There is little incentive for anyone to curate a list of 'best bikes under $500' for any reason other than this though?
However. the fact that you found so many amazon affiliates says more about the integrity of other bike retailers. Why would there not be an even spread of affiliate links to merchants other than amazon do you wonder?
I don't think there is little incentive for anyone to curate a list of best bikes for under $500. There are plenty of incentives for journalism publications like MCN (motorcycle news) to do reviews of the products in the sectors they cover. There are plenty of publications about Cycling, it's a very popular sport.
The problem is that the monetization of the affiliate system creates a massive incentive for people to crowd out the real people who do this. Instead of googling which bike to buy and being met with a number of fairly reputable publications which specialize in this stuff, you're met with Business Insider and other trash which are all just following the incentive of trying to get their affiliate link clicked between the time you start researching and the time you innevitably buy something off Amazon.
I think the MCN example above is actually really good - since no one expects to get an affiliate payment from Amazon from someone buying a motorcycle, the quality of the reviews for "Best motorbike under $5000" are about a million times better than "Best bike for under $500". The good reviews do exist, you just can't find them, because Amazon has completely screwed the click through path from "Google X product -> Purchase on Amazon"
I think we may have stumbled upon an unfortunate circumstance of how our brains work, and it's being actively exploited (like say how we agree that marketing cigarettes to kids is bad kind of thing?). We could reasonably say that we are willing to pay for content, we're just not attuned to seeing how "free" content is actually detrimental to us and is being monetized behind the scenes.
At the same time, Google/Amazon latched on to it and are taking advantage of it for their own gains. Either way, we're stuck in a downward feedback loop that's only going to make this worse until one of the big players falls over.
This is covered by standard journalists all the time - Linus (from LTT) talks about this all the time. Of course manufacturers give samples to test, but that's table stakes, there is absolutely not an expectation of specific positive coverage.
> There is little incentive for anyone to curate a list of 'best bikes under $500' for any reason other than this though?
“Back in the olden days” people would write pages because they loved the subject area and wanted to share knowledge/show off/start conversations.
So it was very common for people who were just really into bikes to spend some time sharing their thoughts on what the top 10 bikes under $500 were because they wanted to help people buy good bikes. There was no monetization, or at least direct monetization.
Those sites may still be around, but monetization has driven low-quality content higher up in SEO so the bike lover (who probably doesn’t care about SEO) doesn’t get content seen.
>There was no monetization, or at least direct monetization
Maybe they can try affiliate links! I think that was how the "crappy" sites used to do it in the old days. I never really understood the whole seo game and if anyone actually made money or just pretended to make money so they can sell courses
I think some people like sharing knowledge. I keep a blog where I just write things that are interesting to me and maybe to others.
I used to have affiliate links because I was playing around with stuff, but don’t think any have worked in 10+ years.
I have no monetization plan or ever figure I’ll make money off the site. But it costs me nothing to run, so that’s ok.
There are many sites like this, but they are much harder to find because Google isn’t able to differentiate meaningful content from the facade of meaningful content (ie, SEO).
It’s like the degradation in academic papers where groups will reference each other like crazy to game rankings.
They are pretty open about the business model, and to put a lot more work into the reviews than just generating a list of affiliate links 3ith the data available from Amazon‘s API: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/about/
Wirecutter doesn’t do reviews of “the best x,” they do reviews of “the best x that can be purchased via an online store that offers adequate referral revenue to Wirecutter”
I see more and more queries suggesting autocompletion of "reddit" and similar sites these days. Google's default results are extremely poor quality for many queries.
I guess many people do that, but it shows the review system failed miserably when you look for quality information on reddit. I mean, in theory, reddit would have all kinds of noise and fake opinions, whereas Amazon etc. should have only verified and curated reviews, including methodologies for spotting abuse and procedures for manual verification. Well, the economics of scale that drives them insane profits is also the cause they lost this battle.
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.
My pet peeve is nagging to leave a review as soon as possible after the purchase. I mean, what can I write at that point? I received the product. It is blue. The seller shipped the product quickly. That's all.
Personally, I'm exclusively interested in reviews by people who have used the product for at least a couple of months, preferably years. But I guess the review score would be much lower and the impulse to buy would be weaker. And its a shame as there are products that deserve excellent reviews.
More likely leaving a 5 star review because they are working for the manufacturer, or left a 1 star review because they are working for the manufacturer of a similar but different product.
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.
Are there any nice Chrome extensions to expand on Google that anyone can recommend? Would be nice to have a default Reddit setting, or a 'search reddit' button on Google.
There's a couple other ones as well besides Reddit, particularly around key forums. Shouldn't be too hard to allow custom-buttons.
In general now that people are here, I'd be pretty interested to know what people's top 5 extensions are outside of the regular (uBlock, Pocket etc). They're quite powerful but I don't use that many actually.
In the EU I use a no-cookies extension, though imperfect. I also use 'video speed controller' religiously to easily watch/listen to content faster. But overal I find few extensions very useful and the ones I use cause issues on a small fraction of sites. Happy to hear from computer super-users what they use.
Yes but unfortunately it still creates links using the “new” Reddit interface. Installing an add-on like Old Reddit Redirect helps to restore sanity when searching by site.
I think search is broken full stop for any search in the form "Best X in/for/under Y" - there are too many low quality sites publishing 'list' articles, which just link to items for sale that offer them affiliate commission.
For the example of "bikes under $500" it's often better to do a google news search to get magazine/newspaper articles where they are more likely to have done actual reviews.
I believe both search and affiliate programs have flaws... but I didn't see anything that convinced me this is some conspiracy between the companies.
I also don't have a problem with affiliate programs. If someone posts links that are relevant to the topic at hand, there is little harm in them getting a few cents from a purchase I would have made anyway. If anything, it is funding content creation in a way that works.
That being said, the point of the article is 100% correct that low-effort, low-value review sites just to get affiliate links ranked in search results are problematic and annoying. I make a judgement call when I run into them - if they really did put in some effort and have decent reviews contrasting different items, I'll go ahead and click the link. They wrote content, the content was helpful, no problem. On the other hand, if it was just a list of links with no added value, I don't click the links. It is just as a easy to do my own search on a product name, or even copy the link and remove the affiliate tag.
Like everything else in the world, nothing is black and white. The presence of some problematic sites doesn't invalidate an entire mechanism for funding content creation.
I would argue that google is being used incorrectly here. Google is specially being asked for a product list which meets a certain criteria. The user is asking Google to recommend the best bikes..
The user is actually looking for authoritative bicycle reviews to make a purchasing decision. Searching for “bicycle reviews” would give a far higher chance of finding what the user is after. They can then use the criteria on the review site to narrow down what they are after.
There is also a limit to what searching will get you. Going to a bike shop will allow an expert in this subject matter to assess your personal requirements and advise accordingly. For a lot of things, going out and talking to someone will yield far better results than Google ever will.
