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- cross-posted to:
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It’s been said before: Google does not find you the best result for your query. Google finds you the result that makes them the most money from AdSense and has words from your query.
If Mozilla wasn’t funded by Google, the best thing they could do is include a helpful/unhelpful ranking for websites, then filter Google results by that. Search should be social, not commercial.
Google’s method of ranking results has clearly had a detrimental effect on website content and structure as well. I can’t believe how much nonsense junk padding there is on all the top results. You can understand why people are happy to have an LLM sift through the junk and make up an answer, even if it’s wrong half the time.
How can I find more of these kind of sites?
As far as I know, rtings.com is a decent one for tech products.
It at least tells you what tests it does, has the results and doesn’t seem to be cobbled together by an LLM from press releases.
Edit: There is also Which? magazine which is pay for and is kept alive entirely by 70 year old men like my dad who have never got round to cancelling it despite not really reading it.
Wow
alt-text: Google results for “best air purifiers “dotdash meredith”” showing People, Better Homes & Gardens, and a dozen other brands showing up, all reusing the same low-quality content
Thanks a lot for sharing this.
I have no idea about air purifiers, but Meredith (and better homes and gardens DO have a test kitchen in Des Moines and I wouldn’t be surprised if they test other stuff there. My dad worked there and as a kid we got to come through a and try out recipes they were thinking of publishing sometimes.
But ANY site running these review articles at this point, be it for hotels or air purifiers or food kr *30 under 30" lists, are all just paid shills. I don’t really have any reason to think “housefresh” is any different either. I don’t even really trust consumer reports at this point after seeing them shill really shitty products a few times. Maybe ifixit is ok?
Go to Amazon and filter by one star, then try to ignore the crazys.
Perhaps it’s becoming clear that search needs to become a common cooperatively managed infrastructure similar to Wikipedia. That this is in the best interest of everyone but advertisers and spammers.
Too bad the Mozilla foundation didn’t pivot to that instead of whatever the hell they’re doing with AI
Truly. I wonder if ActivityPub could be utilized to create a resilient search engine that shares the cost among federated instances. We already have something like that in Lemmy and Mastodon where federated data can be search from any instance. If the data is pages crawled by some automatic crawler which is then federated across instances which in turn allow to search through it, perhaps it might resemble a search engine. Page ranking beyond text matching could even be done by peoples up/down votes instead of some arbitrary algorithm. Similar to how voting works on StackExchange or Lemmy. 🤔 I’m sure someone is thinking about this.
The answer to your question is no, federation is not an appropriate model for internet scale search.
They can’t. Google is their main source of income.
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Serious eats 😢 RIP
Be cool if we had a browser extension that automatically told Google to filter out results from these sites specifically
ublacklist is a must-have extension for blocking whole lists of sites from search results.
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It is.
Their complaint is legit though. Their niche is being invaded by crappy sites that pretend to do what they do, the layperson can tell no difference, and Google pushes them all to the top anyway.
Testing products is expensive and nobody is really willing to pay for somebody else to do it. Google has just made it completely unviable to survive on clicks. At this point they might as well just be generating all the content with an LLM and keep the money for themselves.
That’s irrelevant here because what they’re describing is happening in every market, not just their niche.
