Just use ddg. By nowadays its just better.

Same, I tend to trust wikipedia and it hasn&#x27;t been showing up nearly as much

I&#x27;ve been using a Firefox search keyword for Google+Wikipedia and it works great.

Honestly, I think a good search engine would hardcode the first two results to be the official website for &quot;thing&quot; and the wikipedia page for &quot;thing&quot; if they exist. Then it can list out the organic results. Just that change would make search 10X better than it currently is.

Consider skipping a step and querying wikipedia directly. Bookmark <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?search=%s&amp;title=Special:Search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?search=%s&amp;title=Special...</a> in your browser and giving it the shortcut w (or whatever you think makes sense)

Is it weaponized SEO, though? Because I have been adding &quot;wikipedia&quot; recently to many of my searches. Google has penalized Wikipedia in search results significantly (at least for me). I&#x27;m not sure what&#x27;s the logic behind especially that 1. Wikipedia is trustworthy and ad-free and 2. I click mostly Wikipedia, so from a MLearning perspective I should be getting more wikipedia results.

I found out today that one of my reddit comments (along with many random others) had been scrapped out and automatically put back together (together with those many random other that is) on a blogspot page. I stumbled upon that page today as I was googling for a very specific topic, it went something like this: that SERP looks really interesting, nice! =&gt; this page looks like spam =&gt; this page is spam =&gt; damn, that bunch of text is really mine.

It&#x27;s not just those categories that are producing low quality SERPs, almost any niche you can imagine is being assaulted using weaponized SEO because content marketing has become the competitive advantage of many organisations and part of the default toolkit of any site team.

Maybe deliver high quality results for adblock users only. Lower server costs for adblock users while maximizing ad-revenue for users without adblock. Win-win.

Not only that, there are still ads on the search page.

If those crappy links have Google ads or analytics then it&#x27;s absolutely beneficial for Google.

Their algorithms find it more engaging if I have to click through 50 crappy links to find one good one.  If I spend 5 extra minutes browsing Google, that&#x27;s a great metric, right?

It&#x27;s been a long time coming, but it seems to have hit a critical point recently where it&#x27;s so obviously bad that it&#x27;s becoming very apparent.

You&#x27;re right. I&#x27;ve been complaining about Google results for more than a decade. Things keep getting worse. People used to dismiss my allegations, but I&#x27;m seeing more people noticing now days.

No longer you say. That ship sailed more than a decade ago.I can&#x27;t know for sure why that is but I&#x27;d bet on accurate results not making as much money. It&#x27;s been like a brochure for a long time

I use `site:reddit.com` instead of `inurl:...` or just reddit.

A funny thing is that the spammers are adapting to this. I found a bunch of websites that all had &quot;reddit&quot; in the title a while back, because that is something people add to filter out the spam.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memex.marginalia.nu&#x2F;pics&#x2F;reddit-spam.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memex.marginalia.nu&#x2F;pics&#x2F;reddit-spam.png</a>

One useful feature I use before visiting new places is sorting Google Maps reviews and photos by date. I&#x27;ve found Google Maps comments more accurate than TripAdvisor or Airbnb.

The problem with that is it redirects you to the Reddit search page, which isn&#x27;t great. It&#x27;s much better for me to use &quot;site:reddit.com [query]&quot; on DDG than to use the !r.

Duck Duck Go is great at naive searches, though having context into why I&#x27;m searching for something can be helpful too.I couldn&#x27;t make the switch over for my work while programming.

You ought to try using duck duck go. It&#x27;s all about being a portal to other search services.Ie, searching for `foo` on reddit is: &quot;!r foo&quot;

Seems like we need a search engine for trusted sites, something like MetaCrawler that searches more specialized search engines. There are some sites I trust for travel information. There are other sites I trust for reviews of consumer products and others for movies.

Even appending “reddit” is often inadequate, as the algorithm seems to artificially limit one search result item (potentially with some children under it, but unrelated threads, 2-3 more items) per host.  So it becomes necessary to use “site:www.reddit.com” to get more than a few non-sucky results.

I had no idea others have begun resorting to this as well these days. My assumption was that I had just somehow gotten worse&#x2F;impatient at researching things or that reddit was just a more reliable source these days. Thinking back, may search quality has just gotten wrose.

Exactly my experience this year. For products I have to watch so many videos. Last year it was easier and all reading.

Reddit is full of subversive marketing. The real communities discussing their passions are absolutely exploited by &quot;undercover&quot; PR agencies.

I find that&#x27;s true in specialised subs, but not wider ones. Like, if you&#x27;re looking for a good coffee grinder, r&#x2F;coffee will only recommend the top-end stuff, but if you search in something r&#x2F;AskReddit you get more &#x27;approachable&#x27; results.

Reddit is a great place to get recommended the most expensive stuff. 99% of the time the best sellers on Amazon work great for me, but if I look at Reddit they insist only a couple very expensive brands are worth owning in any category of item. It&#x27;s crazy and sometimes I even fall for it. Can&#x27;t tell if it&#x27;s marketing or if people very into their hobbies become obsessed with tiny differences.

I&#x27;ve made a custom search in Chrome with the &quot;r&quot; hotkey, that searches Reddit in the past year. Sites are also starting to just fake the dates so I&#x27;m getting really old results on regular. This takes care of both:<pre><code> https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=%s+site%3Areddit.com&amp;tbs=qdr:y</code></pre>

This! Had a printer bug and all results where like top 3 ways to share a printer

It&#x27;s impossible to get accurate information about travel, hotels, locations. Results are often filled with listicle crap that each copy each other and contain outdated pop content.I&#x27;ve become so used to suffixing these queries with &quot;forum&quot; or &quot;reddit&quot; to get articles written by real humans.

That kind of manual intervention doesn&#x27;t scale though. The only way it can work is to have community-curated lists of bad domains, similar to adblock lists, that users can upload to personalize their search result.

I hope they&#x27;d have a human complaints department too, for when (a real) business is upset

&gt; Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings.The Google competitor will have a human nuke their entire domain or business (based on a manual index of banned products&#x2F;brands) from the search results forever, or have by default a bias against ad-filled websites which would remove any commercial incentive for those websites to exist in the first place.

It doesn&#x27;t have to be community based. The search engine could be paid and employ actual people to sift through the garbage and vet domains&#x2F;brands&#x2F;etc before they are added to the index.The problem with Google is that their business model is to show you ads (either on their own website or third-party websites embedding Google ads&#x2F;analytics) and not to provide you quality search results, therefore they have no incentive to combat even the most obvious SEO spam (see Pinterest &amp; image search for an example).

I wonder if there&#x27;s a project like sponsorblock, for google search instead of youtube. Basically a centralized community-driven database that blacklists certain urls (timestamps for yt) based on submission &amp; vote. It would be much less of a clear cut than youtube&#x27;s case, though.I personally just append `wiki` or `reddit` to queries. Crappy but kinda works.

This will block sites like OutdoorGearLab which has great content and trustworthy reviews. I think doing a check on the copy on the SEO website and comparing it to other websites might do the trick though.

The Google competitors should just permaban all sites that contain affiliate links. That will instantly solve 90% of the problem.The list of affiliate marketing sites might need to be human curated (just like SponsorBlock) to avoid false positives.

How do you know Google is deprioritizing Wikipedia?

Somehow humans are very good at telling apart SEO crap from legitimate content even without understanding the content or the language itself - SEO crap has some common elements such as ads, affiliate links, a certain page layout, etc.I remember using an open-source ML model (trained on Buzzfeed article titles) to detect YouTube clickbait based on titles and it worked brilliantly, and that was just downloading some code on GitHub and running it as-is. I&#x27;m sure the same could be applied to search results and you could achieve much better quality if you actually put some effort into it.I very much doubt this is some kind of hard problem as opposed to Google just giving up because their business model doesn&#x27;t actually incentivize good search results.

It is all about incentives isn’t it? Google gave all the power to these SEO websites by making it difficult to get your content listed as a search result on the first page.Google could start incentivizing high quality unique content and websites from domain experts, but they have decided they can’t make as much money off of independent publishers as they can from marketing&#x2F;content farms.

SEO isn’t magic. Google decided to deprioritize Wikipedia for example which noticeably degraded results.   Where major websites show up has nothing to do with SEO and simply relates to what they think is important.

Doman-Specific Search Engines is a great idea. I already use PriceRunner to find products I need.

