Can you sell me on Kagi? I took a look at the results for "best laptop" [1] and I'm underwhelmed. I see Reddit at the top (but many people here suggest adding "site:reddit.com" to the search) and most other results are from the same sites (but different order). It's hard to tell which order is better because the query is poorly written. Best laptop for what? I was also surprised to see that it recommends a site that uses affiliate links, its hard to trust those as being unbiased since there's profit motive.
Is there a better example? Re-ordering search results doesn't feel worth paying.
Those are metasearch engines though. Take the Google/Bing output and filter it, maybe add some nice features and Voilà. It's nice but doesn't solve the underlying problem, at least if you rely on Google. A Duopoloy is somewhat better than a monopoly.
Years ago I gave up on DuckDuckGo because Google returned better result. Lately I gave DuckDuckGo another shot. It isn't better than before but with the deteriorating quality of the result coming from Google, now that DuckDuckGo's quality apparently isn't any worse than Google.
Personally I'd say DDG is okay. It's not exactly a good search engine (early Google was definitely better), but at least it's not complete crap like 2024 Google.
From my understanding, Kagi uses Google Search as a source, probably using residential IP proxies, and filter and reorder the results based on a few metrics such as the amount of ads and the domain blocks by the Kagi users.
It’s fine but I went back to DDG/Bing with uBlacklist.
I've never had a single valid result with DuckDuckGo, every single time I've used it I had to fallback to !g. And years after, I still hate the stupid name and logo.
Kagi was much more impressive than DDG when I tried it. I'll probably give it another shot in the coming month, hoping that I can completely replace Google Search this time!
I would also add Brave search. It returns decent results and has a very nice way of displaying reddit posts relevant to the search (saves you from having to type reddit at the end of the query :) )
I have been using DDG exclusively for more than 10 years now. Because of that I cannot really compare it to other search engines, but this is also to confirm that so far I have been able to find everything I needed.
I know there are some negative reviews here about DDG. I don't know, maybe it is more about getting used to it? I remember that I definitely had to adjust quite a bit, but now I almost always get what I need in the top 5(ish) entries. I'd argue it also got better recently, as I rarely see the SEO-spam as of late.
The only thing I am still not using DDG for is searching for local shops, etc. I use Maps or Tripadvisor. Same goes for some other specific topics - it is sometimes easier to use a dedicated app. Anything else, meaning some generic search on an arbitrary topic - DDG is OK, does its job. Not more, not less.
Tangentially related, I’ve noticed on the google search console that they aren’t crawling or indexing my personal blog at all, basically.
I have to manually request indexing in order for my months old blog posts to show up on Google. I went from 1 appearance in search results every few days to 15 per day just by manually requesting indexing on my recent blog posts.
But what I find confusing is that even when I do this, Google won’t follow any links it finds when it eventually gets around to crawling my posts. I submit my site map and it won’t index anything new. I have to manually ask Google to index every new blog post I make.
It seems like small blogs like mine just aren’t what Google is interested in finding and presenting to users.
Maybe with so much linking being reliant upon social media these days it is becoming increasingly difficult to trust new sources?
I notice even regular sites that do link out are increasingly using nofollow as a default.
They do the same thing with substack and medium. Content like this doesn't really show unless you specifically search for it. While I understand where this policy is coming from, i.e., to distinguish proper outlets from blogspam. But it feels that in 2024, a lot of serious longform content has moved from traditional media to sites like the ones aforementioned.
Backlinks probably matter. Like most of my blog is findable on Google, despite being pretty far away from being a "proper outlet".
In general it's hard to for a search engine to understand the context of a website if there are few or no organic links to it. That hasn't really changed the last 30 years.
Related, I found that Googlebot only fetches sitemap.xml.gz, while other bots only try to fetch sitemap.xml. That's probably some configuration quirk on my part.
New posts on my blog have been getting steady inflows from Bing for over a month now, but zero from Google. I never thought the day would come when Google's search quality would be worse than Bing's. Google's search quality for the long tail seems to have declined very much.
This is strange. Going by log files, my low-post-frequency, low-readership personal blog gets regular googlebot visits. I'd say 95+% of the log is crawlers with Google coming the most often. I don't use any of their analytics or advertising services. When I last posted, I checked the log and saw sitemap entries within a minute and indexing a short while later.
