A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

Well, reports about the relative uselessness of modern search engines was bound to hit the general population at some point.

I've suggested that people try Bing or DDG rather than Google for some searches, but it seems it's more a question of luck rather than anything else nowadays.

It seems like maybe both large format and laser printer is such a niche product that any site actually talking about it does not have enough SEO juice to overpower these spam sites despite relevancy. The sad thing is these articles seem to be just keyword stuffing because those printers mentioned on that website are all literally not laser printers despite the text saying they are...

The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.

I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).

So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.

Is this the canary for don’t invest in Google?

Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.

No. For that canary you would have to identify the signal associated with companies stopping big expensive ad campaigns. This process can go on for an extremely long time after Google becomes useless for those searching the web. The primary clients of Google are those with big budget ad campaigns, not the people actually using it for search.

> Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.

Those of us old enough remember, there was a time when online search existed in a goldilocks zone [0] of accuracy, productivity, and reliability.

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

I'm not surprised. As said: it seems to be a matter of luck more than anything else.