Suppose a dozen Google competitors emerged that produced wonderful, but slightly different results in every category.They all use different algorithms, so the SEO specialists can&#x27;t game them all.Making crappy sites would maybe no longer be worth it.

i remember a time when teacher would say form a line, and there would be a chaos of who was getting there first.This was met with a second instruction, the first five people in line, move to the back of the line, and last five in line move to the front.it became a trial and error, with the usual kids jostling for position now wanting to be, at the back of the line, then in the middle of the line, hunting for the condition that creates pole position.the idea that it was the personalities and the value sets, not the position on the line, that triggered the condition, seemingly was too abstract to be deduced. keep in mind this was grade 2.so may the browser filter the first to the nth SEO spammers in the query results be sent somewhere away from the front of the line until a match for query terms occurs.

&gt; What if the search index was much more manually curated?Google would need to not have a monopoly if they wanted to do that. Otherwise, they would be accused of anti-competitive practices (since their policies would be aligned with their policies in other services, they would rarely ban themselves).

What if the search index was much more manually curated? For example, say that you could create a custom search index relevant to your field of expertise, and that other users would rank their results to let the engine know which indices are actually good and for which types of queries. You could still game it, but probably not with traditional SEO techniques.

The efficacy of SEO is largely dependent on a search monoculture. They only need to optimize for one set of unknown rules, and that&#x27;s something that is relatively easy to do well with simple machine learning tools.Real competition in search is probably the best way of reigning in the SEO sector.

&gt; Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings.An algorithm could punish things inherent to SEO optimized sites (ads and tracking). Removing the ability to passively generate money without providing useful content is the key.Of the top of my head, a system like the following would be a pretty good start:Scale of 0 to 100 (closer to 100 being higher up on the results).You are penalized for the following:- subtract 10 points for any ad, using ublock origin&#x27;s list as a good starting point (this stacks, it&#x27;s 10 points off for each link)- subtract 100 points for google tag manager- subtract 100 points for the facebook like button- ... etc for each of the major tracking scriptsThis would obviously need to be updated as ad-tech evolves, but it would cut out 90% of the current SEO spam.Can google do this? No, they have a conflict of interest around placing ads. Somebody else, however, can absolutely do this.

Yeah, it&#x27;s an arms race. That&#x27;s the business you enter into when you decide to run a commercial search engine.To me it seems to be compelling evidence that search engines are not a viable way to organize information on the web, but that&#x27;s a different topic.

Domain age &amp; quantity&#x2F;breadth of content should be taken into account in ranking.A fresh domain that suddenly has a ton of content should be viewed with suspicion and downranked as it&#x27;s likely a spammer (copying GitHub&#x2F;Stackoverflow&#x2F;official docs).Legitimate sites that are starting out shouldn&#x27;t be affected as they are unlikely to have a ton of content from the start.Of course, this isn&#x27;t perfect, but it should take care of the majority of spam copycat sites.

I have to wonder just what is the justification for Google to not let users decide what sites they never want to see results from? I&#x27;m sure it can&#x27;t be storage or compute limitations. This one feature alone would make so many people (me included) happier to use the engine.

You can unfortunately see this with DuckDuckGo: people are clearly targeting more than just Google. Python results, for example, are so infested by SEO-specialist spam that searching for standard library functions will return spam above the actual standard library documentation, particularly for more popular functions. Searching for &quot;python datetime.now&quot; or &quot;python json.loads&quot; will both return spam above documentation. This problem heavily impacts anything &#x27;data scientist&#x27; spammers see as important as well; it&#x27;s actually worse on DDG than Google.What&#x27;s frustrating is that these often seem to be a handful of domains, like &#x27;geeksforgeeks&#x27; and &#x27;towardsdatascience&#x27;; for a while, of course, there was also the &quot;gitmemory&quot; spammer who seemed to be able to push out Github results on both DDG and Google. Yet I think Google removed reporting and blacklisting domains from searches long ago, and I think DDG never had it, leaving the only option for removing them client-side scripts and extensions that work poorly. Likewise, no search engine appears to be manually blacklisting them. Yet as you point out, if one did, then the spammers would probably just move to using many domains, which would probably be worse.

Not if the search engine is paid. The &#x27;circle of doom&#x27; you describe works only in &quot;everything is free&quot; world.

Ive been using Kagi lately, so far so good. Fingers crossed for more competition.

One of the problems here is the effective monoculture.If there were multiple search engines in use with different ranking algorithms and different search strategies, then &quot;SEO&quot; would be difficult to impossible to achieve because optimising would one search engine would likely be a pessimisation for the others.We don&#x27;t just need one competitor, we need many. And they can&#x27;t just be copycats, they need to do their own thing, and that might well make the cost:benefit of SEO unviable.

Suppose a Google competitor emerged that produced wonderful results in every category. Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings. The wonderful results would quickly degrade, and it&#x27;s unclear as to whether this new small company would have the resources to keep up.

Google is best for searching Russian sites automatically (and very poorly) translated to my language that hijack history.back(). I&#x27;m getting those a lot lately.

Yandex is the best when it comes to reverse image search, it almost matches Pimeyes.Bing is the best when it comes to video search.Brave is great when searching for controversial or censored topics.

I also recommend buying a paper copy of the Family Medical Guide by the American Medical Association

But shouldn&#x27;t google&#x27;s page rank find those pages most reputable and list them first?

Theres no point. But people want to search using their url bar. People don&#x27;t want to change their default search from Google. I use DDG and !nhs so I&#x27;m with you.

Or go to NHS official website and search there? What&#x27;s the point of google in this case?

Tip: add NHS or CDC to the end of any health search to get better results from the NHS or CDC instead of however many pages of grifter sites.

SEOs don&#x27;t write all of that for fun. They write it because it ranks well, because Google seems to favor this verbose blurby content.The second Google clearly favors shorter answers, SEOs will publish just that.SEOs go where the wind blows.

try and use scholar.google.com to find primary literature about... well, anything.for example: xyz meta-analysis will return meta studies that summarize other studies about xyzsadly most studies are behind paywalls and only the abstract is visible, but just copy and paste the DOI into sci hub to get the full text

I recently searched &quot;Is XYZ healthy?&quot;,I wouldn&#x27;t expect that to work any better than the other example someone quoted above, where a search for &quot;nice restaurants&quot; returned restaurants in Nice. Put some more thought into your queries. Like most tools, what you get out of a search engine is largely a reflection of what you put into it.

SEO is so annoying, I recently searched &quot;Is XYZ healthy?&quot;, then just some blogs&#x2F;lifestyle magazines&#x2F;whatever showed up, just written in an absolutely verbose manner. I would have expected Yes&#x2F;No, not 4 paragraphs introduction, some about the advantages, some about the disadvantages and so on.

Then there&#x27;s websites like Scribd, SlideShare, and pdf hosting websites which require accounts or subscriptions have hijacked many results. This has happened even if the original pdfs are still at the source.

Agree that the reddit is more relevant to me because it has multiple perspectives in a discussion format, but I don&#x27;t see any particularly bad links with the first search. The first one just has more conventional review sites like GoodHousekeeping and Forbes.

Try “best kitchen knife set” and compare it to “best kitchen knife set reddit”

Can someone provide some explicit search queries so we can see the bad examples? Lots of criticism is being doled out in that thread without an actual example to see for myself.

&gt;it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.Uhhh, you can still do that, you know.

Rose colored glasses. Workers in stores were the original &quot;affiliate marketers&quot;, in a lot of stores (especially electronic ones) workers were&#x2F;are being paid to push the most expensive products.Then when you try to pay, you get upsold warranties.

&gt; it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.I still remember being in Best Buy and hearing the salespeople scamming less knowledgeable customers about how much computer they need or how important expensive cables are. I don&#x27;t think there was ever a time when you could trust electronics store salespeople to sell you &quot;the right stuff for you&quot;.

You want someone to pick gifts for your family and friends?

&quot;it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.&quot;THAT is retail. The craptastic experiment we see these days, online and in meatspace are scams masquerading as retail. I miss Sears.

&gt; it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.When you use Google you are walking into their shop. That salesperson is very knowlegeable, but about you.

yeah, had this experience myself while purchasing holiday gifts. amusingly, it made me pine for the days when you could walk into a shop and a knowledgeable salesperson would ask you a few questions and pick the right stuff for you.it&#x27;s funny because internet shopping became popular in the face of salespeople becoming corrupt under commission and performance schemes, now a big part of the commerce related internet is worse for pretty much the same reasons.

