Google has been killing all but the most widely known domains for a very long time. I've mentioned this repeatedly on ycombinator multiple times, but only people who have made their own website 15 years ago and tried to grow it know what I mean.
My recommendation is to start moving to some other closed platform that is not part of Google search like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (yes I know Google owns it but its still not part of the search ecosystem).
Tying your entire business to how high you rank on Google search is always going to eventually end up in disaster like this.
Read past the provocative title, and Google actually seems to be doing the right things here. They cracked down on product reviews that aren’t actually testing the product in 2021, and the article says big media companies (presumably with lower quality review content) suffered as a result.
But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate links while avoiding the new requirements.
So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying to bring attention to this issue.
If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!
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Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The original title was "How Google is killing independent sites like ours".
Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the authors.
The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.
Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the phone, not the thickest.
And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked through the other results lower on the page and nada, no correct answer.
So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test, but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but the easiest context searches where it works because it knows a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.
> Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).
Something as basic as: "2,5 cm to mm" won't show up the unit conversion widget if it's not formatted as "2.5 cm to mm", at least for me. WolframAlpha also fails at this query. However, ChatGPT understands it and gives the right answer.
> Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are.
Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...
In general, I find the same is true for all mainstream search engines, including DDG and Bing. You can't even search for things to buy anymore, ironically; it'll just dump you into Amazon or some "top 10" shitpost on CNN fake news or Forbes, much like the trash pit of websites shown in the header image of this article. Like others, I also find myself searching on Reddit or HN directly. What the point of a search engine is at that point, I don't know.
Even when the results are not sponsored, they're all generic answers from generic domains. I'm traveling at the moment and it's impossible to find anything written by someone in a 1000 km of the city I'm visiting.
How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
Same. Done with Google search. In addition to the results having become useless, it's Google's frenetic sprint away from the "don't be evil" ethos, which turns out to have only been in Incognito mode all along.
I am a small business owner who started their site and SEO and within three months I was beating multi-million dollar competition on the most important keyword google search terms for our market and industry. I did this with no budget, no adspend, just basic SEO and good keyword research. It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.
Same. Numerous 1st page top results, and even snippets. Honestly no idea how... I do know SEO basics, but didn't know I knew them well enough for this. Within a year I had the first result for a very, very popular search term. Granted it was a lot of hard work (18 hour days, sometimes).
Same here. I'm right up there competing with billion dollar companies with decades of presence and I don't know how many backlinks. While my small business has no backlinks from others and only relies on content for ranking, being entirely dependent on Google to be honest.
I would guess you're working in a niche that has not been targeted by the big media sites alluded to here? Being halfway decent at SEO will come to nothing when you have 20 or so competing sites that can rank overnight for anything.
> It's totally possible for mom and pop websites to get traction with google, even easy. You just have to be halfway decent at SEO.
If this is really true, then you should be running your own SEO consulting business. You would undoubtedly make much more money than your existing (presumably not SEO consulting), small business
Comments like this are similar to people (ahem, Internet randos) talking about their investment portfolio returns, where they wildly exceed the very best professionally managed hedge funds. I always say: "If you are so good, why don't you run your own hedge fund? It will easy to get funding." <<crickets>>
The same issues you have with google search engine optimization are present in every other closed platform too. Welcome to the attention economy, you better learn how to go viral.
It feels like sometime in the past decade, Google search results went from "Here's what most people click on" to "Here's the most trusted sources, handpicked by Google".
WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's and not risk any controversy.
And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate links. We're 'trusted', after all."
It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least interesting results for everything using a small army of human and AI reviewers.
Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no appreciable reason.
The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more relevant than their organic search results -- because they actually care about the ad experience.
Yep, Google outsources search ratings to humans working for a third-party called Leapforce - see "The secret lives of Google raters"[1].
There are specific guidelines for rating results, especially for political and medical queries. This is probably a big part of the massive decline in search quality - authority is valued more over accuracy to the specific query.
Google indeed ranks brands much higher. It feels like all of my results are from generic brands, even if all of their content is copywritten drivel. This is especially obvious when you search for travel advice, and every answer is a generic blog post on a travel service website.
Finding trustworthy reviews and recommendations via Google is useless. The first few pages are always littered by the lowest quality, highest SEO-spam content, and the recommendations on these pages are so shallow and inauthentic that I know the person that wrote the article has never even looked at the product they're shilling. And so often these lists are literally the same list of 20 products slightly re-arranged.
Reddit is also really hit and miss, depending on the community. TikTok has been ruined by TikTok Shop.
Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
It took savvy SEO folk about .3 seconds to figure out that Google was ranking Reddit for almost any informational query and start trying to game the system there too.
