[jgmmo]

Yeah you did a very cursory, cosmetic look at the site and judged it by its subject matter and web design choices.

If you would've bothered to look under the hood, you would see that they reference tons of scientific sources and provide a level of transparency and knowledge-base to the sports supplement industry that is unrivaled.

To be clear, There is no other site nearly as good as Examine for this subject matter.

[Waterluvian]

I checked out examine.com and it's not as bad as the previous comment had me expecting. But it still looks like a boilerplate front page that I would pretty much immediately back out of and keep looking.

I'm not a fan of "don't judge a book by its cover." The purpose of the cover (other than to keep garlic mayo off the pages) is to be judged.

It's at the peril of the website to have such good content diminished by poor window dressing.

[JohnJamesRambo]

I’ve never gone to examine.com directly. I always get there by a google search of whatever supplement or nutrient I am researching (vitamin D examine) and it’s one of the the only places that give peer reviewed and objective and honest info about them. Their “Human Effect Matrix” tables are invaluable.

https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/

[sdoering]

There is a (German) tool for evaluating the quality of websites regarding nutritional information.

The QWEB tool[1]. It might help in comparing the neutrality and quality of different sites. I stumbled upon it when my SO started to study again after so many years in a dreadful job.

[1] https://www.ernaehrungs-umschau.de/fileadmin/Ernaehrungs-Ums...

[zadkey]

Yes, but let's compare Examine.com to let's say Forbes.com

When you read an article at Forbes, you are assaulted by scrolling ads, banners and other stuff from every direction. The appearance and experience is chaotic and clingy.

If we are going by appearances, why should Examine.com have worse search indexing than Forbes articles?

Here is an example from both: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2019/07/25/a-billio...

https://examine.com/supplements/beta-alanine/

[1123581321]

That doesn’t matter. If a cursory visit doesn’t inspire confidence, users will back out and that will look like low engagement/low value to Google’s ranking analysis.

It’s actually a more helpful analysis for this topic to do a cursory, cosmetic look.

[nwienert]

Except that examine is an excellent site, and their cursory look was actually more of a "motivated reasoning look". If you land directly on an examine page for a supplement, it's quite clear the site is really well done.

I'm a designer as well, not just a developer, and it's layout is really well done: clean, straightforward, clearly presented, and the data is easy to find. They link to studies and always err on the side of caution in their descriptions.

[piva00]

So how you go by applying this reasoning to this very website where you are commenting?

Hacker News would never be, for me personally, on the top of the list of websites that inspire confidence by its looks, it's only when you delve into it and realise the content is actually great that you can appreciate it.

Such a shallow evaluation is quite strange coming from technical people who are used to mailing lists and all sorts of badly designed (or at least aesthetically unpleasing/neutral) pages...

[thfuran]

>. If a cursory visit doesn’t inspire confidence, users will back out and that will look like low engagement/low value to Google’s ranking analysis.

But that has no bearing on whether the site is actually presenting comprehensive or accurate information.

[petra]

>> low engagement/low value to Google’s ranking analysis.

Measuring engagement is great for shallow content, if you even can call it that. We see that all across the net.

But high-value, in-depth knowledge, is very often relatively boring.

[m00x]

How do you know this is what Google uses to determine how accurate the information is? Assumptions here are worthless since all they do it lead towards uninformed theories.

Examine.com is a very trustworthy website with good research, unbiased information and very good citations that are summarized in a scientific way.

Regardless of the heuristics they use to determine misinformation, they definitely messed up here and it should be re-evaluated.

[walshemj]

That is one of the guidelines for YMYL sites unfortunately if you work in "dodgy" areas like insurance.

A few years ago some of the mega UK insurance brands got into major trouble with google. I wont mention any names but directly afterwards they started using cute animals - obviously Sergi had being doing some naughty Black Hat SEO

[basch]

If a cursory look dismisses a good site, the person looking doesnt have accurate skimming and scanning skills. Judging trustworthiness is probably one of the hardest skills on the web. It takes immense amounts of practice. Like many other skills, its probably one where people are over confident in their own abilities.

[0xffff2]

>To be clear, There is no other site nearly as good as Examine for this subject matter.

To be clear, no one has presented any actual evidence to back that up yet.

[data_required]

Why not do some research yourself? What do you think are some other contenders for best websites to see compiled research on individual supplements (especially unusual supplements)?

And once you've done this research, will you still believe that Examine's pages rarely deserve to be in the top 10 results on relevant search queries?

It's easy to compare something to abstract perfection, and find it wanting. But if you compare things to actual real alternatives, it's often easier to get a more realistic perspective. (General life principle, in my experience.)