I agree with the premise that Google's search has gotten worse but that seems consistent across engines. I use Duck Duck Go as my default but wind up having to bangtag to other engines more frequently. Maybe clustering search tools which burbled up in the mid-2000s will come back and get more users this time.
Google caused the fight when they started allowing things that would rank pages higher than others, other than actual content alone. Things like meta text overloading, or hiding gigantic walls of text in the HTML code, etc.
Yeah it’s not even spam that concerns me, i can filter those websites out. Literarily searching for one term and getting results for a different term is what bothers me. Shows that there is a fundamental flaw lurking deep in there.
Agreed. Clearly they're using some kind of fuzzy text matching, which isn't quite working correctly. They need to bring back keyword-based matching. At least provide an option to enable that.
Using the example given 'best headphones, I didn't find the results to be so bad as I expected.
That said, can anyone suggest an alternative method of providing a viable result for such a query that is not monetized and biased in some way or another?
Reddit itself is monetized, but the people writing the review or suggesting products most likely weren't paid to recommend stuff. Not that there aren't paid shills on reddit, but as long as your BS meter is decent, a quick peek at the poster's profile can confirm whether the suggestions are legit.
It's a bit of work to weed out real testimonies but if you can collect a bunch of reviews and use your own judgement as a final filter. I think that's better than just clicking any of the "Top 10 <product>" sites that google shows on the first page.
Reddit works absolutely fine for this query so long as you dig a little, in the same way you once had to dig a bit for this kind of query on google search, back when it was good.
You just have to review enough threads on the subject to build up a picture and refine your search.
I did just this for noise cancelling headphones before Christmas and reddit was invaluable.
This is how search for headphone opinions: "What Hi Fi best wired headphones 2023"
In other words I've reverted to a source I trust. Google's little more than a better DNS here. Swapping out the year, that search term's done me proud for 9 years and 4 pairs of headphones.
I recently bought a pair of headphones after asking ChatGPT, the free 3.5 version.
I had a brief conversation with the chat. It offered some options, and I refined my requirements in response. Specifically, after checking what it recommended initially, I told the chat I want wires, I don’t need any noise cancellation, and I absolutely don’t want integration with any cloud services.
I ended up buying Sennheiser IE 40 PRO. Already received and tested. Not sure whether it’s actually the best one, but IMO pretty good model.
I'd say: Not using a search engine for that. Instead, go directly to a relevant reviewer in that niche, and search on their page.
So for headphones it might be something like crinacle.com (via Youtube) and rtings.com (which google will present when searching for headphone review sites), reviewers that provide a proper mix of subjective discussions and objective measurements. Though rtings is monetized.
Bard is a quixotic pipe dream. If Google's managment are sacrificing the Search golden goose in order to tilt at windmills they deserve to fail and be replaced.
Search is already dead, or soon will be. Bard is their only hope, but of course, Bard hides the ads that content providers put on their websites. So, Google is fecked royally, and all of their entitled, dysfunctional employees are in for a rude awakening.
I'm as rubbed-up-the-wrong-way by Google as anyone ... but I'm currently having a better experience with Bard than with chatGPT.
User experience is absolutely better.
Results: yesterday I had an important query so tried different models, Bard came up with the most helpful answer. I can only imagine that the free Bard version is running at a decent clip, whereas the free chatGPT may be substandard (as I hear good reviews of the paid version). Possibly a strategic mistake by openAI.
Bard is better than GPT3.5 (ChatGPT free) and, IMHO, worse than GPT4 (ChatGPT paid).
I find the ChatGPT's interface much better. Bard is really barebones and heavy. Now with GPT store and whatnot, OpenAI is not making it easy for Google at all.
Google Search could be the world's source of truthful information, actively de-prioritizing the dead wood of the internet as they were in the 2000's. Google could still operate a vital layer in the AI future, where humans and bots go to find accurate answers.
LLMs are useful for many creative tasks, but mingling search with dubious LLM proclamations doesn't get me there quicker. For me at least it just introduces a layer of doubt, and more time spent verifying the results.
