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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]

#61
post #60
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe its time for Microsoft to invest a bit more in Bing ...

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

#62
The rant is not so much about laser printers, but about search engines and crappy SEO. I mean, it starts with a laser printer problem he has, but he doesn't blame his printer. He blames Google for not helping him find a better laser printer.

And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.

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

#63
post #60
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google once started out with the goal to index all human knowledge so people could find anything, but they seem to have settled into only helping people find the obvious easy to find stuff, while actively hiding anything that's slightly out of the ordinary.

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

#64
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it curious that everyone trots out this idea that Reddit is a google killer etc. Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam. Am I just unlucky…

Even if you manage to bypass the problems you mention (by bypassing the popular subreddits), Reddit has become a terrible source of information in general. The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that. Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of…

When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.

I feel like this is a product of Reddit's built-in recency bias, where unless a thread is sticky then no one really sees or uses older threads. Classic web forums were a lot better at this; old threads with in-depth technical info and discussions would keep rising to the top, where "hey look at this keyboard I just bought" threads would get one or two replies and be quickly forgotten.

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

#65
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a niche product that any site actually talking about it Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content. Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by mo…

When Pagerank was invented the internet was a lot nicer and less spammy. I think its showing its age and maybe Pagerank just doesn't work for commercial content. Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) payi…

It gets into a conspiracy theory territory a bit, but it makes more than zero sense if all the Google services ~2007 had been a civilian clone of an existing, "non-cooperative" library indexing system for spy agencies. There will be a huge accumulation of documents of unknown importance, and occasionally needs arise to extract information with a word or a phrase as a key.

Google Search and Books does exactly that.

And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.

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

#66
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it curious that everyone trots out this idea that Reddit is a google killer etc. Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam. Am I just unlucky…

I miss usenet

Reddit pretty much is the modern usenet.

Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.

Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.

The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.

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

#67
Using google is so much more frustrating than say 10 years ago. And generated websites is just a small problem with that. In the past google didn't try to be that smart and gave you more control. Now it's optimized for users asking full sentences instead of search queries. Now it's incorporating your location and perceived language into the query. Age of the document plays a huge role. Popularity of words in different context can skew your results towards some random topics.

Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.

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

#68

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 comp…

I find it curious that everyone trots out this idea that Reddit is a google killer etc. Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam. Am I just unlucky…

Could it depend on the types of subreddits you visit? In my experience, Reddit is pretty nice. Not great perhaps, but fairly tolerant, friendly and supportive. But quite often focused on a specific topic and moderated to stay on topic, that is true. Some moderators are definitely more restrictive than others, but if they overstep, people leave and form new subreddits to compete with the old one.

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

#69
post #61
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe its time for Microsoft to invest a bit more in Bing ...

It's the investing that ruined Google search. Instead of search it's super smart, and as a result super annoying. It would be so much better if they kept it as is and just worked on removing spam.

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

#70
In 2010-2012, google results were peak content farm stuff too. Then they fought it actively, in 2013 they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results. Content farms that worked by stuffing keywords and working in rings to boost their page rank went away almost overnight.

And then dark SEO found its way around it again. And now we have a new cesspit, but it looks like Google doesn’t give a shit anymore. They only change the number of ads interspersed among search results.

Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess.

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