Well, reports about the relative uselessness of modern search engines was bound to hit the general population at some point.
I've suggested that people try Bing or DDG rather than Google for some searches, but it seems it's more a question of luck rather than anything else nowadays.
I've tried using Ecosia for their good environmental work but I frequently get a server error when searching but also it seems like searching for programming content rarely returns the right stuff, which might be page 1 on Google.
Google do have a lot of headstart over other search engines. Maybe what we need is a Developers search engine which weights results towards programming sites and also downgrades those drivereasy type posts which have a lot of fluff followed by "download drivereasy to sort all your problems".
It seems like maybe both large format and laser printer is such a niche product that any site actually talking about it does not have enough SEO juice to overpower these spam sites despite relevancy. The sad thing is these articles seem to be just keyword stuffing because those printers mentioned on that website are all literally not laser printers despite the text saying they are...
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
Sure but most of the time reddit is completely unable to provide a decent answer to any non banal search. And whenever I tried to directly ask something specific in a dedicated subreddit it always ends up in one of the following:
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
It’s been said the best way to get answers promptly online is to provide an incorrect one. Maybe a strategy to overcome the attention span issue would be to open a sockpuppet account to intentionally seed misinformation until someone catches it and feels compelled to respond?
But to aulin's fifth point, often you won't get answered with the correct information. Instead you will get "corrected" with the local mythos, as the most repeated answer to a question usually becomes the preferred knowledge of a group.
I agree it's far from perfect, but I'll happily take the hivemind over SEO spam, especially if I know very little to begin with.
Anything "non banal" and I'm more likely to go read a book or consult a professional. Tradesmen on reddit don't owe me answers for my hard to google DIY question.
It is frustrating navigating the sea of people who want to help but are also just googling, but you get an eye for that after a while.
> a niche product that any site actually talking about it
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
When Pagerank was invented the internet was a lot nicer and less spammy. I think its showing its age and maybe Pagerank just doesn't work for commercial content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
It gets into a conspiracy theory territory a bit, but it makes more than zero sense if all the Google services ~2007 had been a civilian clone of an existing, "non-cooperative" library indexing system for spy agencies. There will be a huge accumulation of documents of unknown importance, and occasionally needs arise to extract information with a word or a phrase as a key.
Google Search and Books does exactly that.
And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.
just trying to go directly to the main manufacturers websites... it's really hard tot find a large format laser printer. So it seems anything talking about large format printer is going to dominate, and any mention of "laser" on those pages is going to do well if you search for laser also. I get lots of hits on the large format page where "laser" is another menu option. I found some on xerox, surprised that didn't rank better.
I think the idea is that "laser" should have filtered out the results he was seeing, but it didn't. Furthermore the content on the pages is explicitly lying about the fact that they are laser printers and drowning out the pages that aren't lying. It could just be that Pagerank doesn't work for this type of information organization anymore. It may not be a Google problem but an internet search and Pagerank problem, especially if Bing and Duck Duck Go aren't any better in this regard.
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
I find it curious that everyone trots out this idea that Reddit is a google killer etc.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
I think Reddit is just a symptom. I don't think it's going to be a Google killer but the fact that people are looking to it to fix Google's problems is a sign of the problem at hand. They are abandoning something bad for something slightly less bad at solving the problem at hand, or just desperate for any method. And Reddit is definitely unintentionally doing this. The only reason Reddit isn't gamed (or maybe it is?) is because it's a new phenomenon so far.
Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
> The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.
Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.
On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.
The karma system is definitely the difference that mostly influences the quality of the discussion and visibility of non mainstream topics.
Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.
What you're complaining about has nothing to do with the reason reddit is actually more useful than google.
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
Even if you manage to bypass the problems you mention (by bypassing the popular subreddits), Reddit has become a terrible source of information in general.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
> It's been downhill since all the subreddit bans a couple years ago.
Out of the list on Wikipedia [1], the utter majority of banned popular subreddits were far-right, terrorist, violence-oriented or dealt with questionably or outright illegal sexual material (jailbait, fappening).
As for r/consumeproduct, there's a Google doc floating around detailing its links to the far-right and transphobes [2]. Doesn't sound surprising to me that they got banned.
The vast range of content being banned (largely by subject and tone) created a chilling effect throughout the entire site. Also, a lot of good posters were also bad posters, so after they left because they couldn't talk about how much they hated fat people, they also stopped posting detailed reviews about e.g. laser printers.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
I feel like this is a product of Reddit's built-in recency bias, where unless a thread is sticky then no one really sees or uses older threads. Classic web forums were a lot better at this; old threads with in-depth technical info and discussions would keep rising to the top, where "hey look at this keyboard I just bought" threads would get one or two replies and be quickly forgotten.
