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.
This article is really interesting. So, essentially each of the "top publishers" are some sort of SEO ring with different websites, linking each other I guess, or at least writing the same thing, to make Google's scraper believe it is high quality content? Or something similar.
I don't understand the details really, but I have suspected something similar a long time.
Basically yes. I used to write regularly for a large finance site. You've read articles from this site, they show up on HN regularly and its one of the top 100 sites in the world and bounces around in place among the top 3 finance sites.
Anyway, point is when I wrote for them, we had a list of places we could link to and places we couldn't. A lot of them where other sister sites the parent company owned. If we needed a source we first had to try to find it there. If it wasn't available there then there were another list of sites we were allowed to link to, which was basically top 100 sites.
Then there were sites we were NEVER allowed to link to. I remember one of those sites was Reddit. But there were many others. Then anything that fell in the middle was something we linked to if it was critical for the article, otherwise we wouldn't link at all.
So yes, its basically an SEO circle jerk at the top. Which is why you see the same 100 sites in all search results.
The top publishers are just genuinely the sites that people click on and link to the most. There's no objective definition of "high quality content", there are just the links that people click or don't click when presented with search results.
Google puts the links people click the most at the top. And people tend to click on results from sites they recognize, because the internet is filled with a ton of crap, and publications whose names you recognize are at least usually indicative of some kind of minimal level of quality.
You are explaining one component of SEO, which is click-through rate. Google will A/B test certain sites one spot higher or one spot lower to see if click-thru rate is positively affected. So if SiteA gets 80% of clicks while in spot #2, but SiteB gets 84% of clicks while in spot 2, then SiteB moves up to spot #2. The cycle continues as sites move up and down a few spots for fine tuning.
However click-through rate is only one component of SEO. The biggest and most significant component of SEO is backlinks, which are ranked by quantity and quality of the link. So if google trusts SiteA a lot and SiteA links to SiteB, then google starts to trust SiteB. If other trusted sites also link to SiteB then the domain reputation grows for that site. Then there is the same ranking on a per-page basis as well. So if one page in particular is very well-linked to, then Google starts to link that page higher and higher for relevant results. This is the largest and most significant aspect of SEO. The click-through rate is a fine-tuning algorithm once you get to the top, but it alone isn't going to help. Google will never test SiteA with SiteZZZZZZZ on page 12.
This has nothing to do with Google, but rather everything to do with brand-name journalism and what people click on.
This article is criticizing Google for showing reviews and guides to consumer products from well-known publications that it argues are increasingly low-quality, instead of surfacing high-quality independent reviews from less popular sites.
But this has nothing to do with Google. Google's search quality metrics are pretty simple -- Google is trying to list results in roughly the order of probability that people will click on them. Google is trying to get you to the information you're looking for the fastest.
And the reality is that, if I'm looking for air purifiers, I am absolutely going to click on the links to well-known publications like Wirecutter, or Better Homes & Gardens, or Apartment Therapy -- or a forum like Reddit. I'm far less likely to click on some smaller site I've never heard of, because I trust it less. So Google is giving me what I want.
And the idea that Google should somehow instead be analyzing the content of each product review site to try to determine whether the reviewers are actually independently testing the items or not, that it should be making some kind of determination of "real" quality separate from whether people click on it -- this seems both impossible and misguided.
I don't want Google to be trying to pick which niche independent sites are high-quality or low-quality. I just want Google to avoid actual spam, and otherwise give me the results that lots of people link to and lots of people click on -- PageRank and all that -- which is, of course, going to be publications and sites with brand recognition.
Google isn't killing small, independent sites. It's people -- users, consumers, people like me -- who generally aren't interested in small, independent sites because there's no reliable signal to determine which ones are good or trustworthy.
If I'm looking for an air purifier, I don't have time to waste to look through 20 small, independent reviewers and try to figure out which ones are shills and which minority actually know what they're talking about. No -- I'm going to go to the major review sites, see which models keep popping up, check Reddit for some confirmation and Amazon for some sales rank figures, and make the purchase and get on with my day. Which sucks for small, independent review sites. But they're just in a tough business. And Google has nothing to do with that.
The article points out numerous examples where a site like people.com is ranking for pet air purifiers, with zero evidence that they actually tested the products in question.
Yes but it's unreasonable to expect Google to figure out whether people.com is actually testing the products it reviews or not.
All Google can figure out is whether people click on links to people.com when they search for air purifiers (they do), and whether the page in question is outright spam or has its content stolen from another site (it's not).
The idea that Google should be trying to independently figure out some level of objective "content quality" doesn't make any sense to me. It's fine that it builds a knowledge base up out of objective facts to show in cards and whatnot, but I don't want Google trying to decide which review sites are more trustworthy -- I just want it to show me the review sites that other people are clicking on and linking to. For Google to insert "editorial control" over its search results would be an abuse of its power, to me.
When I search Google, I want popular results to come up -- the "democratically elected" results, in effect, from PageRank and clickthrough rates. I don't want Google trying to make assessments of the accuracy of content when it comes to opinion, and review sites are nothing but opinion.
It was always hard to compete for generic keywords like "air purifiers". Wirecutter or whatever with its ton of backlinks would win unless you're doing really shady SEO.
What's been lost is the niche side of independent sites. You used to be able to write a review about Air Purifier Model 5643563453 and you would rank on the first page for any searches for it if nobody else wrote a review about it.
Now you just won't get that traction and will get generic corp results or at best, independent reviews on social media platforms.
Google at least used to include a sprinkling of different types of results, a store, a wiki, a forum, a review site, a blog... Now you can do a search and get 10 results from the same .com for the brand name.
Google has such an extreme bias for popular websites that they now routinely ignore words used in your query if it means recommending a popular website or recommending the results of the closest-sounding search if it's a popular search result.
It's extremely obnoxious. I have to do literal word searches in almost every Google search query I perform now.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying regarding brand recognition and trust, but if that is how Google works, then they should stop publishing documentation + doing presentations + going on webinars + presenting in panels + discussing on Twitter how much they actually do assess the quality of the content and how much they do care about real product reviews.
