I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links.
I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable.
How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I want to see? Some combination of clicks and time-spent in a page through Google Analytics?
I would rather add a couple of buttons after each search result to provide feedback and the feedback I provide is valid just for my user (so it cannot be gamed). Two buttons with "this is crap" / "this is fine". Then Google can learn from that feedback instead of guessing through AI.
That, plus a "I'm not joe-six-pack" mode toggle, where Tools->Verbatim is enabled
and finds exactly what I am looking for, without assuming I'm misspelling or confused.
If there was any other obvious way to influence google it would instantly be gamed. Both my companies tried to increase their relevance in certain keywords and by competitors reporting their websites.
> I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links.
I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.
While not exactly what you've asked, check out uBlacklist add-on. It adds "Block this site" link next to search results in Google, Bing, and a couple of others. You can block a specific url and it this add-on will remove it from the search results page.
Using google is so much more frustrating than say 10 years ago. And generated websites is just a small problem with that. In the past google didn't try to be that smart and gave you more control. Now it's optimized for users asking full sentences instead of search queries. Now it's incorporating your location and perceived language into the query. Age of the document plays a huge role. Popularity of words in different context can skew your results towards some random topics.
Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.
In my experience the quoted search does work. Google will report it can't find what I asked if there are no such pages with the exact quote:
No results found for "...".
Results for ... (without quotes):
It's just very cumbersome, the old +/- syntax was more usable.
Actually, I'd prefer if each word I write would just default to being a hard requirement. I could then manually allow more creative interpretation with a specific syntax, like ~word, or exclude specific words alltogether with -word.
That works for the case you described. It will still ignore typos, dialects, or in my case a completely different language from the same language group. It will happily highlight different words that it deems to be equal to something I put in quotes.
The solution for consumers are product/price comparison sites like gh.de and idealo.de (german). I don't know the US equivalents of those, but here they get the prices from many sellers and you can compare including shipping, filter by many spec criteria and even find the cheapest solution for a basket of items, split by seller and including shipping which I believe is a NP hard problem (knapsack or traveling salesman?).
I was just looking at laser printers in Idealo yesterday, didn't bother even looking at Google because I share the same experience as Adam. There many cases like this just from my search history. Point is: Google is not the best indexer to shop.
Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.
The rant is really about how bad Google went or how good SEO experts are today. Google search results are basically unusable for some subjects and Google should fix it, if it doesn't want to end up like Altavista!
Altavista (AskJeeves, Yahoo, pick your poison) existed in a market space where there was real competition to be had. The Google of today does not.
The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.
it's not just SEO, they removed essential features like verbatim search, they constantly autocorrect uncommon search terms and they keep trying to optimize searches to only look for results within your bubble
> Google won't end up like Altavista since any alternatives will be faced with the same issue.
They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.
Part of the problem is the word "laser". Large format laser-driven xerographic printers are somewhat obsolete. A long bar of IC LEDs can be used instead of a laser, which avoids the mechanical problems of scanning a long distance with a rotating mirror. It's still xerography, with powdered toner and heated fusing, but it's not "laser".
The Kyocera KIP series printers are good examples of that technology.
There's a somewhat exotic technology used for sign and panel making - UV-cured inkjet printing.
Here's a specialty flatbed printer for very thick (up to 10cm or so) stock. [1] This is often used for large advertising posters, because UV cured inks can survive bright sunlight. Hit hard by UV, the polymer strands crosslink and the liquid ink turns into a hard solid. (It doesn't "dry"; it's not solvent evaporation that's makes this work.)[2] Same concept as dental fillings and stereolithographic 3D printing.
Front Panel Express offers UV-cured inkjet printing on metal as a service. That may be overkill for a prop maker - it's used to make real front panels for heavy use. Front Panel Express preps the blank panels in a plasma furnace before printing for better ink adhesion. After printing, a clear coat can be applied.[3]
So, yes, there's an SEO problem here, but part of the problem is that printing technology has moved on and searching for "laser" is less useful.
(I used to make steampunk props. So I've faced similar problems of surface marking.[4])
The rant is not so much about laser printers, but about search engines and crappy SEO. I mean, it starts with a laser printer problem he has, but he doesn't blame his printer. He blames Google for not helping him find a better laser printer.
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
It's the same everywhere. Amazon and Google are absolutely worhtless for anything that is slightly not mainstream.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
> What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
1) If they keep stock, what they have in stock
2) What the manufacturer promotion of the day is and/or if they need a push to get over the line with some manufacturer's targets
> when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them
I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
Same here, the printers for my home, my office and wife's office come from the same printer shop. Yeah they won't have thousands of models but from the hundred they can provide I got things very usable - and the price difference was fully worth my economy of time.
> article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers
The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
I did not check all of the printers in the list, but the top 4 are all ink jet printers. You're right that lower down the list there are some laser printers as well, but as a list of the top 10 best laser printers, the article is useless.
That site is nothing but a ad-ridden, affiliate link stuffing, spam site with zero quality. A good search engine would not list useless garbage like that.
