To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find. Instead you'll get a list of "Best TVs 2021" or whatever, with some blurb and an affiliate link, not an actual review. That's what people can make for free with a day's notice, so if you write a search engine that discards those sites, that's fine, you'll just return "no results" for every interesting query.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you want better reviews, you probably want to start writing reviews and figuring out how to sell them for money. Many have tried, few have succeeded. But there probably isn't some Javascript that will fix this problem.
I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well.
What's happened since then is that almost all the normal "people linking to things they like" has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Facebook), and vast majority of what remains on the open web are SEO spammers.
Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.
Average websites goal is now to keep you on them as long as possible. According to some metric folks, the longer you stay on a website the more money you spend there. Linking to another website destroys that metric.
Also if you are going to make a purchase somewhere, any website would try to get a cut of the money you spend by actually sending referral links to the product. So small websites that do not allow this service will not get linked so much.
On a metalevel it is thus that links or connections between items are information. Information is money. And as soon as that became evident links and connections also became more scarce.
Yup and developers have been allowing the marketing and product teams to break the back button as well opening every external link in a new window instead so users have to keep something open to their site. You always had middle-click to do this, but now it's being forced on users.
I just noticed even the goobers at GitHub break the back button when you click a project link too. I don't know why people champion this brand when they have dark patterns and shoehorn 'social' functions into the proprietary platform.
Bang on. Saying that "there isn't anything out there anymore" is missing the point: Google's algorithms created this situation, intentionally or not. Before Google, people linked to what they wanted and communities would naturally cluster around topics of interest. Google came in and made reputation into a currency which effectively destroyed all these communities through incentivizing selfishness.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
-- Goodhart's Law.
Google's algorithms didn't create this situation; people chasing high Google rankings did. Had Google used completely different algorithms yet became equally dominant, people still would have poured their hearts and souls into getting higher rankings.
Basically, an application of the tragedy of the commons. Or: "why we can't have nice things".
But that's taking for granted that Google would have become dominant. Perhaps if they hadn't chosen the algorithm they did then they wouldn't have been as overwhelmingly successful. Instead, I could imagine a world in which there are multiple search engines and none of them are all that good. In fact, that's the world I remember from before Google existed. Search was bad but communities were strong and life was good.
Then Google came along and we all found it a lot more convenient than the bad search engines we were used to. And of course, we all know where that led. In some sense, Google built an 8-lane superhighway and bypassed all the small towns.
We all traded away paradise in exchange for convenience. Now we have neither.
On the glass-half-full side of this: we're getting those communities again! Here on HN, on reddit, for certain topics on various social media (there are pearls there too), on Mastodon, various blog authors, Ars Technica, Quanta, etc. [1]
It's just fragmented - i.e., catering to a specific group. Because if it isn't, it's awesome for 5 minutes and then monetization rot sets in.
[1] None of these work for everyone; conversely, all of these are seen as great things by some and have people who prefer that one thing over others for its quality.
The trouble is, you are no longer "surfing" the Web, you are digging through your RSS feeds and links to interesting sites, fediverse subscriptions etc,.that's not good UX, perid.
>Google's algorithms didn't create this situation; people chasing high Google rankings did.
You're technically right. You'd be more right if you said people chased the highest spots on search engines for the widest breadth of queries.
If there were implicit alphabetical ordering of search results I guarantee you'd end up a bias toward A's, Z's or otherwise in people trying to get top spots.
How is transparency worse than smoke screen that we have today? For example healthy and good websites could rank according to good content, good optimization, variety of multimedia content, decent design and UI etc. You can't have too much of good things and qualities. That would be something like writing a too good book or making a too good product.
Because the rank algorithms are subjective heuristics, not absolute metrics. All rank algorithms always have been. It started with the link metrics, then people started gaming that. It's been a signal/noise war ever since.
It's also dangerous to ask for the exact criteria because they are ever changing. Google et al don't want to be prescriptive about what a good site is, they want to recognize what a good one is. You make a good one, they'll figure out how to recognize it.
They can't sit down and publish "The Definitive Guide to a Good Website". That's just not their role and it will be out of date before it's published.
A big problem is that a lot of community content went behind Facebook. Instead of creating webpages or forums people started using Facebook pages and Facebook groups. This is the main reason I have been anti Facebook for over a decade. Not because of privacy reasons as many are but because I saw that Facebook will put the web behind it's closed doors. Even today some of the best reviews about any product or service are usually in enthusiast community forums. But a lot of that activity has gone behind closed doors of facebook and now reddit. Most of the current thriving forums are those that pre existed Facebook.