Also, putting the Wirecutter in the same bag as Apartment Therapy and Better Homes & Gardens is misguided… looking through the examples on the article, it becomes clear that the majority of those lifestyle magazines are just recommending expensive products and popular devices on Amazon.
I would just go to Wirecutter and Consumer Reports.
It sounds like the 2021 Products Review Update did help rank up high quality sites, but the media companies doing affiliate spam found a workaround with "Best of X" lists.
First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there that can't be gamed?
And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on? What if users are so overwhelmed by the number of sites and figuring out whether or not they're trustworthy, that they just want to stick to publications they recognize?
Your way of browsing the web isn't what most users do. Most users click on the first link. Many of them don't know what reference websites are. A Spanish woman in her 20s has no idea what the wirecutter is.
First of all, users are more sophisticated than you think. And why you're bringing nationalities into this, I have no idea. And obviously Google isn't going to be surfacing English content like Wirecutter in Spain -- it will surface well-known publications in Spain.
But secondly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. Users who click on the first link for everything don't change the relative clickthrough rates. The people who actively choose which links to click on would still be the ones influencing the ranking. Google is smart enough to control for clickthrough rates by their listing in results and knowing how far the user has scrolled.
One thing this made me think of is that it would be interesting to try and make a user curated list of these kinds of sites. Every once in a while, I'll come across a blog of either an individual or a very small organization that is, for whatever reason, extremely interested in a very particular product segment (for example: [0]), and get _way_ into the weeds on the product category. They are exactly the kinds of pages I would like to find when I'm researching a product and exactly the kinds of pages that searches either don't turn up at all or are are pretty far down the list.
Having some kind of repository of these kinds of sites would be really useful.
It's a nice idea, but how do I find the lists that are actually legitimate?
I've just resorted to RSS+bookmarking every small site with good content I see. The bookmarks get fed to YaCy, even though it kinda sucks. I just can't trust content aggregators and search engines to deliver good unique content.
This isn't just product reviews. Try searching any question and more than likely multiple results on the first page will be "articles" with some title like "So you want to know about x?" and the same sort of, generic, possibly algorithm generated, useless content. I wish there was an extension where you could add to a communal blacklist of result url's to start trying to put a dent in the huge number of garbage results Google spits out.
I wonder if Google is internally acutely aware of how rapidly its reputation is tanking. I just haven't seen many public acknowledgements of flaws in its search engine, especially in relation to SEO. So I'm very curious if there is some ongoing code-red internally about this, or if it the problem just got lost in one of the hidden layers of corporate fog.
The reply post to that one [1] is a perfect example of what I see everyday on Google. You search for "Best Men's Wallet" and the top examples are from 1) Forbes, 2) BusinessInsider, 3) New York Times.
These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can basically create any content they want and Google will reward them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the rest of us looking for useful content in this search category can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content by sites that honestly have no business writing about this stuff.
Web search is dead for that. When faced with a new product category I don't know anything about I go on YouTube and look for people explaining how to use those kind of products, then look for unboxing or reviews, finally I get a rough idea. Then I can search the web for the few products that seem to fit my needs and budget. The advantage of video is that it's (still?) easy to see if something is a genuine or a fabricated review. The disadvantage is that video takes a much longer time than text.
“Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the ‘small web.’ We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways…”
Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet.
The people most likely to benefit and have the time to enjoy small-web content are inquisitive children who don't have good sources of information at their disposal, i.e. the smart kids of dumber parents who don't have library cards. Kids who have infinite free time but zero chance of persuading their parents to pay for anything academic or 'nerdy'. There's a lot of them out there.
The reason Kagi isn't like Google is because it is paid.
Contrary to popular belief: servers aren't free to run or buy or maintain. Software developers also don't work for charity therefore they require paychecks. Both of these things require money.
So if you have to pay the bills somehow then you either get users to pay for it (what Kagi currently does) or you get someone else to pay for it so it can be free to users (what Google currently does).
So if Kagi makes it "free" then they need to start advertising, which then breaks the model because their customers are no longer the search users, but the advertisers. Now motivations and incentives shift and before you know it, you rebuilt Google with a different name and we are back where we started.
The point is, that the fact that it is user-funded is exactly why its different. If you pick up the ad model then you will slowly evolve (devolve?) into what all the other search engines already are.
> Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet
That “true spirit of the internet” caused the ad-based cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn’t work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
This is the part of the analogy where everyone finds out the Golden Goose is actually dead and Google just started painting regular eggs gold and hoped nobody would notice.
I for one welcome going back to libraries as a source of truth. Too bad no one else will realize that happened though and will continue reading the propaganda rags.
Google spent at least a decade incentivizing spam while they dominated up the search market, tearing any semblance of humanity and authenticity from the web. By the time Reddit realized what they had, LLMs had scraped them dry, then tragically and ironically, their plan to lock LLMs out of their API backfired and users deleted half of Reddit's content. There's so much value in the Small Web right now - microblogs, IndieWeb, etc., but it's just so hard to find these kinds of sites if you don't know what you're looking for
I tried to use Google to search for mattresses this way and found that 10/10 sites on the first page were all just affiliates of the mattress companies they were recommended. Even though they were reputable sites like the NYTimes, etc. I then appended "reddit" to my search and everyone in the comments essentially said to avoid those very brands that were the highest recommended from those sites.
I hate that modern SEO is practically just build to create spam to game Google.
Good luck buying a mattress. The market is so intense that it is basically impossible to find honest information. Everything is affiliate links and the forums are flooded with shills.
I ended up building my own mattress because the community around it doesn't really have a product to push.
From a regulatory perspective, implementing the ability to remove certain websites from search results (similar to twitter mute/block) would solve the problem for everyone. Motivated communities can maintain their lists and share amongst themselves.
My strategy is not to use search engines for product recommendations, but to go to the online shops directly, look for the 1-star and 2-star reviews, and read them carefully. Once narrowed down to a few products, I then research them specifically to find out the details.
For the example of air purifiers, look on Ali if you don't want to DIY one with a box fan and HEPA filter. They're all going to be made by some Chinese OEM anyway, so you'll cut out some middlemen and reduce the price, and at least those listings often have far more technical information, and the reviews can have detailed pictures from buyers of the products' internals.