Bard UI feels wrong form me, the same way other search engines feel wrong. I can't put my finger, maybe its because they don't seem to stream the output letter by letter or maybe the UI styling doesn't look like a chat box when it behaves like a chatbox?
OpenAI might have defined how an AI should look and behave.
For me, it was about 'what happens next with the output'. I found it really annoying trying to share or export. Bard behaved as it should. It's a few small things that make the difference.
I find that they both might out pretty similar stuff. In which case, I find myself acting like water ... finding the easiest end point.
Feeding results back into the algorithm was indeed the reason it was abused.
'They don't have to do that' is correct though, I don't know the reason for that.
A lot of the pages just scratch the surface on the subject to get ad revenue. The example will be incomplete, highly situational, only explain one out of five overloads, etc. Whereas something like MDN or an independent CSS blogger will list every argument, return types, every overload, have complete examples, etc.
They position themselves as a reference but are more interested in SEO rank and ad clicks than providing quality reference information.
I think it may affect their ad revenue adversely, as users will just block website from which they see too many ads, in some cases people may just began to use it like a in-build ad blocker.
Even without custom domain blocking enabled, Kagi results are still somehow much much better (at least for my use cases). So clearly it’s not required to fix the seo spam problem.
My hot take on that is it's more profitable not to.
There was a time that "I'm feeling lucky" worked well because Google would often answer your query with the first result. But now, you often have to click through a few results, tweak your query, etc to answer your question. This almost always means more ad impressions delivered per query.
Delivering better search would mean delivering less ads, and that's the metric they value more.
I very much doubt it's a performance thing, because they already do personalized search based on account, location, etc, so it's not like it'd add any meaningful overhead.
To be fair it is probably a feature needed and wanted by 0.00001% Google users(compared to 90% Kagi users) so it gets prioritized away in PM meetings.
Also uniformity of experience is needed for large scale (trillions of datapoints) A/B optimizations of ad clickthrough rates. So less variabiity is better and this is why Google results look the same for everyone in the world.
In contrast, in Kagi world, user is in the center of it (as they are the ones paying for the product) and the vector Kagi optimizes for is user satisfaction. So users can customize not just what is in their results but also how the results are presented.
Actually, it does, but you need to create a custom search engine. Strangely enough, even without banning the seo spam sites, it still gives better results than my vanilla google
I effectively stopped searching Google as is. It's become completely useless. Recently I got FIVE sponsored results before even getting to the SEO-gamed results.
I have to:
* Add "reddit" to get any sort of non-promoted human-driven knowledge
* Select "Past Year" from Tools
Recently I started getting really old search results. Not sure if I just never noticed, or they finally totally screwed up their algorithm.
I have definitely noticed that the search results are often old now. I constantly have to set "past year". Something that was otherwise rare not even a year or two ago.
I would like to pay for Kagi. But with this economy I'm belt tightening and adding another subscription seems crazy. Even if the experience is 100x better than Google's.
> I'm belt tightening and adding another subscription seems crazy. Even if the experience is 100x better than Google's.
Search is one of the most complex and sophisticated products in the world. Genuinely curious, what other subscriptions are more important than access to high quality information that makes you even just 2x more productive and competitive in the world?
I don't disagree with you. But I've been slashing all of my subscriptions. At least to test whether I truly need said product. For instance I cancelled Intellij and used VS Code for 1.5 months. Went back after proving it was worth the sub.
It's hard to justify adding a new subscription when I'm getting by just fine without it.
I'll add a quick note, basically every brand that knows what SEO is (and in today's age it's every company) has figured out the Reddit astroturfing. I've had bar chats with people in NA, and some of them would talk how they work for marketing departments of random companies. Apparently Reddit is their "free passive advertisement" spot for potential funnel targeting Gen Z + millennials.
So searching for reviews on there is basically useless. At the same level as Amazon at this point. There will be some exceptions, but anonymity and very easy vote manipulation ability makes every review questionable at best. That being said, it is still very good for a quick "general question"-esque searches.
Yeah, Reddit isn't perfect, but for many kinds of subjective research it's still better than the SEO-fest that's the Google SRP.