While I agree with you about the incorrect search being used, I disagree that bike review results will give anything more useful. Many "reviews" are also collections of affiliate links, disguised as a review.
> Searching for “bicycle reviews” would give a far higher chance of finding what the user is after.
Nope. Google will still give you dumb reviews pages full of “Check price on Amazon” affiliate links. What works for me is adding “site:reddit.com” or “forum” to search.
Some communities have their own forums they use too, and I’ve only stumbled upon these by accident. It would be nice if there were an index somewhere that kept track of them.
did you actually try that query? I just got lots of relatively high quality review sites/periodicals. I say "relatively" because even industry stalwarts like Bicycling Magazine, which has been around in print and/or online form for decades, are ad-driven and far from unbiased. But if you trust Consumer Reports or NY Times more, they're on the first page too.
just tried. Got surprisingly sane results :) But what I said I experienced over last year for practically anything else than bikes, all electronics stuff was item one, item two, no real opinions or substance, and invariably "check price on Amazon" buttons.
Blame it on the user is always winning strategy, not? Google prides itself on its semantic search that can peak in the depths of your soul and understand your most hidden desires. I'd disagree and will say that asking for best bikes should give you a list of bikes that many people agree that they are good.
Does anyone know why this website is being blocked by the Indian government? "Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. Please contact administrator for more information."
I wrote this pre-pandemic, back in January of 2020. I was able to snag a bike at a used bike sale a few weeks after writing it. Congrats on your new bikes!
As for the search in question: instead of "best commuter bikes for under $500", do yourself a favor and buy a beater bike for $100-200. The comfort is the same if not higher, but you stop thinking about your bike at all, and if someone steals it you buy another one next day without shedding a tear. My favorite ones are by fahrradmanufaktur, very solid, a new one will cost you a few thousand bucks, but after 5-7 years it still feels fantastic and you can buy it for a fraction of the price.
I really was clueless at the time and figured it would take at least $400-500 to get a decent starter bike. Thankfully I wound up coming across a used bicycle sale in Brooklyn shortly after and picked up an old Giant for $150. Have probably done a couple of thousand miles on it since!
We have a small used bike shop nearby, damn great value for money! Bought a used Merida MTB for my so and a Bergamot each for my daughter and myself. Condition is close to new, cost in total 800 bucks, some smaller repairs included.
With the bike shortage the last two seasons, used bikes in OK condition can be almost more expensive than a new bike (since the new, unused bike is sold out everywhere).
At least where I live, there is no chance to get what I would call a usable/durable bike for "$100-200" at the moment.
I bought a couple of them and parked them in different areas of the city to make it easier to reach any location using the subway + bike combination. I choose the ones with flaws that would deter normal buyers but relatively easy to repair, or with a damaged part that I'd replace anyway. I asked a local repair shop if it's fine if I ask the seller to send a bike directly to them and they happily agreed. So I look for an occasion, buy it, they ship it to the repair shop, the shop guy calls me and we talk about what to repair/replace, and in a few days I have a nice bike that will last many years with proper maintenance without spending a fortune.
I think a bike is one of those items that you have to try out before you buy it, so I would not buy it online and I also would not go to Google to research it (at least initially).
When I was in the market for a new bike a few years ago, I looked at Yelp to find the 5-6 bicycle shops with the best rating in my city. Then I went to each shop and told them what I wanted from my bike and my budget.
This process went very well. Not only am I supremely satisfied with my purchase, even after a couple of years, but I also found a new great bicycle shop that I go to for repairs and upgrades and stuff.
I agree with try-before-you-buy for bicycles - size, style, etc make a massive difference in utility and comfort.
But, how would somebody who only had a bike as a child know this? Google isn't telling them - it sends them to Amazon via listicles. If they happen to search "how to buy a bicycle" there are some potentially useful results. But, even if they do end up a bicycle shop, their likely to run into inventory problems - many bike shops simply don't have any bikes right now. So, it's back to Amazon, or Craigslist/FB Marketplace, or worse.
There's also an even worse thing here. If you search for a product under shopping on google, something that is somewhat known like a certain TV model, and you'll see most SHOPPING results are from websites that actually don't sell anything, but rather will have a "product page" where either the buy button is disabled or redirects to amazon. They typically have much lower prices, or just low enough so you'll click.
A huge number of developers at Amazon and Google are clapping their hands with glee when the read this…. It’s their jobs to get exactly this outcome. They’ll show your post to the boss to lock in their bonus.
This is the prime purpose of these gigantic companies. Of course it works like that.
The smartest software developers in the world dedicate their working lives to advertising.
First world problem really. Also people look for deals hence in this example a second hand bike is purchased. There is no 'title' with bicycles and anything second hand bought off someone you don't know has to be assumed to be stolen. The market for second hand bikes encourages bike theft.
There are plenty of very good new bikes at almost all price points and the guy in the local bike shop can show you three bikes suited to your size, your use case and your budget.
Docking about online doing your research is all very interesting but the guy in the bike shop will help you just fine without you being an armchair expert.
No point ranting on about Amazon you just have to get away from the screen and get to the bike shop.
> I think the answer is because it’s not in their best interest to do so. They like that most consumers will look at these reviews, click through to Amazon and make their purchase with little hesitation.
I don't understand the logic here. Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links from other sites? There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. And there's no long-term benefit, since it just risks teaching people to go straight to Amazon for commercial searches.
I think it’s less in Google’s long term best interest and more a marriage of convenience. Hopefully a temporary one.
Google increasingly wants users to find what they want on Google itself and not have to click through to the direct search results. Featured snippets are the strategy and these affiliate site listicles are crafted explicitly to be hoovered up as such by the algorithm.
One hope is that long term Google improves quality-content detection and deprioritizes the garbage.
but giving mediocre vs high quality results on the other hand forces you to use a particular search result page more and increases the likelyhood that you'll click through a paid search link in your frustration ...
But again, the author's theory is that what's being optimized for is to get people to mindlessly click through an Amazon affiliate link and making a purchase. If people are doing that, they clearly aren't doing more searches like you suggest.
"The search results are intentionally bad to make people search more and click on ads" would be a viable conspiracy theory in isolation, but seems to directly conflict with the complaint of the search results driving people to make purchases via the pages that showed up in the organic results.
And there's no long-term benefit, since it
just risks teaching people to go straight to
Amazon for commercial searches.
Yeah, I came here hoping somebody would have an answer to this seeming non-sequitur.
Google has been utterly useless for "what is the best X?" product search stuff for years, for exactly this reason.
The result in my case is that I've learned simply to not use Google for these searches. That is not good for Google.
The author says "Google, like many of the other tech giants, benefits from an uninformed user base" but I fail to see how that is the case. They benefit from a happy userbase that finds Google useful and therefore trusts Google with their time and personal information.