This is a brilliant breakdown of whats been going on with review lists. Its been obvious for the last five years or so that whenever I googled 'best laser jet printer' or whatever that I was getting fed a load of bullshit but this really steps through exactly how Google and the seo crew are racing us all to the bottom, and to the opposite of useful info.
Google results are trash, i still find myself appending "reddit" to get decent answers.
Just stop paying Google. Stop using their services.
Our company can't even reply to gmail users that ask us questions (hey gmail, if your user emails us, they probably want a response regardless of the hoops you want everyone to jump through with your "anti-spam" measures).
I find Yandex to give much better results than Google, but lately I haven't been able to solve Yandex's CAPTCHAs (the one where you have to click images in the right order). Pretty sure that I give the correct answers.
I think SEO has become a cat & mouse game between the engine & websites. As a product owner, I think its great that Google publishes how it ranks to maintain transparency, but that also allows the big companies to game the system. I almost wonder if they should be less transparent on how they rank.
Further, as the big publishers as well as well known sites get more & more of Google's traffic, doesnt it create a negative feedback loop for Google? Most of these sites have their own internal search. If I know that I'll anyways go to CondeNast for travel, i'd rather go there directly & search & skip google entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it would be in Google's best interest to try & place new & unique websites towards top of the ranking much more frequently than they do. Not sure why they dont do it already.
If you wanted to make a search algorithm that displayed high quality results, you'd blacklist or downweight the big publishers because you know they're going to be dishonest.
But when Google is also making money with their ad platform on those publishers' websites I don't think they'd ever do that.
This is a genuinely difficult problem to solve. The article title is "How Google is killing independent sites like ours" but then (1) I have never heard of HouseFresh and I have no reason to trust them for their reviews; (2) even if the site was highly ranked on Google, I still wouldn't necessarily trust the brand because you know SEO and ranking manipulations exist and I cannot be assured that HouseFresh isn't just a site that hired some high powered SEO consultant. It all boils down to reputation: reputation of the manufacturer and reputation of the reviewer. But humans can't realistically remember the reputation of all the manufacturers and product reviewers online, so we naturally gravitate towards well-known brands and big media publishers.
This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI (i.e. sophisticated reading systems) will be able to address.
If there was a human curator with infinite time, I think they could wade through this crap and find ten links to authoritative sites that would provide a much better experience. They would do the same type of research that this author did, see how well a site’s recommendations correlated with other review sites (and vice versa to problematic sites), look at the history of reviews and see if they correlated to when products where shipped, look at the authors experience in the review space, etc, etc.
This has to be a direction Google will be going in.
The long predicted LLM spam apocalypse is upon us. All open systems and forums will be rendered unusable, including probably eventually e-mail. The future is closed enclaves, private forums, and managed platforms that verify identity.
It was kind of inevitable that some tech would eventually do this, even if it was as unsophisticated as click farms and content mills. If adding information is free and there is no gate, it gets trashed by spam. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.
This page is great at telling a list of popular websites we should simply block/remove from our search results (can use uBlock or uBlacklist). When you search for "Dotdash Meredith" or more specifically "is part of the Dotdash Meredith publishing family" you get a lot of widely known websites. I am removing all these via uBlacklist atm.
Are there any other similar family of websites which we can lookup and block?
Ha! My anti-SEO search engine detected all the SEO junk when searching for "best air purifier for pet hair" that would otherwise show up in Google as per the article
Feel free to give it a try, one search per day is free
> This high-end purifier uses PECO technology to destroy airborne pollutants, including pet hair,
> dander, and viruses. It's also effective at removing odors and VOCs. While it's one of the most
> expensive options on the list, it's a good choice for those with severe allergies or asthma.
This brand was specifically called out by the main article for being overpriced junk by a company currently in a lawsuit regarding false advertising.
That's terrible! Yes, I can see one of the (general) summaries yielded that result. The SEO results were still thankfully down ranked. This Molekule manufacturer that went bankrupt has bankrupted my fun :'(
When Google slashed payouts on Google Ads (then known as Adsense), blog networks went the route of "affilliate link infested product review posts" and haven't looked back.
The web has lost so much personality since the 2000s. Every site covers the same topics with the same shallow posts, and everyone ignores that the only thing keeping the lights on are those "Best product for X" posts.
Anecdotally, I've been shopping for a product with a substantial price tag. I thought I had a complete list of every brand and model I wanted to see. Eventually I found my favorite in a showroom from a manufacturer that's not well known and wasn't on my list. Online, there's hardly any comparisons or reviews that aren't affiliated with a seller or manufacturer.
Good quality product reviews are the antithesis of Google's core business. Google has little to no motivation to solve this in any kind of long-lasting, committed way.
Actually, advertising is kind of the antithesis to most quality, factual, well-researched, unbiased information.
What if google let us pick the version of their algo we want to use for search results? That makes it impossible for SEO companies to target all algos, while also letting us customers use the right algo for the right search?
OpenAI does it with their LLMs albeit with a different intent.
But even reviews that you might see on YouTube are usually not reviews. They are demos. Unboxing a product and demonstrating that a product indeed does what the box says is not a true review.
Is there a list anywhere of trustworthy sites for product reviews? The article mentioned Tech Gear Lab, and though I haven't heard of House Fresh, that seems reasonable? Consumer Reports of course, but are there others?
I don't think so. It depends on the product, ie. Digital Trends are good for stuff like TVs, Serious Eats have great kitchen-related stuff reviews, etc...
I don't really have any large scale answers other than to just aggregate my own recommendations at starterpax.com and refer friends and family to that for various hobbies / categories.
Does someone have a browser add-on with a site blacklist for Google search results? Google won't let you do that in the Chrome store any more, but you can still do it for Firefox.
I paid for a subscription to Consumer Reports, and while it’s not a perfect solution, it has been very helpful. To a lesser extent Wirecutter from the NYT has also been helpful.
What I find interesting is the categories not clearly spammed but obviously in a high cost ecosystem at smallish scale. Rehab centers, front yard water features, etc.
This is an entirely predictable consequence of Goodhart's Law [0] and Google ought to have known better.