It's more "90% spam" vs. "40% spam". At least there's some signal within the noise, whereas for many topics the Google search is just 3 pages of ChatGPT pablum before you get to 5 more pages of manually-written SEO bait, with a small smattering of actual valuable information.
Stand alone comments or posts on reddit are often not that useful. But if you can find users getting into a discussion about a product or category, that is generally the goldmine.
A) It's long enough that it's much less likely to be inorganic,
B) Provides enough context for more informed decision, and
C) in an ideal world if the parties disagree you get the advantage of adversarial discussion (hopefully still relatively friendly)
Admittedly, this is pretty uncommon, but I'm more likely to find it on reddit than anywhere else.
That's basically how astroturfing works though. "Marketing companies" have rotation of accounts that they use to create discussions to make it sound real. The easy ones to spot (again, i'm just a messenger here, but been paying more attention since I've been told about it during drunken rants) is when a reply-comment is asking a very simple follow up question regarding a product review, which can be easily Googled, so the OP would respond back with even more positive reviews. It's fun sometimes to spot it and go into account's history, and sometimes it becomes extremely obvious from just the subs they frequent.
The other couple fun ones that are easy to spot - someone asks for a recommendation, and a comment is a list of 3+ brands to make it sound "organic". You go into the history of the account, and you can see they always include one specific brand name in every list they suggest with 4-5 months in between posts. Or someone asks for a recommendation (brand themselves), then there's a response from a random person suggesting a brand that is extremely niche, and the OP a few days later comments back saying "i tried this, and this is amazing!".
My guess is, most of it is a "long game", as Reddit et al. is extremely lurker-heavy. I could see SEO companies setting up shops and having different tactics to play the game. The other problem is, since every company is doing it, you will get a "great product from Reddit recommendations", as those great companies also have to do it. But it's just a gamble at that point. As much as I'm not a fan of them, I tend to stick with wirecutter / consumerreports as my "starting point" of the research, where it applies. Not the best, but I feel less tricked than going through Reddit.
If they have done such a good job with a back and forth conversation that A) I can't tell it's fake and B) it has useful information then the only thing I have to say is
-edit- also my point was about conversations that are significantly longer and more substantive than the ones you describe. That actually get into details, with back and forth.
Even Yandex now gives better results. Now while I love Russian engineering, Yandex never worked well for English searches and if that is beating Google I'm not sure about Google's future.
I think what recently google has started doing is over index on Forbes, medium etc to fight spam which means all the articles are just that typical forbes-y and medium-y lacking any human element or insight.
The problem with spam is so much that they are kinda using these large well known sites as a filter which means the whole point of a search engine is lost as the rest of the internet is not available.
> Recently I started getting really old search results.
Good to see a confirmation of this. I'm getting old results as well and I can be pretty sure that at least one year ago the quality of the search was much much higher than it is today. Last year I also remember seeing intermittenlty for a brief period of time some sort of feedback popup from Google to rate the quality of the search.
I am using more often bing chat now compared to google. Mainly for the GPT integration. Yes. Bard exists and is comparable. But I don't like where Google is going culturally as well as technologically. Starting with the weird firings lately to the incognito tracking.
Is there a search engine that actually and consistently looks for what you search for now?
Once in a while I try Google but very frequently it completely ignores some of my keywords and I have to click the 'include XXXX' and try again. WTF GOOGLE WHY DO YOU STILL DO THIS
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I mumble "I typed it for a reason" and "I even made it the first term" more than once a day.
Terms with low cardinality should never be automatically removed, or at least results without those terms should be sorted to the bottom of the result set.
And "verbatim search" is no answer as long as there is no way to enable that mode for all future searches.
Kagi works like how Google used to a few years ago if they had just kept improving what’s useful to users. You can pry my Kagi subscription from my cold dead hands.
> "the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing
I say odd, because when the associate/affiliates program was started at amzn (1995), this was precisely the outcome we expected and anticipated and even desired.
It's not clear to me that it is a huge issue if the affiliate marketing is via a "neutral" 3rd party. If I honestly review Sony MDR-7508's as the best headphones, and I get my X% cut from amzn or wherever should anyone buy a pair using a link from my review page, it doesn't seem to me that anything particularly undesirable has happened.
