio books but i used it for pronunciations and accents. I used the one called Narration Box. Here is the link- narrationbox.com

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

#279

Post by zwaps »

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…

Case in point, I need to buy a new medium sized kitchen knife. I essentially know what I want, but I went to Amazon today to check out the state of things.

I am in Germany, however, on the first two (!) pages of search for "kitchen knife", only two companies that I actually know make knives are present (the big ones: Wüsthoff and Victorinox).

ALL other results, that is over 80 results, are fake Chinese companies with "German like" names, essentially selling the SAME product - a fake Damascus (laser etched) knife with wooden handle. Most of them have 53+/- something HRC (probably widely fluctuating around 50 HRC) and are made of "German (style) steel", whatever that means. Indeed, names and presentation suggests that the knives are made in Germany. They are not. Sometimes, the company is registered in the EU, but if someone uses the question function to ask where the knives are produced, it is always China. All of them have fake reviews, naturally.

I mean... how useless Amazon has become to order even a midrange price good, like a decent but not top range kitchen knife. Now, I am not in principle against buying goods from China, but I can use Aliexpress myself thank you. We also all know the quality of these products when they arrive, and the inability to return them (as the price point is chosen that this is not worth it).

What I hate about it is the constant deception. Nobody would buy a knife if it would say "Price 10€, made in China". So instead, it's 30€, the name is something like "Schneidwerk" and the Amazon page is littered with German flags (ugh), whereas the company probably does the same in every other European country (with, for example, French or Italian flags).

Somehow, this makes me really irate.

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

#280

Post by ricardo81 »

seoaeu wrote: post #84
flenserboy wrote: post #49

Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have , period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.

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

As others mentioned, definitely both.

One curious example for a non-commercial term the other day was a search for 'population nairn'. It returned a "people also ask of":

"What is the fastest town in Scotland"?

Answer: walkwithdinosaurs

Nonsensical question and answer.

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