That's why mechanism design [1] exists as a field of study. The whole idea of that field is to provide the proper incentives to steer the participants towards your objective. Yes, considering they will try to "game" the system however they can.
I'm pretty sure google could do strictly better (i.e.: better in all reasonable accounts) than they do now if they focused on the users' experience instead of revenue for a couple terms.
Paul Graham says Google doesn't want to follow anybody down that road (human intervention in search). But ISTM the problem is that even though they don't, they can just throw a giant pile of money at it if they needed to crush a competitor. Also, VC will refuse to invest in anybody doing it because Google.
I wonder if punishing presence of advertisements would filter out most pages that are SEO'd to the max and instead promote "labors of love" type pages.
This is an interesting idea because it would create a type of non- or anti-commercial SEO that could counteract the commercial one. However, Google would never do it because they sell most of the ads that would be (not) hosted on these sites.
Wouldn't it be reasonable from Google to show how their ranking algorithms work so all webmasters and content creators know how to behave on the web. Now we have black box that's causing confusion and is misdirecting websites and web users.
I don't think so. If the problem is people gaming the system, making it easier to game isn't going to improve the situation. It's not going to put good content creators on a level playing field with spammers, because good content creators simply don't care as much as spammers about search engine gaming.
But people are already gaming the system, and on any search from product reviews to code snippets, I see SEO-optimized spams populating the top results. Good content creator don't have the time or the technical inclination to reverse-engineer the ranking algorithm (or to brute-force by creating tens of thousands of sites and see what sticks in a giant multivariate test).
Knowing the actual rules might give them a fighting chance, since the bad guys already know these rules anyway.
Some would even say it killed the web by centralizing all the content in the hands of a few [0].
Which is the direct consequence of everybody optimizing to better show up on Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft and ultimately even migrating all their hosting to these companies.
That will get worse yet most likely. Younger people no longer produce public text to the extent they did prior to the the smartphone heavy era. Supply of that blog style content will continue to dwindle as the producers age out. I'm sure there's a stability point it may reach, of course, because some tiny percentage of people will always want to write long-form.
Younger people TikTok, they Instagram, they chat in private conversations with eachother, they occasionally post short messages in walled gardens like Facebook, they YouTube, they listen to music, they watch Netflix & Co. That's what they do. They do not persistently write LiveJournals, Tumblrs, blogs. That pre video/audio-focused era is over and it's not coming back (even if there's occasionally a bubbling up of hipster fakery centered around how cool it is to write text).
I heard an interesting theory the other day: blog viability declined because Google killed Reader. Which indirectly ends up poisoning Google's biggest well, since blogs are an important source of relevant cross-domain links.
I'm somewhat skeptical, it seems a little too poetic to blame Google's ultimate downfall on a decision that was notably hated at the time. But it's plausible. If you want it to be a conspiracy theory, you can posit that killing off independent blogs was the intent, to convince bloggers to migrate to Google Plus.
I'd believe it. As an IT consultant, I interact with a lot of people who are semi-techs themselves- mostly small business owners who are used to wearing a lot of hats, and also the type to have been motivated to run their own personal blogs about diving/photography/conlangs/quilting/gardening/whatever their personal hobbies are.
Ten years ago, the majority(!) had at least something up and running, where they would post essays, thoughts, whatever came to mind.
Nowadays? All gone. All! When asked why, the answer almost always is along a mix of ever-increasing negative feedback and harassment from randos, and aggressive automated spamming of their forums. Loss of the pseudo-anonymity plays a large role as well. Many have deleted years' worth of work, simply because they are afraid of someone trolling through their posts to find something to harass them with.
I was never a blogger myself, but I am sad about the change. There was a lot of good stuff out there for a while, and sometimes it just plain made me happy to read someone joyfully nerding out on a favorite subject of theirs.
I think a lot of people are still writing this kind of content, but you have to look elsewhere for it: Reddit, Facebook, Twitter; to name the obvious ones. It’s also harder to find, but you can find all kinds of personal content written in comments and posts on these sites.
I realize that this is a hard thing to 'prove', but I am personally certain that the amount and quality of such things has dropped significantly from a decade ago.
Not to zero. You can still find things tucked away in a post on reddit or the like. Almost never, as far as I have experienced, on Facebook or its ilk, as the affordances are different. I genuinely think there has been a loss.