I can believe that Google was genuinely trying to help their users by providing more useful search results, yet, due to Goodhart's law they have in fact accomplished the opposite. As a concrete example, previously references to "lab testing" actually meant something, but Google turned its immense power on that and similar keywords and destroyed their information content.
It is irresponsible of Google to naively act in ignorance of the entirely predictable consequences of their actions. Yes, Goodhart's law is counterintuitive, but it's been a well-known principle for decades and Google ought to realize that they are powerful enough it applies to any action they take and take that into account when making decisions.
This isn't really about google search results. The underlying playbook is the same one that has been used by vulture capitalists for quite some time now. Find a company with some value, buy it, extract the value into cash for the hedge fund, screw the employees and the public, move on to the next target. Look at what Alden Global has been doing to newspapers for years, and more recently Greyhound bus terminals. Gordon Gecko was a character in a movie, but based on all-too-real people and behaviors.
Goes to show how little you can trust reddit comments these days, particularly for good google keywords
This is mentioned in TFA:
>Somehow the user has been banned from Reddit, but their comment is still at the top of the thread — we wonder how many other comments this user has published across different subreddits.
This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment.
I'll be the unpopular voice here (not defending g for the,imho, monopoly though):
- Google is not killing anything and don't owe you traffic;
- You don't get traffic because your website is less algorithm oriented than other sites (among a ton of other things).
if you want to unserstand how and why certain websites rank and all that sort of stuff just lurk on black hat SEO forums and see how they game system. I don't recomment their services but it's worth reading about the things they take into account. From keywords, density, headings all the way to domain age and server location.
This is the "don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" defense [0]. Google isn't killing anything because Google is just an algorithm. Your site fares poorly not because Google wants to hurt you but because you don't want to waste your life catering to an algorithm. It's not Google's fault that that you have other priorities like actually helping your readers live a better life!
While it's strictly accurate, it's not a very useful way to look at the world. Google is killing independent sites that spend more time on the content than on SEO. It might be killing those sites in the same way that a volcanic eruption kills wildlife—as an unthinking, uncaring force of nature—but it's still killing them.
It’s also a framing that ignores the fact that Google clearly wants to be able to filter out the garbage but can’t. It’s not bloggers’ fault for that. At some point, you can either decide to write for people or decide to write for the algorithm.
It’s not about Google owing anyone traffic, people are upset that Google can’t tell the difference between inauthentic product recommendations and authentic ones. Google clearly wishes they could as well, but it doesn’t scale so they don’t solve the problem.
> your website is less algorithm oriented
Maybe we should refuse to accept Google’s framing. It’s content creators’ job to create great content as judged by people. It’s Google’s job to discover that content and rank it above procedurally generated garbage that is devouring the internet. The fact that Google’s results are dominated by trash isn’t because there’s a lack of good content.
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.
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.
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!
--
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.
I still believe the original title is warranted.
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.
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What is the loop hole?
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Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing instead because of how horrible google results are.
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.
>Google search has become worthless for me.
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.
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> 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).
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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...
I second this. The quality of google search has reached a point that's only good to search things that can't be bought.
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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.
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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.
I use Bing, too. People are suprised when I recommend it, but for most general searches, it's quite a bit better.
I use an LLM for 80% of my queries now. Fighting Google isn't worthwhile, unless I need a trusted source.
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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 subscribe to Kagi, and it’s great.
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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).
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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.
What's the site and what keywords are you targeting?
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> 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>>
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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."
Yes, exactly -- Google is the new Yahoo.
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.
What? Malware ads masquerading as legitimate websites are common and Google hasn't visibly done much to combat them.
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.
1. https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of...
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.
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Seeing the world in "sides" makes it hard to discern truth from propaganda.
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> Just use Yandex.
If they ever discover operands, let me know.
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.
There surely must be a better option.
> Reddit is also really hit and miss
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.
Reddit is highly subjective.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Do you happen to know a McMaster-Carr equivalent based in Europe?
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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.
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> 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.
It's called "Consumer Reports" / Consumers Union.
That's what it look like.
The only thing that could enhance or replace it would be official government testing of products.
But people need to use it.
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:
https://www.reddit.com/user/ErinElizabeth1187/
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>There surely must be a better option.
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.
Or rtings for any categories they review.
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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...
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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.
<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.
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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.
> 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.
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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.
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It is very risky but making your own website and having it be easily found should be the way the internet is supposed to work.
One shouldn't have to make a youtube channel, constantly tweet, and manage a facebook group when a single website should have sufficed.
I miss that old Internet. Nowadays it's all social shit.
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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.
The question here is how to break out of it. If you go to Bing for example you fall under Microsoft hood, which isn't really solving the problem.
"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.
These are inspite of.
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.
But should those app stores even be the sole judge of whether or not those apps can exist?
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.
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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.
How many businesses are utterly dependent on AWS?
AWS has competition. I can run on 1000 other hosting providers and the users of the site won't be able to tell the difference.
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.
As customers - which is different.
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
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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.
Even Kagi is like that, since "lighting" is a product class.
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.
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.
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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.
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Certainty can also come from experience of previous actions when such exploits become commonplace.
This article is really interesting. So, essentially each of the "top publishers" are some sort of SEO ring with different websites, linking each other I guess, or at least writing the same thing, to make Google's scraper believe it is high quality content? Or something similar.
I don't understand the details really, but I have suspected something similar a long time.
Basically yes. I used to write regularly for a large finance site. You've read articles from this site, they show up on HN regularly and its one of the top 100 sites in the world and bounces around in place among the top 3 finance sites.
Anyway, point is when I wrote for them, we had a list of places we could link to and places we couldn't. A lot of them where other sister sites the parent company owned. If we needed a source we first had to try to find it there. If it wasn't available there then there were another list of sites we were allowed to link to, which was basically top 100 sites.
Then there were sites we were NEVER allowed to link to. I remember one of those sites was Reddit. But there were many others. Then anything that fell in the middle was something we linked to if it was critical for the article, otherwise we wouldn't link at all.
So yes, its basically an SEO circle jerk at the top. Which is why you see the same 100 sites in all search results.
Do you have any theory of why Reddit was banned? To prevent some "astroturfing" blackbox algorithm to flag the site?