You can filter domains, at least. You can add "-pinterest.com" or just "-pinterest" to clean a lot of crap out of your searches. But I've always wanted a regexp search. Just a regexp, absolutely no algorithmic "help" of any sort whatsoever, and I've wanted that since Alta Vista was the go-to search engine.
I would like to be able to vote on search results and add certain sites to my default blocklist. I don't understand Google doesn't do that; crowdsourcing is exactly their thing, and this would be something that provides tons of valuable info to them yet would also be loved by their users.
Kagi allows you to set the priority of domains, as well as some other tuning. Though it is in beta at the moment, and the plan to charge for use eventually.
I suspect that most such articles are written by some poor soul living in an area where the best available jobs are writing garbage click farm articles. I wouldn't be surprised if some were even generated largely or entirely by machine. Calling them "crap articles" downplays the fact that they are not even really content, they are just a pretense to fill a page with affiliate links.
I tried the top several results (searching for "large-format laser printer" as per Adam Savage's rant). Most of the results contained no large-format laser printers and no useful advice on finding or choosing them. The most promising was an e-commerce page almost all of which was other things but one of whose items was indeed advertised as a "large-format laser printer". Unfortunately it was actually a "computer to plate" machine, suitable if you want to print very large numbers of identical copies of something, prices starting at a mere $20k, almost certainly in no way suitable for Adam Savage's needs.
(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
It seems like maybe both large format and laser printer is such a niche product that any site actually talking about it does not have enough SEO juice to overpower these spam sites despite relevancy. The sad thing is these articles seem to be just keyword stuffing because those printers mentioned on that website are all literally not laser printers despite the text saying they are...
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
I find it curious that everyone trots out this idea that Reddit is a google killer etc.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
Even if you manage to bypass the problems you mention (by bypassing the popular subreddits), Reddit has become a terrible source of information in general.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
I think Reddit is just a symptom. I don't think it's going to be a Google killer but the fact that people are looking to it to fix Google's problems is a sign of the problem at hand. They are abandoning something bad for something slightly less bad at solving the problem at hand, or just desperate for any method. And Reddit is definitely unintentionally doing this. The only reason Reddit isn't gamed (or maybe it is?) is because it's a new phenomenon so far.
What you're complaining about has nothing to do with the reason reddit is actually more useful than google.
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
Reddit is a cesspool compared to what? Certainly not here. Sure, r/gaming is garbage, but overall my experience with Reddit is fairly positive. Especially if you’re looking for things like product advice, but it’s also the main source for eg. trans surgery and fashion advice. Things that are literally scary to discuss here.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
I don’t think you’re leveraging Reddit correctly. I use Google, search for something like “Kokatat icon drysuit site:Reddit.com” and am going to find far more useful human, real-world info than if I just use google to search the naked Internet, where the results would be half a page of ads and half a page of marketing, SEO-optimized sales or affiliate sites.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
The general idea is that Reddit has small communities that care about niche topics. If you want to know about mechanical keyboards or looking after a rare pet, you'll find a community there that talks about it. They'll probably ban you if you talk about anything other than the specific topic, you regularly see stern warnings added whenever a topic escapes the niche area and gets exposed to the wider Reddit audience, but that's why they are useful.
Could it depend on the types of subreddits you visit? In my experience, Reddit is pretty nice. Not great perhaps, but fairly tolerant, friendly and supportive. But quite often focused on a specific topic and moderated to stay on topic, that is true. Some moderators are definitely more restrictive than others, but if they overstep, people leave and form new subreddits to compete with the old one.
Odds of searching for "[obscure proper noun] [issue in fewest words] site:reddit.com" solving a problem is good. "site:5ch.net" sometimes works too for certain deeper topics by the way, and Reddit is a sunny day in a park compared to 2ch.net/5ch.net.
> a niche product that any site actually talking about it
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
When Pagerank was invented the internet was a lot nicer and less spammy. I think its showing its age and maybe Pagerank just doesn't work for commercial content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
Sure but most of the time reddit is completely unable to provide a decent answer to any non banal search. And whenever I tried to directly ask something specific in a dedicated subreddit it always ends up in one of the following:
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
just trying to go directly to the main manufacturers websites... it's really hard tot find a large format laser printer. So it seems anything talking about large format printer is going to dominate, and any mention of "laser" on those pages is going to do well if you search for laser also. I get lots of hits on the large format page where "laser" is another menu option. I found some on xerox, surprised that didn't rank better.
I think the idea is that "laser" should have filtered out the results he was seeing, but it didn't. Furthermore the content on the pages is explicitly lying about the fact that they are laser printers and drowning out the pages that aren't lying. It could just be that Pagerank doesn't work for this type of information organization anymore. It may not be a Google problem but an internet search and Pagerank problem, especially if Bing and Duck Duck Go aren't any better in this regard.