Odds of searching for "[obscure proper noun] [issue in fewest words] site:reddit.com" solving a problem is good. "site:5ch.net" sometimes works too for certain deeper topics by the way, and Reddit is a sunny day in a park compared to 2ch.net/5ch.net.
I don’t think you’re leveraging Reddit correctly. I use Google, search for something like “Kokatat icon drysuit site:Reddit.com” and am going to find far more useful human, real-world info than if I just use google to search the naked Internet, where the results would be half a page of ads and half a page of marketing, SEO-optimized sales or affiliate sites.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
Reddit is a cesspool compared to what? Certainly not here. Sure, r/gaming is garbage, but overall my experience with Reddit is fairly positive. Especially if you’re looking for things like product advice, but it’s also the main source for eg. trans surgery and fashion advice. Things that are literally scary to discuss here.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
The general idea is that Reddit has small communities that care about niche topics. If you want to know about mechanical keyboards or looking after a rare pet, you'll find a community there that talks about it. They'll probably ban you if you talk about anything other than the specific topic, you regularly see stern warnings added whenever a topic escapes the niche area and gets exposed to the wider Reddit audience, but that's why they are useful.
Could it depend on the types of subreddits you visit? In my experience, Reddit is pretty nice. Not great perhaps, but fairly tolerant, friendly and supportive. But quite often focused on a specific topic and moderated to stay on topic, that is true. Some moderators are definitely more restrictive than others, but if they overstep, people leave and form new subreddits to compete with the old one.
No. For that canary you would have to identify the signal associated with companies stopping big expensive ad campaigns. This process can go on for an extremely long time after Google becomes useless for those searching the web. The primary clients of Google are those with big budget ad campaigns, not the people actually using it for search.
> Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
Those of us old enough remember, there was a time when online search existed in a goldilocks zone [0] of accuracy, productivity, and reliability.
Sure, but have you seen just how bad manufacturers of anything expensive and technical are at actual presenting their product catalogs in a clear and informative manner that lends itself to comparing with the competition?
Anything A3+ (13” x 19”) or smaller in the commercial printing industry is pretty universally considered “small format”. (Some places consider anything sheet-fed as small format and sheets come a lot bigger than A3+.)
It’s not surprising that searching using a specific industry term that’s different from your understanding of it would bring results for that larger-than-you-thought category of product.
Further, the smallbiztrends article that comes up first for me, that Adam claims “not a single one is an actual laser printer”, contains several printers that use the same dry toner, electrostatic process as laser printers and that most people outside of printing, if asked to name the printing tech, would call a “laser printer” (because they’ve never heard of an LED printer). The print quality issues that started his search were likely fuser-related not laser-related, meaning these colloquially incorrectly called laser printers would have been fine.
Search engines have problems, but this video isn’t hitting on them for me.
Are there even lasers in the large format (50cm+ x roll of paper) realm? I thought it was all ink plotters/printers, at least that's all I've seen in print shops or design places. A lack of lasers might contributes to the SEO spam for the odd terms.
A3 lasers certainly exist. But A3 is not wide format.
I've never heard of a true wide format laser (A2 and larger), and I suspect the technology doesn't exist to make an affordable one. You'd need super-precise optics, an absolutely huge toner/fuser system, and a supply chain for all of the above.
And there would be limited sales. Wide format printers are used for high quality art/photo printing, signage and ads, and sometimes for fabric printing.
Lasers are optimised for office document printing. You don't often need an A2 or larger office document. And when you do - cartography and blueprints - you're probably going to use a plotter.
There are digital presses in B2 size using dry toner indirect (“laser”), liquid toner indirect (also “laser”), and inkjet processes. They are available in both sheet-fed and web-fed (“rolls”) configuration. (B2 sheet is 514x728mm, ~20x29”, or think “home/small poster size”; it’s sometimes called “half sheet”)
I work in this space (as a consumer of this equipment); all opinions here are my own, not my employer’s. For that reason, I’m reluctant to link to any specific vendor products, but if you’re interested, googling/YouTubing “b2 digital press” will give you some cool “how it works” videos.
So a printing industry professional looking for a web printer wouldn’t at all be upset with getting procedurally generated listicles about inkjet printers?
Clearly the problem here isn’t Adam’s lack of industry knowledge. Had he been served the correct results for his query he would have instantly learned what large format means in the industry and would have adjusted his query accordingly. The problem is that Google helps scammers and spammers at the expense of legitimate creators. Just like removing the like/dislike ratio on YouTube, which of course has caused a big increase in generated spam.
I think your take is a bit generous for that website.
Take this blurb for example:
> HP Designjet Z9+ PS Large Format Color Inkjet Printer
As one of the most expensive printers on the market, this HP DesignJet Z9+PS provides exceptional color control with a secure wireless connection and fast printing. Without a doubt this is a large format laser printer of the highest quality which can produce prints up to 44 inches wide.