Yeah here's a very detailed report on what's been going on written by a friend of mine.
https://detailed.com/google-control/
No, there's no SEO ring or anything like that.
The top publishers are just genuinely the sites that people click on and link to the most. There's no objective definition of "high quality content", there are just the links that people click or don't click when presented with search results.
Google puts the links people click the most at the top. And people tend to click on results from sites they recognize, because the internet is filled with a ton of crap, and publications whose names you recognize are at least usually indicative of some kind of minimal level of quality.
That's all that's going on.
It's worth noting it's not just "people preferring well known sites" it's "Google preferring well known sites as part of EEAT"
You are explaining one component of SEO, which is click-through rate. Google will A/B test certain sites one spot higher or one spot lower to see if click-thru rate is positively affected. So if SiteA gets 80% of clicks while in spot #2, but SiteB gets 84% of clicks while in spot 2, then SiteB moves up to spot #2. The cycle continues as sites move up and down a few spots for fine tuning.
However click-through rate is only one component of SEO. The biggest and most significant component of SEO is backlinks, which are ranked by quantity and quality of the link. So if google trusts SiteA a lot and SiteA links to SiteB, then google starts to trust SiteB. If other trusted sites also link to SiteB then the domain reputation grows for that site. Then there is the same ranking on a per-page basis as well. So if one page in particular is very well-linked to, then Google starts to link that page higher and higher for relevant results. This is the largest and most significant aspect of SEO. The click-through rate is a fine-tuning algorithm once you get to the top, but it alone isn't going to help. Google will never test SiteA with SiteZZZZZZZ on page 12.
This has nothing to do with Google, but rather everything to do with brand-name journalism and what people click on.
This article is criticizing Google for showing reviews and guides to consumer products from well-known publications that it argues are increasingly low-quality, instead of surfacing high-quality independent reviews from less popular sites.
But this has nothing to do with Google. Google's search quality metrics are pretty simple -- Google is trying to list results in roughly the order of probability that people will click on them. Google is trying to get you to the information you're looking for the fastest.
And the reality is that, if I'm looking for air purifiers, I am absolutely going to click on the links to well-known publications like Wirecutter, or Better Homes & Gardens, or Apartment Therapy -- or a forum like Reddit. I'm far less likely to click on some smaller site I've never heard of, because I trust it less. So Google is giving me what I want.
And the idea that Google should somehow instead be analyzing the content of each product review site to try to determine whether the reviewers are actually independently testing the items or not, that it should be making some kind of determination of "real" quality separate from whether people click on it -- this seems both impossible and misguided.
I don't want Google to be trying to pick which niche independent sites are high-quality or low-quality. I just want Google to avoid actual spam, and otherwise give me the results that lots of people link to and lots of people click on -- PageRank and all that -- which is, of course, going to be publications and sites with brand recognition.
Google isn't killing small, independent sites. It's people -- users, consumers, people like me -- who generally aren't interested in small, independent sites because there's no reliable signal to determine which ones are good or trustworthy.
If I'm looking for an air purifier, I don't have time to waste to look through 20 small, independent reviewers and try to figure out which ones are shills and which minority actually know what they're talking about. No -- I'm going to go to the major review sites, see which models keep popping up, check Reddit for some confirmation and Amazon for some sales rank figures, and make the purchase and get on with my day. Which sucks for small, independent review sites. But they're just in a tough business. And Google has nothing to do with that.
The article points out numerous examples where a site like people.com is ranking for pet air purifiers, with zero evidence that they actually tested the products in question.
This tweet thread goes into more detail https://x.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1717291171473727719?s=20
Yes but it's unreasonable to expect Google to figure out whether people.com is actually testing the products it reviews or not.
All Google can figure out is whether people click on links to people.com when they search for air purifiers (they do), and whether the page in question is outright spam or has its content stolen from another site (it's not).
The idea that Google should be trying to independently figure out some level of objective "content quality" doesn't make any sense to me. It's fine that it builds a knowledge base up out of objective facts to show in cards and whatnot, but I don't want Google trying to decide which review sites are more trustworthy -- I just want it to show me the review sites that other people are clicking on and linking to. For Google to insert "editorial control" over its search results would be an abuse of its power, to me.
When I search Google, I want popular results to come up -- the "democratically elected" results, in effect, from PageRank and clickthrough rates. I don't want Google trying to make assessments of the accuracy of content when it comes to opinion, and review sites are nothing but opinion.
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Oh my god, does Twitter now redirect to X for some users?
I've seen more and more links that start with x.com, but my browser still redirects me back to twitter.com
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It was always hard to compete for generic keywords like "air purifiers". Wirecutter or whatever with its ton of backlinks would win unless you're doing really shady SEO.
What's been lost is the niche side of independent sites. You used to be able to write a review about Air Purifier Model 5643563453 and you would rank on the first page for any searches for it if nobody else wrote a review about it.
Now you just won't get that traction and will get generic corp results or at best, independent reviews on social media platforms.
Google at least used to include a sprinkling of different types of results, a store, a wiki, a forum, a review site, a blog... Now you can do a search and get 10 results from the same .com for the brand name.
Google has such an extreme bias for popular websites that they now routinely ignore words used in your query if it means recommending a popular website or recommending the results of the closest-sounding search if it's a popular search result.
It's extremely obnoxious. I have to do literal word searches in almost every Google search query I perform now.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying regarding brand recognition and trust, but if that is how Google works, then they should stop publishing documentation + doing presentations + going on webinars + presenting in panels + discussing on Twitter how much they actually do assess the quality of the content and how much they do care about real product reviews.
Also, putting the Wirecutter in the same bag as Apartment Therapy and Better Homes & Gardens is misguided… looking through the examples on the article, it becomes clear that the majority of those lifestyle magazines are just recommending expensive products and popular devices on Amazon.
I would just go to Wirecutter and Consumer Reports.
I think there will be tons of signals google could use to rank up a high quality independent site like this one. They just choose not to.
It sounds like the 2021 Products Review Update did help rank up high quality sites, but the media companies doing affiliate spam found a workaround with "Best of X" lists.
First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there that can't be gamed?