I use DDG which is backed by Bing and it’s much the same. Product reviews and some how to questions are just a couple pages of SEO garbage.Google used to measure engagement to try to get feedback on the quality of the links, but perhaps clickbait has broken that as well.

I wonder if we just would disallow affiliate links in general. I.e. you can still create your own webshop, take orders and forward to someone else (similar to dropshipping) but basically outlaw the process of collecting money&#x2F;commission just for a single placement of links. Or at least, force those sites to correctly mark themselves as &quot;Advertising&quot;.

This assumes the rules are black and white and there&#x27;s no concept of bad faith.A system could very well have rules&#x2F;guidelines and then have humans review &amp; monitor the system and user-submitted complaints for any abuse, and harshly penalize such abuse with a temporary or permanent ban.It could end up in a situation where it&#x27;s technically possible to gain a slight advantage by gaming the system but no participant will risk a complete ban and the system ends up working well for everyone.

This sounds more like a Google curse - the inability to do something extraordinarily simple because it can&#x27;t be sufficiently automated.Like there is no reason to have a site like &quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitmemory.cn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitmemory.cn&#x2F;</a>&quot; in the index, ever. It is pure and utter spam. Ban the domain.

I ran into the same problem when building finclout&#x27;s feedback loop. In my opinion, there is no way around keyword matching for search. As a result SEO is unlikely to be preventable. However, if the feedback can be collected at scale and is actually incentivised (i.e., did this link solve your problem ? ) this might actually work.

It&#x27;s a policy problem, there&#x27;s no easy fix.Design a system of rules to rank content. Watch as highly incentivized participants work harder than everyone else to game the system to their advantage.&quot;But I can see these results are obviously bad, surely something can be done?&quot;. Leads to System-Amendment#5796 = Gather user feedback to alter results. Leads to highly incentivized users gaming the feedback system.

In photography I have struggled to choose products, often I have to rely on my experience (e.g. it takes six months to discover that your Epson EcoTank printer makes prints that fade in six months) and specialized forums (DPReviews) You might find lightfastness rankings for some printers at<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wilhelm-research.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wilhelm-research.com&#x2F;</a>if somebody paid them to do the research otherwise you might have rely on heuristic &#x27;pigment based inks are relatively lightfast&#x27; and that at least one other person who does similar work, has similar skills, and uses similar method gets good results. That still doesn&#x27;t help with problems like &#x27;90% of instances of this Sigma lens seem to be pretty good but 10% have defective autofocus&#x27;.I find online reviews are close to worthless because there are so many people who don&#x27;t know how to use gear or have unrealistic expectations. At Best Buy I saw a review of a printer where somebody showed pictures of prints they made where they printed on the wrong side of photo paper and blamed the printer, for instance.

24 hours, any purchases made, and it&#x27;s still a thing. Though rates are much lower nowadays than they were 3+ years ago.

At least in the past (haven&#x27;t checked in years), the Amazon affiliate program rewarded the affiliate for the next purchase made (within a pretty long time window) after clicking an affiliate link, even if it&#x27;s not of the product linked; so there&#x27;s no downside to sending you to an arbitrary, unavailable, irrelevant product as long as you&#x27;re clicking on links when you&#x27;re in a shopping mode and likely to make a purchase soon.

I bought my home water filter based on a Consumer Reports recommendation. I feel that&#x27;s still a reliable source. I think you can sign up for online access for a month to do all your research.I also really like the Wirecutter but I know not everyone here agrees with me.

Ha! I was searching for the same (water softening systems) for Mexico... the amount of signal to noise ratio is so small in google, that it&#x27;s mostly unusable.

It isn&#x27;t just me noticing this.I had a project take me into an unfamiliar knowledge space. Up until... 2018? I could have relied on Google to find the meaningful information.The reason people accepted Google was that it dramatically lowered information acquisition costs through the Internet. That benefit doesn&#x27;t seem as common now. Back to webrings.

Same for my experience buying a furnace. Science journal articles were my best source of information, because I worried the manufacturers and installers would be biased.I&#x27;m not sure how this could be otherwise. Who&#x27;s going to pay for someone to stay current on such things and publish an easy to understand summary?

You guys had a bad time trying to search things that are at least a little complicated and obscure. I had the same experience trying to find a basic brownie recipe last week.

If you are reading papers on water softeners you might already know everything this video contains. For me it was a good intro to the topic of good water for making coffee: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jfElZfrmlRs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jfElZfrmlRs</a>

I&#x27;ve been there and it&#x27;s a hell of a rabbit hole, one that is easy to lose days to. Whatever you do don&#x27;t fall for the Berkey scam.

I am in the exact same quagmire trying to research water softeners and drinking water (RO) systems. I am having to pull fragments of information from many different sites &#x2F; videos and having to discard large amounts of contradictory and misleading information.At this point, I’ve had to resort to reading scientific papers on how some of these technologies work (and how some don’t work) just to avoid the bad information. Unfortunately, the more I research the farther I get from making a purchase. This is not where I want to be, however, since the water in my area is very hard and everything gets scaled up all the time. I’m looking to purchase an espresso machine to get into the hobby but I’m not going to drop the money in expensive equipment until I can get access to water which will not damage it in short order.

The US has Consumer Reports, which is similar I think... but yeah, only works for major product categories.

I have used their tests in the past and I’ve never regretted a purchase influenced by their tests.

Sadly, Stiftung Warentest often doesn&#x27;t have the expertise to properly test many products.
I often notice the shortcomings in product tests for products that I know and use.I was reminded of this with their last test of 3d printers.
Their test results where far from what everyone with experience in the field would consider accurate.

They are OK, but I remember when they decided a Nokia phone was better than an iPhone.Tests usually have subjective criteria that determine the ranking.

&gt; which does independent testing of productsCan we have some independent testing of web search engines?

Rtings seems a similar project; some of their test results are free, some are paid. They have a wide set of comparison tools, they test for a lot of features and they document their testing procedures well; it&#x27;s a really nice change from SEO spam articles.I recommend their tests of headphones [1], I especially like how they measure breatability [2]. They also have a page about printers [3].[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;headphones" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;headphones</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;tests&#x2F;design&#x2F;breathability" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;headphones&#x2F;tests&#x2F;design&#x2F;breathability</a>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;printer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtings.com&#x2F;printer</a>

I&#x27;m in a strange position here. I fundamentally agree that reviews for the most part are absolute steaming pile of crap of a space for many niches. I work in one of the worst - web hosting reviews. It&#x27;s plagued by fake affiliate reviews dominating basically every search result. I&#x27;ve been trying for 10 years to run a company that did reviews differently in the web hosting space.Full disclosure, I have affiliate links on companies that have them too. But I also list companies without them and it has had zero bearing on any result in 10 years. In fact, when I launched I had to beg the CEO of the top rated company to create a special affiliate program for me. Why? Because he didn&#x27;t believe in review sites and affiliates in the space. It took months, but I told him if he didn&#x27;t create one, what I was trying to do would never have a chance because I&#x27;d never make a dollar - you&#x27;re the top rated company. I want to do something different, but it needs to remain somewhat financially viable and if you don&#x27;t have a program I&#x27;m dead before it starts.So what happened in those 10 years?Honestly, not a whole a lot. I have mediocre rankings (often page 2-5) on some of the most competitive terms on Google. I can&#x27;t afford to buy the links my competitors do because they make 10x or more what I do pushing the highest paying affiliates and designing for conversion. The site has some traction within niche communities - especially the WordPress hosting space - because I also run annual performance benchmarks (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wphostingbenchmarks.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wphostingbenchmarks.com</a>) where I document and thoroughly test most of the meaningful players in that space.It makes a couple grand a month, I&#x27;ve disclosed the revenue publicly on IndieHackers (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;reviewsignal-e1ddcc26ac" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;reviewsignal-e1ddcc26...</a>) and it&#x27;s gone down since then.The data I&#x27;m providing is almost surely the most transparent data tracking the industry and maybe the least biased (the reviews work by analyzing Twitter sentiment at scale - everything publicly documented in terms of ranking algorithm and published comments).But outside little bubbles in communities that care, nobody noticed. Google doesn&#x27;t care. Google happily ranks affiliate sites spending six figures buying links off apache.org and other open source projects (look at those sponsor lists on a lot of open source projects - hosting&#x2F;gambling is a bad sign).I got excited when my work fighting against .ORG registry price increases and sale at ICANN (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewsignal.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;the-case-for-regulatory-capture-at-icann&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewsignal.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;the-case-for-regula...</a>) got a lot of press, even getting cited by the California AG in his letter which effectively killed it. I got backlinks from a lot of large news sites and traffic. I honestly saw no meaningful improvement in rankings or traffic.So I&#x27;m stuck, I keep the sites running - part time - mostly between other projects. I&#x27;ve moved back heavily into consulting and other projects because being an honest affiliate - I can&#x27;t compete. Providing honest, transparent data and presenting it with the goal of informing versus pushing sales is a terrible business model. The majority of people simply don&#x27;t care. A lot of &#x27;in-the-know&#x27; folks read and get informed by my work. They advise their clients using it, and I never see any financial benefit from it. The broader world, especially Google, doesn&#x27;t know or care.Is the root problem affiliate links? It certainly skews incentives and pushes manipulation. If we removed them, what fills the void? Ads? Sponsored content? Something else? I don&#x27;t think the problem goes away - there is so much money in some of these industries and the stakes are so high. Companies and people will take advantage of it one way or another.How do we identify honest &#x2F; good content from the garbage seems to be the bigger question. After 10 years, I&#x27;m don&#x27;t have an answer and I&#x27;m certainly not being noticed.