I love using Reddit for information but be wary of any new Reddit thread ranking well in Google search that's only a few months old, in a small community, with very few other responses besides a strangely specific answer to the question.
In shopping for flashlights, the respective subreddit recommends only obscure AliExpress brands. The community are retiree collectors who obsess over specs and cannot possibly use them in the field.
Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations, for example. What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with; at a certain point you can't even see anything outside your own beam. They shit on all "American" brands (but Coast is shit).
It's hilarious watching them drive off clueless gift-givers seeking advice.
I've noticed that a large portion of reviews are literally just rehashing reviews on amazon. And, if I were to guess, a good number of them are just these review sites pumping in "top 10 x reviews from amazon" into chatgpt and having it write their review for them.
> YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product. Doesn't work for everything, but in a lot of cases the paid promotional reviewers aren't getting their hands on the product in question and instead they are putting up stock images and reading the marketing material.
The bigger the youtuber, the harder it is to know if it's a paid promotional thing.
> The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product.
IDK, there's a long tradition of shill reviewers being given free products "for testing" on the unspoken agreement that if the review is bad, they won't get more free products in the future.
It depends on what you are looking for. I found looking at the BIFL subreddit, sites that cater more towards industry (McMaster Carr as an example), and companies based in Europe (Fjallraven as an example) can help find higher quality products faster (or finding items on there and then searching reddit/forums for "alternatives").
Sometimes it just feels impossible though E.g. trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.
> trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.
If you're wanting BIFL kitchen items for low use try looking for commercial foodservice versions. That stuff is generally priced between plastic throwaway versions and Williams Sonoma but if it's built to survive at least a month in a busy professional kitchen, it'll probably serve me for life.
Alternatively, head over to your nearest ethnic grocers. I have some Asian and Mexican grocery stores near me that have kitchen supply sections that stock no-frills but reasonable quality versions of kitchen tools. My nearby standard American grocery stores stock much lower quality items by comparison.
Every review on youtube is paid placement for the most part. The exception is if you find a real user who will post some crappily shot video and never step in frame themselves, those are always the highest quality reviews yet its rare and below the fold because people do it out of their own freetime and goodwill and aren’t trying to make a hustle out of it (which means accepting paid review offers).
Yeah, YouTube is absolutely dominated by paid product placement, especially for stuff like power tools. That said, YouTube reviews at least tend to be real in the sense that at least the reviewer is actually using and demonstrating the product, which is a huge step up from the "we summarized some Amazon reviews for you" SEO spam.
> Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
The problem with smaller ones is, that it can be a good honest channel today, get an "offer they can't refuse" and promote some crap for a few thousand dollars/euros overnight.
Dave from the eevblog, AvE, Great scott!, bigclive, and maybe a few others are the ones I'd trust, because they show the ugly details of most products. Project farm also does many item comparisons, but most of the brands are unavailable here. All of them pretty big and popular channels, but most go very deep into specifics. For random (mostly kitchen and as-seen-on-tv) items, "Freakin' reviews" seems to be pretty genuine (electronics are much closer to my area of expertise), but I seem to notice many failure points in random gadgets and the guy from this channel points them out directly, with all the problems associated with them.
Again... i'm not affiliated with any of them, most of them show a lot of shitty items (even popular ones), and well.. call them shitty as they are, so maybe I'm biased because of the number of bad reviews they produce and very few good ones, but i've bought stuff they recommended and liked it a lot. You cannot compare this to eg. "unbox therapy" where almost every item is clearly sponsored and you can see it in the "very good" reviews they get, even if they're shitty things.
Critical internet/app browsing should be taught in school, like critical reading. I feel lucky to have been a nerd in the 2000s where people picked up this skill, but honestly I have no idea how kids, older folks just getting into tech and such are acquiring sources/skills trapped inside of Discord, YouTube, Facebook or whatever.
I know I buy sort of expensive products, but most of the things I've bought recently like my christiania bike all have youtube channels detailing their products. I think that is frankly the only real way for brands to advertise to people like me who'll maybe look at reddit threads or similar, but these days you can barely even trust many of those. We bought a Baby Brezza based on recomendations, they have a semi decent youtube with a mix of useful information and advertisement.
A good example of the reddit bit is the robock s8 we bought. 95% of the reviews on reddits tell you to buy the big version with the huge dock... But then there was this one person in one thread who posted about how it was easy to just empty it without the station and that the station was known to rot or mold (not sure how you say that in english). So we bought the smallest s8 version we could and whoever that redditor was, they were absolutely right that it was so easy to maintain it without any of the addons. Roborock doesn't have a good youtube channel, they do have one, but it's really just advertisement.
Anyway, I agree with you. I don't even really use google anymore. I switched to ecosia (it also sucks) out of spite, but it's been as good as google for anything except for when I want to do site:blabla.com in which case I'll !g. Before you recommend it I've used the duck before and it doesn't work for me. Likely because I'm Danish.
