Comparisons of mattress materials or brands, histories of different mattresses used by cultures, forums for mattress aficionados, tutorials for making your own or modifying mattresses, general mattress information or facts, other random weird shit the internet used to have about strangely niche subjects that have way more people dedicated to them then you'd expect you'd only discover by searching random terms then you find there's a whole world of weird things dedicated to this niche topic, say mattresses in this case, that you'd otherwise never know about.
So, if I want a page full of ads, by yours and the other commenter's examples, I should have to type in 'buy mattress' or 'mattress shopping' shouldn't I? Why should just searching the word mattress imply I'm looking to buy one? Ideally, if I search for just mattress, I should get a little bit of all those things in one search, including a few ads to buy one, but it shouldn't be everything.
My point is, searching for just mattress should reasonably and logically include a small sampling of 'all' related topics. As by your own words, specific implications behind the search should be left to additional keywords. Assuming the search is for the purposes of buying, without specifying that, is certainly more profitable to google than a small sampling of all related topics, but not what most users want when simply searching for a vague general thing or concept.
Suppose that we know, axiomatically, that 99% of people who search "mattresses" want to buy a mattress.
Search engine A, when someone queries "mattress", shows a page of options to buy a mattress.
Search engine B, when someone queries "mattress", shows a light touch on a number of different aspects of mattresses, including a history, the wikipedia page, and so on.
Which one is doing a better job of showing relevant results to the user? I would suggest A.
Good luck finding a comparison page of just about anything that isn't SEO spam these days. And I would bet money if you search for DIY mattress, a good fraction of the results will be Pinterest.
It should not be your job to do that, but of the trillion dollar company whose stated mission literally is 'organizing world's information'. The inversion of roles is the problem.
what is a "general mattress fact"? If you typed "mattress Wikipedia" you'd get a bunch of mattress history and facts, so it's not exactly hard to find what you're looking for, but it's probably the case that most people who type just "mattress" are looking to buy one. If that weren't true, why would Google show so many ads? It's not like showing a million ads is going to trick a seeker of general mattress facts into buying a mattress they don't need.
It's trivial to find "random fun mattress facts" by Googling for exactly that, but thanks to link and content aggregators, instead of flipping through channels on the tee-vee, we scroll for miles with our thumbs. Before commercial interests took over the web, it was full of weird and wonderful sites by hobby enthusiasts, built in their spare time that would have random weird facts and stories. For better or worse, that Internet is behind us now, so it's rare to come across that sort of treasure trove of a site. (To be clear, there's better and worse today, compared to the Internet of yore.)
What's the case here, is that mattress store owners, in the conversion to online sales, have purchased, not only the adword for "mattress", but paid for all manner of SEO tricks and hackery in order to drive their site to the top of the results. Far in excess of what a hobbyist could or would bother with.
It's a long shot, but the long tail of the Internet says that this has happened at least once. Someone was just poking around came across a random mattress myth or fact page, and found out that something they hate about their mattress isn't something they have to put up with. Whether that's "being tricked" into buying a mattress they didn't need, I won't say, but it still tickles an intellectually curious itch that I didn't even know I had, to find out that it’s illegal to purchase a mattress on Sundays in Washington.
A single word query like "mattress" is vague and starting from first principles, we live under capitalism, assume everyone's trying to sell you something, and a search for "mattress" proves to be no exception. Same goes for if you search for "windows". Second link is how to get it (for $199).
Most definitely NOT the advertisers who wants to pay the biggest bugs or yielding huge ad click throughs. I would expect Google ranking reviews from more honest sites like consumer reports, BBB, chiropractor reviews etc and supported by articles in good newspapers or magazines. Mattress business is extremely high margine business with their major spend category being ads, not R&D or manufacturing. They almost entirely depends on glossy ads with ongoing war of making outrageously false claims among competitors. Ads are the last thing you want to depend on in this category to make your purchase decision that would impact you for may be half decade.
If I'm a buyer, I would expect to see the most trafficked, most popular, most bought deep linked online mattress shopping page - as the first link. I'm ok if that is after one or two ads.
If the search engine was trustworthy then I will click on that deep linked product page, cursorily glance the user reviews to see if there are any red flags, if not, then quickly empty my wallet and be done with my shopping for a mattress.
Admittedly it's not the best example. But personally I'd weight sites offering unbiased information (some of which may indeed be happen to be merchants) higher than those trying to shove "the world's #1 mattress" down my throat.
> I'm curious what kinds of sites people think should be returned for a search term of "mattress", if not mattress shopping sites?