I was always fascinated by the idea of &quot;field testers&quot; testing products in their daily lives and writing a short review about their experience. A cook would write about a chef knife, a post officer about comfortable all-weather boots, a craftsman about a tool etc.The biggest problem would be how to incentivize such people, but gamification and some monetary rewards from the community could probably solve this.

Which? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.which.co.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.which.co.uk&#x2F;</a> is great, based in the UK, not very expensive to join for a month to look up one product.

I unfortunately share your experiences. However in Germany there is a foundation called “Stiftung Warentest” [1], which does independent testing of products. With reviews full of Amazon affiliate links dominating search results, I tend to purchase their tests for ~3 Euros more often than ever.However this only works for popular product categories, but less so for specialized equipment.My impression is also
that affiliate links hurt consumers in the long run as they reduce the selection of products in reviews or blogs to those the authors can earn money with. This however leaves out potential alternatives. More often than not the winner of product categories (at least those I was researching) of independent tests were not available from
sites running affiliate programs.
For example a consumer-grade lawn mower from an otherwise professional gardening company or a tent from a Scandinavian brand.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stiftung_Warentest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stiftung_Warentest</a>

I&#x27;m just imagining this rule meaning the only printer you can buy is the one from Office Space. Beating the crap out of a machine counts as tearing it down, right?

The only reviews I respect nowadays are... tear downs. No innards, no fun.
Unfortunately printers would be proper hard to tear down on a review.

At the risk of any SEO-blogspam people reading this and adjusting their tactics, you can filter by domain, eg.product name review site:reddit.com

I&#x27;ve also had  the same problem. For a while i could get good recommendations&#x2F;reviews by adding &quot;reddit&quot; to the query as i could find good information there, however i think that the sites have caught up on that and now i only get 1-2 results from reddit.com and then the rest are other sites that reference reddit so they are in the results.

What is there to know about it? Looks like it&#x27;s just sand that&#x27;s produced by crushing stones in an industrial process, rather than relying on rivers to do it for you. It&#x27;s probably used as an aggregate for concrete.Edit: a quick search on Google Scholar brings up papers like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kresttechnology.com&#x2F;krest-academic-projects&#x2F;krest-mtech-projects&#x2F;Civil&#x2F;Civil%20M.tech%20Projects%202017&#x2F;2.Concrete&#x2F;Base%20Papers&#x2F;3.Effect%20of%20replacement%20of%20natural%20sand%20by%20manufactured%20sand%20on%20the%20properties%20of%20cement%20mortar.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kresttechnology.com&#x2F;krest-academic-projects&#x2F;krest...</a>

You&#x27;ve probably already google-fu&#x27;ed this, but its ~4mm crushed granite used as a concrete-sand substitute where granite&#x2F;gneiss sand isn&#x27;t available.Most construction materials businesses sell locally by word of mouth, and if they paid for a website at all it&#x27;s old and still using http. So Google drops them.

This is far worse in a place like india. It’s pretty much impossible to find anything technical or product related that’s localized. The only non blogspam source often is &lt;vomit&#x2F;&gt; quora.For example. Most construction happening in india now uses something called M-Sand. I actually CANNOT find what the hell it is except from some company websites or random YouTubers blabbering non engineering garbage about it.

Yeah, I also noticed that for &quot;tiptoi wiki&quot; Google ranks<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github-wiki-see.page&#x2F;m&#x2F;entropia&#x2F;tip-toi-reveng&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Languages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github-wiki-see.page&#x2F;m&#x2F;entropia&#x2F;tip-toi-reveng&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;...</a>higher than the actual GitHub wiki that all of the content was copied from<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;entropia&#x2F;tip-toi-reveng&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Languages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;entropia&#x2F;tip-toi-reveng&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Languages</a>BTW, building my own interactive book was a great thing to do over Christmas.

Github issue clones and StackOverflow clones pretty much dominate most of my programming related search results these days.Unfortunately DDG isn&#x27;t much better.It takes a lot of effort to finesse a search query such that I can get a good result, like a link to documentation or a personal website where someone wrote something up (which is often more thoughtful than what Medium and Dev.to offer).

uBlacklist [0] solves this. The filters in [1] let me block all those clone sites.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iorate&#x2F;uBlacklist" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iorate&#x2F;uBlacklist</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rjaus&#x2F;awesome-ublacklist" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rjaus&#x2F;awesome-ublacklist</a>

Add &quot;site:github.com&quot; to your search and just get results from github.

You can&#x27;t even search for GitHub issues anymore. You&#x27;ll get some mirrored site that has the discussion, and from that webpage, you can&#x27;t even get a direct link back to GitHub.

That&#x27;s a good tip.  I too do this quite a lot; forums can be quite noisy but also a great source of first-hand experiences.

Google used to have a great discussion search mode that only showed forum results. I miss it dearly.

One thing what helps me getting better results is adding the keyword &#x27;forum&#x27;. Usually still have okayish results. 
Forums are nowadays the only source information not spoiled by SEO etc

Consumers laments the effect of consumers consuming too much stuff.Maybe buying more useless stuff isn&#x27;t the solution???

Right, but the majority of folks on here squeal when consumer reports or wirecutter want to be paid for their recommendations. Buying the devices, comparing them, etc all cost money, and refusing to pay inevitably leads to the state we&#x27;re in...I don&#x27;t have a solution for this; I just think we&#x27;re in the exact state we would expect.

Pro tip: You can often get free access to Consumer Reports paywalled website with a library membership.

In the USA, Consumer Reports exists to help deal with this. It&#x27;s a yearly fee to subscribe, but it&#x27;s as unbiased of reviews as you can get!

And just at this moment, we have hordes of affiliate marketers working 24&#x2F;7 updating their &quot;articles&quot; to say &quot;best _______ 2022&quot;.

&gt; They seem to be totally missing this signalOk, but how would they know that you already bought the product? As advanced as ads are, they still don&#x27;t have the Amazon confirmation telling them you already completed the purchase.

&gt; the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days &#x2F; weeks are drastically reducedThis is a comment sentiment (I’ve already bought a fridge! Don’t need another!) and it is a bit of a failure mode. But, I think value on advertising around recent purchases to people is super high. A recent purchase, although often wrong, is one of the best signals you can get. So much purchasing happens in clusters (setting up a space, picking up a hobby, etc) that a specific person is in buying mode for a specific topic is crazy valuable. And there’s splash damage on the wrong ads. Maybe you don’t buy a second rice cooker, but the ad reminds you to get a toaster.

Dcrainmaker has been &quot;pay for play&quot; for at least the past 10 years.  He&#x27;s very thorough, but not altruistic.  There was a guy on Slowtwich that shared a conversation with him that was enlightening to that fact.

&gt; Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than thatThis also seems to be what Amazon is also devolving into. Amazon ads is the fastest growing part of amazon!