It's literally written in a way that is completely lying and designed to mislead and keyword stuff. It's not even trying to hide the fact that it's lying to a human reader since it contradicts itself immediately by calling it an Inkjet printer (which it is). It makes more sense when you realize it's not trying to trick the human reader at all! It's trying to trick Google bot!
The title of the article implies it is about laser printers or at the least laser-like printers, but the list contains inkjet printers, making it somewhat useless even if some of the results are in fact laser-like printers because it forces the person to continue to sift through the spam for what they need.
The whole article is garbage information and just because it accidentally actually included one or two laser printers does not mean it is a relevant result! Why are you nit-picking on Adam Savage being wrong about how there is indeed a laser printer when the literal whole article is mostly lies.
For a huge pile of things that aren't consumer goods, google is pretty good at figuring out what you're looking for even if you use imprecise terms, especially if the particular imprecision is common among non-specialists. That's sort of the selling point of google search and why the primary interface to just about all general-purpose web search engines isn't what used to be called 'keyword search'. It's definitely a search engine quality problem
Would better filtering of procedurally generated pages and ecommerce sites help?
It feels like they drown out all the useful information when I'm searching for stuff. I usually resort to constraining searches to forum sites but that rejects a lot of blogs and other useful sources of information.
... large format laser printer, like A2 and up, in full color? Looks like there are few full-sized office photocopiers that can handle it as well as few models sold as drafting plotters, but the failed print he is holding in the video is an A4 sheet. Any lasers can do A4 just fine, some A3 as well.
Does he really need to hold up a botched A2 printout to prove that he needs non-botched A2 printouts?
Surely those are orthogonal requirements, the size of the sheets and the ability to successfully fuse the toner? Can’t we in all fairness take him at his word that he sometimes wants to print at a larger size?
I think most large format printers are open pedestal roll feed design that takes A0(2.8x3.9ft) or A1(1.95x2.76ft) rolls so material is like 3ft wide paper towel. I know because I borrowed one back in University to print out Apollo control panel for myself, which in hindsight probably wasn't allowed.
I know Adam Savage is an ex-ILM professional propmaker and legendary Mythbusters host, but if he by million to one chance would call me to procure an A0 laser printer to print on special plastic sheets, I'd ask him if he mean it.
The SEO optimized site, smallbiztrends.com, lists six large format laser printers though! Their title is for eight of them though, and two of them are inkjets, and I'm assuming they didn't change their list in response to the video.
The site is full of Markov chain garble using random products as seeds to useless copy in order to sell ad space and affiliate links. There's no person who would even want to update the site.
Meta: this is a video with Adam Savage (perhaps most widely known from hosting Mythbusters on TV) from Tested.com. Perhaps would have been worth at least naming him in the title, since the source of a video rant can influence one's interest in clicking.
I searched for a particular piece of music gear using the shopping tab on Google the other day and they show you the results starting from the cheapest price, well the 1st result was like half the rest of legitimate shops and it was this stupid blog which was linking to Amazon with affiliate links that was worthless because the price was wrong.
I see a lot of inkjet printers in the results, but literally the first printer on the first result page is OKI C844dnw A3 Color which looks to be a laser printer.
The rant is really about how bad Google went or how good SEO experts are today. Google search results are basically unusable for some subjects and Google should fix it, if it doesn't want to end up like Altavista!
it's not just SEO, they removed essential features like verbatim search, they constantly autocorrect uncommon search terms and they keep trying to optimize searches to only look for results within your bubble
It's the investing that ruined Google search. Instead of search it's super smart, and as a result super annoying. It would be so much better if they kept it as is and just worked on removing spam.
Google once started out with the goal to index all human knowledge so people could find anything, but they seem to have settled into only helping people find the obvious easy to find stuff, while actively hiding anything that's slightly out of the ordinary.
I think this is the best description of what's happened. The only thing I really use Google for any more is if I have a development or design issue. I no longer use it for shopping or literally anything else I would use it for because of what you're talking about.
A five years ago, I noticed most of the results were all paid ads, at the top and bottom of the page and in the right hand column. Then you'd have a long list of Amazon product links. By the time you finally found the company or product you wanted, you were five pages deep and wondering why it was so hard to find something that just a few years earlier would be in the first couple of results.
I just gave up using it - to me its become completely useless. Its a last ditch resource I use if I really need to find something.
Doesn't always work. For example Google seems to "auto correct" Gasgerd, a widely used nickname for former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder to Gasherd with and without quotes.
> Google won't end up like Altavista since any alternatives will be faced with the same issue.
They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.
Altavista (AskJeeves, Yahoo, pick your poison) existed in a market space where there was real competition to be had. The Google of today does not.
The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.
