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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]

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an accurate criticism and I agree. “This list of laser printers contains only inkjet printers” is not.

What makes you think that you got the same top result as the original commenter?

I wasn’t sure, so I included my top link to check. It seems it was correct.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31477038

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

#132
post #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 th…

Kagi has good results.

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

#133
post #79

I don’t understand why this is so hard for google. Allow end users to flag links as SEO spam. It’s very easy for a human to figure out. I can tell in maybe 1/4 a second that a page is just SEO shit. The keyword stuffing, the irrelevant fluff before and after any relevant content (if it’s there at all), the annoying ads that take up the whole screen, etc. Let us flag it, remove it from the index. Take a snapshot of th…

Because SEO firms would LOVE to go though marking all real sites as spam. They are _much_ more motivated then end users so the vast bulk of report will be false.

It would be verified by a human on Google’s side before something is taken down

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

#134

I have an HP m377dw laser and this exact thing was happening when I printed on card stock. TIL via the comments of this video that there should be a paper thickness setting in the driver.

Yeah, paper thickness, color, paper type, and any coatings on the paper. All these things should matter for a proper setting of the fuser temperature the printer uses. If your printer is advanced enough, it should run the fuser at the proper temperature for the stated paper.

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

#135
post #98

I don’t understand why this is so hard for google. Allow end users to flag links as SEO spam. It’s very easy for a human to figure out. I can tell in maybe 1/4 a second that a page is just SEO shit. The keyword stuffing, the irrelevant fluff before and after any relevant content (if it’s there at all), the annoying ads that take up the whole screen, etc. Let us flag it, remove it from the index. Take a snapshot of th…

And then spammers or unscrupulous competitors will flag legitimate sites as spam, pushing the signal-to-noise ratio to the point of uselessness. Plus, few users will actually flag correctly. Most will simply not notice, or not bother, others will flag perfectly legitimate results as spam just because Google wasn't psychic enough to know exactly what they want from their vague query. And Google already has a pretty go…

Google can easily afford to have people verify a link should be taken down before doing it. And yes spammers find ways around gaming bounce rates.

If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place

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

#136
A large format laser printer is horribly expensive. And most of them are only black and white. It's quite hard to make what the industry calls "large format" in a toner-based printer machine. Just getting a belt that wide, or rollers that wide, or a fuser to heat evenly that wide, is going to be super hard and hence super expensive.

But it sounds like he doesn't actually want what's called "large format" in the industry, he just wants an A3/tabloid size printer that doesn't suck. A3/tabloid is not "large format" in the printing industry. Large format means like A1 or A0 sized paper, usually on a roll.

Probably the best way to get a cost effective high quality A3/tabloid size printer is going to be to buy a used commercial machine that's roughly 10-15 years old. You'll still be able to get parts and toner for it, these things normally last a few decades. But it won't be small and it won't be electrically efficient.

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

#137
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…

uk link to a3 lasers

https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=prl&xf=3309_A3

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

#138

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 p…

> Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess. There are uBlock filter lists that help filter out generated content from search results, such as https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

A note of thanks, gentle user.

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

#139
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.

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

They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.

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

#140
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn. https://plumbaroakland.com/best-large-format-laser-printer/

I did not check all of the printers in the list, but the top 4 are all ink jet printers. You're right that lower down the list there are some laser printers as well, but as a list of the top 10 best laser printers, the article is useless.

As is becoming apparent, there is no "large format [color] laser printer" that are in production right now. There are large format printers, color printers, and laser printers, but no printers that meet all three criteria at the same time. They are part mutually exclusive qualifiers.

These generated spam contents are indeed problematic, but if done correctly, should contain zero printer anyway.

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