Sure, Clueless Cletus or Simple Sally might buy a bike from that clickbait bike article but I'm not sure they're walking away from the experience feeling that Google was particularly useful or helpful and wanting to rely upon them in the future.
> Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links
I don’t think it’s specifically Amazon links, but if they’re mindlessly measuring metrics without thinking about “why” things happen, the affiliate link spam that dominates results might increase ad buys. Think about it. If you can’t rank on the first couple of pages due to affiliate marketing spammers, you might buy an ad. If you’re competing with some of those spammers for ad buys, you might pay more.
It’s just super poor leadership and a lack of critical thinking that has let it happen IMO.
So we've an "if", a "might", a "might", and one more "might" with no supporting evidence, and that's directly contradicted by the screenshots in the article. Specifically, if the goal here was to bury the good content so that people would be forced to buy ads for it *there should be some ads pointing to said good content*. There aren't in the screenshot.
I would suggest that you didn't really think this through. You've decided who the villain is, spent 10 seconds coming up with a illogical narrative where that is true, and then just state it as some obvious fact. Just like the author of the original article.
The first hit he gets is a website plastered with ads. Boosting sales of ads is still a plausibele explanation.
"But I bet it has something to do with the fact that all of the bikes they review are sold on Amazon and that every link uses an Amazon affiliate tag. It goes quite well with the dozen or so ads plastered across the site (some of which are autoplaying videos with sound)."
Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have, period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.
I take your point, but don’t you think you’re overstating things a bit? The internet is still incredibly useful and so is Google search (granted, it takes more effort and sophistication to avoid the spam).
The original commenter said: "Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless."
I agree that Google search has been coopted. It now requires a keener awareness of what is and isn't being artificially promoted. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it something that unsophisticated users fall prey to (by design)? Also sadly yes. But 'all but worthless'? That's a huge overstatement.
I don't think I'm overstating things. Yes, the internet is useful, but consider how the ability to accurately search is the real key to the whole of it. As the original post points out, this hits us in day-to-day matters just as much as in trying to find/discover useful research on a particular topic. The simple fact is this: not only must nearly every link you click be viewed with suspicion, so must every search result you're given by Google, and pretty much every other engine. What is most useful is a presentation of naked results (with functional boolean operators, exclusions that work, a lack of "suggested" terms, etc.), but that doesn't shape and cause more interactions, direct people to the "proper" sites, or improve the bottom line. I remember the internet when it was usable for much more than consumption; it is only marginally so today.
What if I told you that it is, but you’re not the target user? When you’re serving billions of users, there are going to be niche groups not worth catering to. I would bet most people are quite happy with the results.
Just like most people are happy with their experience at Apple Stores whereas I feel like they’re pandering and annoying because I know exactly what I’m looking for or what the problem is and they’re still asking me basic questions unintentionally wasting my time. I’m not the target demographic they’re catering to. It’s fine, I just deal with it.
You seem be saying there's a single "actual user", and that user happens to be identical to yourself.
In practice any product with more than a few users is going to have to separate out the different needs, situations, and personalities of the users. Personas and market segmentation are two of many ways to slice up the user base.
Some products can use that slicing to only address small niches and just say "to hell with everybody else". Indie games, for example, often address very specific audiences. Ditto a lot of books. Academic books especially might be written for an audience in the thousands or even hundreds.
But products like Google are going for extremely large audiences. Inevitably, needs will conflict. They can try to sort that out in product, and I think they've done a surprisingly good job of guessing what people actually want based on them typing a few words into a box. But when there's a conflict, it's no shock to me they're going to favor the vast majority of their audience over the relatively small niche of persnickety software developers like myself.
I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result from DDG was some “excel-help” website that was actually just parroting common search terms as the headers on non-articles full of ads. The entire search space has apparently been hijacked by what is essentially a fake help site. I see results like that on google too sometimes but not across a whole results page.
These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.
Whenever DDG is mentioned, these "but it uses Bing" comments always pop up. Sure maybe somebody is in the lucky 10k with TIL moment, however these "but it uses Bing" comments leave out the fact that Bing doesn't know you made the search. That's kind of the point in DDG is to be able to search the web anonymously.
I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
It speaks more to the quality of the results you can expect receiving non-personalized Bing results.
From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
Nah, most of my searches still start at DuckDuckGo since I haven’t fully gotten back in the habit of putting the search redirection keyword back in yet.
If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all.
I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.
I find DDG is generally good or at least good enough when the data you need is relative popular and relative well distributed around the internet. DDG falls very, very flat when it comes to needing to scour the depths of the internet for something very specific.
Case in point is car parts - find an obscure part from a Japanese Honda, for example, and attempt to find it in DDG. I'll wait. :P
It’s mentioned because Bing isn’t very good so you shouldn’t expect any different with DDG.
Also every time this comment is posted, someone tries to argue that it doesn’t come from Bing despite zero evidence so it’s a TIL for more than you think.
are people using DDG using it just because it's not Bing and/or G? I thought the whole premise of DDG was providing the ability to search anonymously by "proxying" your search to a different search engine altogther. I was aware of the switch away from G to Bing, and I was okay with that as now G no longer gets any search data from me even if it was made anon by DDG.
Isn't the phenomenon you're describing (and I agree it's a real trend) more due to SEO efforts than to any defects in the search engine itself?
It seems like there are millions of how-to informational articles now that are inherently designed to be clickbait. It's not that they don't have useful information, but they make you dig through a lot more verbiage than is necessary, because apparently some search engines think longer = more informative.
¿Por que no los dos? Google has increasingly favored results that work in concert with the overall revenue-generating aspects of the web. Selling things has overtaken providing information, and SEO exists to push pages to the top of search results with the explicit purpose of making sites better at earning money. Google's business is selling ads and, perhaps more importantly, selling information about user preferences that allow businesses to better target potential buyers.
Just a random example I tried a bit ago. A search of "guitar tuner" gave results like Fender's online tuner site (stuff with plenty of upsells for Fender gear) a site that had a basic online tuner page – filled with ads, and a tutorial at the web site of a company that sells music lessons and runs music camps.
I think it is a failure on the part of the search engine if it falls for that SEO trickery.
I recall in the early 2000s it was popular to fill the bottom of a page with keywords in the same color as the background color, to trick the crawler into thinking the page was full of relevant content. After a little while that stopped working and would actually get your site penalized in ranking. The bad actors are never going to go away, they’re going to keep getting more clever and search engines like Google and Bing with billions in the corporate warchest ought to keep the edge in that arms race.
Similarly on Google and YouTube- nearly the entire search space for "how to pronounce xyz" has been taken over by videos of text to speech recordings that have absolutely no idea how to pronounce anything.
There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.
I knew a student in a neighboring lab (very smart guy, postdocing at Stanford atm) who had to look up how to pronounce the word "schadenfreude". Sure enough he found the PronunciationManual video first, eventually leading to a hilarious conversation where his advisor was trying to figure out what he meant when he said "skoodenfruity".