Now on the other hand, if Sony pays me some negotiable sum to rank them the best whenever a sale occurs from my page, or even worse, just outright pays me to say that, then we're in a distinctly bad place.
Assuming you accept my framing, then we face the difficulty of being able to differentiate these two conditions, which is non-trivial to do.
Not related to the actual topic here, but I’d been eyeing those exact headphones for years but never bought them because I thought they were for musicians or something. I recently got them (and a cheap DAC for my desk hooked to my MacBook Pro) and just…wow. With the right equalizer settings, you can hear whole new parts of songs you didn’t/couldn’t know were there.
I still travel with just AirPods because they’re so compact and easy, but I’m in love with those Sonys.
My problem with those headphones is that I don't find them comfortable for long periods of wear, mostly because they are too warm/hot. The sound is awesome, but I can't do much more than 30 minutes with them. I suspect there are some Sennheisers that may be better in this regard, and roughly as good acoustically.
I also have a pair of Sony noise-cancelling headphones, and ironically those are not only more comfortable, but their tech specs at least match the MDR-7508's.
I don’t think they’re losing the fight, I think they’re not fighting it because the spammers that bubble up are profitable to them in one way or another. I switched to Kagi and no longer have this problem.
Google’s problem is that success isn’t being measured by quality, it’s being measured by revenues. And revenues keep going up and to the right.
Everyone that says Sundar is a bad CEO, Google quality has gone down, etc have no quantitative proof besides their “feelings”. The overwhelming proof in terms of revenues is that everything is going well for a multi-trillion dollar company. Globally ads spend keeps increasing.
Until the revenues start going down and subsequently the stock price, then the people who would do anything to change things don’t care.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadI personally don’t.
Is there a better example? Re-ordering search results doesn't feel worth paying.
[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop&r=us&sh=MuemT1_yBcwqyx...
It won’t give you “personalized results” like Google so you might have to adapt to that.
It’s fine but I went back to DDG/Bing with uBlacklist.
Kagi was much more impressive than DDG when I tried it. I'll probably give it another shot in the coming month, hoping that I can completely replace Google Search this time!
I know there are some negative reviews here about DDG. I don't know, maybe it is more about getting used to it? I remember that I definitely had to adjust quite a bit, but now I almost always get what I need in the top 5(ish) entries. I'd argue it also got better recently, as I rarely see the SEO-spam as of late.
The only thing I am still not using DDG for is searching for local shops, etc. I use Maps or Tripadvisor. Same goes for some other specific topics - it is sometimes easier to use a dedicated app. Anything else, meaning some generic search on an arbitrary topic - DDG is OK, does its job. Not more, not less.
I have to manually request indexing in order for my months old blog posts to show up on Google. I went from 1 appearance in search results every few days to 15 per day just by manually requesting indexing on my recent blog posts.
But what I find confusing is that even when I do this, Google won’t follow any links it finds when it eventually gets around to crawling my posts. I submit my site map and it won’t index anything new. I have to manually ask Google to index every new blog post I make.
It seems like small blogs like mine just aren’t what Google is interested in finding and presenting to users.
In general it's hard to for a search engine to understand the context of a website if there are few or no organic links to it. That hasn't really changed the last 30 years.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Related, I found that Googlebot only fetches sitemap.xml.gz, while other bots only try to fetch sitemap.xml. That's probably some configuration quirk on my part.
I agree with the premise that Google's search has gotten worse but that seems consistent across engines. I use Duck Duck Go as my default but wind up having to bangtag to other engines more frequently. Maybe clustering search tools which burbled up in the mid-2000s will come back and get more users this time.
It seemed like a great way to make endless cash, but they double dipped and ended up breaking the web by hyper incentivizing trash content.
As predicted by many, DoubleClick killed Google. It took longer than people predicted, but you can’t play both sides forever.
Now what?
e.g., fuzzy text matching => "fuzzy text matching"
It's back to good old word of mouth for me.
It's a bit of work to weed out real testimonies but if you can collect a bunch of reviews and use your own judgement as a final filter. I think that's better than just clicking any of the "Top 10 <product>" sites that google shows on the first page.