Reddit is 99% schill bots. Heaven help you if you're researching baby products. The entire scandalous baby product market has commandeered Reddit with accounts like this one that I found just because I kept seeing the name pop up relentlessly hawking the same products:
Only complaint I hear about them is Tesla fanboys complaining that the cars are not getting perfect scores and that its a conspiracy. Not sure if there is any truth to that(probably not). Other than that I haven't heard much bad to say but who knows, they could also be compromised.
I did actually buy a year long subscription of CR when I moved into my new house a few years ago and I found their reviews to be generally more helpful and have bought a few products based on their recommendations.
People like to shit on Nextdoor but once I embraced it as a homeowner it's my go-to for everything. Fuck Google/Yelp for reviews. It's refreshing getting local first-hand reviews and recommendations from neighbors about plumbers, roofers, electricians, solar panel experiences, tax stuff, home security camera questions, etc. Having a local authenticated community is so refreshing compared to the corporate bot infested internet.
Just don't ask for realtor suggestions. Your inbox will never be the same again. And everyone is a realtor or related to the one that does the best job...
Knowing there's an unpaid human writing the review is about the only thing that matters. I guess for repair services it has to be local, but the real point is, if I get a recommendation from friends or family, I can trust that they aren't affiliates, because they're staking the relationship on their review.
> in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars. I don’t mean this to offend. I mean it as a job description. An advertiser's job is to convince you to do stuff you would not otherwise do.
There's a couple Facebook groups for residents for the city I live in and I've found them useful for the same reason. I should also start checking NextDoor more, thanks for the mention.
It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business with whom you have no formal business relationship. This is just a risk that one acknowledges when they decide to go for it. If I ran an eBay store, I'm totally dependent on the whims of eBay, and my business plan should include the risk that they can do anything they want--up to and including kicking me out. Same if I had a business that ran off of Facebook.
Not taking sides here or saying anyone is right or wrong, but it's reality of operating on the Internet that small businesses probably just have to go into with both eyes open. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep.
This is a serious problem. Internet marketplaces are so big now that its really hard to even have a business without them at all.
I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties. That way the whims of the marketplace owner can't destroy thousands of prosperous businesses at the push of a button.
We have similar regulations for utilities. The power company can't kick you out on a whim. I think the same rationale applies here.
I've argued this before; these companies have taken on a utility role and need utility-type regulation, i.e. an obligation to provide service fairly and universally, an ombudsman, viable oversight, physical presence, a local call center to provide local employment and to give back to the community, etc.
This situation where 100% of the taxi and food delivery profit from every small town in the world gets siphoned off back to a single office in California just isn't viable. Even from a within-US perspective it isn't viable.
That's exactly the thinking that led to the Digital Markets Act in the EU. Those marketplaces are effective monopolies or oligopolies in their space, so access to them needs to be regulated to ensure a level playing field.
> I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties.
The solution is not for them to be big and regulated, it's for them not to be so big.
The main thing that would help here is to inhibit vertical integration. For example, suppose people had a legal right to pricing information. Companies like Amazon and eBay would be encouraged to provide an API and have no right to stop anyone from scraping their site for anything it doesn't provide.
Now anyone can make a product search engine that will show you results from any site. You're not stuck with Amazon's gawdawful search. And since anyone can do this, it's easy to enter the market and none of them will have dominance. Conversely, if you want to start a new retailer, or sell your own products directly from your own site, you just submit your site for indexing to the popular product search engines and customers appear. But none of the search engines can destroy you because there are dozens of them and the biggest one is only 15% of the market.
We need more competition. The target of the rules should be to lower barriers to entry.
> It's always struck me as very risky to have a business that is utterly dependent on the actions/policies of a separate business with whom you have no formal business relationship.
Right, but the "separate business" here -- in a real-world analogy -- is akin to a commercialised offshoot of the department of transport.
They may not make the roads, but they decide what goes on all the maps, they control most of the road signs, they benefit from the traffic monitoring data, and if you were to open up a shop selling only advice on where to shop, they determine whether your shop can be seen behind their signs. They profit from how they manage this, and the only way to get better management is to pay for it. Everyone pays for it, so the advantage dissipates until you pay more for your signs.
There is little to no way to do business without these people, short of setting up a stall at the local covered market or farmer's market (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Etsy) where you are beholden to another set of signage issues as well as the secondary knock-on effects of large-scale signage issues on the way to the market, over which you have even less influence.
If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.
But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.
But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.
If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.