I must say, PronunciationManual is one of the few YT channels that has me literally LOL frequently, and so did your story there. My enjoyment of those hilarious videos is just tempered a bit by pity with the innocent victims that fall for it.
I also had the same issue with these. So i started using these AI narrator platforms. These are generally used to convert ebooks into audio books but i used it for pronunciations and accents. I used the one called Narration Box. Here is the link- narrationbox.com
I've found DDG to be fine most of the time, but I wish they'd up their game on advanced operators. DDG seems to have a "feature" where it will ignore quotes around terms iff there were zero results for the original query, but not tell you that it did so. It's really annoying to get to the second or third page of results and realize that this happened.
These things have been around for a while. Back in the day, it was a major problem with yahoo. Every search you do would have 5 or 6 links to the likes of ask Jeeves which was in turn just showing you what ask would return if you put in the same search terms.
Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type.
And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.
> I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.
It's possible in Chrome and Firefox (and I assume other browsers, though can't say for sure) to add search shortcuts for other websites. If I know I want the wikipedia link, rather than searching google for the thing, I type "wp <thing>", and it takes me either directly to the wikipedia page, or to the search results. I think the default is the domain followed by a space, so "wikipedia.org <thing>", but that can be changed.
this has always befuddled me. why use google at all to search a specific site rather than searching on the site directly? why give google the traffic? because lazy/convenience of google being the default page for new browsers and/or google the default search associated with the location bar?
Because search is hard. Most domain sites search titles and descriptions of articles for keywords. Google will index the entire page and be able to provide more and better ordered results.
Or use to. Now the quality and quantity of results forces site owners to implement their own search or use third parties.
This is still the case for plenty of websites. Searching google with "site:example.com search terms" often still gives better results than using a site's own search tool.
Most importantly, searching through Google generally gets me to my intended destination faster than loading some site and doing a search. Like you say, the URL bar in any browser I use also defaults to searching in the default search engine, so if it's Google, it's faster just to type it in there. So, from a new tab, I can just type in "wiki handball" to find the wikipedia page for handball and click to get what I want faster, instead of going to wikipedia.org, waiting for that page to load and then searching for handball and clicking.
DDG has the bang searches though, so typing in !wiki handball is faster still.
If you have DuckDuckGo in your browser search bar, then you get their bang functionality automatically, which replicates this. E.g. "bicycle !w" searches wikipedia. Includes !so (stackoverflow), !g (google), !yt (youtube), !a (amazon), !twitter, !reddit, many others.
For whatever reason, this feature is not actively promoted in Firefox (or Chrome). If you add a bookmark in Firefox, one of the fields that shows up is "Tags" which is sort of uninteresting. Then you have to go into your Bookmarks toolbar and find the bookmark you added to get to keywords so you can add a shortcut (my Wikipedia shortcut is just `w`). Then of course switch your search term with %s if you have a search shortcut vs just a shortcut to a particular page.
Chrome has an even more complicated way to hide this, although I don't regularly use it so I don't remember what the process was.
I agree that Firefox's method is a bit unintuitive, but Chrome's is dead simple. Settings > Manage Search Engines, and then just modify the ones it probably added automatically to have useful keywords.
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
They have a reputation for not motivating their best people to maintain and improve existing products. Maybe search is affected.
Also, it's a huge company. Maybe there are internal structures that when you work hard to advance your career within the company it doesn't align with advancing the overall company.
That had been the case for long. And google periodically reset their search algorithm purging billions of pages to clean up the junk. After which the results got better.
But sometime back, it stopped doing it. Or can't do it anymore.
Web-search is now up for disruption, when that happens.
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?
It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last week I was trying to Google something about earbuds (I don't even remember what exactly), and searching for ("earbuds" -headphones) still brings up headphones as a bolded result because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms.
Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.
> because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms
That's a double edged sword.
One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example).
Bingo. In the past, you needed “Google-fu” to find what you were looking for. People that didn’t understand how the search was done under the hood (non-techies) would search with poor terms and get poor results. Nowadays, you can’t “game” the system with precise keywords but millions more people find what they’re looking for. Overall, it’s an improvement.
Doesn't seem to ignore it for me -- on the first page I only see "headphones" word in the search string itself, in "related searches" and in google maps listing shops that sell them.
Even educated people don't have the ability to hold every possible taxonomic schema in their heads. Don't even get me started on multi-lingual, cross-culture, jargon, creole, and dialect differences.
A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music.
Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son
Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox?
Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it.
I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.
Right. Google is the stage the actor gets to perform. Google built the stage. It's like the phrase "if you build, they will come" came to fruition.
The thing to remember as a Dev, no matter how well intended your project is, users will always find a way to use it in a manner you never thought about that is the most advantageous way for the user.
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
IMHO it’s both. Obviously people spend a lot of effort reverse engineering Google’s ranking algorithms because it’s profitable but some of it, at least from the outside, seems self-inflicted.
Image search has been useless for me for a long time because of Pinterest. Many times Pinterest will show you an image but when you click on it it takes you to a page with completely different content. Maybe Google has a good reason for not penalizing Pinterest, but it’s weird to me that they are not more aggressive in sanitizing the quality of their searches.
I understand that google is constantly at war with SEO-people who are motivated to abuse the hell out of search, but why can't they un-fuck verbatim search and give me back the ability to completely remove particular domains from search results?
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this but Google is an enormously profitable company which also is a world-leader in software development and ML, which you would not know from looking at search results.
It also seems relevant that Google has actively removed features like the ability to report SEO spam or block domains — if they cared about the user experience, you'd think there'd be an easy menu with advanced 1990s technology like “Never show results from this domain” or “Report this result as spam”. Yes, there are lots of SEO spambots out there but there are also millions of people who would zealously report spam sites for the many queries which are basically useless now.
As a simple example, on the weekend I was searching for manuals for my discontinued refrigerator. There are a ton of bottom-feeder sites which will list any part number imaginable and some which are even using fake forum sites with templated exchanges between users where someone gives a link to a malware/phishing/porn page followed by several other fake users thanking them. Google has chosen to make reporting things like that almost impossible, so unsurprisingly they remain common. I suspect that's due to their desire to avoid paying humans to distinguish between valid complaints and fake complaints from competing SEOs but either way from my perspective the results are unambiguously worse than they were a decade ago and I have no reason to believe anyone will care about this unless revenue slips.
You may not be able to tell Google directly, but uBlacklist works reasonably well and has regular expression support so you can block all TLDs. I added
I get this from their perspective. Their goal isn't to work just for people whose work makes them extremely precise in phrasing. I am sure that a lot of the mechanisms that make me bonkers are ones that make search results better for the average user.