You just have to review enough threads on the subject to build up a picture and refine your search.
I did just this for noise cancelling headphones before Christmas and reddit was invaluable.
Goes for search results, AI, product recommendations, etc.
However, the Reddit search is atrocious, so you'll either have to try your luck googling, or spend some time in the subreddit.
headphones 2023 OR 2024 review "sound" "noise" "wired" OR "wireless" "battery" -amazon -affiliate -commissions
Aaaand the top result is a page clearly written by GPT. So no, I can't suggest any good alternative. It's all trash.
In other words I've reverted to a source I trust. Google's little more than a better DNS here. Swapping out the year, that search term's done me proud for 9 years and 4 pairs of headphones.
I had a brief conversation with the chat. It offered some options, and I refined my requirements in response. Specifically, after checking what it recommended initially, I told the chat I want wires, I don’t need any noise cancellation, and I absolutely don’t want integration with any cloud services.
I ended up buying Sennheiser IE 40 PRO. Already received and tested. Not sure whether it’s actually the best one, but IMO pretty good model.
So for headphones it might be something like crinacle.com (via Youtube) and rtings.com (which google will present when searching for headphone review sites), reviewers that provide a proper mix of subjective discussions and objective measurements. Though rtings is monetized.
User experience is absolutely better.
Results: yesterday I had an important query so tried different models, Bard came up with the most helpful answer. I can only imagine that the free Bard version is running at a decent clip, whereas the free chatGPT may be substandard (as I hear good reviews of the paid version). Possibly a strategic mistake by openAI.
I find the ChatGPT's interface much better. Bard is really barebones and heavy. Now with GPT store and whatnot, OpenAI is not making it easy for Google at all.
LLMs are useful for many creative tasks, but mingling search with dubious LLM proclamations doesn't get me there quicker. For me at least it just introduces a layer of doubt, and more time spent verifying the results.
OpenAI might have defined how an AI should look and behave.
I find that they both might out pretty similar stuff. In which case, I find myself acting like water ... finding the easiest end point.
Google has no incentive to fight spam because every time someone clicks in a spam link, this link is full of ads served by Google
Simply being able to block low quality domains from showing up again would go a long way to cleaning things up.
Me: Ok, please block Pinterest, W3schools, ...
Google: Sorry, can't do that.
They position themselves as a reference but are more interested in SEO rank and ad clicks than providing quality reference information.
Also many of the worst offenders seem to be spam sites with unique URLs. Too many for me to individually make a dent.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...
For a given domain, you can select: block, lower, normal, higher, and pin to help you rank results on your personal preferences.
There was a time that "I'm feeling lucky" worked well because Google would often answer your query with the first result. But now, you often have to click through a few results, tweak your query, etc to answer your question. This almost always means more ad impressions delivered per query.
Delivering better search would mean delivering less ads, and that's the metric they value more.
I very much doubt it's a performance thing, because they already do personalized search based on account, location, etc, so it's not like it'd add any meaningful overhead.
Also uniformity of experience is needed for large scale (trillions of datapoints) A/B optimizations of ad clickthrough rates. So less variabiity is better and this is why Google results look the same for everyone in the world.
In contrast, in Kagi world, user is in the center of it (as they are the ones paying for the product) and the vector Kagi optimizes for is user satisfaction. So users can customize not just what is in their results but also how the results are presented.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39031691
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39040559
Google Search Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39040559 - Jan 2024 (23 comments)
Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results are getting worse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39031691 - Jan 2024 (66 comments)
Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497 - Jan 2024 (271 comments)
I have to:
* Add "reddit" to get any sort of non-promoted human-driven knowledge
* Select "Past Year" from Tools
Recently I started getting really old search results. Not sure if I just never noticed, or they finally totally screwed up their algorithm.
I would like to pay for Kagi. But with this economy I'm belt tightening and adding another subscription seems crazy. Even if the experience is 100x better than Google's.
Search is one of the most complex and sophisticated products in the world. Genuinely curious, what other subscriptions are more important than access to high quality information that makes you even just 2x more productive and competitive in the world?
That's an argument, not a question.
I've been to real trials. They don't bother with all that verbiage. "Leading!" is all they have to say.)