And second of all, what if they do, but users still don't click on it because they don't recognize the name of the site? Is Google supposed to be giving users results that they don't want to click on? What if users are so overwhelmed by the number of sites and figuring out whether or not they're trustworthy, that they just want to stick to publications they recognize?
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Your way of browsing the web isn't what most users do. Most users click on the first link. Many of them don't know what reference websites are. A Spanish woman in her 20s has no idea what the wirecutter is.
First of all, users are more sophisticated than you think. And why you're bringing nationalities into this, I have no idea. And obviously Google isn't going to be surfacing English content like Wirecutter in Spain -- it will surface well-known publications in Spain.
But secondly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. Users who click on the first link for everything don't change the relative clickthrough rates. The people who actively choose which links to click on would still be the ones influencing the ranking. Google is smart enough to control for clickthrough rates by their listing in results and knowing how far the user has scrolled.
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One thing this made me think of is that it would be interesting to try and make a user curated list of these kinds of sites. Every once in a while, I'll come across a blog of either an individual or a very small organization that is, for whatever reason, extremely interested in a very particular product segment (for example: [0]), and get _way_ into the weeds on the product category. They are exactly the kinds of pages I would like to find when I'm researching a product and exactly the kinds of pages that searches either don't turn up at all or are are pretty far down the list.
Having some kind of repository of these kinds of sites would be really useful.
[0]https://gunsafereviewsguy.com/
It's a nice idea, but how do I find the lists that are actually legitimate?
I've just resorted to RSS+bookmarking every small site with good content I see. The bookmarks get fed to YaCy, even though it kinda sucks. I just can't trust content aggregators and search engines to deliver good unique content.
This isn't just product reviews. Try searching any question and more than likely multiple results on the first page will be "articles" with some title like "So you want to know about x?" and the same sort of, generic, possibly algorithm generated, useless content. I wish there was an extension where you could add to a communal blacklist of result url's to start trying to put a dent in the huge number of garbage results Google spits out.
There's uBlacklist [1], but there's not much community activity on its subscription list [2] or awesome-ublacklist [3].
[1] https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
[2] https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/subscriptions
[3] https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
I wonder if Google is internally acutely aware of how rapidly its reputation is tanking. I just haven't seen many public acknowledgements of flaws in its search engine, especially in relation to SEO. So I'm very curious if there is some ongoing code-red internally about this, or if it the problem just got lost in one of the hidden layers of corporate fog.
It’s acknowledged obliquely at the end of this tweet: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1716964371916800472
The reply post to that one [1] is a perfect example of what I see everyday on Google. You search for "Best Men's Wallet" and the top examples are from 1) Forbes, 2) BusinessInsider, 3) New York Times.
These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can basically create any content they want and Google will reward them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the rest of us looking for useful content in this search category can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content by sites that honestly have no business writing about this stuff.
[1] - https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629
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Barely. With several follow-up tweets by them defending its bad behavior.
Web search is dead for that. When faced with a new product category I don't know anything about I go on YouTube and look for people explaining how to use those kind of products, then look for unboxing or reviews, finally I get a rough idea. Then I can search the web for the few products that seem to fit my needs and budget. The advantage of video is that it's (still?) easy to see if something is a genuine or a fabricated review. The disadvantage is that video takes a much longer time than text.
“Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the ‘small web.’ We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways…”
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet.
The people most likely to benefit and have the time to enjoy small-web content are inquisitive children who don't have good sources of information at their disposal, i.e. the smart kids of dumber parents who don't have library cards. Kids who have infinite free time but zero chance of persuading their parents to pay for anything academic or 'nerdy'. There's a lot of them out there.
The reason Kagi isn't like Google is because it is paid.
Contrary to popular belief: servers aren't free to run or buy or maintain. Software developers also don't work for charity therefore they require paychecks. Both of these things require money.
So if you have to pay the bills somehow then you either get users to pay for it (what Kagi currently does) or you get someone else to pay for it so it can be free to users (what Google currently does).
So if Kagi makes it "free" then they need to start advertising, which then breaks the model because their customers are no longer the search users, but the advertisers. Now motivations and incentives shift and before you know it, you rebuilt Google with a different name and we are back where we started.
The point is, that the fact that it is user-funded is exactly why its different. If you pick up the ad model then you will slowly evolve (devolve?) into what all the other search engines already are.
> Kagi needs to be free to use or have some sort of school partnership program if it's to embody the true spirit of the internet
That “true spirit of the internet” caused the ad-based cesspool we have today. Pretending for a free lunch doesn’t work. What you may be suggesting is school districts pay for Kagi, and in that I fully agree. But in terms of being free, no, free doesn’t work.
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This is the part of the analogy where everyone finds out the Golden Goose is actually dead and Google just started painting regular eggs gold and hoped nobody would notice.
And the brief period where the Internet was a secret trick to get information that nobody else had, for free, is over
I for one welcome going back to libraries as a source of truth. Too bad no one else will realize that happened though and will continue reading the propaganda rags.
Google spent at least a decade incentivizing spam while they dominated up the search market, tearing any semblance of humanity and authenticity from the web. By the time Reddit realized what they had, LLMs had scraped them dry, then tragically and ironically, their plan to lock LLMs out of their API backfired and users deleted half of Reddit's content. There's so much value in the Small Web right now - microblogs, IndieWeb, etc., but it's just so hard to find these kinds of sites if you don't know what you're looking for
Well. They do affiliate and bigger Gorillas do affiliate. But they claim to do a more honest review. Well. Air cleaner.
I do my review here without any affiliate link: Most DIY filters outclass commercial available filters: https://dynomight.net/better-DIY-air-purifier.html
https://energy.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/Case-Study_DIY...
> What do BuzzFeed, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Popular Science, and Better Homes & Gardens have in common?
They are all in my ublacklist personal block list. That was before going full time with Kagi where I blocked most of them too.
I tried to use Google to search for mattresses this way and found that 10/10 sites on the first page were all just affiliates of the mattress companies they were recommended. Even though they were reputable sites like the NYTimes, etc. I then appended "reddit" to my search and everyone in the comments essentially said to avoid those very brands that were the highest recommended from those sites.
I hate that modern SEO is practically just build to create spam to game Google.
Good luck buying a mattress. The market is so intense that it is basically impossible to find honest information. Everything is affiliate links and the forums are flooded with shills.