I have an HP m377dw laser and this exact thing was happening when I printed on card stock. TIL via the comments of this video that there should be a paper thickness setting in the driver.
Yeah, paper thickness, color, paper type, and any coatings on the paper. All these things should matter for a proper setting of the fuser temperature the printer uses. If your printer is advanced enough, it should run the fuser at the proper temperature for the stated paper.
All printers suck. I've tried every range and type of printer imaginable over the last 35 years and every single one has made me hate my life.
I just threw a laser out of the window because it got to the point where it would only print one page before jamming. I bought a Canon inkjet and that has lasted a couple of months, but now you have to push each piece of paper in to get it started, and a couple of weeks ago it stopped printing the left side of the paper, so I have to make sure everything I print is only on the right. So, this printer is going out the window as soon as the cartridge runs dry.
The solution for consumers are product/price comparison sites like gh.de and idealo.de (german). I don't know the US equivalents of those, but here they get the prices from many sellers and you can compare including shipping, filter by many spec criteria and even find the cheapest solution for a basket of items, split by seller and including shipping which I believe is a NP hard problem (knapsack or traveling salesman?).
I was just looking at laser printers in Idealo yesterday, didn't bother even looking at Google because I share the same experience as Adam. There many cases like this just from my search history. Point is: Google is not the best indexer to shop.
Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.
Wow, even if you put "large format laser printer" in quotes, and put Google in verbatim mode, that smallbiztrends crap comes up first, followed by useless results.
The rant is not so much about laser printers, but about search engines and crappy SEO. I mean, it starts with a laser printer problem he has, but he doesn't blame his printer. He blames Google for not helping him find a better laser printer.
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
It's the same everywhere. Amazon and Google are absolutely worhtless for anything that is slightly not mainstream.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
> when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them
I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
For that maybe, for laptop chargers and batteries, cables, electronic components etc I've got better luck at that store. Keep in mind that they are not a general public storem you don't buy consumer electronics there, but for professionals. Technicians of all kinds go there to buy, so they are not just salespeople.
This. High quality advice from an expert at a shop, who knows where to find even bigger experts, is absolutely worth paying extra for. The problem is: how do I know which shop has that expert?
And sadly, a lot of companies which have built up a stellar reputation over the years, at some point turn to cutting cost while milking their reputation into the ground.
Same here, the printers for my home, my office and wife's office come from the same printer shop. Yeah they won't have thousands of models but from the hundred they can provide I got things very usable - and the price difference was fully worth my economy of time.
> What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
1) If they keep stock, what they have in stock
2) What the manufacturer promotion of the day is and/or if they need a push to get over the line with some manufacturer's targets
Maybe, but what are your alternatives? You won't find anything in Google or Amazon. If you're lucky you find a niche forum or reddit sub with enough activity. If you don't you're better off a distributor.
> Maybe, but what are your alternatives? You won't find anything in Google or Amazon. If you're lucky you find a niche forum or reddit sub with enough activity
Depends what you're buying.
If its a highly commoditised product like an average PC then it basically doesn't matter. Most commodity PCs are (basically) identical and its largely a case of "you get what you pay for", so your budget will do most of the dictating on what your outcome will be.
If its something more niche or more expensive (e.g mid-range/high-end commodity servers), then you've got two alternatives:
1) If you've got a group of trustworthy friends who either work in tech or are "techies" then the old-school word-of-mouth to find yourself a trustworthy reseller (there are some truly independent resellers out there, but they are a rare species, especially in places like the US or Europe).
2) As you say, do your own homework via niche forums / reddit / youtube videos / slack channels / discord / whatever you prefer. Remember that the goal here is not necessarily to know exactly what you are buying, but to make yourself an "informed consumer" so at least you know broadly what your options are.
Its a tough position to be in, I agree. I think the way the IT industry operates is ghastly and does nobody any favours.
> article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers
The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
That site is nothing but a ad-ridden, affiliate link stuffing, spam site with zero quality. A good search engine would not list useless garbage like that.
He can't know, but I'm the original commenter and it was the same article. Apparently it wasn't all ink jet printers, but just the top 4 of the list. Still not great for a list that claims to be explicitly about laser printers.
I did not check all of the printers in the list, but the top 4 are all ink jet printers. You're right that lower down the list there are some laser printers as well, but as a list of the top 10 best laser printers, the article is useless.
As is becoming apparent, there is no "large format [color] laser printer" that are in production right now. There are large format printers, color printers, and laser printers, but no printers that meet all three criteria at the same time. They are part mutually exclusive qualifiers.
These generated spam contents are indeed problematic, but if done correctly, should contain zero printer anyway.
I tried with "laser printer", and the results were simply PERFECT.
Now, this may depend on one's location, but for me (here in Europe) it works perfectly well (and I'm not Russian), I just ignore the site language, since the results are mostly English anyway.