What if eBay were the only way to sell your goods on the internet? Because that's what the problem is with search - if Google doesn't weight your page high enough in results you're screwed. There's no other game in town.
eBay already acts like it still is the only place to sell goods on the internet. But I'd say eBay was actually better back when it was the only mainstream way/place to sell many goods on the internet.
eBay now sells promoted rankings. Funny when a vendor selling 1 product has it listed at several different prices, so you can save some money by finding the lowest priced one in their "other listings" that they don't promote.
eBay sells Google ads on its pages. (sad seller noises).
and eBay is one of the biggest ad buyers on Google.
Almost any site on the internet is going to depend on Google. It's too big and too important. They have a monopoly, I'm amazed it hasn't been broken up yet.
"I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep. "
If we compare to a small business on a highway and a company decides to move the highway so far away from them as to diminish their customer base effectively driving them out of business; this can't happen, since roads are governed as public resources. This is what the Internet needs.
Roads do in fact change, and traffic patterns and access costs change with them. Lots of small towns are intimately familiar with this, booming or busting because of a new major road nearby.
They change more slowly than internet traffic and are less globally impacting than a gigacorp's shuffling though, of course.
I agree with this, but then look at Uber: Without the cooperation and approval of Apple and Google via their respective developer programs and app stores, they wouldn't exist because you couldn't do notifications or location in webapps at the time.
There are myriad examples like this of downright giant startups that would not exist if they refused to proceed just because Apple can veto them. Instagram is probably the largest example. Look what happened to Tumblr.
Depends on the size of the business. Apple/Google can screw over small businesses all day long, but once they start getting bigger there is some assumed risk on A/G's part in future anti trust lawsuits if they screw over companies with enough wealth to hurt them in court.
The moving fear is being vetoed only works for well funded startups. A small independent startup would have to consider this before betting the farm on a product that might get smashed by the feeling of the day Google and Apple app moderators have.
Uber could sell their own devices to users and drivers. The app is _that_ useful for millions (billions?) of people, that people would buy it. People used to buy separate GPS devices, so it's not something out of the ordinary.
These companies enjoy special legal protections that shield them from the liabilities of their actions which they say are absolutely required for them to exist.
Perhaps those protections should now be rescinded and they should be held liable for their conduct.
Between the rise of fake "30 best X" articles that this discusses and the widely-documented problem of fake reviews on places like Amazon, I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand loyalty again. Picking based on brands I trust rarely gets me the "best value" item and certainly doesn't get me the absolute global maximum "best overall", but it's turned into the only reliable way to choose something in a finite amount of time that I will reliably not be disappointed with.
There's obviously always the risk that just because a brand was good a year ago doesn't mean it's still good, but I've found that the rate of decline of most good brands is substantially lower than the SEO-spurred rate of decline of the quality of internet publications that purport to provide unbiased reviews.
> I've increasingly found myself back to leaning on brand loyalty again
You’re making me realize I too have been doing this for a while now. At least when satisficing instead of maximizing … and honestly I’m less and less interested in maximizing.
These days when making a purchase I go to a friend group who knows their thing (podcaster friends when looking for a microphone, for example), ask what brand they use, then I go to that brand’s website and buy the highest-line product that I can afford. There’s little to no google searching involved and next to zero awareness of any ads.
Ask a friend in the know and buy that. Done.
If there are no friends in the know, I ask anyone who uses a thing that solves my problem “Hey do you like your <thing>? What do you like about it?”. If they say yes, I go buy that. Life is too short to spend in the quagmire of ecommerce and friends.
Amazon always shows me the best household brands, classics like FINDYURT and ZUKESEYAKAMERICAUSA. They list classic product models like 'Kitchen Knife 8" Chef Kitchen 9" For Cutting For Vegetables for Fruits For Meats Pro Knife Shank With Accessories Blade Kitchen Knife.' <3
Brand loyalty also goes for review sites itself. Sure I find myselfnsometimes getting frustrated if I look into a new product category (like best CD Ripping drive as of 2024 until I find the related forum post ). But I typically I rather first skim through the URL to see some sites I remember (notebookcheck, tomshardware, Chinagadgets.de, or whatever ) that I am loyal to until I get disappointed. This works because they are testing different products and I am kind of loyal. How loyal can I ever be to a site that only sells air purifier tests. How many times in my life do I need this test? I agree in this case it is even easier to be more loyal to brand because they probably sell more things than just air purifiers.
Yup, it's why I shop at Costco. They do a good job of making sure everything on the shelf is actually decent, so I don't have to google "<product> reddit" in store.
This is why I bought a Brother printer when I needed a color inkjet. Brother is known for no-nonsense laser printers, but not inkjet. I bought it anyway because I just trust the brand for keeping things simple feature wise. There are better inkjet options from Canon and Epson, but they both nickel and dime you on the ink, have DRMed ink cartridges and what not. I traded off better quality prints for peace of mind.