It used to have positive utility, as before you were acquainting with people you would literally have had nil chance of acquainting with before.
Now?
Nope. Putting anything out there is basically just doing the rest of the world's Open Source Intel for them. Maybe it isn't the Net that changed. It's just there's way more sharks out there that can't just leave well enough alone.
I frequently append site:reddit.com to searches for a niche search term these days. I think a lot of people who would have blogged or commented on blogs are posting there instead.
I wonder if they'll do a walled garden after their IPO. I've always found the site pretty useless, outside the 'old.reddit.com' version. On the bright side, maybe this will open up space for one of the federated clones to grow.
Which ones. They can index their own, but for the others only the public stuff. Facebook has a lot of things private so nobody can see them except your friends. (they are by no means perfect, but a lot of things are private and only seen by friends - most of it isn't of interest to a search engine anyway but comments of the form "I love X product" could in a perfect world be indexed as a sign of what people find good)
> I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all.
Most of these many more people are mobile users, where creating long-style text content can be quite bothersome.
What ain't bothersome, with a smartphone, is taking pictures and videos to slap filters over them, alas that's why we are where we are with TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web.
It's even noticeable in a lot of online discussions with text outside of these communities; The average length of forum posts feels like it's gotten way shorter over the decades. People have less attention to read anything that looks longer than a few sentences, often declaring it a "wall of text" based on quantity of text alone.
Imho it's a big part of what drives misinformation; Doing any kind of online research on a small phone screen is extremely bothersome compared to the workspace an actual computer/laptop, particularly with multi-monitor, gives.
There's also the difference in attention; When I sit down at my laptop/desktop, I actively decide to spend and focus my attention on that task and device.
While smartphone usage is mostly dominated by short bursts of "can't do anything else right now", I don't chose to take out my phone and surf the web, it's something I do when I'm stuck in some place with nothing else to do and no access to an actual computer.
But for the majority of web-users [0], that smartphone access to the web is all they know, which then ends up heavily shaping the ways they consume and contribute to it.
> TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web
For my part, I'm glad these fora aren't indexed well; I don't want my search results dominated by single-sentence posts and photos. In particular, I don't have accounts on any of these services.
I'd be happy if search engines would decline to index sites behind paywalls. Links to Medium, Substack and Washpo are very common, and if the first thing I see is a popup demand for payment, that browser-tab gets closed.
I wonder if it would be possible to have a big filter button “commercial” or “non-profit” or something along those lines. So you get results that are not deemed commercial or are.
Don’t know how hard it would be to know which is which. Maybe non-commercial : don’t run ads, don’t sell a product or service and provide information only.
The original Google algorithm was a clever hack but it relied on web being a hypertext, and links being used contextually.
The algorithm made linking valueable. So instead of writing hypertext people tried to create isolated sites and boost their rank. Remember rel="nofollow"?
I agree very much with this. It seems that between the walled gardens and also people being so reluctant to have “their” audience leave their site/page/etc the discoverability of the web has dropped dramatically.
That's an interesting observation. IMO, we stopped linking to good content because Google was good at finding it. Now Google is suffering, and we need to go back to doing more links.
Yup, early Google relied on a lot of unpaid , unseen human intervention and choices. I ran some weblinks and curatorial sites during the search wars, and PageRank could only work because there were people behind the sites choosing links based on their usefulness to their audience.
I wish FB would be more open, but since they have all this walled garden info, are they well placed to start a competing search engine? Would be interesting if their activity could help filter out seo hackers.
FB search seems to have gotten worse and worse. Unless I can remember the specific Group where I saw something, it's very unlikely that I can find it again. And they know which posts I've been highly engaged on...
The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth. There are literally millions of Internet savvy people who would be able to survive on what we would consider barely anything profit-wise in adsense revenue, which also usually pays out in US dollars. In this currently terrible global economy, desperation turns the most intelligent minds bound into poverty into bootleg SEO engineers, online catfishers, scammers, and ransomware creators, and God bless their creativity...
Instead of creating income opportunity and crowdsourcing people in foreign countries for common (more positive) good, companies rarely create opportunities for the people who would normally turn into spammers and scammers, and that's what creates an endless army of people that constantly destroy online communities like Soundcloud, FaceBook, Twitter, and TikTok with stolen content, trend scams, fake news, and spam messages.
