Perhaps it's becoming clear that search needs to become a common cooperatively managed infrastructure similar to Wikipedia. That this is in the best interest of everyone but advertisers and spammers.
Truly. I wonder if ActivityPub could be utilized to create a resilient search engine that shares the cost among federated instances. We already have something like that in Lemmy and Mastodon where federated data can be search from any instance. If the data is pages crawled by some automatic crawler which is then federated across instances which in turn allow to search through it, perhaps it might resemble a search engine. Page ranking beyond text matching could even be done by peoples up/down votes instead of some arbitrary algorithm. Similar to how voting works on StackExchange or Lemmy. 🤔 I'm sure someone is thinking about this.
Yeah, decentralized ownership or democratic ownership would be another way to achieve this. A federated system even if possible would almost certainly be less efficient resource-wise.
Just to be clear, what I'm referring to here is that a search would occur on a single instance. E.g. searches on lemmy.world occur on the lemmy.world instance, and load lemmy.world's servers. The federated part is in the building the database on lemmy.world. E.g. a crawler or a user on lemmy.ca adds a new web site and that record is federated to lemmy.world to add to its database. Another user on feddit.de upvotes a search result and that upvote is federated to lemmy.world so that the search result shows higher for users searching on lemmy.world. In this kind of model individual search instances could in fact be very large based on their usage. If there's no limit to what's federated, that would put a lower bound on the size of instances. If there's a limit (something dumb like federate only search records for *.fr domains) then that would allow for smaller instances that don't have the compute and storage for the complete index.
One answer that's proven to work is by involving a lot of people's labor in the editorial/curation process. Similar to how posting/commenting/voting/moderation work on Lemmy, how it's worked on Reddit and other human-driven platforms. Corporations have proven on multiple occasions that paying for this labor is not feasible and so a system that depends on it should be corpo-resistant or capital-resistant.
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
It's been said before: Google does not find you the best result for your query. Google finds you the result that makes them the most money from AdSense and has words from your query.
If Mozilla wasn't funded by Google, the best thing they could do is include a helpful/unhelpful ranking for websites, then filter Google results by that. Search should be social, not commercial.
Google's method of ranking results has clearly had a detrimental effect on website content and structure as well. I can't believe how much nonsense junk padding there is on all the top results. You can understand why people are happy to have an LLM sift through the junk and make up an answer, even if it's wrong half the time.
Even a junk made-up answer would be an improvement over the results I recently got after trying both Google and DDG to search up a random question that came to me. I wanted to find a list of animals with vertical pupils, and all I got were pages with headlines like "Why do some animals have vertical pupils?" that didn't answer my question or even the question in the headline!
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
Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.
Honestly, right here, that's the beauty upside of the fediverse, we are slightly bigger than the general internet bubble and that's enough to watch content not bound by it, Iyk what I mean.
As far as I know, rtings.com is a decent one for tech products.
It at least tells you what tests it does, has the results and doesn't seem to be cobbled together by an LLM from press releases.
Edit: There is also Which? magazine which is pay for and is kept alive entirely by 70 year old men like my dad who have never got round to cancelling it despite not really reading it.
Wirecutter used to be good, but they've pretty much entirely sold out to whoever pays them I think. The Spruce Eats seems maybe slightly better than them these days for that sorta household stuff?
TechGearLab and OutdoorGearLab are still good.
Project Farm on YouTube is top tier testing for tools and whatever else catches his eye, though I wish it was a little easier to see the results in a spreadsheet instead of having to screenshot the video.
Instantly blocked by Cloudflare without even the usual cumbersome javascript probes. The web is getting worse so quickly that it's difficult to read the articles about how the web is getting worse.
I was skeptical at first, wondering why the hell I'd pay for search. I set up the trial of Kagi, and it's fast like the pages load instantly, the result knockouts are almost always useful and the standard results are usually highly relevant and useful.
In a just world, the idea of SEO shouldn't even exist. You shouldn't be able to game an algorithm to rise to the top. But that's what literally our entire world has become now. Social media influencers, scammy and spammy websites and services, AI art thieves, content farm sewage. None of it would exist if the algorithms didn't let you game them or promote certain behaviors.
The problem is that "don't let people game you" is extremely difficult.
It's many, many orders of magnitude easier to provide a useful search of sites that tell you the truth about what they are than it is when 99% of sites lie to you.
It doesn't seem like anything happened with them, they're just published by a company that also spams seemingly hollow search results for reviews. Reviews it seems like they may not have meaningfully conducted. But serious eats isn't actually implicated in anything other than being published by them as best I can tell. Dotdash Meredith also seems to publish a bunch of other food/recipe sites too.
Was bought out by dotdash a few years ago. Been on a steady decline ever since. The old content is still there, so it still works as a reference, but the new stuff is not of the same quality
When you make a website and perform SEO tactics like the ones in this article, Google isn't providing a service to you, you're providing the service to Google.
I have no idea about air purifiers, but Meredith (and better homes and gardens DO have a test kitchen in Des Moines and I wouldn't be surprised if they test other stuff there. My dad worked there and as a kid we got to come through a and try out recipes they were thinking of publishing sometimes.
But ANY site running these review articles at this point, be it for hotels or air purifiers or food kr *30 under 30" lists, are all just paid shills. I don't really have any reason to think "housefresh" is any different either. I don't even really trust consumer reports at this point after seeing them shill really shitty products a few times. Maybe ifixit is ok?
Go to Amazon and filter by one star, then try to ignore the crazys.
Go to Amazon and filter by one star, then try to ignore the crazys.
This is underrated. This is where you find out management switched over and changed policies, that quality is great but they have trouble delivering, or their returns require arcane rituals on the third blood moon.
There is a dodgy car rental brand in australia, nz, usa and canada that i had used, and exclusively markets to overseas tourists, but not locals - presumably because locals would know that they should not rent a car that failed the technical inspection and is illegal to drive, which to the surprise of nobody happens a lot with cheap, 20 year old rental cars.
It's very hard to find organic customer reviews of the company, because their own SEO drowns out any authentic customer voices:
Their links come from "paid blog posts" (they pay the blogger to write some fluff piece) in private travel blogs, advertising banners, forum posts and articles on big travel sites like trip advisor
Their own "travel tips for #country#" websites which offers the same info as other tourist sites, but where they exclusively mention their own business. They have a whole network of their own sites, each for a different country they opperate in, a different language for the customer nationality they are targeting and the age group/price level they want to serve
social media channels of course
In forum posts where the company is mentioned in a bad way, some new account pops up defending the company, or the thread is deleted soon afterwards.
Same with online reviews on google maps, where the company sits at a 4.5 score, but some bad reviews about deposits not being paid out after the car was returned have magically disappeared.
I can't believe I ever trusted consumer reports after I read up on how they purposely distorted their Suzuki samurai testing. The CR own record video shows they were determined to roll it.
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.
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
housefresh.com
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