Just looking at the domain it already looks like a massive failure in results. Clicking into the site it looks like a content farm. The top articles are:
I tried the top several results (searching for "large-format laser printer" as per Adam Savage's rant). Most of the results contained no large-format laser printers and no useful advice on finding or choosing them. The most promising was an e-commerce page almost all of which was other things but one of whose items was indeed advertised as a "large-format laser printer". Unfortunately it was actually a "computer to plate" machine, suitable if you want to print very large numbers of identical copies of something, prices starting at a mere $20k, almost certainly in no way suitable for Adam Savage's needs.
(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
I suspect that most such articles are written by some poor soul living in an area where the best available jobs are writing garbage click farm articles. I wouldn't be surprised if some were even generated largely or entirely by machine. Calling them "crap articles" downplays the fact that they are not even really content, they are just a pretense to fill a page with affiliate links.
I would like to be able to vote on search results and add certain sites to my default blocklist. I don't understand Google doesn't do that; crowdsourcing is exactly their thing, and this would be something that provides tons of valuable info to them yet would also be loved by their users.
I suspect such a system would be quickly gamed by spammers. With the bot-nets and other resources they have at their disposal, they would be able to flag and drown out legitimate sites or competitor sites in order to boost their own. Then the problem changes to being able to differentiate legitimate/regular users from spammers/black-hat SEO practitioners.
Maybe, or maybe there are ways to identify and eliminate the bots and spammers.
For example, it could be linked to accounts, and dishonest accounts get removed, together with all their votes. Or the votes are kept, but because they're so different from real people's votes, they only count for the search results shown to other bots and spammers.
And at the very least, your own votes should override anyone else's votes, so for regular users who actively vote, the search results will still be close to what they want.
I'm also thinking about classifying results by different contexts. A page might be very relevant in one context, and not at all in another. But do let users control those contexts.
You can filter domains, at least. You can add "-pinterest.com" or just "-pinterest" to clean a lot of crap out of your searches. But I've always wanted a regexp search. Just a regexp, absolutely no algorithmic "help" of any sort whatsoever, and I've wanted that since Alta Vista was the go-to search engine.
Kagi allows you to set the priority of domains, as well as some other tuning. Though it is in beta at the moment, and the plan to charge for use eventually.
Using google is so much more frustrating than say 10 years ago. And generated websites is just a small problem with that. In the past google didn't try to be that smart and gave you more control. Now it's optimized for users asking full sentences instead of search queries. Now it's incorporating your location and perceived language into the query. Age of the document plays a huge role. Popularity of words in different context can skew your results towards some random topics.
Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.
In my experience the quoted search does work. Google will report it can't find what I asked if there are no such pages with the exact quote:
No results found for "...".
Results for ... (without quotes):
It's just very cumbersome, the old +/- syntax was more usable.
Actually, I'd prefer if each word I write would just default to being a hard requirement. I could then manually allow more creative interpretation with a specific syntax, like ~word, or exclude specific words alltogether with -word.
That works for the case you described. It will still ignore typos, dialects, or in my case a completely different language from the same language group. It will happily highlight different words that it deems to be equal to something I put in quotes.
It's infuriating when I search in Ukrainian on YouTube and all the top results are Russian. Using words dissimilar with Russian helps, but that's not always an option. More and more today, I'm fighting with services that want to show me engaging, trending content. It's as if they're holding the real gems hostage, only giving them up grudgingly when I fail to succumb to cat videos or [insert trending content].
In 2010-2012, google results were peak content farm stuff too. Then they fought it actively, in 2013 they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results. Content farms that worked by stuffing keywords and working in rings to boost their page rank went away almost overnight.
And then dark SEO found its way around it again. And now we have a new cesspit, but it looks like Google doesn’t give a shit anymore. They only change the number of ads interspersed among search results.
Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess.
My guess would be that they are working on it. At their scale, it is hard to imagine them having technical difficulties removing SEO garbage from results.
It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
> It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
I think a regular, non-adblocked google search may result in almost the entire first page being ads. At this point, the ads are probably more relevant to the average user than whatever seo-spam "top x of y" would have been there on the first page.
At least ads lead you to the product directly rather than make you visit another shady ad-infested site in the interim.
I subscribe to this filter, and while it's useful, it only covers a subset of the content farms out there. We really need a general purpose filter list for this sort of stuff. The sites I've been seeing more of lately are Q&A pages that have a few dozen questions with no rhyme or rhythm, and whose answers seem to be GPT-3 generated or scraped from other sites.
> they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results
There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well).
I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure.
Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.