Google search has been invalidating and subverting their most accurate search results based on abstract SEO rules for quite some time now. It was likely done so that they could implant paid ads first into content, because that makes them the most profit. Doing that has destroyed their reliability and reputation as a search service leader, and they're never going to admit it, but payola is the undertone that is ruining their search results... There is a certain type of corruption that occurs when a company turns away from upholding customer service and value towards a monopolistic "profit-first economic stranglehold" business model... That strategy never ultimately works out well for both companies AND users in the long run. The next leader will likely be a search that avoids the same pitfalls until they themselves become a profit-driven monopoly.
There is no algorithm that will usefully and fairly counter spam based on desperation, companies need to realize that creating opportunity for people to operate equally on their platforms is the best move, otherwise, spam will drive any community of rule abiding users away or into madness.
>The main driver of SEO spam, and online scams in general are countries that have little to no opportunity for economic growth.
Not quite right because cybercrime aka hacking, cracking, spamming etc. originated in US not in East Europe, Russia and third world countries which are dominating hacking and spamming scene today. Main motivation of cybercriminals is quick money and ease of getting away with it since you are not physically committing a crime but digitally/electronically.
It is quite right. Those are the main drivers and it's due to lack economic opportunities.
Hacking heavily originated in the US because the US practically built the entire modern tech universe from the ground up. The US was far out in front when it came to utilizing the Internet and the Web, so of course unethical people in the US pioneered various types of online crime, the US was the early adopter.
If you're an elite engineer in the US, you can make millions of dollars doing legal work for big tech. It helps in a big way to drain the labor pool as it pertains to criminal activity online. You generally can't do that today in the countries that dominate SEO spam, online scams, etc. In those countries elite engineers suffer terrible wages doing legal work compared to what they should be able to earn for their abilities; commonly they can earn a lot more doing illegal work instead, it's a very potent lure.
You're an elite engineer in Russia, top ~1%-3% globally. What do you do? Earn several thousand dollars per month doing legit software development in Russia (with either zero or little consequential equity compensation); flee Russia for a more affluent market; or do illegal work where the rewards can be dramatically greater. It would be difficult to resist if you were unable or unwilling to leave Russia.
Furthermore, the penalties for cyber crimes, and ability to track footprints are much more articulate and accessible for authorities in the US and UK for citizens that hack and abuse US & UK systems, which makes enforcement upon US and some EU hackers much more harsh/severe/less complex to enforce, and more likely to be apprehended... Many users in economically disadvantaged countries use older devices like PCs running older software, routers that don't allow Mac level reporting, and well past EOL cell phones that don't leave the kinds of footprints that modern devices do (on top of the well documented now legacy security measures they can take).
>You're an elite engineer in Russia, top ~1%-3% globally. What do you do? Earn several thousand dollars per month doing legit software development in Russia
Become software entrepreneur?
And many international software companies have software development teams and presence in Russia.
In places with a less-established legal system it's harder to make money by above-board entrepreneurship and keep it instead of handing it over to local strongmen (two colorful examples that have stayed in my memory and unlike many others have become public and have also been described in non-Russian media - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/valery-pshen... and https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-embassy-ru... , but of course those are the exceptions because the usual result is complying with threats and handing over your business or most of it). But it's not really about Russia, it's a general issue with parallels in other countries as well. And of course, there's the issue of the local market; the financial advantages for a skilled tech person going towards entrepreneurship legitimately are less attractive in most places compared to USA; heck, even EU potential tech entrepreneurs often just go 'across the pond' to start their business.
If you can't get a work visa to a first world country, you do have less options than someone already living there; and the salaries offered by first-world "international software companies" in their remote subsidiaries tend to be 'according to local market rates' (the same "several thousand dollars per month" mentioned by the parent poster is a decent rate) and thus not as competitive with "black entrepreneurship" which pays according to global standards.
Exactly. Hacking for hire, making cheats, botnets, SEO farms, selling exploits and hacked social media accounts; practically anything you can think of that US software engineers can't be bothered with, as they already earn a healthy salary. That is entrepreneurism.
It's hardly only shady stuff; Kaspersky, ABBYY FineReader, VKontakte, Telegram are Russian software products that come to mind.
Russia also has its own SaaS enterprise sector with companies like SKB Kontur or Diasoft.
Just like the US has to this day warez and cracking groups, where it's for the longest time mostly been about scene prestige, and not making the big bucks.
I wasn't speaking about that kind of entrepreneurism but about making legal software and legal web services that solve problems and are useful. So many Russian hackers got arrested when they travelled somewhere outside Russia and now they are serving 10 or 20 year sentences in US jails.
