Comment by crazygringo
9 months ago
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.
A site that is excellent at SEO spam isn’t the same as a “democratically elected” result.
The list of sites for that term are utter crap, recommending the purifiers paying the top commission. Why would you want Google to perpetuate that ranking just because other users are getting duped to click on them?
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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
The Stupid burns slowly, but it burns like white phosphorus, through everything.
Using the 'share/copy link' button has been pointing to x.com since they did the whole x.com change but afaik going to x.com will redirect to twitter.com. No clue what they're on about using one domain but redirecting to the other.
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?
People clicking on known brands most of the time now is a behavior that was reinforced by google.
I used to find good high quality results from domains other than the big brands through Google, now it is never the case. Now that smaller domains haven't been getting that search engine traffic, people wanting to make a sustainable business being a content creator have moved to other platforms for a long time now.
> First of all, like what? What high-quality signals are there that can't be gamed?
Probably the ones the author refer to would be a good start.
>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?
It's an interesting question, but the premise of your question is even more interesting: that serving shitty web results is somehow what a search engine is meant to be doing, because that's what users "want". I'm very skeptical of it.
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.
I've had the opportunity to analyze click behavior for some pages, and there's a huge bias for people to click things at the top.
Let's say for example 90% of users are unsophisticated and 10% are sophisticated. Even if the #2 link is preferred 100% of the time by sophisticated users, you're still going to see 90% of people clicking the first link.
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