Yes this, I've found product reviews looking distinctly dodgy for quite a few years now, while the article is about something I would see as a bit niche, electronics reviews have been in a hole for a while. I noticed some sites have been using amazon reviews for a long time.
I still prefer for the most part, to buy some electronics from brick and mortar shops, at least then I can see the products in action, and I will seek out and travel to specialist shops for things like audio gear, they'll usually match online prices and let you try things out.
I run a forum platform, and the best recommendations for anything are within the small communities.
It doesn't really matter what the community is for, only last week on a cycling forum someone asked for "What's the best alarm clock?"... two days of discussion later, and everyone has aligned on "Buy one of the Braun alarm clocks" with the only debate left about which particular model was best (it turns out, 3 models cover everyone, and all are still better than anything else). If you went to Google and asked the same question https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+... you get a lot of "Best alarm clock" list (with the year meantioned)... but few to none recommend a Braun alarm clock.
You can repeat this for virtually anything... the small communities won't have an instant answer unless someone already asked it, but will produce a better answer every time, and I agree with the article that what has happened to Google isn't great, the incentives have all aligned to produce the worst content, by some of the most trusted sources, and to have that ranked high regardless of whether it helps answer anyone's question.
I think the main reason behind this is that small communities are not infested by bots yet. Once community grows it inherently attracts bots and they just game the system to theirs owner advantage.
Another bad aspect is that it's becoming harder to google for general information without being hit with production recommendations. For example, if you google an ambiguous term like "Indoor light" the entire front page is products. There is no information about how indoor light impacts sleep health, or comparing different technologies of light bulbs, or different styles of lighting a room, or showing how much energy we spend on indoor lighting. It's literally all products, on a topic which has a lot of nuisances to explore.
Some search terms seem to trigger "medical information", "scholarly journals" or "technical documentation" subroutines and avoid products all together.
That's because your search query isn't specific enough. Google doesn't read your mind to figure out what about "indoor light" you seek. So it defaults to commerce.
If type "indoor light sleep health" I get the results you would expect.
Same for "indoor lights technology comparison"
Do you really think it's unreasonable that "indoor lights" goes to e-commerce? What do you think most people who enter that term are looking for?
I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow? Everyone complains that search results are deteriorating. What I think is really happening is that "the internet" isn't only targeted at nerds anymore.
(And of course people are also strongly opposed to behavioral profiling which would be like reading your mind...)
> I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow?
If there is any ambiguity Google defaults to commerce. I think the front page for such general queries should have room for science, history, art, culture. Google's default is to sell you something, and it is often the only thing it shows.
I think there was plenty of junk in the "small sites" world when it came to affiliates that deserved algorithmic modification, but Google absolutely took a sledgehammer to that side of the industry killing small players over the last six months. Now the big content sites that invest in search-volume-heavy terms are feasting on the traffic (and affiliate payouts).
But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again, hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce filtering they already show on a lot of terms).
I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had.
The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.
> But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty
FWIW I read this level of certainty as "I am privy to specific information pertaining to it and in fact I'm one of the people in charge of making sure it happens"
To be clear, I have never nor will I ever likely work at Google or any of its competitors. I have spent an ungodly amount of time building (and breaking) affiliate sites / information sites / et al as side projects.
Haven't done it in a few years (having kids has sucked my energy for side projects pretty dry), but at one point had like ~15 sites in my portfolio that I used to experiment with.
Death, taxes, and an algo update fucking with a site's traffic at Google's whim.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38923627#38933675
My recommendation is to start moving to some other closed platform that is not part of Google search like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (yes I know Google owns it but its still not part of the search ecosystem).
Tying your entire business to how high you rank on Google search is always going to eventually end up in disaster like this.
But then those media companies found a loophole with "The Best X" lists that weren't subject to the 2021 Products Review Update changes, which lets them continue spamming affiliate links while avoiding the new requirements.
So now independent sites with actual reviews are in a holding pattern for these search terms, waiting for Google to bring the hammer down again on sites that are evading its quality metrics. This article is pretty clearly an open letter trying to bring attention to this issue.
If the team at Google working on ranking for product reviews is reading this, I hope you have another update in the works to close this loophole. H1 planning just wrapped up!
--
Edit: The title on HN has changed to be less click-baity. The original title was "How Google is killing independent sites like ours".
Title aside, the article is quite excellent and does a great job of explaining the product review niche of SEO. Kudos to the authors.
The fact that Google has to manually step in to intervene or else the big domains get all the top rankings tells you that they are very heavily biased towards big media domains.
On most searches, especially with my phone, the results are almost all sponsored and rarely what I'm actually looking for.
Google search has gone from being one of the best to being ask jeeves at it's worst.
