Their complaint is legit though. Their niche is being invaded by crappy sites that pretend to do what they do, the layperson can tell no difference, and Google pushes them all to the top anyway.
Testing products is expensive and nobody is really willing to pay for somebody else to do it. Google has just made it completely unviable to survive on clicks. At this point they might as well just be generating all the content with an LLM and keep the money for themselves.
SEO has been a plague in search engines for almost as long as they have existed. Unfortunately combatting it is an endless cat and mouse game, as there will always be some who will devise new ways to game the system. With how commercialised the web has become there’s enormous incentive to do so.
I’m also not convinced Google has much intention of really fixing it. They already have a monopoly on search, and as an advertising company are unlikely to want to upset the big media companies exploiting their search engine.
Google actually has an incentive not to make search too good. That means less time looking through search results, seeing ads, and less time hopping between 5 different sites trying to find what you need, seeing ads on each one.
I moved from Google Search to Kagi, and I really like it. It's a bit expensive though the experience is really nice, and you know where you stand with them as a customer, regarding their priorities/motivations.
I'd use Kagi, but anonymous searching is impossible because you need an accoint to use the search, due to it being a paid service. I just have to take their word that they maintain privacy. I don't trust any company's word for shit. Also AFAIK it's not open source, so I can't self host it either.
Also, it's quite expensive when other options are free. I get why they do it this way, but it's just not for me.
And Google is still better at getting me what I want than their competitor. I get what I want from Bing 2/10 times and Bing fails every time it's a deeper topic
alt-text: Google results for “best air purifiers "dotdash meredith"” showing People, Better Homes & Gardens, and a dozen other brands showing up, all reusing the same low-quality content
I just use it for opening the door to learn about features (not brands/models) that I didn't know about previously. Then I do searches for those features and try to find forum results (usually Reddit unfortunately). It seems to work decently well
Nothing in that article is a surprise, its almost as bad just looking up general info lately. I have been doing some searching in both google and yandex and often get better results in yandex.
I only trust impassioned long form comments from people who are either livid or in love.
Nobody is gonna spoof a review where a given air conditioner let's them sloppy fuck their overweight cougar hookup more comfortably, or how a shitty frying pan got them closer to bludgeoning their loud neighbors with it, and perhaps it's only redeeming value would be as said blunt instrument of violence.
When you find those reviews you know you are on it.
Goshdarnit, I've seen these weirdo webpages before, which would talk at length about how they've conducted tests, but then not show any data. I was seriously wondering, why they were bothering, but of course, it's some shitty metric they have to fulfill.
Part of this is also our fault for how we allowed our browsing habits to change and adjust and make the issue worse. Like how many of us will just search random things even if we want to search in or go to a specific website as a goto?
In the old days we might search once or find the website through word of mouth or links on other affiliated websites, and then bookmark good website and search there first before turning to google. Now? Lord knows I immediately google even if I know I can go to another website. Instead of browsing websites directly we sit on social media, be it reddit twitter facebook and are spoonfed our content without actually going to the original source or if we do just to the page and never to check. g like rolling stone reviewing air purifiers.
Some of this is the result of convenient access, some of this is thanks to addictive predatory design, and for those who held out as long as possible the companies in charge of content sites would pivot to cater towards social media and search algorithms and enshitify their homepage making it harder to bother.
Just add "Reddit" tag to everything and cross link multiple posts talking about that content. Basically do the work for me of having to filter through so many threads and answers. Yeah sucks to be this co depending but this would generate clicks and catch people who search for "product x Reddit". Of course you lose those who filter by site:reddit.com.
I also hope Lemmy gets big to get rid of this Reddit codependency, because I want way less manipulated information but not from Reddit which becomes more and more astroturfed. I think it's a pipedream to get completely rid of it but at least these responses are useful most of the time and not SEO optimized.
It is worth noting that marketing companies have picked up on this and they will often create oddly specific questions on Reddit then answer them with a bought account.
Yeah there are multiple ways. Nevertheless it's public, so people can vote on stuff and reply when the response is bullshit. That's why I think visible downvotes are very important. If you have an answer botted to be on spot one of the replies but it has like 200% the downvotes, it's possible that there's something fishy going on and one can evaluate. That's not possible if you can't see this addition info and only the sum of votes.
This is illustrated pretty nicely at the end of the article; where they highlight just such a comment, the link it posted, and the suspended account page for the user.
Picked it up years ago too. Its worth it to check multiple threads, and read multiple comments, and then do an additional deeper dive from there, but the amount of guerilla marketing and astro turfing on social media is astounding. I do miss those early days when the old farts in charge of marketing didnt pay attention to message boards.
They stored all the edits, from before the API changes. They can and have undeleted entire accounts. I agree that deleting the account would be nice, but they acted in bad faith from the Digg migration that I saw. I don't believe that deleting the accounts worked, cause I did and I can find my old posts again.
Top 10 lists have always been popular. Even before the internet you'd see it in magazines and on tv. Honestly if it's well done I dont think theyre inherently bad especially if it's clear the list is just a rough list and not a scientific ranking. I enjoy seeing articles listing movies of a type of genre or from an actor or from a director or etc in order to add to my movies to watch list for example.
The problem lies when its half assed or especially when its unrelated. Like how in the OP link rolling stones air purifiers. Or if you try and look up info on a game that happens to be or have had recently trended and you get flooded by sites that arent even game related.
housefresh.com
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