> So many Russian hackers got arrested when they travelled somewhere outside Russia
How many? 20? 30? 50? IMHO the cases are rare (and get widely publicized whenever that happens, creating a disproportional visibility), you get a couple captures per year but the number is just a tiny fraction of the actual participants, more like an exception than the rule.
SEO is perfectly legal. So is spamming, regrettably.
I think Goo no longer cares about the quality of search results; they have other business priorities, so SEO works. Spam is another thing again; we still, after 30 years, don't have an agreed definition of spam. We still don't have a flawless spam filter - far from it. So it astonishes me how much email spam I get promoting SEO services for my non-existent website.
>SEO is perfectly legal. So is spamming, regrettably.
SEO is legal but spam is not at least not in US and many other jurisdictions.
>I think Goo no longer cares about the quality of search results; they have other business priorities, so SEO works.
Google cares about spam but there is so much data and information on the web that it is impossible to figure out what is spam and what is not. Another big problem is fake data and information that is also very hard to figure out. Generally Google prefers popularity over quality because it is easier to detect what is popular than what is of good quality.
>Spam is another thing again; we still, after 30 years, don't have an agreed definition of spam. We still don't have a flawless spam filter - far from it.
Definition of spam is unsolicited message. So if I get pharma emails in my email inbox that I didn't ask for it is considered spam. SMS messages are another example for example if I get SMS message promoting free coupons but I didn't ask for it then it is spam.
Considering how much spam Google saw in the last 20 years both on the web and on the Gmail they should have some decent machine learning/AI algorithms which could flag spam pretty efficiently.
Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues:
1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.)
2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge.
3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands competing with you, the time demand may be overwhelming and not worth it.
4. If you are a trusted reviewer or site, you will get economic pressure to review a particular thing or brand you may not like very much but the money may be good. So you will begin to experience conflicts of interest.
5. If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers.
7. Some things are timeless (a pipewrench, let's say) and some are seasonal (consumer electronics, toys, etc). The former deserves a through review but the latter doesn't deserve as much but it may get the bulk of interest due to seasonal demand). Does it really matter if the latter's latest iteration has 2% increased battery life to discuss?
I'm sure there is a lot I didn't think of. But it's a doomed category, unless people are willing to pay for professional reviews (Consumer Reports types and other independents).
If reviews are just a hobby and not a way to make money, eventually you will slow down or move on, opening a hole that gets filled up by spammers.
In my experience, the best reviewers are hobbyists. The thing is, it's not reviews that are their hobby. Rather, they review the products go along with their hobby.
So, for my hobbies (espresso and aquariums), there are tons of easily accessible reviews on all kinds of aquarium gear and coffee machines, grinders, etc. On the other hand, nobody does plumbing or HVAC as a hobby (that I know of) so it's very difficult to find high quality reviews of water softeners or furnaces. It takes a very special rare sort of person who would install these things just to review them. The closest thing I could find was this video [1] on a DIY water filtration system by an RV/off the grid type hobbyist (from what I can tell).
People like to talk about their work too. There's plenty of those sort of reviews out there. Mostly on reddit because like others have mentioned organic search results are completely gamed.
> Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues
Review sites suffer from a singular problem. They are overwhelmingly SEO spam content farms. People go find some product niche and pay some Fivvver/whatever people to write literally fake reviews of products. Because they're pulling all the SEO tricks and are in a niche category they shoot to the top of search results for that niche.
Their reviews sound realistic and viable but they're pure fantasy. The writers never touch the products being reviewed. Many times they'll pull details from Amazon listings (including factual errors) and even other "review" sites.
Once they get established in their niche they'll accept paid placement from product manufacturers without marking it as such. A single scammer might own dozens of these sites, even supposedly competing ones.
I pay for Consumer Reports. I'd encourage more people to too. I don't trust it completely but it's a good companion to manual searches on Reddit/HN/car forums, etc.
Someone pointed out yesterday on that other search thread that [most?] libraries provide free access to Consumer Reports through a membership. I just looked at the San Francisco Public Library and it does indeed give me access to the magazine and a searchable database.
One way out is to grow a community of enthusiastic reviewers. LibraryThing succeeded for book reviews. LibraryThing book reviews are better because LibraryThing caters to bookworms.