But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.
it's so bad these days. If you are on mobile good luck finding anything of use if it doesn't involve ads somehow....non affiliated content, useful personal blogs - high quality ad free pages....good luck!
it's to the point where I find what I want when I search torrent search engines.....and not via any search engines on the web.....
That's "getting a stupid answer" because of the kind of question. The problem is you can't rank bicycles under $500; they are all undifferentiated. The search results on Google for this question strike me as fairly reasonable, given the impossibility of the question and the deluge of affiliate spam they have to index.
not necessarily. the assumption part is the key. If I search wild turkey, I would accept listings on the bird or the specific whiskey. I would not accept listings of other brands of whiskey or scotch or other alcohol. I also would not accept listings on birds unless there was direct mention of wild turkey in it. Assuming I was interested in something other than what was requested is where it lost usefulness to me. Maybe others found it more useful, but when I search for a term I want that term in the results when I hit search. It's an entirely different concept when I hit Feeling Lucky. At that point, I'll accept any of the previous examples
it's just an example. of course somebody on the internet did the exact thing i was meaning to be an example. kudos
the point of the story is that I'll take "anything related in the slightest to my query for $500" when hitting the Feeling Lucky button. when I hit search, I want specifics to my search term. don't go making 6 degrees of separation results.
If you google "how do i search the web without e commerce results", you get "how to improve search in your ecommerce site".
If you search "examples of bougainvillea not pruned", you get pruning tips.
Often the first page of results will already have the tag "Without: --keyword that changes everything but is inconvenient for the algorithm--. Force include this word?"
Whenever I want to make a purchase online, I search for "best _____" and add reddit as a keyword. Reading through a few threads on reddit will typically give me a pretty good idea of where to start.
But you raise a much more important point: if you query the web like a stupid person then you'll get stupid results.
The OP shouldn't have searched for "under 500" because good bikes under 500 are called used road bikes from a local shop or craigslist owner (as the author revealed and I discovered myself when I was younger c. 2006) so saying "under 500" is sort of like saying, "show me the cheap mass market bicycles please", because the number of people who want good bikes is small, but it's a really devoted group, who are willing to pay what people like us would pay for a good PC or even a car, so if you've already decided you want the chromebook of bikes, then amazon and google aren't doing you that much of a disservice, let's be fair.
That spam level on search engines is increasing year on year, is a fact.
It’s also a fact the Google keeps rolling out several updates but the overall quality is getting worse no matter what.
I ran into a similar thing last year when researching replacement LED spots for my ceiling lights. Most review sites used a similiar headline like "best LED spots in 2020" and they were all comparison tables featuring only products available on Amazon, most of them being manufactured by brands that noone probably ever heard of and that are only available on Amazon, and it was all the same basic crap. Not sure how but eventually I found much a better brand with higher-quality LEDs.
We'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 recommendation for a £15 bottle of red, and he'll happily waste 20 minutes of his day writing a list and sending me links. I know the pleasure he gets when I message and go "thank you! This is amazing!"
Also just to add - this is exactly why those "get paid to recommend things to your friends" startups never work. Because the minute we know that the 'friend' on Facebook who's shouting about the great bottle of wine is getting paid £1 per sale we deliberately don't buy it. (As opposed to the "next time you're in Tesco, pick up a bottle of XYZ, it's great" message - when we probably do.)
I want you to be right but the GME and AMC nonsense doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that Reddit isn’t being gamed already by automated accounts. I’ve had my own comment altered a little and regurgitated by a bot before, which was extremely creepy.
But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.
I do think it is slowly deteriorating though. I've noticed it on indie gaming subreddits. A dev will announce a new game and I suspect a lot of the comments are fake. Maybe not bots just yet, probably more likely the dev gathered a large group of friends to help out. But it wouldn't surprise me if this type of promotion became more and more bot driven as time goes on.
I don’t know. It depends on the ‘quality’ of the community. Eg when I’m considering a new IT tool, I tend to search ‘!hn $tool’ just to see what the comments on HN are like, as it’s the most reasonable signal I can find vs google. Similar example, when searching for a good EV charging pass my first go-to were the Tweakers.net forums. It’s a place where the general IT crowd of the Netherlands hangs out and indeed someone already wrote a very extensive topic on the EV charging world, the business models, what to watch out for, etc.
I suppose if you have the same for cooking, cycling, cars, etc. It might actually end up going that direction for more people.
As a community becomes higher quality though, it also becomes more interesting for scammers to abuse. (The Bitcoin Reddits you mentioned are a great example). Good moderation is key I think.
I like to stick to smaller subreddits as they tend to be more authentic. Usually anything under 100K subscribers (with exceptions) can be really enjoyable to lurk + a great source of info.
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!
Half of the time when I click links on old.reddit.com, it just redirects me back to the home page. When I go to those same links, on the new site, it takes me to some image gallery page. They've definitely broke a good portion of the old site.
people sometimes bemoan stack overflow's rigor and pedantry, but try to ask a technical question on reddit... unless you're in a very well moderated reddit you're getting worse answers or no answers at all
yes! probably only a matter of time until they ramp up the astroturfing (which already happens a fair amount). It seems pretty common for someone to do a Google search for "X product review reddit"
> We're going to end up going back to community sites.
For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.
Many of the forums I used to visit in the 2000s are looong gone. I have a lot of respect for the ones that stuck around. For example I am have been on a soccer team's messageboard for over a decade, and seen it go from hundreds of daily posts to maybe a few dozen now.
I like how the show "Halt & Catch Fire" used this topic as a plot within the show. You had the Google-esque team of laborious devs unhappily stressed on coming up with the perfect algo, then you had the Yahoo-esque team of party atmosphere humans scanning the web for things to highlight/promote/scan/etc.
> 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.
Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge.
Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.
Hm, this is not really news, but perhaps it's the first time I consciously think about it.
The article is right. I used to search Google for what the best X is. At some point. Indeed, I also used to search amazon and read the reviews.
Now, and for what feels like a while, I am not doing that anymore. Like, at all. And this is not a decision I consciously made.
If I want to know what the best dishwasher is, I am not going to amazon. I am not putting it into Google, simply because it's all affiliate links all the way down.
I either read professional reviews (like non-profit and established test companies, like Warentest here in Germany) or I ask the community somewhere.
Google and Amazon have conditioned me to subconsciously not use them anymore for that purpose.
Buried in there is also the fact that getting good and reliable information might indeed not be cheap (could be paid for by the public/donors if it is a non-profit, but still costs).
In the earlier days of the web and search that was not so much the case, I reckon. For example, a lot more paywalls than 10 years ago.
What makes you think what you're reading on reddit is not already socially engineered advertisements and bot spam?
People have been paying attractive people to "hang out" in bars and pitch gizmos and doo-dads for decades (citation needed); absolutely there are accounts on reddit shilling gizmos across relevant subs.
Same here. When I need information on a product I want to buy, I will either go to a specific subreddit or, in the case of tech, a YouTuber that I trust to see if they have a review of it.