Not surprising. It&#x27;s incomparably quicker and more profitable to list a few top selling products with affiliate links and a bunch of relevant keywords, than to spend significant time and money actually researching and comparing these products in a meaningful way.

I never had problems with fake products on Amazon until I looked for a usb thumb drive for the Arlo camera base station.There’s a dramatic difference in price for 1T sizes. Some at $30. Others at $150. I couldn’t understand it.One of the 0 star reviews said it was actually a 32Gb drive that somehow fools the OS to think it is bigger. Not sure how that happens but it steered me away from any of the cheaper options as I don’t need a headache.

&gt; trying to be more than thatCitation needed ;)

&gt; I can’t help but think that Google is allowing this to happen because it pays the billsGoogle is not that short sighted. They know that if people stop trusting it to give good results then they&#x27;ll lose their market.I suspect the problem is just harder than it seems.

&gt; but at the end of the day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than that.Looked at Netflix clicked on a movie that I though may be interesting, it was overdubbed in English since it was a Korean movie. I watched maybe 5 minutes of it then exited. Go to YouTube and suddenly Korean videos are being suggested.At a car dealership with my sister she asked me to be there for support when she leased a car. At home same day hours later YouTube again it is plastered with &quot;how to buy a car&quot; videos. I hadn&#x27;t been looking for a car, never searched for anything like that in the previous days ever.

&gt; Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days &#x2F; weeks are drastically reduced.This is a ten-year old talking point. Why people continue to insist on this falsehood is beyond me. Do you think these advertisers are stupid?-&gt; buy refrigerator. gets lost during transport &#x2F; is damaged &#x2F; “oh, I wanted the 550T, not 505T” &#x2F; “works great, let’s also replace the one in the beach house” &#x2F; etc.You have to remember that these possibilities are competing with other ads that have extremely low rates of success.

If Google really cared, dropping all pages with affiliate links, would get rid of 99.9999% of the junk.And no, I don&#x27;t care about the tiny, tiny number of legit reviews with links. I doubt I&#x27;d see them anyhow.

Isn’t the obvious solution to include the age (or the number of sales) of a product into its rating? This way they can’t just rotate the product&#x2F;brand names.

Is there some aggregation of these domain-specific review sites anywhere?Wirecutter has been pretty hit-and-miss for me recently. I have found my best product recommendations through a bunch of random blogs who have some particular expertise.

If you would literally pay for an amazon filter, why don&#x27;t you put your money where your mouth is and buy from dedicated shops?Initially because I hate monopoly but also because looking for something decent on amazon is a major PITA I avoid amazon for nearly everything. If I need a computer, I buy direct to the vendor or to a computer shop. If I need new bicycle parts I go to an online bikeshop, if I want a new sampler groovebox, I go to a store selling home studio gears. Well this isn&#x27;t totally true as I now favor second hand stuff but the reality is Amazon is not very effective at offering you the best things, and not even at the best price. Most online shops nowadays offer shipping time on par with what you get on Amazon.In then end I don&#x27;t see any good incentive to use Amazon. Some people will say centralized market place but if searching a decent product takes much more time than finding a good specialized store and getting decent product quickly you haven&#x27;t really gained anything. Single account for all your shopping? Many shops offer buying without creating an account. Others will allow you to seamlessly create the account at ordering time and password managers make it easy to manage multiple accounts.

SoundOnSound is great, especially since they still host their entire review history. They tend to show up in my top Google results, when searching for older audio equipment at least. For things like mixers and audio interfaces, they&#x27;ve tested quite a few things.

Yep; a huge portion of Google results, especially for spicy searches like “best ______ 2021” are just lists of affiliate links to top 10 selling items on Amazon from made-up brand names that are rotated once a product receives a few bad reviews.It’s really hard to find legit review sites; at least Wirecutter seems to actually test things, but sites like SeriousEats, OutdoorGearLab, Carryology, DCRainMaker, SoundOnSound, Adventure Journal, Magnetic Magazine, The Loam Wolf, etc that are quite niche &#x2F; domain-specific are where I go for actual trustworthy reviews.I agree that Google seems to be dominated by clickbait ad-riddled BS SEO sites now more than ever, and I can’t help but think that Google is allowing this to happen because it pays the bills. I’ve posted about this before, but at the end of the day, Google and FB are advertising companies trying to be more than that. The difference to me is that I’m willing to reward actual reviews and effort with rev share if I decide to buy something reviewed, but I’m super unimpressed with all the irrelevant ads we still get in 2021 despite having so much personalization data about users.Another thing that advertisers don’t seem to understand somehow: if I searched for a thing or even clicked through a FB ad and bought it, the chances that I’m also interested in buying a similar thing in the next few days &#x2F; weeks are drastically reduced. They seem to be totally missing this signal, showing me ads for some category of thing I already purchased for a very long time after I don’t need any more suggestions.Lastly, I would literally pay per month for an Amazon search that filters out all the fake brands. If I search for “webcam”, there are half a dozen brands I want to see, yet instead I’m forced to sift through piles of junk that I would never even consider purchasing to find what I’m looking for. I’ve heard that Amazon knows this is a thing but chooses not to fix it due to some psychological allure of sifting through the junk to find the nuggets of gold. In the worst cases, I have to use Google to find stuff on Amazon because their own search is so horrendous, with the categories being an absolute joke.

In the end search is about relevancy. Trustworthiness of a blog or article is hard to discern by machines. The blogs likely rank high because of relevancy as well as clicks. Sponsored doesnt always mean that the reviews are biased. Reviews on reddit aren’t exactly trustworthy too - there are always going to be competing arguments and reviews for a product, you just have to use your own judgment which plays into your personality, risk tolerance etc.

Curious about your startup; how are you planning to solve these issues?

Same experience here. Researching high-quality products on Google is very frustrating:- Results 1-3 are ads- Results 3-5 are blogs that get sponsored- Results 5-10 are full of astroturfed user reviewsFinding trustworthy and consistent information is so hard that I mostly rely on Reddit for product research. There is a subreddit for literally every product category, and posting a request with your requirements takes much less time than cutting through all the noise on Google.To make this whole mess a better experience, I&#x27;m now working on my own startup that tries to solve these issues.

I genuinely agree with you. People need to eat, and live comfortably and be able to afford things like medical care, a place to live safely etc.I also think the blanket of “all affiliates are bad” is a bit much. I love supporting people who just do a good job. SEO spam is not what I call a good job, it’s a sleazy exploitation of the average consumer.With that said, I have purchased many things based on what I consider honest good reviews who linked to affiliate programs and I do not regret this. I wish companies (Amazon for instance, as they’re rent biggest right now) simply policed their affiliate programs better to incentive good unbiased reviews sites that Specialize in high quality, and dropped the SEO spammers

Three problems here.1. Skewed incentives. A company that buys &quot;organic&quot; product placement wants to show it in the best possible light, and increase sales. They don&#x27;t need an impartial review, so the blogger has a hard time to produce one.2. Fragility and failures. Affiliate links expire and don&#x27;t get updated. Ads point at things no longer available. Ads spend an inordinate amount of resources on the viewer&#x27;s machine. Targeting is inaccurate, despite incessant attempts to track and correlate users&#x27; profiles.3. Direct payment is rarely an option! I personally would greatly appreciate an option to pay $1-2 and read an impartial review of something I&#x27;m planning to purchase. Maybe even $5-7 for expensive stuff. But there are very few places that offer this. Those that do try hard to peddle a yearly subscription. Also, it appears that I&#x27;m the minority, and the number of visitors willing to pay directly is too low to sustain the authors.I still hope that it&#x27;s Patreon and direct support by consumers what the future looks like, not corporate sponsorship and ads.