I don’t understand why this is so hard for google. Allow end users to flag links as SEO spam. It’s very easy for a human to figure out. I can tell in maybe 1/4 a second that a page is just SEO shit. The keyword stuffing, the irrelevant fluff before and after any relevant content (if it’s there at all), the annoying ads that take up the whole screen, etc. Let us flag it, remove it from the index. Take a snapshot of the page at the time it was removed so if the owner wants to appeal Google can say why it was removed.
I like this idea. So how would you prevent company X from flagging all their competitors as spam sites - and just in general how do you deal with the abuse of such a feature?
Can't wait for real people's personal accounts to get flagged or banned. Google Maps has companies lying about their info and people correcting those will get their accounts shadowbanned with no recourse.
Because SEO firms would LOVE to go though marking all real sites as spam. They are _much_ more motivated then end users so the vast bulk of report will be false.
I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or real.
Of all the companies in the world google will be the last to employ real humans to verify anything. Look online for the shear amount of forum threads full of people disgrunted with the their poor support response and lack of humans in the loop.
I know, my point is that if they just take a small amount of their $50 billon in profit every year and hire a team of actual people to go through this stuff it would probably be a lot cheaper and more effective than constantly tweaking their ranking algorithm
Coming up with new algo's gets you promoted in google's structure, proposing and managing an army of support people is not 'elegant' and nobody would want to work on it.
Or at least allow the user to flag such links to be added in his own, individual corpus of unwanted spam. They do the exact same thing with email already, so why not extend it to web pages.
And, yes, allow the user to permanently filter out domains from their search results.
I use an extension for that. There used to be the collaborative "WoT", but that got issues after it got bought up by a venture capital firm. In general I think the individual use (blocking sites I will never want to see in search results) is more important than the social use, so I just use uBlocklist, which injects a "block this site" link after every Google search result.
If I was a motivated SEO booster, I would just pay a room full of people somewhere in the world to "downvote" all of my competitors search engine results. The problem still exists. As long as there is an incentive to be gained from SEO spammers, they will find a way to influence search results. This transcends Google or DDG or any specific search engine susceptible to SEO abuse.
And then spammers or unscrupulous competitors will flag legitimate sites as spam, pushing the signal-to-noise ratio to the point of uselessness. Plus, few users will actually flag correctly. Most will simply not notice, or not bother, others will flag perfectly legitimate results as spam just because Google wasn't psychic enough to know exactly what they want from their vague query.
And Google already has a pretty good metric in the bounce rate without the need to add a "flag" option. That is, if you go back to the search page shortly after clicking a link, that link is probably irrelevant. I guess that SEO spammers found a way around that.
> Google can easily afford to have people verify a link should be taken down before doing it.
Google is super rich, they probably can if they want to dedicate a huge amount of resources to that. It is hard for humans to win against bots in this game.
> If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
It is something spammers do. They make the page attractive using psychological tricks (like typical clickbait). They make it informative by copying parts of Wikipedia or StackOverflow. It does not make the world a better place, and it is something Google fights against, with mixed success.
It can not be at Google scale because of massive incentives to mark your competitor's sites as spam.
But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)
I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links.
I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable.
How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I want to see? Some combination of clicks and time-spent in a page through Google Analytics?
I would rather add a couple of buttons after each search result to provide feedback and the feedback I provide is valid just for my user (so it cannot be gamed). Two buttons with "this is crap" / "this is fine". Then Google can learn from that feedback instead of guessing through AI.
That, plus a "I'm not joe-six-pack" mode toggle, where Tools->Verbatim is enabled
and finds exactly what I am looking for, without assuming I'm misspelling or confused.
If there was any other obvious way to influence google it would instantly be gamed. Both my companies tried to increase their relevance in certain keywords and by competitors reporting their websites.
While not exactly what you've asked, check out uBlacklist add-on. It adds "Block this site" link next to search results in Google, Bing, and a couple of others. You can block a specific url and it this add-on will remove it from the search results page.
> I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links.
I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.
there is some strong business lessons here. printer manufacturer trashed their user experience all the way, from your first google search to the last hit with a baseball bat in the woods.
198 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadI've suggested that people try Bing or DDG rather than Google for some searches, but it seems it's more a question of luck rather than anything else nowadays.
Google do have a lot of headstart over other search engines. Maybe what we need is a Developers search engine which weights results towards programming sites and also downgrades those drivereasy type posts which have a lot of fluff followed by "download drivereasy to sort all your problems".
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
Anything "non banal" and I'm more likely to go read a book or consult a professional. Tradesmen on reddit don't owe me answers for my hard to google DIY question.
It is frustrating navigating the sea of people who want to help but are also just googling, but you get an eye for that after a while.
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
Google Search and Books does exactly that.
And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.
Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.
On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.
Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
Out of the list on Wikipedia [1], the utter majority of banned popular subreddits were far-right, terrorist, violence-oriented or dealt with questionably or outright illegal sexual material (jailbait, fappening).
