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Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

examine.com

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Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#321

Post by JamesBarney »

Semiapies wrote: post #318
JamesBarney wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being hockey is a giant sport, and supplement research is a very niche hobby. I'm not trying to convince you supplements aren't bogus or even that examine is a great resource. Just that the claim "there exists a better supplement site than examine.com" is a false one. Let me start with why do you believe this claim to be true or at least more likely than the opposing claim.

"The difference being hockey is a giant sport..." Your choice of metaphor. But you're clearly not getting the point; what you imagine is "obvious" about your rightness really isn't. "Just that the claim 'there exists a better supplement site than examine.com'..." This is not a point I've seen anyone here arguing. It's definitely not a point I'm arguing. However, it's clearly a point you and the otherthe boosters of t…

So what are you arguing if not that examine isn't the best supplement site?

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#322

Post by AhmedF »

kragen wrote: post #319
jpking wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think "everyone" was hyperbole, yes. However, I'm unsure why clickbait has to be dishonest. In the example the headline was clearly written to attract people with (or susceptible to) a preconceived belief (which the article argues against). Those people are probably more susceptible to the clickbait. Could you elaborate on the dishonesty?

What, you mean “The top 19 nutrition myths of 2019”? Well, declaring a belief a “myth” is a pretty nasty rhetorical move—it implicitly claims that those who believe it are merely ignorant pagans whose beliefs are absurd, a claim that is only rarely justifiable, and certainly not in this case. And in what sense are these myths “top”? Did they take a poll? Because I don't see any evidence of that in the article. It loo…

You should try reading the full article (the myths article links to an article that expounds on each myth) before accusing us of being oversimplified.

As for the myths themselves - we've received over 50,000 emails from our users over the past 8 years. I'm pretty confident we can state those as myths that remain persistent in the nutrition space.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#323

Post by quickthrower2 »

charrondev wrote: post #296
quickthrower2 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can knock a site out of Google with bad backlinks, then you could do that to your competitors as a sort of anti-SEO.

It’s definitely a thing https://ahrefs.com/blog/negative-seo/

Thanks for that.

It does say "It’s believed that with Penguin 4.0 Google has transitioned back to devaluing (or ignoring) spammy links, rather than penalising for them"

My working model is Google is working hard to make search relevant, as that's their bread and butter. If you do a Google search and you get spammy sites, you stop using Google, and they lose money.

Black hats will always be one step ahead, and will find very technical ways to beat Google in the short to medium term, and sometimes forever.

However negative seo is going to be such a common attack vector, especially against unsophisticated webmasters (which ironically might be the people with the most useful information, the people who Google DO want to show). So Google is going to consider this a major bug if such sites are getting attacked like this.

Ignoring but not penalising spammy links is the best thing for Google to do.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#324

Post by kragen »

AhmedF wrote: post #322
kragen wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, you mean “The top 19 nutrition myths of 2019”? Well, declaring a belief a “myth” is a pretty nasty rhetorical move—it implicitly claims that those who believe it are merely ignorant pagans whose beliefs are absurd, a claim that is only rarely justifiable, and certainly not in this case. And in what sense are these myths “top”? Did they take a poll? Because I don't see any evidence of that in the article. It loo…

You should try reading the full article (the myths article links to an article that expounds on each myth) before accusing us of being oversimplified. As for the myths themselves - we've received over 50,000 emails from our users over the past 8 years. I'm pretty confident we can state those as myths that remain persistent in the nutrition space.

As I think I said, the article body is fairly decent despite the occasional missed caveat; my thesis was merely that the headline is false, and intentionally so. I haven't read the whole article, but as you can see from my comment above, I did read a substantial fraction of it. That's how I know the falsehoods in the headline are not mere errors.

I did not accuse you of being oversimplified, and I'm sorry that wasn't clear. I said that beliefs like “salt is bad for you” are not so much myths as they are oversimplified, since indeed there is (for example) a very significant population with salt-sensitive hypertension. The thing that is oversimplified is the (broadly incorrect) belief held by many people, the belief you are arguing against. Since it contains an important element of truth, it is dishonest to simply call it a “myth”.

I have little doubt that these beliefs remain persistent. My thesis there is not that they aren't persistent; it is that they probably aren't the “top 19”, as the headline claims, presumably falsely.

I don't expect you to change your headline-writing practices, since clearly the dishonest strategy that produced that headline was chosen intentionally, but I do want to make sure that you don't misunderstand my critique. I think it's kind of a shame that you're throwing away credibility with dishonest headlines, intrusive interstitial newsletter ads, and so on, when the articles themselves are so valuable. But I'm fighting my own battles, not yours.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#325

Post by joveian »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #231
Waterluvian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked out examine.com and it's not as bad as the previous comment had me expecting. But it still looks like a boilerplate front page that I would pretty much immediately back out of and keep looking. I'm not a fan of "don't judge a book by its cover." The purpose of the cover (other than to keep garlic mayo off the pages) is to be judged. It's at the peril of the website to have such good content diminished by po…

I’ve never gone to examine.com directly. I always get there by a google search of whatever supplement or nutrient I am researching (vitamin D examine) and it’s one of the the only places that give peer reviewed and objective and honest info about them. Their “Human Effect Matrix” tables are invaluable. https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/

IMO, their Human Effect Matrix is the worst part of the site and often misleading, although the list of studies it links to relating to a particular aspect is sometimes helpful. The long description with references is helpful. I often go to examine.com directly and search from there since they often seem to not rank all that high on DDG and most general search results are not worth looking at (sometimes general search engines can be helpful to locate info about a more specific topic).