Ditto. My most recent example, I asked Google what the thickness of the Pixel 8 is including the camera visor, which was something not listed in the spec sheet since the official dimensions sneakily only list the thinnest point on the phone, not the thickest.
And Google proudly and confidently gave me the answer at the top ... but it was the thickness without the visor, something I already knew since that's in the specs everywhere. I looked through the other results lower on the page and nada, no correct answer.
So I asked Bing and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for at the top measured by some Android review site. And man is that phone a tick boy in that spot. You can probably put your weed in there.
Sure, that's sample size=1 so probably not an accurate test, but still, to me it feels like Google sucks for anything but the easiest context searches where it works because it knows a lot of info about me like where I live and where I work so it can correctly deduct the context, but for other shit not related to me, it's like you're drowning in SEO junk.
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).
Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...
How to use public transit? What to see and do? How to get an airport transfer? Here are machine-generated answers from myairporttransfers.com and copywritten posts from cheapairteavels.com.
Dead Comment
If this is really true, then you should be running your own SEO consulting business. You would undoubtedly make much more money than your existing (presumably not SEO consulting), small business
Comments like this are similar to people (ahem, Internet randos) talking about their investment portfolio returns, where they wildly exceed the very best professionally managed hedge funds. I always say: "If you are so good, why don't you run your own hedge fund? It will easy to get funding." <<crickets>>
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WebMD, Wikipedia, CDC, etc. for health results, the NYT, CNN, BBC, etc. for news, major magazines/newspapers for reviews. Which makes sense from a corporate perspective, you don't want your users searching for something controversial and stumbling upon something that doesn't line up with the mainstream POV. Maybe "Bob's 10 best mattresses" is a thorough and exhaustive article that easily beats the rest, but what if Bob is antivax, or thinks Bush did 9/11? It's safer to just ignore small blogs like Bob's and not risk any controversy.
And here's the side effect. Some of these organizations realized "Wait, we rank really high on Google for anything! So let's pump out shitty listicles about the top 10 air purifiers, even though we're a tech company, and fill them up with expensive affiliate links. We're 'trusted', after all."
It's no longer about training a great algorithm to find great results -- but hand-selecting the most anodyne, least interesting results for everything using a small army of human and AI reviewers.
Not to mention how it ignores half of your query terms for no appreciable reason.
The ultimate irony now is that Google's ads are usually more relevant than their organic search results -- because they actually care about the ad experience.
There are specific guidelines for rating results, especially for political and medical queries. This is probably a big part of the massive decline in search quality - authority is valued more over accuracy to the specific query.
1. https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...
Dead Comment
Reddit is also really hit and miss, depending on the community. TikTok has been ruined by TikTok Shop.
Small YouTube channels seem to be where it's at for now - but even then it's sometimes hard to tell if it's an honest review, or a paid video, and YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
There surely must be a better option.
It took savvy SEO folk about .3 seconds to figure out that Google was ranking Reddit for almost any informational query and start trying to game the system there too.
I love using Reddit for information but be wary of any new Reddit thread ranking well in Google search that's only a few months old, in a small community, with very few other responses besides a strangely specific answer to the question.
In shopping for flashlights, the respective subreddit recommends only obscure AliExpress brands. The community are retiree collectors who obsess over specs and cannot possibly use them in the field.
Availability of parts and removable/disposable batteries are never a consideration in their recommendations, for example. What throws the most lumens is the only factor they concern themselves with; at a certain point you can't even see anything outside your own beam. They shit on all "American" brands (but Coast is shit).
It's hilarious watching them drive off clueless gift-givers seeking advice.
> YouTubers do a terrible job disclosing paid promotion/free products.
The trick I think I've found for this (which isn't fool proof) is to find videos where the youtuber is actually physically interacting with the product. Doesn't work for everything, but in a lot of cases the paid promotional reviewers aren't getting their hands on the product in question and instead they are putting up stock images and reading the marketing material.
The bigger the youtuber, the harder it is to know if it's a paid promotional thing.
IDK, there's a long tradition of shill reviewers being given free products "for testing" on the unspoken agreement that if the review is bad, they won't get more free products in the future.
Sometimes it just feels impossible though E.g. trying to find various items for the kitchen that are better than the crappy import stuff sold everywhere but not ludicrously expensive for a low use item.
If you're wanting BIFL kitchen items for low use try looking for commercial foodservice versions. That stuff is generally priced between plastic throwaway versions and Williams Sonoma but if it's built to survive at least a month in a busy professional kitchen, it'll probably serve me for life.
Alternatively, head over to your nearest ethnic grocers. I have some Asian and Mexican grocery stores near me that have kitchen supply sections that stock no-frills but reasonable quality versions of kitchen tools. My nearby standard American grocery stores stock much lower quality items by comparison.