I ended up building my own mattress because the community around it doesn't really have a product to push.
From a regulatory perspective, implementing the ability to remove certain websites from search results (similar to twitter mute/block) would solve the problem for everyone. Motivated communities can maintain their lists and share amongst themselves.
Presented like this it really is an absolutely damning indictment.
Can anyone tell where this screenshot comes from?
https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-p...
https://ahrefs.com/serp-checker
My strategy is not to use search engines for product recommendations, but to go to the online shops directly, look for the 1-star and 2-star reviews, and read them carefully. Once narrowed down to a few products, I then research them specifically to find out the details.
For the example of air purifiers, look on Ali if you don't want to DIY one with a box fan and HEPA filter. They're all going to be made by some Chinese OEM anyway, so you'll cut out some middlemen and reduce the price, and at least those listings often have far more technical information, and the reviews can have detailed pictures from buyers of the products' internals.
This is a brilliant breakdown of whats been going on with review lists. Its been obvious for the last five years or so that whenever I googled 'best laser jet printer' or whatever that I was getting fed a load of bullshit but this really steps through exactly how Google and the seo crew are racing us all to the bottom, and to the opposite of useful info.
Google results are trash, i still find myself appending "reddit" to get decent answers.
Just stop paying Google. Stop using their services.
Our company can't even reply to gmail users that ask us questions (hey gmail, if your user emails us, they probably want a response regardless of the hoops you want everyone to jump through with your "anti-spam" measures).
I find Yandex to give much better results than Google, but lately I haven't been able to solve Yandex's CAPTCHAs (the one where you have to click images in the right order). Pretty sure that I give the correct answers.
I think SEO has become a cat & mouse game between the engine & websites. As a product owner, I think its great that Google publishes how it ranks to maintain transparency, but that also allows the big companies to game the system. I almost wonder if they should be less transparent on how they rank.
Further, as the big publishers as well as well known sites get more & more of Google's traffic, doesnt it create a negative feedback loop for Google? Most of these sites have their own internal search. If I know that I'll anyways go to CondeNast for travel, i'd rather go there directly & search & skip google entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it would be in Google's best interest to try & place new & unique websites towards top of the ranking much more frequently than they do. Not sure why they dont do it already.
If you wanted to make a search algorithm that displayed high quality results, you'd blacklist or downweight the big publishers because you know they're going to be dishonest.
But when Google is also making money with their ad platform on those publishers' websites I don't think they'd ever do that.
^ this is it ^
Do I have this right?
1. Google is overrun by low quality product reviews and comparisons
2. Google starts to weight highly sites with manual testing
3. All those sites shamelessly lie and say they have manual testing -> back to 1
Isn't this a problem that Pagerank is supposed to solve? Auditing content for quality is basically an intractable problem to scale
This is a genuinely difficult problem to solve. The article title is "How Google is killing independent sites like ours" but then (1) I have never heard of HouseFresh and I have no reason to trust them for their reviews; (2) even if the site was highly ranked on Google, I still wouldn't necessarily trust the brand because you know SEO and ranking manipulations exist and I cannot be assured that HouseFresh isn't just a site that hired some high powered SEO consultant. It all boils down to reputation: reputation of the manufacturer and reputation of the reviewer. But humans can't realistically remember the reputation of all the manufacturers and product reviewers online, so we naturally gravitate towards well-known brands and big media publishers.
I hope that paid search engines like Kagin would be used more frequently. Monopoles always bad.
*Kagi
This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI (i.e. sophisticated reading systems) will be able to address.
If there was a human curator with infinite time, I think they could wade through this crap and find ten links to authoritative sites that would provide a much better experience. They would do the same type of research that this author did, see how well a site’s recommendations correlated with other review sites (and vice versa to problematic sites), look at the history of reviews and see if they correlated to when products where shipped, look at the authors experience in the review space, etc, etc.
This has to be a direction Google will be going in.
"This type of SEO spam seems like an area where generative AI will be able to address."
LOL, no. Generative AI is literally taking over SEO spam and exponentially magnifying it. That's where the money is. And Google is here to make money.
GenAI as in increasingly sophisticated reasoning engines, not writing fake product reviews.
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The long predicted LLM spam apocalypse is upon us. All open systems and forums will be rendered unusable, including probably eventually e-mail. The future is closed enclaves, private forums, and managed platforms that verify identity.
It was kind of inevitable that some tech would eventually do this, even if it was as unsophisticated as click farms and content mills. If adding information is free and there is no gate, it gets trashed by spam. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.
This page is great at telling a list of popular websites we should simply block/remove from our search results (can use uBlock or uBlacklist). When you search for "Dotdash Meredith" or more specifically "is part of the Dotdash Meredith publishing family" you get a lot of widely known websites. I am removing all these via uBlacklist atm.
Are there any other similar family of websites which we can lookup and block?
Ha! My anti-SEO search engine detected all the SEO junk when searching for "best air purifier for pet hair" that would otherwise show up in Google as per the article
Feel free to give it a try, one search per day is free
https://www.aisearch.vip/?q=best%20air%20purifier%20for%20pe...
That's neat. But it still got fooled by them:
> Best Splurge: Molekule Air Pro
> This high-end purifier uses PECO technology to destroy airborne pollutants, including pet hair, > dander, and viruses. It's also effective at removing odors and VOCs. While it's one of the most > expensive options on the list, it's a good choice for those with severe allergies or asthma.
This brand was specifically called out by the main article for being overpriced junk by a company currently in a lawsuit regarding false advertising.
That's terrible! Yes, I can see one of the (general) summaries yielded that result. The SEO results were still thankfully down ranked. This Molekule manufacturer that went bankrupt has bankrupted my fun :'(
When Google slashed payouts on Google Ads (then known as Adsense), blog networks went the route of "affilliate link infested product review posts" and haven't looked back.
The web has lost so much personality since the 2000s. Every site covers the same topics with the same shallow posts, and everyone ignores that the only thing keeping the lights on are those "Best product for X" posts.