&gt; If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.The problem is that the sane alternative, where people can get fed while selling quality a-la-carte content directly to the reader, doesn&#x27;t really exist. If one or more review sites would work to develop a good reputation, I&#x27;d be happy to spend a one-shot $3 or $5 on their (for example) wireless earbud reviews. But this thing basically doesn&#x27;t exist (or at least I can&#x27;t find it, because of all the aforementioned shit-quality search engine results). Someone upthread mentioned a German site that does this, but then someone replied saying their expertise is limited and their reviews in many product categories aren&#x27;t that great. Then we have things like Consumer Reports in the US, but I&#x27;ve found the quality of their reviews to have declined over the past decade or so; I&#x27;ve read some of their free content for product categories where I&#x27;m already knowledgeable, and I&#x27;ve disagreed heartily with enough of their findings to be skeptical of them.When it comes to news and opinion pieces, I&#x27;d be fine paying on a per-article basis, but we have no established micropayments system, and I&#x27;m not paying $10-$20&#x2F;mo for each of the 50 sites that come up in various news aggregators I read and have paywalls. There are a few sites and YouTube channels that I read&#x2F;watch nearly daily, so I subscribe to their Patreon or periodically drop money in their donations bin. But the majority of the content I consume comes from various sources, from a list that changes nearly daily.&gt; Maybe we designed a shitty system with bad incentivesWho is the &quot;we&quot; here, though? I would love to change this, but I feel pretty powerless to do so. At least not without making it my life&#x27;s work, with a very high chance of failing at it regardless.

Well, there are at least two separate, though not unrelated, problems:1. Good jobs are hard to find, so some people try to make a living instead by influencing what other people buy, in exchange for kickbacks from the sellers.2. The sellers offering the largest kickbacks are never the sellers offering the best value for money, because if they are, a reseller can buy the products from them, charge a higher price, and spend some of the markup on kickbacks to product shills. This results in a systematic bias toward overpriced junk in heavily advertised products.3. While some knowledgeable people do still take the time to share their knowledge and unbiased judgments, which is for example mostly how Wikipedia is written, Google and other search engines are increasingly directing search traffic to the product shills instead.I agree with you that, given problem #1 and problem #3, problem #2 is sort of inevitable, and all three problems tend to mutually reinforce each other. But I think we could reduce either problem #1 or problem #3 by an order of magnitude without significantly reducing the other one. In particular, we might not be able to completely solve the SERP quality problem without solving the jobs problem, but I think we could improve it enormously just by writing a better search engine, which is an easier problem than fixing the entire economy.I&#x27;m sorry to hear you&#x27;re back on the streets, and I hope your situation improves before you die. I&#x27;m glad you&#x27;re not dead yet because I often find your comments insightful. Happy new year!

&gt; I am going to remind people that this happens because that&#x27;s the internet (and world) we designed.we didn&#x27;t design that - they did. I used the Internet in the 90s on my 56k modem and it was mostly ad-free. Stuff was still free, but mostly because people created content out of curiosity and because it was their hobby (yes, I had a website and was using frames and image maps heavily) or university sponsored (IRC, NNTP, Mailinglists). I paid 5$&#x2F;month for a shell account, later shared the cost for a dedicated server with a couple of friends (we had a traffic limit of 50GB&#x2F;month) to offer content and services to other people - expecting nothing in return.Then companies realized how much money was in, and suddenly all good, federated and free services were overrun by spam (mostly NNTP). To this day, companies like FB, Insta, Google etc. try to lure as many content-creators to users their &quot;free&quot; sites, while they actually pay with their data or the data of your content consumers - while the data is used to steal attention to show you ads for stuff you don&#x27;t need. The amount of GDPR violations by those Megacorps is immense as they very well know that presenting a &quot;reject all tracking&quot; button as demanded by the GDPR ruins their business model (less than 10% actually agree to being tracked when presenting them the choice).My solution to all this is easy: Ban all advertising on the internet, or, at least advocate to as many people as possible to use adblockers. Only when ads are gone, will people spend money on products such as FB and Youtube, and only then can there be actually competition - because right now, you can&#x27;t compete with &quot;free&quot; services with any other model than using ads+tracking yourself.

I&#x27;m not going to say &quot;quit your whining&quot; but rather, maybe this isn&#x27;t &quot;the world we built&quot;, maybe it&#x27;s &quot;the way the world is&quot;. I know I&#x27;ve been guilty of thinking the later when I should think the former but really don&#x27;t know what we&#x27;d change. Do you really think the internet would have flourished if it was pay per view (or similar solution)?I remember using online services in the 80s where they charged by the minute. CompuServe, GEnie, and even just my ISP when I first got internet in the 90s. Data of 1 but I know that gave me a &quot;use it as little as possible&quot; mindset.Further, if some groups set out to charge and some other groups offered &quot;free with ads&quot; I&#x27;m pretty confident &quot;free with ads&quot; would win (see Radio, TV, Podcasts as other examples of &quot;free with ads&quot;). So, short of outlawing free (which would likely never happen), I don&#x27;t see how we&#x27;d have not gotten where we are at the moment.That isn&#x27;t to say we can&#x27;t do better now but I&#x27;m less confident we could have conscientiously directed ourselves to better. I think natural forces got us her and will take people experiencing better to get them to switch better.To put it another way, without tasting the &quot;free with ads&quot; kinda sucks, few would be willing to fork over $ for better.

&gt; People use AdBlock and don&#x27;t want to leave tips, support Patreon etc for a blog. Good jobs are hard to find. Telling someone &quot;Get a real job&quot; is often not a viable solution for various reasons.&gt; If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.Even if no one used ad blockers and tips were commonplace, we&#x27;d still have these problems with crap SEO and affiliate links. It&#x27;s like with technology products: they say &quot;if you aren&#x27;t paying for it, you&#x27;re the product not the customer,&quot; but even if you are paying for it you can still be the product (e.g. your TV manufacturer putting ads in your expensive TV&#x27;s menus).Ultimately the problem is greed and the ridiculous degree of tolerance of it, unchecked by any cultural expectation of quality or virtue.

For my entire life I&#x27;ve tried to become a programmer, went as far as studying CS for three years, never managed to get a diploma as I ran into some financial and health issues... you mention&gt; I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that&#x27;s the actual root cause of this stuff and you won&#x27;t fix it if you don&#x27;t address those issues.I think the real issue, is, the world is much bigger than the first world countries. I would love to have a diploma, to get a &quot;real&quot; job as a programmer for some random company, to add that &quot;value&quot; to the internet, to design useful software for actual people, etc. etc. But I was born in Eastern Europe..I tried freelancing a few times through gac, rac, and scriptlance which later got &quot;globalized&quot; (all acquired and killed by freelancer.com, yay capitalism).. and I just can&#x27;t compete with indians on that site, way too many of them, somehow quoting 5% of the price promising double or triple of what I can do somehow...So I tried looking for that &quot;Real&quot; job, except I was born ugly as hell with broken teeth, so nobody would even take me seriously. Even one of my professors in uni told me once: &quot;See.. if you could do less drugs and study more, I bet you could get an A, it&#x27;s a B- for now..&quot;.. I never even tried drugs, but apparently I&#x27;m so ugly half my profs thought I was drugged. As far as I can tell, It&#x27;s just nepotism right and left, people only hiring other pretty-looking-people-alike for both normal and startup-like jobs where I come from. Zero chance for me.So on the brink of giving up on everything, I took a construction job for 6 months, which allowed me to save enough money for a plane ticked and my first month of rent in UK. Now I&#x27;m a Reach Truck driver in a warehouse.. making &gt;triple the salary I could make as a programmer in my home country, but slowly destroying my back and knees every d day.Funnily enough, I&#x27;ve met quite a few programmers, lawyers, accountants, pharmacists and even a surgeon through my warehouse jobs in the last two years. Quite smart people, a few broken teeth here and there, a couple disfigured faces, husbands, kids, sick family, plenty stuff...The internet is just bullshit, just like most of this society. Making money, jobs, starvation, HA! I don&#x27;t even know what I&#x27;m trying anymore or why I still keep reading on this site.Sorry for the rambling, your message just resonated somehow for me so I felt I should say something. Good luck to you!