The four resources I've used the most when researching supplements are Google Scholar (sorry to say in this context that they are the most helpful and the reason I can't fully quit Google, although Google seems to have finally stopped making me log in to use it), Ray Sahelian's site (I'd avoid his supplements and books but the site has some good info, mostly lists of studies and some first hand reports of negative effects, and he encourages lower doses of many things), Wikipedia (mostly to find references as actual text on the page is too often inaccurate although it varies and some pages are good quality), and Examine. For the few things that the Linus Pauling Institute[0] at the University of Oregon has pages on they seem to have the best quality general summary and some helful references. There is usually surprisingly little overlap of references between these different resources so checking them all for everything seems like the best plan.

[0] https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/nutrient-index

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#326

Post by kragen »

skinnymuch wrote: post #320
kragen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 2019. EVERYONE does this to get attention from people. I don't. Nobody I respect does. None of the scientific papers they cite do. Nobody in my friends list on Fecebutt does. Nobody I follow on Twitter does, to my knowledge. Slatestarcodex doesn't. HN doesn't. Wikipedia doesn't. Library Genesis doesn't. The Pirate Bay doesn't. JSTOR doesn't. Sam Zeloof doesn't. Ken Shirriff doesn't. The only sites I've visited…

> Fecebutt Seriously? This is worse than people still including $ in Microsoft.

I have no idea how you could think I intended that joke seriously. Do you work for Micro$oft or something?

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#327

Post by joveian »

tr3ndyBEAR wrote: post #116
nisa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For technical queries it's gotten even worse in the past years. It flat out ignores string matches or decides that I wanted something else. What's even stranger is that there are sites that match these strings 1:1 and they are helpful but they don't show up. I discovered that while scrabbling through Stackoverflow answers and then trying to find a site I knew had all the specific keywords. It's also not robots.txt or…

At this point, I'm starting to use duckduckgo not for privacy concerns but because they literally work better for stuff like this

Unfortunately, it isn't reliable and DDG is much more willing than Google to say "I've got nothing". I default to DDG but often it is this type of situation (searching for error messages) where Google works when DDG didn't.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#328

Post by Semiapies »

JamesBarney wrote: post #321
Semiapies wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The difference being hockey is a giant sport..." Your choice of metaphor. But you're clearly not getting the point; what you imagine is "obvious" about your rightness really isn't. "Just that the claim 'there exists a better supplement site than examine.com'..." This is not a point I've seen anyone here arguing. It's definitely not a point I'm arguing. However, it's clearly a point you and the otherthe boosters of t…

So what are you arguing if not that examine isn't the best supplement site?

You and others here have multiple replies from multiple people, including myself, explaining this in detail. I'm beyond even trying to think that you're posting in good faith.

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#329

Post by data_required »

Semiapies wrote: post #318
JamesBarney wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being hockey is a giant sport, and supplement research is a very niche hobby. I'm not trying to convince you supplements aren't bogus or even that examine is a great resource. Just that the claim "there exists a better supplement site than examine.com" is a false one. Let me start with why do you believe this claim to be true or at least more likely than the opposing claim.

"The difference being hockey is a giant sport..." Your choice of metaphor. But you're clearly not getting the point; what you imagine is "obvious" about your rightness really isn't. "Just that the claim 'there exists a better supplement site than examine.com'..." This is not a point I've seen anyone here arguing. It's definitely not a point I'm arguing. However, it's clearly a point you and the otherthe boosters of t…

"Not even not-terribly-convincing evidence, not even flimsy evidence, no evidence at all."

I've listed quite a bit of things I would consider to be strong evidence in favor of Examine being a high-quality supplements site deserving of getting high ranks in Google supplement search results. So have numerous other commenters in this comments section. The Examine employee, AhmedF, has as well.

So I'm curious- what would qualify as "evidence" for you? And why do none of the other points mentioned qualify as "evidence"?

I'm pretty baffled at this point as to what it would take. You ask for evidence, I think remarkably strong evidence has been provided by me and numerous others, and then you just seem to ignore it?

BTW, I think our discussion got mentioned on the Nootropics subreddit comments thread about this topic. (Examine's blog post is one of the top 10 posts of all time on that subreddit. People with a big interest in supplements consider this to be a BIG deal).

Our discussion was referenced here- https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/cpg1ha/over_the...

"God those comments represent the worst of hacker news. There is a giant argument about whether examine.com is the best website on supplements. With anyone who's ever looked at a supplement site arguing it's examine.com and people who've never looked at a supplement site in their life arguing that surely a better one must exist."

Re: Why has examine.com disappeared from search results?

#330

Post by squarefoot »

zadkey wrote: post #307
Waterluvian wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked out examine.com and it's not as bad as the previous comment had me expecting. But it still looks like a boilerplate front page that I would pretty much immediately back out of and keep looking. I'm not a fan of "don't judge a book by its cover." The purpose of the cover (other than to keep garlic mayo off the pages) is to be judged. It's at the peril of the website to have such good content diminished by po…

Yes, but let's compare Examine.com to let's say Forbes.com When you read an article at Forbes, you are assaulted by scrolling ads, banners and other stuff from every direction. The appearance and experience is chaotic and clingy. If we are going by appearances, why should Examine.com have worse search indexing than Forbes articles? Here is an example from both: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2019/07/25/a-bi…

Ublock Origin + uMatrix + Privacy Badger + Disconnect will make the Forbes page appear as it should be: a white page with almost nothing but the article visible.

I sometimes attempt to surf the web without those extensions just out of curiosity, and I promptly turn them back on in horror. As of today I couldn't imagine living without them; I would rather stay offline than experiencing the awful mess nearly all web pages turned into after the 2K era.

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