You'd never know it by the google results, but there are robust hobbyist communities dedicated to exposing the underlying information (and misinformation) about mattresses and the companies that make them. The Mattress Underground is a good example [0]
This is an interesting case in point - you might never even know what you're missing if google doesn't even hint that it exists, because it buries things under ads! A generalizable way to "hack" google into showing you useful results when a keyword is so polluted with SEO and ads is to add the word "forums" to your search string, although even that is no guarantee.
I go out of my way to avoid clicking on ad results and buying things that are heavily advertised (certain VPNs, audiobook services etc) because if they are trying that hard to push ads, it is almost certainly shit targeted towards uninformed consumers.
Those results are not the best value or most popular or highest rated or most comfortable or highest quality. They are the ones with the most money blow on internet ads.
To begin with the searcher never indicated they are interested in actually buying a mattress (for example by saying 'mattress price' or by clicking the shopping tab).
Now maybe Google infered that for them, right or wrong.
The problem then becomes that what is presented is not mattress-buying information which could for example consist of information about different mattress types, reviews and discussions (how many of you would be forced to actually type 'mattress reddit' in this scenario?). Instead it is a page full of ads. It does not help the searcher make a buying decision. It actually makes their job harder with so many options to choose from and very little condensed information to help with the choice. All those brains and AIs at Google "organizing the world's information" are nowhere to be seen as literally all the cognitive load is transferred back to the searcher.
What is wrong with that is that Google's mission states "organize the world's information" (and this was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that) while what Google actually did was "organize the world's ads". Sad thing about it is that there was a point in the past when that was not the case.
No. Mattress business is one giant hornet's nest where deception, false claims and high margin are norm. Most companies who sale mattress actually don't do squat of real research or improvement or even own design but they keep claiming to do so. Their entire business depends on attracting customers through false ad and making them spend $1000+ mattress which takes a fraction of cost to make it. Their major expenditure is literally these ads. There are few other businesses where organic results would be more appreciated by customers. I'd personally spent months in to digging through this garbage and ultimately settled on my chiropractor's recommandation while making sure he used exacly same mattress on his own bed. There is no sane way left to buy a mattress on Internet.
I see a couple of mattress stores, a wiki ad, a facebook group for the first couple of mattress stores, something russian and then more mattress stores. Nary an ad in sight, (got uBlock origin and javascript off)
I'd like to see someone develop a search engine that was optimized for finding web sites based on categories, such as non-commercial, enthusiast, blog, academic, companies, merchants, etc..
My favorite google flavors are google scholar and google news, which seem to more or less do what they say.
Too many search engines seem to have crowded out the web search function with widgets for ads, local properties, wikipedia, media companies, etc..
Agreed; so figuring out how to sustainably meet (and ideally exceed) people's basic needs is important to safeguard content production.
Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
I've seen some ad-free alternative, but they usually have much less budget on promoting themselves, so harder to reach the critical mass (for network effect)
Agreed, uBlock origin has become a necessity since the web has turned to toxic sludge.
But Google has gotten so unbelievably bad that even uBlock origin can't protect against the onslaught of SEO spam and downright crappy results. I'm wasting hours every week, sorting through Google's atrocious output.
Give duckduck go a try. If you arent having luck with a particular query you can always type "g! " at the beginning to route it to google. Very low barrier to entry, i prefer it now that im mostly adjusted.
Are we talking about the same thing? They aren't actual favicons btw, they are composed of text with the word "Ad" but formatted and positioned to look like exactly like favicons.
Ah yes they did change the ad indicator as you described, but that's not what the pushback was against.
They briefly changed desktop search to include favicons next to every native search result, making it way harder to quickly see what was and wasn't an ad (since every result had some image next to it). They rolled that back and it has not returned (yet).
Check the screenshot from the first article you linked for the difference.
Even when there's not a lot of apparent advertising, a large portion of the high ranking pages are ads or referral links disguised as informative content.
Well didn't how Yahoo die to a certain extent? I remember back when Google first came on the scene - we were all using Yahoo. Yahoo was an ad-filled ungodly mess, while Google was clean and fast. People switched over really fast.
64 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadIt's good enough. And when you don't get what you want, you can use the google bang code, !g in front of your search.
DDG should be your default.
But the main difference is that DGG chooses ads based only on search term, as opposed to tracking you and collecting your data across the entire net.
An actual new search engine that does its own indexing is sorely needed.
Plenty of relevant results, zero ads.
When somebody searches "mattress", 99% of the time, they want to buy one.
> When somebody searches "mattress", 99% of the time, they want to buy one.
This is unfounded I suspect but it would be a reasonable justification for Google's results.