Goodreads also has a community of enthusiastic reviewers, but because Amazon owns it I'm afraid they don't have much incentive to improve the site or change anything.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, as you're correct - however to point out there seems to be a trend where reviewers are only given pre-release versions if they practically always give favourable reviews to the products they list, especially if they're provided the product for free; there doesn't have to be an express relationship or contract between a reviewer and a company either, it's the reverse of how Bill Gates apparently has given $200 million+ to different news channels/media organizations - and so they're less likely going to as freely share negative news about him or perhaps his organizations, so then ; this makes me think, similarly to how stocks being sold by CEOs (etc) must be pre-planned to avoid shenanigans like market manipulation, that anyone giving large sums of money to any media/journalism organization must divide the amount up over 20-40+ years, so that organization at least has a runway and not dependant on larger "dopamine hits" at shorter intervals.
Yeah, that's been a problem with reviews for a long time. In fact it's what Consumer Reports used initially to differentiate themselves: their "thing" was that they only reviewed products bought anonymously at retail (no free samples or manufacturer-provided review items) and didn't accept any advertising from manufacturers either.
Sites that receive free review samples and are supported by affiliate links are kind of the exact opposite model.
It does in a funny way provide something of a metric for how willing the site is to be critical. Several video game reviewers I follow have stopped receiving product from some studios, which I think is a badge of honest review. Although it's not something you'd know easily so it doesn't help much in terms of finding good reviewers.
I trust DC Rainmaker's reviews of fitness tech products because he always returns products back to the manufacturers after writing reviews. So there's no conflict of interest based on free products.
If companies don't like his reviews, they'll stop sending review units. That hits both in the pocketbook and the race to be one of the earlier reviewers of a new product. Reduced conflict, perhaps, but not none.
Yes, I'm aware. That's less money in his pocket, and less ability to have the review be available on or before the product launch. There's still some conflict of interest, even if it's lessened.
Only purchasing review units at retail would remove this conflict.
Depends, if someone is popular you can't afford not to have them review your things. A a certain point a bad review will still generate more money than no review at all. Few reach that level though, most reviewers don't have that much following.
This presupposes that companies think their products are bad. If you have (what you believe to be) a good product, you definitely want DC Rainmaker to review it. I think this is a reasonably general point across industries - companies want to get their products into the hands of the most reputable reviewers.
Search engines are pretty good at solving the problem they were designed to solve, which is "finding pages which contain all the query words". But they are pretty bad at solving the much harder problem of rating the trustworthiness & authenticity, intentions of the owner, monetization of the site, etc.
One possible solution to this could be:
- Let the community vote on the most trusted sources
- Include results from enthusiasts that have little incentive to write biased reviews (Reddit, HN, expert forums)
- Look at the ownership of the site and how transparent they are about it
- Regularly reassess these criteria
This wouldn't scale for a generic search engine, but I'm working on a service that does this for many product verticals/niches.
Agreed here, but in your second bullet, people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition etc. It just so happens that these "forums" have built in voting systems that they spend time preventing from being gamed so the search engine doesn't have to.
Not sure if this is a good model for a search engine, but it does work to a small degree in those forums.
people have great incentive to write good quality reviews on Reddit, HN, expert forums... karma/recognition
Internet points are a terrible reason to write anything. They're completely meaningless. We should all judge comments on their own merit and not because the author has a lot of karma. Apart from mine, obvs.
This resonates with my experience. A couple of years ago I invested more time than I proud of into buying the right bluetooth headset for me. I have found a site with pretty detailed reviews and tested their reviews standing in stores and trying dozens of headsets out. I also bought 3 headsets on Amazon and sent back all of them later. My impression was that the reviews on this particular site are 100% unbiased, where all other reviews I read just want to sell whatever product is in focus.
I wonder how a search engine could distinguish between "honest & professional" and "fake & amateur" headset reviews without having a head and two ears?
This resonates with me a lot. A few months back I upgraded my desktop's insides. New motherboard, CPU, graphics card, etc. That was the first time in about seven years I've gone looking for review for that sort of stuff.
I remember doing the exact same thing in the past and being overwhelmed with information. The detail and data in reviews would take a long time to collate and make sense of. But this time even the big name sites seem to be much shallower. Less models reviewed, less testing and benchmarking, more regurgitated press releases and other news.
Last time it took me a while to sort out all of the information, this time all my time was spent trying to find any that wasn't 100% fluff.
To address your issue, we can simply accept that certain information cannot ever be available day and date. The best results I've ever got from Google is by doing
> site:reddit.com <QUERY>
If I want to know about headphones, or TVs, I'll find better answers in the sidebar than anywhere else on the Internet. But, I will not be able to find those quality answers until a reasonable period of time has passed where products can be tried and reviewed by real people.