The problem with smaller ones is, that it can be a good honest channel today, get an "offer they can't refuse" and promote some crap for a few thousand dollars/euros overnight.
Dave from the eevblog, AvE, Great scott!, bigclive, and maybe a few others are the ones I'd trust, because they show the ugly details of most products. Project farm also does many item comparisons, but most of the brands are unavailable here. All of them pretty big and popular channels, but most go very deep into specifics. For random (mostly kitchen and as-seen-on-tv) items, "Freakin' reviews" seems to be pretty genuine (electronics are much closer to my area of expertise), but I seem to notice many failure points in random gadgets and the guy from this channel points them out directly, with all the problems associated with them.
Again... i'm not affiliated with any of them, most of them show a lot of shitty items (even popular ones), and well.. call them shitty as they are, so maybe I'm biased because of the number of bad reviews they produce and very few good ones, but i've bought stuff they recommended and liked it a lot. You cannot compare this to eg. "unbox therapy" where almost every item is clearly sponsored and you can see it in the "very good" reviews they get, even if they're shitty things.
That's what it look like.
The only thing that could enhance or replace it would be official government testing of products.
Critical internet/app browsing should be taught in school, like critical reading. I feel lucky to have been a nerd in the 2000s where people picked up this skill, but honestly I have no idea how kids, older folks just getting into tech and such are acquiring sources/skills trapped inside of Discord, YouTube, Facebook or whatever.
A good example of the reddit bit is the robock s8 we bought. 95% of the reviews on reddits tell you to buy the big version with the huge dock... But then there was this one person in one thread who posted about how it was easy to just empty it without the station and that the station was known to rot or mold (not sure how you say that in english). So we bought the smallest s8 version we could and whoever that redditor was, they were absolutely right that it was so easy to maintain it without any of the addons. Roborock doesn't have a good youtube channel, they do have one, but it's really just advertisement.
Anyway, I agree with you. I don't even really use google anymore. I switched to ecosia (it also sucks) out of spite, but it's been as good as google for anything except for when I want to do site:blabla.com in which case I'll !g. Before you recommend it I've used the duck before and it doesn't work for me. Likely because I'm Danish.
https://www.reddit.com/user/ErinElizabeth1187/
Maybe Consumer Reports?
Only complaint I hear about them is Tesla fanboys complaining that the cars are not getting perfect scores and that its a conspiracy. Not sure if there is any truth to that(probably not). Other than that I haven't heard much bad to say but who knows, they could also be compromised.
<https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#fatads>
> in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars. I don’t mean this to offend. I mean it as a job description. An advertiser's job is to convince you to do stuff you would not otherwise do.
Not taking sides here or saying anyone is right or wrong, but it's reality of operating on the Internet that small businesses probably just have to go into with both eyes open. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in the situation where my revenue could dramatically go up and down purely because Some Company X making some kind of routine algorithm change. I wouldn't be able to sleep.
I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties. That way the whims of the marketplace owner can't destroy thousands of prosperous businesses at the push of a button.
We have similar regulations for utilities. The power company can't kick you out on a whim. I think the same rationale applies here.
This situation where 100% of the taxi and food delivery profit from every small town in the world gets siphoned off back to a single office in California just isn't viable. Even from a within-US perspective it isn't viable.
The solution is not for them to be big and regulated, it's for them not to be so big.
The main thing that would help here is to inhibit vertical integration. For example, suppose people had a legal right to pricing information. Companies like Amazon and eBay would be encouraged to provide an API and have no right to stop anyone from scraping their site for anything it doesn't provide.
Now anyone can make a product search engine that will show you results from any site. You're not stuck with Amazon's gawdawful search. And since anyone can do this, it's easy to enter the market and none of them will have dominance. Conversely, if you want to start a new retailer, or sell your own products directly from your own site, you just submit your site for indexing to the popular product search engines and customers appear. But none of the search engines can destroy you because there are dozens of them and the biggest one is only 15% of the market.
We need more competition. The target of the rules should be to lower barriers to entry.
Dead Comment
Right, but the "separate business" here -- in a real-world analogy -- is akin to a commercialised offshoot of the department of transport.
They may not make the roads, but they decide what goes on all the maps, they control most of the road signs, they benefit from the traffic monitoring data, and if you were to open up a shop selling only advice on where to shop, they determine whether your shop can be seen behind their signs. They profit from how they manage this, and the only way to get better management is to pay for it. Everyone pays for it, so the advantage dissipates until you pay more for your signs.
There is little to no way to do business without these people, short of setting up a stall at the local covered market or farmer's market (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Etsy) where you are beholden to another set of signage issues as well as the secondary knock-on effects of large-scale signage issues on the way to the market, over which you have even less influence.
Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
This is the key.
If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.
But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.
But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.
If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.
eBay now sells promoted rankings. Funny when a vendor selling 1 product has it listed at several different prices, so you can save some money by finding the lowest priced one in their "other listings" that they don't promote.
eBay sells Google ads on its pages. (sad seller noises).
and eBay is one of the biggest ad buyers on Google.
One shouldn't have to make a youtube channel, constantly tweet, and manage a facebook group when a single website should have sufficed.
If we compare to a small business on a highway and a company decides to move the highway so far away from them as to diminish their customer base effectively driving them out of business; this can't happen, since roads are governed as public resources. This is what the Internet needs.
They change more slowly than internet traffic and are less globally impacting than a gigacorp's shuffling though, of course.
There are myriad examples like this of downright giant startups that would not exist if they refused to proceed just because Apple can veto them. Instagram is probably the largest example. Look what happened to Tumblr.
The moving fear is being vetoed only works for well funded startups. A small independent startup would have to consider this before betting the farm on a product that might get smashed by the feeling of the day Google and Apple app moderators have.
Perhaps those protections should now be rescinded and they should be held liable for their conduct.
I can rank on every search engine except Google and it would still kill my business. They own 90% of all the traffic.
Your analogy isn't valid.
There's obviously always the risk that just because a brand was good a year ago doesn't mean it's still good, but I've found that the rate of decline of most good brands is substantially lower than the SEO-spurred rate of decline of the quality of internet publications that purport to provide unbiased reviews.
You’re making me realize I too have been doing this for a while now. At least when satisficing instead of maximizing … and honestly I’m less and less interested in maximizing.
These days when making a purchase I go to a friend group who knows their thing (podcaster friends when looking for a microphone, for example), ask what brand they use, then I go to that brand’s website and buy the highest-line product that I can afford. There’s little to no google searching involved and next to zero awareness of any ads.
Ask a friend in the know and buy that. Done.
If there are no friends in the know, I ask anyone who uses a thing that solves my problem “Hey do you like your <thing>? What do you like about it?”. If they say yes, I go buy that. Life is too short to spend in the quagmire of ecommerce and friends.
I still prefer for the most part, to buy some electronics from brick and mortar shops, at least then I can see the products in action, and I will seek out and travel to specialist shops for things like audio gear, they'll usually match online prices and let you try things out.
It doesn't really matter what the community is for, only last week on a cycling forum someone asked for "What's the best alarm clock?"... two days of discussion later, and everyone has aligned on "Buy one of the Braun alarm clocks" with the only debate left about which particular model was best (it turns out, 3 models cover everyone, and all are still better than anything else). If you went to Google and asked the same question https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=What%27s+... you get a lot of "Best alarm clock" list (with the year meantioned)... but few to none recommend a Braun alarm clock.
You can repeat this for virtually anything... the small communities won't have an instant answer unless someone already asked it, but will produce a better answer every time, and I agree with the article that what has happened to Google isn't great, the incentives have all aligned to produce the worst content, by some of the most trusted sources, and to have that ranked high regardless of whether it helps answer anyone's question.
Some search terms seem to trigger "medical information", "scholarly journals" or "technical documentation" subroutines and avoid products all together.
If I search "Indoor lighting science" on DDG almost all the product stuff is gone. I even get an NIH paper on lighting and health.
Same for "indoor lights technology comparison"
Do you really think it's unreasonable that "indoor lights" goes to e-commerce? What do you think most people who enter that term are looking for?
I mean seriously, do you expect Google to read your mind somehow? Everyone complains that search results are deteriorating. What I think is really happening is that "the internet" isn't only targeted at nerds anymore.
(And of course people are also strongly opposed to behavioral profiling which would be like reading your mind...)
If there is any ambiguity Google defaults to commerce. I think the front page for such general queries should have room for science, history, art, culture. Google's default is to sell you something, and it is often the only thing it shows.
But I can assure everyone with almost absolute certainty, Google is going to change the algorithm in the next year or two again, hammering these bigger sites and, if I had to guess, expand and build more "on-page" results functionality (like the ecommerce filtering they already show on a lot of terms).
I don't really see a future world where a Google SERP isn't either a paid ad, or an on-page feature that allows Google to monetize the query itself if there's a penny of margin to be had.
The goal will be either get an ad click or keep the user on the SERP itself much longer with features that answer their questions and guide them to monetized purchase decisions.
FWIW I read this level of certainty as "I am privy to specific information pertaining to it and in fact I'm one of the people in charge of making sure it happens"
Haven't done it in a few years (having kids has sucked my energy for side projects pretty dry), but at one point had like ~15 sites in my portfolio that I used to experiment with.
Death, taxes, and an algo update fucking with a site's traffic at Google's whim.