Anecdotally, I've been shopping for a product with a substantial price tag. I thought I had a complete list of every brand and model I wanted to see. Eventually I found my favorite in a showroom from a manufacturer that's not well known and wasn't on my list. Online, there's hardly any comparisons or reviews that aren't affiliated with a seller or manufacturer.
Google Search is ripe for disruption, just as they disrupted Yahoo and AltaVista in 1990s.
Nothing would make me happier than the trillion $ corps being disrupted by new players offering serious value to users.
Trillion $ corps rent seeking their way into 100 markets and having law makers working for them isn't a great thing for the future of humanity.
Good quality product reviews are the antithesis of Google's core business. Google has little to no motivation to solve this in any kind of long-lasting, committed way.
Actually, advertising is kind of the antithesis to most quality, factual, well-researched, unbiased information.
What if google let us pick the version of their algo we want to use for search results? That makes it impossible for SEO companies to target all algos, while also letting us customers use the right algo for the right search?
OpenAI does it with their LLMs albeit with a different intent.
I know when I need an air purifier, I look to Rolling Stone Magazine for an honest, accurate review
At this point it you are searching for the "best" anything on Google, that's on you.
Looks like these "reviews" never happened.
But even reviews that you might see on YouTube are usually not reviews. They are demos. Unboxing a product and demonstrating that a product indeed does what the box says is not a true review.
Is there a list anywhere of trustworthy sites for product reviews? The article mentioned Tech Gear Lab, and though I haven't heard of House Fresh, that seems reasonable? Consumer Reports of course, but are there others?
I don't think so. It depends on the product, ie. Digital Trends are good for stuff like TVs, Serious Eats have great kitchen-related stuff reviews, etc...
Google is culpable here. But the actual people who work there seem to not care, or are gleefully unaware.
But the publishers who sold out to the algorithm are also to blame. I don’t know how to break the vicious cycle here.
I don't really have any large scale answers other than to just aggregate my own recommendations at starterpax.com and refer friends and family to that for various hobbies / categories.
Does someone have a browser add-on with a site blacklist for Google search results? Google won't let you do that in the Chrome store any more, but you can still do it for Firefox.
I paid for a subscription to Consumer Reports, and while it’s not a perfect solution, it has been very helpful. To a lesser extent Wirecutter from the NYT has also been helpful.
What I find interesting is the categories not clearly spammed but obviously in a high cost ecosystem at smallish scale. Rehab centers, front yard water features, etc.
Also, a lot of these publishers are used by spammers for link building, dont believe? just go to BHS marketplace
.... Barbershop Harmony Service?
What is BHS marketplace?
Most likely “black hat SEO”
Black Hat [Something]?
Seeing PopSci mentioned here stings, but they're right. I loved that magazine as a kid.
Is there a ublock origin list that can be used to filter those websites ?
There is uBlacklist you can use to remove all these sites from search results
This is an entirely predictable consequence of Goodhart's Law [0] and Google ought to have known better.
I can believe that Google was genuinely trying to help their users by providing more useful search results, yet, due to Goodhart's law they have in fact accomplished the opposite. As a concrete example, previously references to "lab testing" actually meant something, but Google turned its immense power on that and similar keywords and destroyed their information content.
It is irresponsible of Google to naively act in ignorance of the entirely predictable consequences of their actions. Yes, Goodhart's law is counterintuitive, but it's been a well-known principle for decades and Google ought to realize that they are powerful enough it applies to any action they take and take that into account when making decisions.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Wow. This is super helpful. We have all noticed the enshittification of google search results, but this actually helps explain why.
google SERP became very bad now may be.
This isn't really about google search results. The underlying playbook is the same one that has been used by vulture capitalists for quite some time now. Find a company with some value, buy it, extract the value into cash for the hedge fund, screw the employees and the public, move on to the next target. Look at what Alden Global has been doing to newspapers for years, and more recently Greyhound bus terminals. Gordon Gecko was a character in a movie, but based on all-too-real people and behaviors.
I searched for "Best Air Purifier for Pets" and I clicked on the first reddit result https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
That post is 4 months old but someone posted this just 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/dyson/comments/1730x73/best_air_pur...
Goes to show how little you can trust reddit comments these days, particularly for good google keywords
This is mentioned in TFA:
>Somehow the user has been banned from Reddit, but their comment is still at the top of the thread — we wonder how many other comments this user has published across different subreddits.
This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment.
> This occurs when a moderator in the subreddit has manually approved the comment.
If you are a reddit mod and not getting paid in 2024 you're doing it wrong.
[dead]
I'll be the unpopular voice here (not defending g for the,imho, monopoly though): - Google is not killing anything and don't owe you traffic; - You don't get traffic because your website is less algorithm oriented than other sites (among a ton of other things).
if you want to unserstand how and why certain websites rank and all that sort of stuff just lurk on black hat SEO forums and see how they game system. I don't recomment their services but it's worth reading about the things they take into account. From keywords, density, headings all the way to domain age and server location.
This is the "don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison" defense [0]. Google isn't killing anything because Google is just an algorithm. Your site fares poorly not because Google wants to hurt you but because you don't want to waste your life catering to an algorithm. It's not Google's fault that that you have other priorities like actually helping your readers live a better life!
While it's strictly accurate, it's not a very useful way to look at the world. Google is killing independent sites that spend more time on the content than on SEO. It might be killing those sites in the same way that a volcanic eruption kills wildlife—as an unthinking, uncaring force of nature—but it's still killing them.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=33m1s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=...
It’s also a framing that ignores the fact that Google clearly wants to be able to filter out the garbage but can’t. It’s not bloggers’ fault for that. At some point, you can either decide to write for people or decide to write for the algorithm.
It’s not about Google owing anyone traffic, people are upset that Google can’t tell the difference between inauthentic product recommendations and authentic ones. Google clearly wishes they could as well, but it doesn’t scale so they don’t solve the problem.
> your website is less algorithm oriented
Maybe we should refuse to accept Google’s framing. It’s content creators’ job to create great content as judged by people. It’s Google’s job to discover that content and rank it above procedurally generated garbage that is devouring the internet. The fact that Google’s results are dominated by trash isn’t because there’s a lack of good content.
Not everyone has the time and resources to do SEO to beat big media companies at this game. Buying an old domain is a prime example.