Amazon and Google are certainly not where I go to find credible information on products anymore. I advise my friends to do the same now
Case in point, I need to buy a new medium sized kitchen knife. I essentially know what I want, but I went to Amazon today to check out the state of things.
I am in Germany, however, on the first two (!) pages of search for "kitchen knife", only two companies that I actually know make knives are present (the big ones: Wüsthoff and Victorinox).
ALL other results, that is over 80 results, are fake Chinese companies with "German like" names, essentially selling the SAME product - a fake Damascus (laser etched) knife with wooden handle. Most of them have 53+/- something HRC (probably widely fluctuating around 50 HRC) and are made of "German (style) steel", whatever that means. Indeed, names and presentation suggests that the knives are made in Germany. They are not.
Sometimes, the company is registered in the EU, but if someone uses the question function to ask where the knives are produced, it is always China.
All of them have fake reviews, naturally.
I mean... how useless Amazon has become to order even a midrange price good, like a decent but not top range kitchen knife.
Now, I am not in principle against buying goods from China, but I can use Aliexpress myself thank you.
We also all know the quality of these products when they arrive, and the inability to return them (as the price point is chosen that this is not worth it).
What I hate about it is the constant deception. Nobody would buy a knife if it would say "Price 10€, made in China". So instead, it's 30€, the name is something like "Schneidwerk" and the Amazon page is littered with German flags (ugh), whereas the company probably does the same in every other European country (with, for example, French or Italian flags).
Affiliate links arent the problem per-se. Shitty content is. Google is supposed to penalize sites like this with lousy, thin reviews and promote things like wirecutter and whatnot.
I much prefer affiliate links to the alternative: Unblockable ads and paywalls.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadHowever. the fact that you found so many amazon affiliates says more about the integrity of other bike retailers. Why would there not be an even spread of affiliate links to merchants other than amazon do you wonder?
Certainty of payment, that's why.
The problem is that the monetization of the affiliate system creates a massive incentive for people to crowd out the real people who do this. Instead of googling which bike to buy and being met with a number of fairly reputable publications which specialize in this stuff, you're met with Business Insider and other trash which are all just following the incentive of trying to get their affiliate link clicked between the time you start researching and the time you innevitably buy something off Amazon.
I think the MCN example above is actually really good - since no one expects to get an affiliate payment from Amazon from someone buying a motorcycle, the quality of the reviews for "Best motorbike under $5000" are about a million times better than "Best bike for under $500". The good reviews do exist, you just can't find them, because Amazon has completely screwed the click through path from "Google X product -> Purchase on Amazon"
At the same time, Google/Amazon latched on to it and are taking advantage of it for their own gains. Either way, we're stuck in a downward feedback loop that's only going to make this worse until one of the big players falls over.
Let's say I want to do an honest review of bikes under $500, where am I going to get the bikes from in order to do this? Shall I go out and buy them?
“Back in the olden days” people would write pages because they loved the subject area and wanted to share knowledge/show off/start conversations.
So it was very common for people who were just really into bikes to spend some time sharing their thoughts on what the top 10 bikes under $500 were because they wanted to help people buy good bikes. There was no monetization, or at least direct monetization.
Those sites may still be around, but monetization has driven low-quality content higher up in SEO so the bike lover (who probably doesn’t care about SEO) doesn’t get content seen.
Maybe they can try affiliate links! I think that was how the "crappy" sites used to do it in the old days. I never really understood the whole seo game and if anyone actually made money or just pretended to make money so they can sell courses
I used to have affiliate links because I was playing around with stuff, but don’t think any have worked in 10+ years.
I have no monetization plan or ever figure I’ll make money off the site. But it costs me nothing to run, so that’s ok.
There are many sites like this, but they are much harder to find because Google isn’t able to differentiate meaningful content from the facade of meaningful content (ie, SEO).
It’s like the degradation in academic papers where groups will reference each other like crazy to game rankings.
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
This usually gets me the quality information I’m looking for.
Personally, I'm exclusively interested in reviews by people who have used the product for at least a couple of months, preferably years. But I guess the review score would be much lower and the impulse to buy would be weaker. And its a shame as there are products that deserve excellent reviews.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
0. https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/bad-search/
Still better than print media though.
There's a couple other ones as well besides Reddit, particularly around key forums. Shouldn't be too hard to allow custom-buttons.
In general now that people are here, I'd be pretty interested to know what people's top 5 extensions are outside of the regular (uBlock, Pocket etc). They're quite powerful but I don't use that many actually.
In the EU I use a no-cookies extension, though imperfect. I also use 'video speed controller' religiously to easily watch/listen to content faster. But overal I find few extensions very useful and the ones I use cause issues on a small fraction of sites. Happy to hear from computer super-users what they use.
Just have to point out the irony of patching google’s spyware browser to get around google’s poor results
For the example of "bikes under $500" it's often better to do a google news search to get magazine/newspaper articles where they are more likely to have done actual reviews.
I also don't have a problem with affiliate programs. If someone posts links that are relevant to the topic at hand, there is little harm in them getting a few cents from a purchase I would have made anyway. If anything, it is funding content creation in a way that works.
That being said, the point of the article is 100% correct that low-effort, low-value review sites just to get affiliate links ranked in search results are problematic and annoying. I make a judgement call when I run into them - if they really did put in some effort and have decent reviews contrasting different items, I'll go ahead and click the link. They wrote content, the content was helpful, no problem. On the other hand, if it was just a list of links with no added value, I don't click the links. It is just as a easy to do my own search on a product name, or even copy the link and remove the affiliate tag.
Like everything else in the world, nothing is black and white. The presence of some problematic sites doesn't invalidate an entire mechanism for funding content creation.
Affiliate programs distort content, to the point of being useless, or justify making of outright fake content.
The user is actually looking for authoritative bicycle reviews to make a purchasing decision. Searching for “bicycle reviews” would give a far higher chance of finding what the user is after. They can then use the criteria on the review site to narrow down what they are after.
There is also a limit to what searching will get you. Going to a bike shop will allow an expert in this subject matter to assess your personal requirements and advise accordingly. For a lot of things, going out and talking to someone will yield far better results than Google ever will.
Nope. Google will still give you dumb reviews pages full of “Check price on Amazon” affiliate links. What works for me is adding “site:reddit.com” or “forum” to search.
For more information see this article on mattress reviews [0].
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
At least where I live, there is no chance to get what I would call a usable/durable bike for "$100-200" at the moment.
When I was in the market for a new bike a few years ago, I looked at Yelp to find the 5-6 bicycle shops with the best rating in my city. Then I went to each shop and told them what I wanted from my bike and my budget.
This process went very well. Not only am I supremely satisfied with my purchase, even after a couple of years, but I also found a new great bicycle shop that I go to for repairs and upgrades and stuff.