The issue is the immediacy. We want answers now, but we won't ever have them until later. This requires a cultural shift in consumerism that companies will not like: "Wait and see."
The same problem happens for people pre-ordering video games that end up releasing in a state of complete trash. You can only get reliable information once the early adopters have tested it. If you are an early adopter, you are shit out of luck, but you are doing the rest of us a service that we appreciate greatly.
I do the same reddit.com trick, but for TVs and headphones (and anything else they cover), I can wholeheartedly recommend rtings.com.
They're in Montreal. They buy their products retail. They get their funding through subscriptions and affiliate links. Overall ratings are formulaic based on measurements applicable to the category. The formulas are available on the site. So are all the test designs.
They're surprisingly thorough too--when I was shopping for some over-ear headphones I really appreciated that they measured the clamping force (when you wear glasses, something that clamps onto the arms too hard gets really uncomfortable pretty quickly) and breathability (temperature differential between your ears and ambient when wearing the headphones). These are pretty important for all-day comfort but don't really factor in most of the time.
Maybe there's a hardware engineer out there with a decade of experience shipping and reviewing TVs publishing his thoughts to his blog. He's heard about the latest and greatest and he's offering his expectations based on the promotional material, his friends at the company, history from the brand - whatever. Maybe, if he's built a reputation of good reviews he's got a big audience. Big audience? TV brands give him an early review model.
Modern Google actually makes the content problem worse. When our notional TV blogger is starting out in our world he publishes two or three essays, nobody reads them, he stops putting in do much effort, posts occasionally, dwindles off. In a world with a perfect search engine his early essays get some attention to encourage him to post more, a feedback loop starts, and before you know it he's a full time TV reviewer.
> If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find.
I think in practice this is actually largely untrue -- with technology products, video games, movies, and just about anything I can think of, most well known reviewers are given early access to the product so that reviews can come out on or before day 1 of general availability. That said this does create a dirth of 100% trustworthy reviews on day 1 since companies are naturally disincentivized from giving early access to reviewers who they know are going to write a negative review.
There are still good reviews. For TVs, RTINGS produces high-quality reviews (although they're not listed super straightforwardly). For computer internals, AnandTech does even better. You don't have to talk about the absolute latest product out that same day for you to have quality reviews of other options in the meantime.
Everyone just makes blogspam because its far less work than actually buying products and developing expertise and testing them and writing out a whole thorough review. Google's algorithms just can't tell a quality review from a surface-level, uneducated take.
Its a double edged sword. Reviews take effort so you want to make them easier for customers to write. But making them easier for your users also makes them easier for those trying to game the system. This is why Amazon's product reviews are useless as well as pretty much any other community based review system.
But on top of that you do have the problem of whether or not someone is really qualified to write a review. So Joe User thinks product X is good. What is their metric for good? It reminds me of an LTT review of the Amazon TV from a few months ago. They gave it an awful rating but noted that the reviews on the product page were generally very positive. And their reasoning was that the people buying these TVs and reviewing them didn't have a good comparison point for what a good TV actually is. They are probably comparing it to a much older and less advanced product not to a contemporary one.
So then you think the answer must be get reviews from industry related media. But then you fall into the classic problems of unethical journalists or simply ones that are out of touch.
It's not a question of whether someone is qualified or not, everybody is more than qualified to write about their own feelings toward a product they bought or service they used. In fact no one is more qualified to talk about their own feelings and experience. How useful that review is to you is a combination of the writing quality and depth, and how similar the reviewer is to your own experience and preferences.
Professional critics usually try to distinguish themselves by producing well written in-depth reviews but not from their own perspective but that of a hypothetical everyman who, ideally, is similar enough to a critical mass of their audience.
So it always interests me when people complain about popular gaming review sites being out of touch because almost always it's the reader that's out of touch but doesn't realize their bubble. It's not an absolute rule but I'm in enough niche hobbies to realize that my desires for products are way out of whack.
> It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.
I'd say it's more that YouTube offers a clearer path to content monetization than text does. YT is a much more lucrative platform for the same level of effort as SEO for their text blogs.
There’s top channels like LTT and if what you are looking for is out of their niche, you look for the biggest channels in that niche and go mostly by association (who they have made collaborations with,..).
EDIT: of course the big win of video reviews is that you can see the thing working.