My point is, searching for just mattress should reasonably and logically include a small sampling of 'all' related topics. As by your own words, specific implications behind the search should be left to additional keywords. Assuming the search is for the purposes of buying, without specifying that, is certainly more profitable to google than a small sampling of all related topics, but not what most users want when simply searching for a vague general thing or concept.
Search engine A, when someone queries "mattress", shows a page of options to buy a mattress.
Search engine B, when someone queries "mattress", shows a light touch on a number of different aspects of mattresses, including a history, the wikipedia page, and so on.
Which one is doing a better job of showing relevant results to the user? I would suggest A.
What's the case here, is that mattress store owners, in the conversion to online sales, have purchased, not only the adword for "mattress", but paid for all manner of SEO tricks and hackery in order to drive their site to the top of the results. Far in excess of what a hobbyist could or would bother with.
It's a long shot, but the long tail of the Internet says that this has happened at least once. Someone was just poking around came across a random mattress myth or fact page, and found out that something they hate about their mattress isn't something they have to put up with. Whether that's "being tricked" into buying a mattress they didn't need, I won't say, but it still tickles an intellectually curious itch that I didn't even know I had, to find out that it’s illegal to purchase a mattress on Sundays in Washington.
A single word query like "mattress" is vague and starting from first principles, we live under capitalism, assume everyone's trying to sell you something, and a search for "mattress" proves to be no exception. Same goes for if you search for "windows". Second link is how to get it (for $199).
Because that's their business?
If I'm a buyer, I would expect to see the most trafficked, most popular, most bought deep linked online mattress shopping page - as the first link. I'm ok if that is after one or two ads.
If the search engine was trustworthy then I will click on that deep linked product page, cursorily glance the user reviews to see if there are any red flags, if not, then quickly empty my wallet and be done with my shopping for a mattress.
Admittedly it's not the best example. But personally I'd weight sites offering unbiased information (some of which may indeed be happen to be merchants) higher than those trying to shove "the world's #1 mattress" down my throat.
You'd never know it by the google results, but there are robust hobbyist communities dedicated to exposing the underlying information (and misinformation) about mattresses and the companies that make them. The Mattress Underground is a good example [0]
This is an interesting case in point - you might never even know what you're missing if google doesn't even hint that it exists, because it buries things under ads! A generalizable way to "hack" google into showing you useful results when a keyword is so polluted with SEO and ads is to add the word "forums" to your search string, although even that is no guarantee.
[0] https://www.themattressunderground.com/mattress-forum.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23397615
kinda stuff being posted here and it gets approximately zero traction
So how else do you expose the ad to eyes other than getting meta by making postings like GP?
I suspect the mattress hobby community is not very large.
Those results are not the best value or most popular or highest rated or most comfortable or highest quality. They are the ones with the most money blow on internet ads.
Now maybe Google infered that for them, right or wrong.
The problem then becomes that what is presented is not mattress-buying information which could for example consist of information about different mattress types, reviews and discussions (how many of you would be forced to actually type 'mattress reddit' in this scenario?). Instead it is a page full of ads. It does not help the searcher make a buying decision. It actually makes their job harder with so many options to choose from and very little condensed information to help with the choice. All those brains and AIs at Google "organizing the world's information" are nowhere to be seen as literally all the cognitive load is transferred back to the searcher.
What is wrong with that is that Google's mission states "organize the world's information" (and this was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that) while what Google actually did was "organize the world's ads". Sad thing about it is that there was a point in the past when that was not the case.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mattress
Basically a map listing three mattress stores, followed by two ads. Then finally a few non-ad results, but still stores selling mattresses.
If you’re on desktop, there’s a bonus ad on the right sidebar, below the definition.
My favorite google flavors are google scholar and google news, which seem to more or less do what they say.
Too many search engines seem to have crowded out the web search function with widgets for ads, local properties, wikipedia, media companies, etc..
so therefore, if all i see is ads at first, it's entirely reasonable to claim that i get a page full of ads.
Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
But Google has gotten so unbelievably bad that even uBlock origin can't protect against the onslaught of SEO spam and downright crappy results. I'm wasting hours every week, sorting through Google's atrocious output.
"Every Google result now looks like an ad" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823
"Google backtracks on search results design" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210
Mobile favicons had been around for some time prior to those articles and continues to have them.
Are we talking about the same thing? They aren't actual favicons btw, they are composed of text with the word "Ad" but formatted and positioned to look like exactly like favicons.
They briefly changed desktop search to include favicons next to every native search result, making it way harder to quickly see what was and wasn't an ad (since every result had some image next to it). They rolled that back and it has not returned (yet).
Check the screenshot from the first article you linked for the difference.