But, how would somebody who only had a bike as a child know this? Google isn't telling them - it sends them to Amazon via listicles. If they happen to search "how to buy a bicycle" there are some potentially useful results. But, even if they do end up a bicycle shop, their likely to run into inventory problems - many bike shops simply don't have any bikes right now. So, it's back to Amazon, or Craigslist/FB Marketplace, or worse.
This is the prime purpose of these gigantic companies. Of course it works like that.
The smartest software developers in the world dedicate their working lives to advertising.
There are plenty of very good new bikes at almost all price points and the guy in the local bike shop can show you three bikes suited to your size, your use case and your budget.
Docking about online doing your research is all very interesting but the guy in the bike shop will help you just fine without you being an armchair expert.
No point ranting on about Amazon you just have to get away from the screen and get to the bike shop.
I don't understand the logic here. Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links from other sites? There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. And there's no long-term benefit, since it just risks teaching people to go straight to Amazon for commercial searches.
Google increasingly wants users to find what they want on Google itself and not have to click through to the direct search results. Featured snippets are the strategy and these affiliate site listicles are crafted explicitly to be hoovered up as such by the algorithm.
One hope is that long term Google improves quality-content detection and deprioritizes the garbage.
But they do? IMHO some of the SEO techniques use direct payments to Google for keywords, results placement, etc.
but giving mediocre vs high quality results on the other hand forces you to use a particular search result page more and increases the likelyhood that you'll click through a paid search link in your frustration ...
"The search results are intentionally bad to make people search more and click on ads" would be a viable conspiracy theory in isolation, but seems to directly conflict with the complaint of the search results driving people to make purchases via the pages that showed up in the organic results.
Google has been utterly useless for "what is the best X?" product search stuff for years, for exactly this reason.
The result in my case is that I've learned simply to not use Google for these searches. That is not good for Google.
The author says "Google, like many of the other tech giants, benefits from an uninformed user base" but I fail to see how that is the case. They benefit from a happy userbase that finds Google useful and therefore trusts Google with their time and personal information.
Sure, Clueless Cletus or Simple Sally might buy a bike from that clickbait bike article but I'm not sure they're walking away from the experience feeling that Google was particularly useful or helpful and wanting to rely upon them in the future.
I don’t think it’s specifically Amazon links, but if they’re mindlessly measuring metrics without thinking about “why” things happen, the affiliate link spam that dominates results might increase ad buys. Think about it. If you can’t rank on the first couple of pages due to affiliate marketing spammers, you might buy an ad. If you’re competing with some of those spammers for ad buys, you might pay more.
It’s just super poor leadership and a lack of critical thinking that has let it happen IMO.
I would suggest that you didn't really think this through. You've decided who the villain is, spent 10 seconds coming up with a illogical narrative where that is true, and then just state it as some obvious fact. Just like the author of the original article.
"But I bet it has something to do with the fact that all of the bikes they review are sold on Amazon and that every link uses an Amazon affiliate tag. It goes quite well with the dozen or so ads plastered across the site (some of which are autoplaying videos with sound)."
Google ruined itself years ago, or maybe "we" ruined it.
I agree that Google search has been coopted. It now requires a keener awareness of what is and isn't being artificially promoted. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it something that unsophisticated users fall prey to (by design)? Also sadly yes. But 'all but worthless'? That's a huge overstatement.
Just like most people are happy with their experience at Apple Stores whereas I feel like they’re pandering and annoying because I know exactly what I’m looking for or what the problem is and they’re still asking me basic questions unintentionally wasting my time. I’m not the target demographic they’re catering to. It’s fine, I just deal with it.
In practice any product with more than a few users is going to have to separate out the different needs, situations, and personalities of the users. Personas and market segmentation are two of many ways to slice up the user base.
Some products can use that slicing to only address small niches and just say "to hell with everybody else". Indie games, for example, often address very specific audiences. Ditto a lot of books. Academic books especially might be written for an audience in the thousands or even hundreds.
But products like Google are going for extremely large audiences. Inevitably, needs will conflict. They can try to sort that out in product, and I think they've done a surprisingly good job of guessing what people actually want based on them typing a few words into a box. But when there's a conflict, it's no shock to me they're going to favor the vast majority of their audience over the relatively small niche of persnickety software developers like myself.
These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.
I don't know the intent of the "but it uses Bing" posts to just be "in case you didn't know" or "it's lame because it just uses Bing" or something in between. It just seems to me these comments are missing the forest through the tree.
From my experience, it isn’t very good, and I’ve had DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for years, at first to give DuckDuckGo the old college try, but now primarily to be able to replicate a feature I had in Firefox in Safari and iOS Spotlight (being able to redirect a search to any search engine with a keyword).
If it’s fine for you for most things, great, but based off very recent and nearly daily data on my end, that is not my experience at all.
I do agree about Google getting worse though. There isn’t a search engine today that can even hold a candle to Google from over 10 years ago including Google itself. Unfortunately, the closest thing is still Google.
Case in point is car parts - find an obscure part from a Japanese Honda, for example, and attempt to find it in DDG. I'll wait. :P
Also every time this comment is posted, someone tries to argue that it doesn’t come from Bing despite zero evidence so it’s a TIL for more than you think.
It seems like there are millions of how-to informational articles now that are inherently designed to be clickbait. It's not that they don't have useful information, but they make you dig through a lot more verbiage than is necessary, because apparently some search engines think longer = more informative.
Just a random example I tried a bit ago. A search of "guitar tuner" gave results like Fender's online tuner site (stuff with plenty of upsells for Fender gear) a site that had a basic online tuner page – filled with ads, and a tutorial at the web site of a company that sells music lessons and runs music camps.
I recall in the early 2000s it was popular to fill the bottom of a page with keywords in the same color as the background color, to trick the crawler into thinking the page was full of relevant content. After a little while that stopped working and would actually get your site penalized in ranking. The bad actors are never going to go away, they’re going to keep getting more clever and search engines like Google and Bing with billions in the corporate warchest ought to keep the edge in that arms race.
There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EekGFJhrg
FWIW, here's the link for Schadenfreude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo
It's maddening.
And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.
Yup: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
Or use to. Now the quality and quantity of results forces site owners to implement their own search or use third parties.
DDG has the bang searches though, so typing in !wiki handball is faster still.
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Chrome has an even more complicated way to hide this, although I don't regularly use it so I don't remember what the process was.
It's often inaccurate too. I've had a lot of issues with menus, hours, and phone numbers being completely incorrect when searching for businesses.
The one that really bothered me was when I needed to change flights and the reported number for an airline was just some fake support line scam.
I’m not saying I think they should win outright but they should at least be holding their own if they are giving it their all.
Also, it's a huge company. Maybe there are internal structures that when you work hard to advance your career within the company it doesn't align with advancing the overall company.
But sometime back, it stopped doing it. Or can't do it anymore.
