At some point Google is going to let you simply narrow your search to the dozen or so sites you regularly visit.
The rest of the web, outside the top 100, is dying.
Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
141–150 of 289 posts
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit would need to fix their UI so that it isn't actively hostile to people trying to read content on their site.
StackExchange is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the web. I saw a meta post the other day where they were soliciting feedback about how make their mobile site more information dense. Love it!
Shame most of the content is moderated to an epic level of uselessness.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#143It gets even worse / weirder - I've found if you search for products that might not even exist, you get made up lists of products.
A while ago, I wondered if there were such a thing as a microwave + toaster oven combo (there are several convection oven + microwave combos on the market, but none can toast like a toaster oven).
Here's the top non-sponsered result: https://www.chefspencil.com/10-best-microwave-toaster-oven-c...
And the second result: https://thebrilliantkitchen.com/best-microwave-toaster-oven-...
Sure sounds like there's at least 10 of these items in existence for me to choose from - but none of the items in these lists are actually both microwaves and toaster ovens.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is always going to be better. Niche subs are where actual experts who've tried entire ranges of products hang out, amazon is where one random guy bought their first crappy product and left a 5 star review because they don't actually know whether what they bought is good or not.
If consumers start relying on niche subs en masse, then it is only a matter of time until Reddit is overrun with shills and sock puppets.
The mods of subs for the most part know what those look like as do the existing communities. Most niche reddit subs are very sensitive to astroturfing because the people involved in it rely on good information from those subs, they also know who the regulars are as well.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Isn't the fuzzying of the query and expansion of the results, including prioritizing "natural language" querying a deliberate UX choice ? I don't get what the marketers have to do with that part ?
Is it? SEO spammers seem like they'd have an easier time making a page with every permutation of the search string compared to legitimate authors who would likely have only a single variation
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#146why would anyone take traffic estimates from a site like SimilarWeb as legit?
All those kinds of traffic rankers like Alexa etc have been uncredible for like 20 years. There's too much bot traffic out there now for hits to be filtered reasonably by an external third party
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#147So here's a side-question. The original key idea behind Google's approach to search was page rank : how many, and what kinds, of other sites linked to this one (and potentially, in what context). Does anyone think that this can possibly be at the core of Google's page rank anymore? Most pages don't have any significant number of links any more, and if they do, they are presumably garbage most of the time. Who is out…
I agree with much of this.
I believe the antidote to this is simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content, so essentially marry many small decentralized communities on a searchable platform. Anonymous but karma/identity weighted profiles, curating and debating lists of their favorite things around a single topic.
Aggregate them into a single master index with nice UI, then pay out equitably based on performance.
There’s a lot of questions on preventing spam and fraud, and I think the further away you get from “high ticket products” the more you avoid that problem, but it can’t be worse than Google: in one you’re relying solely on magical AI and links, the other you can have as much magical AI and links as you want, but you also have user accounts which maybe invited each other and can vouch for each other at a cost, votes that can be weighed by all sorts of factors, and basically a much richer graph of self-moderating people to back the index.
Working on something like this at the moment!
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Is it not a consequence of deliberate choices made by Google?
People would be doing this no matter what choices Google make because of how universally used it is. What choice do you think Google could make which would avoid that?
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#149We're going to end up going back to community sites. Reddit is obviously the good example here, but you can guarantee if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing . Exactly the same as when I ask my friend who's passionate about wine for his recommendat…
Going to? I've been including "reddit" in the majority of my google searches for years now.
Re: Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
An actual "best X for 202X" page is extremely useful; the problem is that there are no search signals to distinguish it from a trivially created spam mockery.
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".