I mentioned subreddit searching in another post - this is a good way to find reviews. I often have other forums I will google search inside for opinions on something. It's more effort than a review site, but it is due-diligence. Since there is money in it for someone lying to you, unfortunately its a "why we can't have nice things" scenario. It is why you can't ask the car dealer what the best car is for you. If you want a good understanding of something, you need to dig. If I see a site with Amazon links, I close it in < 500ms.
Developing common standards/protocols for everything required for a quality review vs. a "candy" or shallow hype review would be a good place to start, making it culture that everyone educated knows about to follow - and then they can only go to or support reviewers who list what testing protocols they follow.
Industry has already done this with the "food pyramid" - influencing, capturing governments to make the food pyramid more based on economic reasons and much less on science - with the government putting it out and distributing it into schooling of different levels, giving it an unearned or undeserved authority which then people blindly trust/follow - not understanding that or when systems and their output or oversight have been captured; why the pandemic bringing the classroom home via Zoom, so parents could see/hear the learning material has outraged many parents - an example I've heard, where white children are being taught to feel guilty about their 'white privilege', or parents being upset their children are being taught at a very young age that they can decide what gender they are; I'm not stating what I believe here, just giving examples I've heard of.
This capturing of the government is why I think ultimately the government should be developing and maintaining such platforms, as per law, and requiring individuals and organizations to in real-time add and update their data (simply example being restaurants, their menu's ingredients, their open hours) - in part to de-risk the government having an unnatural power as "the single arbiter" of truth, perhaps instead to de-risk capture that the government funds multiple independent organizations at the federal level - that States can decide which ones they follow, if necessary, part of why States exist - to de-risk the potential capture of the Federal umbrella; however the system is in an imbalanced, broken, captured state - with the duopoly evolving to be more extreme lead or formed by the establishment, with a broken voting system in arguably most countries of the world, and mainstream media being captured by for-profit industrial complexes that fund MSM through ad revenues - which further develop or mould our culture and narratives/talking points and beliefs, whether truthful or not; without fixing these the other platforms/systems excelling won't be possible.
Regarding finding reviews, I think we have to look at the problem in a different way.
Instead of having 1 search engine which returns the same results for everyone (depending on interests, etc, like Google does), we could have trust networks. E.g. you trust a few people, those people trust other people. From this network you could build something like PageRank, which computes some kind of transitive closure of trust for one given person. This will then determine the search ordering for that person.
Well said - it is among my biggest annoyances with the web. Reviews are almost always packaged into best-of or top-X lists. The quality of the Wirecutter is gradually trending down but it is still the website I use to find the "best" of something. I don't have to waste time sorting through hundreds of list-spam sites.
I always liked the wire cutter for just kind of cutting through the crap and saying “this is the one”. I wonder if we need some sort of thing for reviews where humans filter out the sites that are credible.
It’s a bit funny because this we sort of done by Jason Calcanis’ Mahalo back in the day - but maybe he was just ahead of the SEO curve.
Jason Calacanis was never ahead of anything, except a few more recent idiots.
"Obvious, unactionable, or wrong" is a term of art created specifically to talk about Calacanis' advice.
"Mahalo", a Hawaiian term loosely translated as "who is this freak and why does he think our language is there to promote his shitty startup?" was the answer to the single most terrible thing VCs could identify at the time: that someone would create Wikipedia without a plan to monetize every aspect of it. And yet Calacanis did a worse job than the "original fool", Jimmy Wales, whose similar attempt at least didn't end up as a parked domain of SEO spammers.
Companies like Sweetwater do this right. They have “sales engineers” that help you find what you’re looking for over the phone or text message or email. It probably doesn’t scale but as a customer, I don’t care as it saves me so much research time and I consistently get what I’m looking for.
"SEO" spam is "Google SEO" problem. So SE ranking Optimization is not (yet) so much a problem for other Crawler/index SEs (Bing, Mojeek, Gigablast). You might say that Amazon (in eCommerce) and TRIP (in Travel) have cracked the problem of combining good/deep Content/Reviews and Category expertise with Search.
We regularly see partnership opportunities with customers interested in our API [0]. I presume Bing see the same, though their terms are more fixed and require you sharing more data. Definitely big opportunities in other categories, which are often squandered through a naive, if understandable route, of choosing a Scrape and index route.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you want better reviews, you probably want to start writing reviews and figuring out how to sell them for money. Many have tried, few have succeeded. But there probably isn't some Javascript that will fix this problem.