Web-search is now up for disruption, when that happens.
Clearly the use of these links creates a worse experience for users.
Not sure why you're carrying water for Google but I'm confident in their ability to filter obvious spam from their search results.
Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.
That's a double edged sword.
One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example).
They needed to help the less educated, too.
A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music.
Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son
Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox?
Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it.
I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.
The thing to remember as a Dev, no matter how well intended your project is, users will always find a way to use it in a manner you never thought about that is the most advantageous way for the user.
Image search has been useless for me for a long time because of Pinterest. Many times Pinterest will show you an image but when you click on it it takes you to a page with completely different content. Maybe Google has a good reason for not penalizing Pinterest, but it’s weird to me that they are not more aggressive in sanitizing the quality of their searches.
It also seems relevant that Google has actively removed features like the ability to report SEO spam or block domains — if they cared about the user experience, you'd think there'd be an easy menu with advanced 1990s technology like “Never show results from this domain” or “Report this result as spam”. Yes, there are lots of SEO spambots out there but there are also millions of people who would zealously report spam sites for the many queries which are basically useless now.
As a simple example, on the weekend I was searching for manuals for my discontinued refrigerator. There are a ton of bottom-feeder sites which will list any part number imaginable and some which are even using fake forum sites with templated exchanges between users where someone gives a link to a malware/phishing/porn page followed by several other fake users thanking them. Google has chosen to make reporting things like that almost impossible, so unsurprisingly they remain common. I suspect that's due to their desire to avoid paying humans to distinguish between valid complaints and fake complaints from competing SEOs but either way from my perspective the results are unambiguously worse than they were a decade ago and I have no reason to believe anyone will care about this unless revenue slips.
/pinterest\..*/
and here's the (lack of) results when I google image search "pinterest fish": https://i.imgur.com/pMQ2JQK.png
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
One curious example for a non-commercial term the other day was a search for 'population nairn'. It returned a "people also ask of":
"What is the fastest town in Scotland"?
Answer: walkwithdinosaurs
Nonsensical question and answer.
But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.
it's to the point where I find what I want when I search torrent search engines.....and not via any search engines on the web.....
But it's just a matter of time before the astroturfers start marketing more effectively via Reddit for SEO purposes.
What? That's the whole purpose of search algorithms isn't it? I'm not sure I understand your complaint.
the point of the story is that I'll take "anything related in the slightest to my query for $500" when hitting the Feeling Lucky button. when I hit search, I want specifics to my search term. don't go making 6 degrees of separation results.
If you search "examples of bougainvillea not pruned", you get pruning tips.
Often the first page of results will already have the tag "Without: --keyword that changes everything but is inconvenient for the algorithm--. Force include this word?"
Try https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=best%20road%20bikes... If you search Million Short then the top two results are (1) an actual bike store and (2) an actual bicycling magazine that's 100+ years old instead of seo spam.
But you raise a much more important point: if you query the web like a stupid person then you'll get stupid results.
The OP shouldn't have searched for "under 500" because good bikes under 500 are called used road bikes from a local shop or craigslist owner (as the author revealed and I discovered myself when I was younger c. 2006) so saying "under 500" is sort of like saying, "show me the cheap mass market bicycles please", because the number of people who want good bikes is small, but it's a really devoted group, who are willing to pay what people like us would pay for a good PC or even a car, so if you've already decided you want the chromebook of bikes, then amazon and google aren't doing you that much of a disservice, let's be fair.
Exactly the same as when I ask my friend who's passionate about wine for his recommendation for a £15 bottle of red, and he'll happily waste 20 minutes of his day writing a list and sending me links. I know the pleasure he gets when I message and go "thank you! This is amazing!"
Also just to add - this is exactly why those "get paid to recommend things to your friends" startups never work. Because the minute we know that the 'friend' on Facebook who's shouting about the great bottle of wine is getting paid £1 per sale we deliberately don't buy it. (As opposed to the "next time you're in Tesco, pick up a bottle of XYZ, it's great" message - when we probably do.)
But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.
I suppose if you have the same for cooking, cycling, cars, etc. It might actually end up going that direction for more people.
As a community becomes higher quality though, it also becomes more interesting for scammers to abuse. (The Bitcoin Reddits you mentioned are a great example). Good moderation is key I think.
I like to stick to smaller subreddits as they tend to be more authentic. Usually anything under 100K subscribers (with exceptions) can be really enjoyable to lurk + a great source of info.
The one that started it is called “wall street bets” and people openly call each other “retards” and “autists” over there.
Then he kept posting updates
For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.
Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge.
Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.
The article is right. I used to search Google for what the best X is. At some point. Indeed, I also used to search amazon and read the reviews.
Now, and for what feels like a while, I am not doing that anymore. Like, at all. And this is not a decision I consciously made.
If I want to know what the best dishwasher is, I am not going to amazon. I am not putting it into Google, simply because it's all affiliate links all the way down. I either read professional reviews (like non-profit and established test companies, like Warentest here in Germany) or I ask the community somewhere.
Google and Amazon have conditioned me to subconsciously not use them anymore for that purpose.
Very interesting.
In the earlier days of the web and search that was not so much the case, I reckon. For example, a lot more paywalls than 10 years ago.
But this is an arms race with SEOs and bots. Eventually Reddit will probably be worthless for this.
People have been paying attractive people to "hang out" in bars and pitch gizmos and doo-dads for decades (citation needed); absolutely there are accounts on reddit shilling gizmos across relevant subs.
Amazon and Google are certainly not where I go to find credible information on products anymore. I advise my friends to do the same now
I am in Germany, however, on the first two (!) pages of search for "kitchen knife", only two companies that I actually know make knives are present (the big ones: Wüsthoff and Victorinox).
ALL other results, that is over 80 results, are fake Chinese companies with "German like" names, essentially selling the SAME product - a fake Damascus (laser etched) knife with wooden handle. Most of them have 53+/- something HRC (probably widely fluctuating around 50 HRC) and are made of "German (style) steel", whatever that means. Indeed, names and presentation suggests that the knives are made in Germany. They are not. Sometimes, the company is registered in the EU, but if someone uses the question function to ask where the knives are produced, it is always China. All of them have fake reviews, naturally.
I mean... how useless Amazon has become to order even a midrange price good, like a decent but not top range kitchen knife. Now, I am not in principle against buying goods from China, but I can use Aliexpress myself thank you. We also all know the quality of these products when they arrive, and the inability to return them (as the price point is chosen that this is not worth it).
What I hate about it is the constant deception. Nobody would buy a knife if it would say "Price 10€, made in China". So instead, it's 30€, the name is something like "Schneidwerk" and the Amazon page is littered with German flags (ugh), whereas the company probably does the same in every other European country (with, for example, French or Italian flags).
Somehow, this makes me really irate.
I much prefer affiliate links to the alternative: Unblockable ads and paywalls.