As for r/consumeproduct, there's a Google doc floating around detailing its links to the far-right and transphobes [2]. Doesn't sound surprising to me that they got banned.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IdBsrh8FS6k85XsrpqDjmqPe...
I feel like this is a product of Reddit's built-in recency bias, where unless a thread is sticky then no one really sees or uses older threads. Classic web forums were a lot better at this; old threads with in-depth technical info and discussions would keep rising to the top, where "hey look at this keyboard I just bought" threads would get one or two replies and be quickly forgotten.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
> Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
Those of us old enough remember, there was a time when online search existed in a goldilocks zone [0] of accuracy, productivity, and reliability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone
It’s not surprising that searching using a specific industry term that’s different from your understanding of it would bring results for that larger-than-you-thought category of product.
Further, the smallbiztrends article that comes up first for me, that Adam claims “not a single one is an actual laser printer”, contains several printers that use the same dry toner, electrostatic process as laser printers and that most people outside of printing, if asked to name the printing tech, would call a “laser printer” (because they’ve never heard of an LED printer). The print quality issues that started his search were likely fuser-related not laser-related, meaning these colloquially incorrectly called laser printers would have been fine.
Search engines have problems, but this video isn’t hitting on them for me.
Maybe `a3 laser` or `wide format laser` ?
I've never heard of a true wide format laser (A2 and larger), and I suspect the technology doesn't exist to make an affordable one. You'd need super-precise optics, an absolutely huge toner/fuser system, and a supply chain for all of the above.
And there would be limited sales. Wide format printers are used for high quality art/photo printing, signage and ads, and sometimes for fabric printing.
Lasers are optimised for office document printing. You don't often need an A2 or larger office document. And when you do - cartography and blueprints - you're probably going to use a plotter.
I work in this space (as a consumer of this equipment); all opinions here are my own, not my employer’s. For that reason, I’m reluctant to link to any specific vendor products, but if you’re interested, googling/YouTubing “b2 digital press” will give you some cool “how it works” videos.
Clearly the problem here isn’t Adam’s lack of industry knowledge. Had he been served the correct results for his query he would have instantly learned what large format means in the industry and would have adjusted his query accordingly. The problem is that Google helps scammers and spammers at the expense of legitimate creators. Just like removing the like/dislike ratio on YouTube, which of course has caused a big increase in generated spam.
Take this blurb for example:
> HP Designjet Z9+ PS Large Format Color Inkjet Printer As one of the most expensive printers on the market, this HP DesignJet Z9+PS provides exceptional color control with a secure wireless connection and fast printing. Without a doubt this is a large format laser printer of the highest quality which can produce prints up to 44 inches wide.
It's literally written in a way that is completely lying and designed to mislead and keyword stuff. It's not even trying to hide the fact that it's lying to a human reader since it contradicts itself immediately by calling it an Inkjet printer (which it is). It makes more sense when you realize it's not trying to trick the human reader at all! It's trying to trick Google bot!
The title of the article implies it is about laser printers or at the least laser-like printers, but the list contains inkjet printers, making it somewhat useless even if some of the results are in fact laser-like printers because it forces the person to continue to sift through the spam for what they need.
The whole article is garbage information and just because it accidentally actually included one or two laser printers does not mean it is a relevant result! Why are you nit-picking on Adam Savage being wrong about how there is indeed a laser printer when the literal whole article is mostly lies.
It feels like they drown out all the useful information when I'm searching for stuff. I usually resort to constraining searches to forum sites but that rejects a lot of blogs and other useful sources of information.
Surely those are orthogonal requirements, the size of the sheets and the ability to successfully fuse the toner? Can’t we in all fairness take him at his word that he sometimes wants to print at a larger size?
I know Adam Savage is an ex-ILM professional propmaker and legendary Mythbusters host, but if he by million to one chance would call me to procure an A0 laser printer to print on special plastic sheets, I'd ask him if he mean it.
Google just needs to invest more in stopping SEO.
A five years ago, I noticed most of the results were all paid ads, at the top and bottom of the page and in the right hand column. Then you'd have a long list of Amazon product links. By the time you finally found the company or product you wanted, you were five pages deep and wondering why it was so hard to find something that just a few years earlier would be in the first couple of results.
I just gave up using it - to me its become completely useless. Its a last ditch resource I use if I really need to find something.
Putting just one term / word in quotes makes it an non-optional search term btw.
They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.
The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.
I just threw a laser out of the window because it got to the point where it would only print one page before jamming. I bought a Canon inkjet and that has lasted a couple of months, but now you have to push each piece of paper in to get it started, and a couple of weeks ago it stopped printing the left side of the paper, so I have to make sure everything I print is only on the right. So, this printer is going out the window as soon as the cartridge runs dry.