After reading your comment, I visited your page and glanced around. Am I right in interpreting your specialty is coming up with how to turn a better phrase (writing)?If so, then that&#x27;s a very underappreciated domain at this time (much to our detriment, but that&#x27;s for a different discussion). Not just in tech, but everywhere. The entire field has been aggressively monetized to near extinction; whatever writing doesn&#x27;t directly impact revenue&#x2F;profits, gets dumped onto line workers. And the results show.The quality of writing and lucid ideas found in advertisements and landing pages is markedly higher than from say, in a somewhat-technical presentation to managers-of-managers. I&#x27;ve sat through more than a few quite underwhelming presentations that violated some of the most basic principles of presenting (&quot;don&#x27;t mumble hoping the slide will carry the presentation&quot;, &quot;don&#x27;t read the slide word-for-word&quot;, etc.).There is a dearth of assistance for coaches to help improve those kinds of &quot;writing&quot;. And a huge number of aspiring, gung-ho FAANG employees who are wondering why management won&#x27;t listen to them. There&#x27;s a gap to be filled here, and people with the disposable income to pay for outcomes.Leverage your non-technical sphere as a strength (I liked your pull request journey, it is true that coders don&#x27;t normally perceive and accommodate skill stratifications in our docs, a byproduct of the monetization of writing that killed too many technical writing&#x2F;librarian positions in our industry). Perhaps look into positioning the writing assistance you offer to technical staff as a way to communicate to non-technical managers, where you help translate the technical concepts that have to be broken down to you due to your non-technical background, into ideas the managers readily grasp. It would help if you retained a lot of the corporate-speak that Rands in Repose sometimes writes about that you doubtless saw in your Aflac stint, and knew when to judiciously use it.Maybe investigate some offer like helping coders write emails to managers. If that gains traction, offer small-medium-large presentation improvement coaching, based upon the length of the presentation (15, 30, 60 minutes). Where shorter lengths increase in cost. Then if that gains traction, offer coaching linked to an annual performance goal of &quot;improve communicating with managers&quot;.

&gt;If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.People don&#x27;t&#x2F;can&#x27;t pay for things anymore because trillions of dollars have been siphoned out of the holdings of the middle and working classes over the past 50 years. If not for piracy and subscription services, the music and film industries would have collapsed years ago. If you made people pay for the things they used to, they... wouldn&#x27;t. Because they can&#x27;t.

Don&#x27;t mistake &quot;people using adblock&quot; with &quot;I don&#x27;t have a valid business model&quot;. Adblock users are a minority among people browsing the internet.

I agree with you. I think Google works very well. People expect to go on Google, pay nothing, and get good information. So industries have arisen that do just that. I find it amazing that I can type obscure questions into Google and get content custom crafted to answer my question.Often the answers are not the best. What can I expect? I paid nothing for them! When I want good information, I pay for it.

Most SEO spam I&#x27;ve seen lately looks like it&#x27;s produced by neural networks and maybe curated by people afterwards.Have you tried making some content available only to subscribers?

Even if you use patreon, people get greedy and eventually will sell out and put up reviews of stuff for affiliate links, free products for reviews, etc.

Just researched good&#x2F;quality crafting printers yesterday. Search results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that offered obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to direct you to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in &quot;This product is currently not available&quot; site.I am going to remind people that this happens because that&#x27;s the internet (and world) we designed. If you aren&#x27;t a coder and you want to earn a living online, blogging is a way to do that and Amazon links are a way to make it pay.People use AdBlock and don&#x27;t want to leave tips, support Patreon etc for a blog. Good jobs are hard to find. Telling someone &quot;Get a real job&quot; is often not a viable solution for various reasons.If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that&#x27;s the actual root cause of this stuff and you won&#x27;t fix it if you don&#x27;t address those issues.I&#x27;ve tried for years to take the high road, to not have ads or Amazon links on my sites, etc. The result is starvation and intractable poverty and everyone telling me to get a real job. (I tried. They didn&#x27;t hire me and continue to cyber stalk me and steal my ideas.)Anyway, I know all replies to this comment will boil down to &quot;Quit your bitching. No one gives one damn if you die on the streets of starvation and we are so bored with hearing about your whiny problems.&quot; Rest assured, I am not leaving this comment with any expectation whatsoever that it will in any way help me.But maybe after I die on the streets someone will pause and think &quot;Maybe she had a point. Maybe we designed a shitty system with bad incentives and we are getting exactly the crap we pay people to give us.&quot;Because the &quot;high road&quot; where someone tries to add value and respect the fact that you folks don&#x27;t want ads or affiliate links etc literally doesn&#x27;t pay to the point of it will keep you underfed and either homeless or underhoused and then your poverty will be a new excuse to have no respect for your observations that &quot;Hey, people, the system you designed is broken and this is why and how.&quot;

When I do product research I generally search for whatever the enthusiast community lives and usually there are guides there. Blogs are exactly as you describe, either built in ads or useless.For common items it&#x27;s kinda difficult, but still possible! (Printers had a pretty active subreddit&#x2F;community for example.)

I have Brother printer, full can of paint and sensor saying that is empty, I cannot do anything with it, and that is just one in long list of issues I had with printer...

Buy a Brother Color Laser printer. $250 and the ink never dries. I haven&#x27;t thought about printing other than pressing &quot;print&quot; in 6 months.

&gt; I’m trying to addresss this in my own way by making long term product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people and companies did the same thing.Link?

This is something I have a problem with as well. Search results typically include the first five results being paid ads.Everything else for the first couple pages are typically review sites that are not really reviews.YouTube isn’t much better.I’m trying to addresss this in my own way by making long term product reviews of stuff I own, but I wish other people and companies did the same thing.

Or at least allow us to block them in the search settings, but Google shows zero interest in doing so. Just as they do not want to have a flag &quot;do not show paywalled content&quot; which is often asked for.

Seibel doesn&#x27;t seem to understand how affiliate ads work either, Google doesn&#x27;t make money from them. Google would be better off just applying a ranking penalty for any page that has numerous Amazon affiliate links. 99% of dedicated affiliate sites are trash

Even before that, I hate hate HATE how they don&#x27;t have a way to say &quot;don&#x27;t ever display this channel in search results&quot;. So much spam.

B-b-b-b-b-but I&#x27;ve been told that some people don&#x27;t look at likes&#x2F;dislikes and that makes it ok! Oh well, I&#x27;m sure some product manager got their raise for removing such a useless feature

YouTube&#x27;s latest brilliant &quot;innovation&quot; to hide the dislike count made this problem so much worse too. When e.g. trying to make a purchase decision, you can&#x27;t quickly skim through a bunch of search results any longer. Instead you are forced to sit through so much bad content that you could&#x27;ve previously avoided. Maybe that was their real motivation too – to boost some watchtime metrics.

The problem is, they do. Once I clicked the link, all my purchases in the next 24h will be credited to the affiliate. They are incentivised not to remove content about products that are no longer manufactured.

&gt; Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in &quot;This product is currently not available&quot; sites.This should not be considered &quot;especially sad&quot; in my view. It would be worse if these links worked, thus generating additional revenue for these &quot;web players&quot; (pun intended).

&gt; This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro &lt;power tool&gt;“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon.Cannot reproduce.

I&#x27;ve given up using Google or any search engine for that matter when it comes to tools purchasing decisions (other product categories too, for that matter). First use, I buy from Hazard Fright. If it gets janky on first use or wears out with enough use, I search in the forums where the trades hang out in discussing what they use, wince while reaching into my wallet, and pay for a built-for-business grade tool. There are a few YouTube channels I refer to as well (examples are Project Farm and Mike Festiva) for tools and consumables recommendations.I always observe what tools trades carry when they work on my properties, and chat with them over the drinks and snacks I offer them, on what they like and don&#x27;t like. That figures heavily into my decisions.Google&#x27;s main purpose these days for me is non-mainstream, far niche searches. I&#x27;ve taken to looking into deploying my own ArchiveBox to just store my own curated search results that I like. When I initially noticed the SEO spam around 20 years ago, I began to prepare for it by manually saving into text files the page links off of search results that I used, and that has helped me a lot. Ironically, I&#x27;m building my own personal Yahoo Directory. I don&#x27;t see any solution on the horizon to SEO pollution getting better, so I want to scale up my solution.

This is been my experience with tool reviews as well. Searching for “best intro &lt;power tool&gt;“ yields a bunch of low quality SEO that’s just pulled from Amazon.I think the interesting question is this: why is this happening? There’s always been a battle between Google and SEO black hats, but I can’t remember the last time it got this bad. Is Google just temporarily losing, or have they lost the will to fix this at all?

I don&#x27;t trust consumer reports any longer.  they have amazon affiliate links.  I suspect the current CEO is selling them out, bit by bit.  Also, their current web format makes it hard to find recommendations on used cars.

Consumer Reports is my first stop whenever I look to purchase some non trivial item. I typically use the top five from their recommended list to quickly narrow down my initial result set. Then I&#x27;ll cross reference with Wirecutter to see if they are in agreement (usually are). If I&#x27;m down to one or two choices at that point I&#x27;ll try to find some unbiased reviews on YouTube. Not a perfect system, but I find it works pretty well compared to just going right to a Google search result.

