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

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

#51
post #23

Anything A3+ (13” x 19”) or smaller in the commercial printing industry is pretty universally considered “small format”. (Some places consider anything sheet-fed as small format and sheets come a lot bigger than A3+.) It’s not surprising that searching using a specific industry term that’s different from your understanding of it would bring results for that larger-than-you-thought category of product. Further, the sm…

Are there even lasers in the large format (50cm+ x roll of paper) realm? I thought it was all ink plotters/printers, at least that's all I've seen in print shops or design places. A lack of lasers might contributes to the SEO spam for the odd terms. Maybe `a3 laser` or `wide format laser` ?

There are digital presses in B2 size using dry toner indirect (“laser”), liquid toner indirect (also “laser”), and inkjet processes. They are available in both sheet-fed and web-fed (“rolls”) configuration. (B2 sheet is 514x728mm, ~20x29”, or think “home/small poster size”; it’s sometimes called “half sheet”)

I work in this space (as a consumer of this equipment); all opinions here are my own, not my employer’s. For that reason, I’m reluctant to link to any specific vendor products, but if you’re interested, googling/YouTubing “b2 digital press” will give you some cool “how it works” videos.

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

#52
post #41

The rant is really about how bad Google went or how good SEO experts are today. Google search results are basically unusable for some subjects and Google should fix it, if it doesn't want to end up like Altavista!

Google won't end up like Altavista since any alternatives will be faced with the same issue.

Google just needs to invest more in stopping SEO.

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

#53
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but most of the time reddit is completely unable to provide a decent answer to any non banal search. And whenever I tried to directly ask something specific in a dedicated subreddit it always ends up in one of the following: - I'm violating one of their moderator rules - wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first - not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone - short…

It’s been said the best way to get answers promptly online is to provide an incorrect one. Maybe a strategy to overcome the attention span issue would be to open a sockpuppet account to intentionally seed misinformation until someone catches it and feels compelled to respond?

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law

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

#54
post #41

The rant is really about how bad Google went or how good SEO experts are today. Google search results are basically unusable for some subjects and Google should fix it, if it doesn't want to end up like Altavista!

Altavista (AskJeeves, Yahoo, pick your poison) existed in a market space where there was real competition to be had. The Google of today does not.

The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.

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

#55
post #50

The solution for consumers are product/price comparison sites like gh.de and idealo.de (german). I don't know the US equivalents of those, but here they get the prices from many sellers and you can compare including shipping, filter by many spec criteria and even find the cheapest solution for a basket of items, split by seller and including shipping which I believe is a NP hard problem (knapsack or traveling salesma…

I think we have an equivalent of sort here in Finland called hinta.fi

Laser printer listing: https://hinta.fi/g28/tulostimet?l=1&fq=Laser&fg=1

Many product categories don't have an extensive filtering available tho.

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

#58
post #50

The solution for consumers are product/price comparison sites like gh.de and idealo.de (german). I don't know the US equivalents of those, but here they get the prices from many sellers and you can compare including shipping, filter by many spec criteria and even find the cheapest solution for a basket of items, split by seller and including shipping which I believe is a NP hard problem (knapsack or traveling salesma…

I was just looking at laser printers in Idealo yesterday, didn't bother even looking at Google because I share the same experience as Adam. There many cases like this just from my search history. Point is: Google is not the best indexer to shop.

Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.

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

#59
post #50

The solution for consumers are product/price comparison sites like gh.de and idealo.de (german). I don't know the US equivalents of those, but here they get the prices from many sellers and you can compare including shipping, filter by many spec criteria and even find the cheapest solution for a basket of items, split by seller and including shipping which I believe is a NP hard problem (knapsack or traveling salesma…

The Dutch version is https://tweakers.net/

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

#60
post #52
post #41

The rant is really about how bad Google went or how good SEO experts are today. Google search results are basically unusable for some subjects and Google should fix it, if it doesn't want to end up like Altavista!

Google won't end up like Altavista since any alternatives will be faced with the same issue. Google just needs to invest more in stopping SEO.

it's not just SEO, they removed essential features like verbatim search, they constantly autocorrect uncommon search terms and they keep trying to optimize searches to only look for results within your bubble
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