They do 12,000+ pages on a cheap toner and are built like tanks.
They use Postscript so drivers are reliable and have wired ethernet just works.
sample listing for laser printers: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=prl
Laser printer listing: https://hinta.fi/g28/tulostimet?l=1&fq=Laser&fg=1
Many product categories don't have an extensive filtering available tho.
Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.
https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=prl&xf=3309_A3
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
A phone call is more useful than a search engine.
I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
Their website is absolutely awful though: https://www.cetronic.es/
And sadly, a lot of companies which have built up a stellar reputation over the years, at some point turn to cutting cost while milking their reputation into the ground.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
Depends what you're buying.
If its a highly commoditised product like an average PC then it basically doesn't matter. Most commodity PCs are (basically) identical and its largely a case of "you get what you pay for", so your budget will do most of the dictating on what your outcome will be.
If its something more niche or more expensive (e.g mid-range/high-end commodity servers), then you've got two alternatives:
Its a tough position to be in, I agree. I think the way the IT industry operates is ghastly and does nobody any favours.The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
https://plumbaroakland.com/best-large-format-laser-printer/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31477038
These generated spam contents are indeed problematic, but if done correctly, should contain zero printer anyway.
https://yandex.ru/
https://yandex.com/
Except it doesn't help any single bit because the top result it's exactly the same "smallbiztrends.com" that was mentioned in a rant.
Russian Yandex is not any different than Google because their primary income is exactly the same: ads.
I tried with "laser printer", and the results were simply PERFECT.
Now, this may depend on one's location, but for me (here in Europe) it works perfectly well (and I'm not Russian), I just ignore the site language, since the results are mostly English anyway.
I got (for UK/English settings)
Google: 5 Ads followed by https://smallbiztrends.com https://www.printerland.co.uk
DDG: 1 Ads followed by: https://plumbaroakland.com https://smallbiztrends.com
Mojeek: https://foodisforfuel.com https://www.cadtutor.net
>top result is for https://foodisforfuel.com
Just looking at the domain it already looks like a massive failure in results. Clicking into the site it looks like a content farm. The top articles are:
Do Justin Boots Run True to Size?
Air Duct Cleaning Services in San Antonio
Where to Find a Fireworks Store in Chicago
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(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
For example, it could be linked to accounts, and dishonest accounts get removed, together with all their votes. Or the votes are kept, but because they're so different from real people's votes, they only count for the search results shown to other bots and spammers.
And at the very least, your own votes should override anyone else's votes, so for regular users who actively vote, the search results will still be close to what they want.
I'm also thinking about classifying results by different contexts. A page might be very relevant in one context, and not at all in another. But do let users control those contexts.
Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.
Actually, I'd prefer if each word I write would just default to being a hard requirement. I could then manually allow more creative interpretation with a specific syntax, like ~word, or exclude specific words alltogether with -word.
And then dark SEO found its way around it again. And now we have a new cesspit, but it looks like Google doesn’t give a shit anymore. They only change the number of ads interspersed among search results.
Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess.
It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
I think a regular, non-adblocked google search may result in almost the entire first page being ads. At this point, the ads are probably more relevant to the average user than whatever seo-spam "top x of y" would have been there on the first page.
At least ads lead you to the product directly rather than make you visit another shady ad-infested site in the interim.
There are uBlock filter lists that help filter out generated content from search results, such as https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well).
I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure.
Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.
Of all the companies in the world google will be the last to employ real humans to verify anything. Look online for the shear amount of forum threads full of people disgrunted with the their poor support response and lack of humans in the loop.
And, yes, allow the user to permanently filter out domains from their search results.
There's a great talk by Anil Dash that I like titled "The Web We Lost" that centers around on this topic - https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/
And Google already has a pretty good metric in the bounce rate without the need to add a "flag" option. That is, if you go back to the search page shortly after clicking a link, that link is probably irrelevant. I guess that SEO spammers found a way around that.
If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
Google is super rich, they probably can if they want to dedicate a huge amount of resources to that. It is hard for humans to win against bots in this game.
> If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
It is something spammers do. They make the page attractive using psychological tricks (like typical clickbait). They make it informative by copying parts of Wikipedia or StackOverflow. It does not make the world a better place, and it is something Google fights against, with mixed success.
But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)
I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable.
How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I want to see? Some combination of clicks and time-spent in a page through Google Analytics?
I would rather add a couple of buttons after each search result to provide feedback and the feedback I provide is valid just for my user (so it cannot be gamed). Two buttons with "this is crap" / "this is fine". Then Google can learn from that feedback instead of guessing through AI.
That, plus a "I'm not joe-six-pack" mode toggle, where Tools->Verbatim is enabled and finds exactly what I am looking for, without assuming I'm misspelling or confused.
Now Google thinks their last suggestion was obviously a success.
I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...