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
I don’t understand why this is so hard for google. Allow end users to flag links as SEO spam. It’s very easy for a human to figure out. I can tell in maybe 1/4 a second that a page is just SEO shit. The keyword stuffing, the irrelevant fluff before and after any relevant content (if it’s there at all), the annoying ads that take up the whole screen, etc. Let us flag it, remove it from the index. Take a snapshot of the page at the time it was removed so if the owner wants to appeal Google can say why it was removed.
If I was a motivated SEO booster, I would just pay a room full of people somewhere in the world to "downvote" all of my competitors search engine results. The problem still exists. As long as there is an incentive to be gained from SEO spammers, they will find a way to influence search results. This transcends Google or DDG or any specific search engine susceptible to SEO abuse.
Because SEO firms would LOVE to go though marking all real sites as spam. They are _much_ more motivated then end users so the vast bulk of report will be false.
And then spammers or unscrupulous competitors will flag legitimate sites as spam, pushing the signal-to-noise ratio to the point of uselessness. Plus, few users will actually flag correctly. Most will simply not notice, or not bother, others will flag perfectly legitimate results as spam just because Google wasn't psychic enough to know exactly what they want from their vague query.
And Google already has a pretty good metric in the bounce rate without the need to add a "flag" option. That is, if you go back to the search page shortly after clicking a link, that link is probably irrelevant. I guess that SEO spammers found a way around that.
Or at least allow the user to flag such links to be added in his own, individual corpus of unwanted spam. They do the exact same thing with email already, so why not extend it to web pages.
And, yes, allow the user to permanently filter out domains from their search results.
I use an extension for that. There used to be the collaborative "WoT", but that got issues after it got bought up by a venture capital firm. In general I think the individual use (blocking sites I will never want to see in search results) is more important than the social use, so I just use uBlocklist, which injects a "block this site" link after every Google search result.
It can not be at Google scale because of massive incentives to mark your competitor's sites as spam.
But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)
I like this idea. So how would you prevent company X from flagging all their competitors as spam sites - and just in general how do you deal with the abuse of such a feature?
Readit News
I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable.
How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I want to see? Some combination of clicks and time-spent in a page through Google Analytics?
I would rather add a couple of buttons after each search result to provide feedback and the feedback I provide is valid just for my user (so it cannot be gamed). Two buttons with "this is crap" / "this is fine". Then Google can learn from that feedback instead of guessing through AI.
That, plus a "I'm not joe-six-pack" mode toggle, where Tools->Verbatim is enabled and finds exactly what I am looking for, without assuming I'm misspelling or confused.
I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...
Now Google thinks their last suggestion was obviously a success.
Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.
Actually, I'd prefer if each word I write would just default to being a hard requirement. I could then manually allow more creative interpretation with a specific syntax, like ~word, or exclude specific words alltogether with -word.
sample listing for laser printers: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=prl
Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.
Laser printer listing: https://hinta.fi/g28/tulostimet?l=1&fq=Laser&fg=1
Many product categories don't have an extensive filtering available tho.
https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=prl&xf=3309_A3
The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.
Google just needs to invest more in stopping SEO.
They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.
The Kyocera KIP series printers are good examples of that technology.
There's a somewhat exotic technology used for sign and panel making - UV-cured inkjet printing. Here's a specialty flatbed printer for very thick (up to 10cm or so) stock. [1] This is often used for large advertising posters, because UV cured inks can survive bright sunlight. Hit hard by UV, the polymer strands crosslink and the liquid ink turns into a hard solid. (It doesn't "dry"; it's not solvent evaporation that's makes this work.)[2] Same concept as dental fillings and stereolithographic 3D printing.
Front Panel Express offers UV-cured inkjet printing on metal as a service. That may be overkill for a prop maker - it's used to make real front panels for heavy use. Front Panel Express preps the blank panels in a plasma furnace before printing for better ink adhesion. After printing, a clear coat can be applied.[3]
So, yes, there's an SEO problem here, but part of the problem is that printing technology has moved on and searching for "laser" is less useful.
(I used to make steampunk props. So I've faced similar problems of surface marking.[4])
[1] https://www.sackel.com/products/sackel-corporation-uv-led-sa...
[2] https://www.piworld.com/article/uv-curable-ink-works/
[3] https://www.frontpanelexpress.com/fpd-doc/en/index.htm?fpd_g...
[4] http://www.aetherltd.com/aesthetic.html
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
A phone call is more useful than a search engine.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
https://plumbaroakland.com/best-large-format-laser-printer/
https://yandex.ru/
https://yandex.com/
Except it doesn't help any single bit because the top result it's exactly the same "smallbiztrends.com" that was mentioned in a rant.
Russian Yandex is not any different than Google because their primary income is exactly the same: ads.
(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
There's a great talk by Anil Dash that I like titled "The Web We Lost" that centers around on this topic - https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/
And Google already has a pretty good metric in the bounce rate without the need to add a "flag" option. That is, if you go back to the search page shortly after clicking a link, that link is probably irrelevant. I guess that SEO spammers found a way around that.
If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
And, yes, allow the user to permanently filter out domains from their search results.
But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)