It's hard to justify adding a new subscription when I'm getting by just fine without it.
Do note that depending on which sub you venture in to, it might be very much promoted stuff
Random video game subs tend to be pretty good though
So searching for reviews on there is basically useless. At the same level as Amazon at this point. There will be some exceptions, but anonymity and very easy vote manipulation ability makes every review questionable at best. That being said, it is still very good for a quick "general question"-esque searches.
It's more "90% spam" vs. "40% spam". At least there's some signal within the noise, whereas for many topics the Google search is just 3 pages of ChatGPT pablum before you get to 5 more pages of manually-written SEO bait, with a small smattering of actual valuable information.
A) It's long enough that it's much less likely to be inorganic,
B) Provides enough context for more informed decision, and
C) in an ideal world if the parties disagree you get the advantage of adversarial discussion (hopefully still relatively friendly)
Admittedly, this is pretty uncommon, but I'm more likely to find it on reddit than anywhere else.
The other couple fun ones that are easy to spot - someone asks for a recommendation, and a comment is a list of 3+ brands to make it sound "organic". You go into the history of the account, and you can see they always include one specific brand name in every list they suggest with 4-5 months in between posts. Or someone asks for a recommendation (brand themselves), then there's a response from a random person suggesting a brand that is extremely niche, and the OP a few days later comments back saying "i tried this, and this is amazing!".
My guess is, most of it is a "long game", as Reddit et al. is extremely lurker-heavy. I could see SEO companies setting up shops and having different tactics to play the game. The other problem is, since every company is doing it, you will get a "great product from Reddit recommendations", as those great companies also have to do it. But it's just a gamble at that point. As much as I'm not a fan of them, I tend to stick with wirecutter / consumerreports as my "starting point" of the research, where it applies. Not the best, but I feel less tricked than going through Reddit.
https://xkcd.com/810/
-edit- also my point was about conversations that are significantly longer and more substantive than the ones you describe. That actually get into details, with back and forth.
Google search tries and fails to interpret what you want to search for, where there was no interpretation needed in the first place.
The problem with spam is so much that they are kinda using these large well known sites as a filter which means the whole point of a search engine is lost as the rest of the internet is not available.
Good to see a confirmation of this. I'm getting old results as well and I can be pretty sure that at least one year ago the quality of the search was much much higher than it is today. Last year I also remember seeing intermittenlty for a brief period of time some sort of feedback popup from Google to rate the quality of the search.
you realize that now comments on reddit are SEO spam too?
Alphabet has taken its eye off the battle.
Once in a while I try Google but very frequently it completely ignores some of my keywords and I have to click the 'include XXXX' and try again. WTF GOOGLE WHY DO YOU STILL DO THIS
Terms with low cardinality should never be automatically removed, or at least results without those terms should be sorted to the bottom of the result set.
And "verbatim search" is no answer as long as there is no way to enable that mode for all future searches.
> "the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines (SERPs) use affiliate marketing
I say odd, because when the associate/affiliates program was started at amzn (1995), this was precisely the outcome we expected and anticipated and even desired.
It's not clear to me that it is a huge issue if the affiliate marketing is via a "neutral" 3rd party. If I honestly review Sony MDR-7508's as the best headphones, and I get my X% cut from amzn or wherever should anyone buy a pair using a link from my review page, it doesn't seem to me that anything particularly undesirable has happened.
Now on the other hand, if Sony pays me some negotiable sum to rank them the best whenever a sale occurs from my page, or even worse, just outright pays me to say that, then we're in a distinctly bad place.
Assuming you accept my framing, then we face the difficulty of being able to differentiate these two conditions, which is non-trivial to do.
I still travel with just AirPods because they’re so compact and easy, but I’m in love with those Sonys.
I also have a pair of Sony noise-cancelling headphones, and ironically those are not only more comfortable, but their tech specs at least match the MDR-7508's.
Everyone that says Sundar is a bad CEO, Google quality has gone down, etc have no quantitative proof besides their “feelings”. The overwhelming proof in terms of revenues is that everything is going well for a multi-trillion dollar company. Globally ads spend keeps increasing.
Until the revenues start going down and subsequently the stock price, then the people who would do anything to change things don’t care.