Yeah I sing the praises of Consumer Reports all the time. I think I pay $10 annually for a subscription and every time I buy or recommend something I check with them and so far have not been let down. Their reviews almost always include objective measurements and durability testing, it’s really surprising how people miss them among more modern options.

What more can Google even do about the onslaught of ever-evolving SEO spam besides hardcode some arbitrary &quot;winners&quot;, which would have its own set of problems? It seems like a very hard problem.

Sorry I have to weigh in here and say that Consumer Reports is a pay-to-play service now, where often the worst products &amp; services are not the best, and often times criminally bad.As an example, I used them for moving services for a state-to-state move. Turns out the top three or four moving services are merely dispatchers run by a single company, run by a convicted felon out of Florida under a rotating number of businesses and cutouts.When I contacted Consumer Reports to let them know about the many tens of thousands of complaints about the companies they were ranking highest, they referred me to their attorney.

I wish CR did -more- reviews in each category. I know it&#x27;s next to impossible to thoroughly review every single product in the world, but I would pay 10x the subscription fee if I could reliably go there and find all the current models available in the different categories.

Aw man. I just signed up for the $59&#x2F;yr magazine + online access. I believe the bulk of what you&#x27;re saying, and that CR&#x27;s methodology has value. That said the following was also part of my experience on consumerreports.com -In the bottom footer, I click on &quot;Ad Choices&quot;. I&#x27;m presented with a list of advertisers in a TrustArc-branded dialog. To opt out of being retargeted by consumerreports.com, there are checkboxes for three vendors: Microsoft, LiveRamp Inc. and Google Advertising Products. For seven other vendors, there&#x27;s no checkbox, just instructions to visit the website: Amazon Advertising, Bidtellect Inc, Comscore B.V, Facebook, Google Inc, Kibo Commerce, and Twitter.Also in the footer (maybe only for California residents such as myself?) there is a &quot;Do Not Sell My Personal Information&quot; link. It opens a OneTrust-branded dialog with the option to disable &quot;Share My Information with Third Parties on Digital&quot;. It also declares that &quot;If you are a Print or All-Access Member and receive Consumer Reports magazine or Consumer Reports on Health through the mail, we may share your name and mailing address for direct mail purposes with selected companies offering products or services that we believe will be of interest to you.&quot; I followed a link to a separate page, which required me to copy-paste in my just-received membership number, to opt out of this.

CR today: &quot;After extensive review, LG Microwave model AX7J3498-2 is best avoided&quot;LG tomorrow: &quot;Announcing LG Microwave model G8A867FL2-B! Also, model AX7J3498-2 will no longer be available&quot;Consumers two days from now: &quot;Well, there are no bad reviews for model G8A867FL2-B when I look it up, I guess it&#x27;s ok to buy&quot;I like the idea of Consumer Reports or in depth reviewing but manufacturers have learned to game it too.

My friend in Germany pointed me to a site like CR but with a better track record.  I have to ping him for the name again.

Seconding this. As recently perhaps as 7 or 8 years ago, I used to shake my head sympathetically at how antiquated their business model seemed, and wondered when they&#x27;d finally close up shop. Fast forward to today, with bots, review bribery, astroturfed &quot;buying guides&quot;, and paid content even at quality outlets like NYTimes Wirecutter, CR is now my most trusted source on purchasing anything over $100, or a product that could be crucial to my health.

I&#x27;ve got two problems with Consumer Reports reviews.1. They aren&#x27;t often comprehensive enough in their product lineup to be valuable. Obviously a hard problem to solve on product categories like consumer electronics where the product choices can count in the hundreds.2. They aren&#x27;t often including the latest and greatest in their reviews either, so I&#x27;m quite often not confident I&#x27;m getting the best bang for my buck going with their reviews.

This thread has now successfully been diverted from a discussion on Google search results to a discussion on CR.

The New York Times’ Wirecutter is also quite good.

For now I&#x27;ve been using the NYT wirecutter folks. They do a good job posting their methodology and you can usually dig much further for what problems they found.

CR has biases, and they leak out in various ways. When I was doing detailed car-shopping in the 1990s, I noticed that drivetrains in American-badged cars would show significant problems while Japanese-badged cars with the same drivetrains from the same supplier would be ranked consistently higher (e.g. Isuzu vs Chevy light trucks, Mazda vs Ford sedans).

If you want to solve the problem of product research in an old-school way, Consumer Reports still exists. Their business model for almost a century has been to produce independent reviews of products, and charge for the reviews. It is also run as a non-profit. I&#x27;m honestly surprised how little I hear about them. Not that any organization is perfect, but they have been the poster child of success via paid content since the 1930s.It also makes me think that part of the problem is not only that Google&#x27;s results are getting worse, it is that much of the population goes to the internet for all problems. Whether it is googling or asking on social media... the &quot;front-line&quot; information on the internet is simply not reliable anymore.

I&#x27;ve also noticed something similar when researching mobile phones. Device pages that are clearly automatically created with poor and often nonsensical sentences and repition created by some script. And ranking top of Google. Similarly on YouTube videos that are collection of still images with robot voice reading clearly copy texts with almost zero original content. Again ranking near the top for a topic.

I&#x27;d say the web has just become a crappy place. It was better when everything didn&#x27;t have to make money, but was just done for the love of it.

&gt; The web has become a crappy place to research productsI&#x27;d say most people&#x27;s interface to the web has become crappy.

I find myself appending the word &quot;forum&quot; to a large percentage of my google queries these days, to avoid the dynamic you mentioned. This essentially filters the results for real&#x2F;original content of other people that were looking for the same information as me.

Sorry but what do you expect apart from blogs and review sites? Like what’s the magical result here?I feel like the fallacy here is assuming that the problem is that Google isn’t finding the good websites. There’s also a simple explanation that the content simply doesn’t exist.

Also because YouTube removed downvotes, it becomes basically useless for searching product reviews.

&gt; Repeated my search on Youtube to find reviews or unboxing. Most video search results were basically &quot;Youtube SEO&quot; again - the most viewed&#x2F;top-ranked videos did never show a single actual print run or even the printer available. It was mostly marketing websites turned into video (slowly scrolling&#x2F;moving over product description or pictures clearly taken from the web). And of course, affiliate links in the description.This. The web would be a much better place if Netizens didn&#x27;t continue to monetize garbage like MKBHD, Unbox Therapy and others that provide absolutely no value in &quot;reviews&quot;. They&#x27;re all just shills for product placement at this point. And yet these paid for commercials rack up millions of views and get pushed to the top of YouTube results whether they&#x27;re of value or not. YouTube doesn&#x27;t want new creators - instead they&#x27;ve invested in a few that push the content they want based on the advertising dollars that are rolling in. Google isn&#x27;t search comparative to the early days of the web. Now it&#x27;s garbage results driven by SEO hackers. A world without Google would be a much better place IMO.

yup, I was compiling a wish list and searched for a list of good programming books and ran into the same issue. any website that promises a &quot;list&quot; like &quot;top 10 programming books&quot; is usually affiliate spam, with poor recommendations and grammatical errors

Affiliate marketing reviewers are the internet&#x27;s parasites

Github issues are cloned now by SEO sites.

I don’t blame google for this. The web is dead. Facebook and Twitter and Discord took over individual passion publishing, to the point that interesting people are forced to do hideous shit like post 30 post Twitter threads to make a point.Even in the tech space, while exceptions like Stackoverflow targeted google as an UI, lots of content is buried in unindexed GitHub issues, etc.

Just researched good&#x2F;quality crafting printers yesterday. Search results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that offered obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to direct you to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in &quot;This product is currently not available&quot; sites.Repeated my search on Youtube to find reviews or unboxing. Most video search results were basically &quot;Youtube SEO&quot; again - the most viewed&#x2F;top-ranked videos did never show a single actual print run or even the printer available. It was mostly marketing websites turned into video (slowly scrolling&#x2F;moving over product description or pictures clearly taken from the web). And of course, affiliate links in the description.The web has become a crappy place to research products as long as money can be made with those through affiliations. I wonder if outlawing affiliate marketing would make the world a better place.P.S: Whats most ridiculous about my Youtube Printer research experience, the best and most helpful video was a sales video from a home shopping TV station [0], where they actually showed some printing action and handling of one of the models I was interested in.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ytMXgjCReO0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ytMXgjCReO0</a>

Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories