I'd like to note, donning my #2 at amzn hat again, that when the idea for affiliate sales originally came up, we certainly did imagine people creating pages with lists like "best bikes for under $500". However, I feel fairly confident in saying that nobody involved in that in the 95-96 timeframe was imagining that such pages would be created by anyone other than actual enthusiasts (probably a reflection of the state of the internet at the time).
In retrospect, this was a profound failure of our imaginations back then. It's also somewhat damning that in the 25+ years since, nothing about the affiliate sales concept has been substantially modified to mitigate the weaponization of this by "best X for 202X" pages.
Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have, period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.
Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type.
And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.
I’ve found DuckDuckGo can be better at some searches, and at others far worse. I was recently trying to search up how to do something in Excel and every result from DDG was some “excel-help” website that was actually just parroting common search terms as the headers on non-articles full of ads. The entire search space has apparently been hijacked by what is essentially a fake help site. I see results like that on google too sometimes but not across a whole results page.
These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.
It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings
I get this from their perspective. Their goal isn't to work just for people whose work makes them extremely precise in phrasing. I am sure that a lot of the mechanisms that make me bonkers are ones that make search results better for the average user.
But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.
If you google "how do i search the web without e commerce results", you get "how to improve search in your ecommerce site".
If you search "examples of bougainvillea not pruned", you get pruning tips.
Often the first page of results will already have the tag "Without: --keyword that changes everything but is inconvenient for the algorithm--. Force include this word?"
it's so bad these days. If you are on mobile good luck finding anything of use if it doesn't involve ads somehow....non affiliated content, useful personal blogs - high quality ad free pages....good luck!
it's to the point where I find what I want when I search torrent search engines.....and not via any search engines on the web.....
I take your point, but don’t you think you’re overstating things a bit? The internet is still incredibly useful and so is Google search (granted, it takes more effort and sophistication to avoid the spam).
We're going to end up going back to community sites. Reddit is obviously the good example here, but you can guarantee if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing.
Exactly the same as when I ask my friend who's passionate about wine for his recommendation for a £15 bottle of red, and he'll happily waste 20 minutes of his day writing a list and sending me links. I know the pleasure he gets when I message and go "thank you! This is amazing!"
Also just to add - this is exactly why those "get paid to recommend things to your friends" startups never work. Because the minute we know that the 'friend' on Facebook who's shouting about the great bottle of wine is getting paid £1 per sale we deliberately don't buy it. (As opposed to the "next time you're in Tesco, pick up a bottle of XYZ, it's great" message - when we probably do.)
I want you to be right but the GME and AMC nonsense doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that Reddit isn’t being gamed already by automated accounts. I’ve had my own comment altered a little and regurgitated by a bot before, which was extremely creepy.
But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.
> We're going to end up going back to community sites.
For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.
> if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing.
Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge.
Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.
I like how the show "Halt & Catch Fire" used this topic as a plot within the show. You had the Google-esque team of laborious devs unhappily stressed on coming up with the perfect algo, then you had the Yahoo-esque team of party atmosphere humans scanning the web for things to highlight/promote/scan/etc.
yes! probably only a matter of time until they ramp up the astroturfing (which already happens a fair amount). It seems pretty common for someone to do a Google search for "X product review reddit"
So here's a side-question. The original key idea behind Google's approach to search was page rank : how many, and what kinds, of other sites linked to this one (and potentially, in what context).
Does anyone think that this can possibly be at the core of Google's page rank anymore? Most pages don't have any significant number of links any more, and if they do, they are presumably garbage most of the time. Who is out there writing articles called "How to find the best bicycle for under $500" and providing links to excellent, current reviews of bicycles under $500? The answer might not be "nobody", but my instinct is that it's so small that it's effectively the same thing.
Consequently, at some point, Google switched from trying to leverage human judgement (i.e. how many other people link to a page), and have been forced (?) to replace that with their own assessment of a page based largely on its own content, metadata and outbound links.
Whereas in the 2000's, you could blame people for crappy results from a Google search ("why do people keep linking to that stupid article"), at this point it seems to me that everything, absolutely everything about Google results can be laid at Google's feet.
My impression back when Google really took off was that other search engines were basing their relevance scores on page content and getting lots of spam in their results from pages that gamed the relevance algorithm. Then here comes Google using human judgment via PageRank and getting great results, because who would link to garbage?
Of course the web has changed since then. And I think you're right on in thinking that the signal-to-noise ratio of links has gone way down. But it may not be fair to chastise Google for not getting good results just from page content. Has anyone ever done a good job of information retrieval in an adversarial environment without leaning on human judgment?
I believe the antidote to this is simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content, so essentially marry many small decentralized communities on a searchable platform. Anonymous but karma/identity weighted profiles, curating and debating lists of their favorite things around a single topic.
Aggregate them into a single master index with nice UI, then pay out equitably based on performance.
There’s a lot of questions on preventing spam and fraud, and I think the further away you get from “high ticket products” the more you avoid that problem, but it can’t be worse than Google: in one you’re relying solely on magical AI and links, the other you can have as much magical AI and links as you want, but you also have user accounts which maybe invited each other and can vouch for each other at a cost, votes that can be weighed by all sorts of factors, and basically a much richer graph of self-moderating people to back the index.
> Does anyone think that this can possibly be at the core of Google's page rank anymore?
Yes, it is, and it still makes up the super majority of factors. It's the reason why people buy expired domains (that have links pointing to them), it's the reason why they pay lots of money to rent a subdomain or folder on cnn.com. It's the links, and it's only the links. And it works great.
The actual content on the site has little to do with the ranking. Yeah, sure, you need to have the keywords in there, but you don't need quality content, you just need quality links.
I see reviews of best X under $Y that I would have some trust in their conclusions on websites that also do news about the subject area. I don't see why these websites should not be able to use affiliate links.
Some examples: Cycling Weekly for bicycles and AnandTech for computing stuff.
I don't go to their websites via Google search though.
> I think the answer is because it’s not in their best interest to do so. They like that most consumers will look at these reviews, click through to Amazon and make their purchase with little hesitation.
I don't understand the logic here. Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links from other sites? There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. And there's no long-term benefit, since it just risks teaching people to go straight to Amazon for commercial searches.
> Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links
I don’t think it’s specifically Amazon links, but if they’re mindlessly measuring metrics without thinking about “why” things happen, the affiliate link spam that dominates results might increase ad buys. Think about it. If you can’t rank on the first couple of pages due to affiliate marketing spammers, you might buy an ad. If you’re competing with some of those spammers for ad buys, you might pay more.
It’s just super poor leadership and a lack of critical thinking that has let it happen IMO.
I think it’s less in Google’s long term best interest and more a marriage of convenience. Hopefully a temporary one.
Google increasingly wants users to find what they want on Google itself and not have to click through to the direct search results. Featured snippets are the strategy and these affiliate site listicles are crafted explicitly to be hoovered up as such by the algorithm.
One hope is that long term Google improves quality-content detection and deprioritizes the garbage.
but giving mediocre vs high quality results on the other hand forces you to use a particular search result page more and increases the likelyhood that you'll click through a paid search link in your frustration ...
And there's no long-term benefit, since it
just risks teaching people to go straight to
Amazon for commercial searches.
Yeah, I came here hoping somebody would have an answer to this seeming non-sequitur.
Google has been utterly useless for "what is the best X?" product search stuff for years, for exactly this reason.
The result in my case is that I've learned simply to not use Google for these searches. That is not good for Google.
The author says "Google, like many of the other tech giants, benefits from an uninformed user base" but I fail to see how that is the case. They benefit from a happy userbase that finds Google useful and therefore trusts Google with their time and personal information.
Sure, Clueless Cletus or Simple Sally might buy a bike from that clickbait bike article but I'm not sure they're walking away from the experience feeling that Google was particularly useful or helpful and wanting to rely upon them in the future.
I believe both search and affiliate programs have flaws... but I didn't see anything that convinced me this is some conspiracy between the companies.
I also don't have a problem with affiliate programs. If someone posts links that are relevant to the topic at hand, there is little harm in them getting a few cents from a purchase I would have made anyway. If anything, it is funding content creation in a way that works.
That being said, the point of the article is 100% correct that low-effort, low-value review sites just to get affiliate links ranked in search results are problematic and annoying. I make a judgement call when I run into them - if they really did put in some effort and have decent reviews contrasting different items, I'll go ahead and click the link. They wrote content, the content was helpful, no problem. On the other hand, if it was just a list of links with no added value, I don't click the links. It is just as a easy to do my own search on a product name, or even copy the link and remove the affiliate tag.
Like everything else in the world, nothing is black and white. The presence of some problematic sites doesn't invalidate an entire mechanism for funding content creation.
I would argue that google is being used incorrectly here. Google is specially being asked for a product list which meets a certain criteria. The user is asking Google to recommend the best bikes..
The user is actually looking for authoritative bicycle reviews to make a purchasing decision. Searching for “bicycle reviews” would give a far higher chance of finding what the user is after. They can then use the criteria on the review site to narrow down what they are after.
There is also a limit to what searching will get you. Going to a bike shop will allow an expert in this subject matter to assess your personal requirements and advise accordingly. For a lot of things, going out and talking to someone will yield far better results than Google ever will.
There's also an even worse thing here. If you search for a product under shopping on google, something that is somewhat known like a certain TV model, and you'll see most SHOPPING results are from websites that actually don't sell anything, but rather will have a "product page" where either the buy button is disabled or redirects to amazon. They typically have much lower prices, or just low enough so you'll click.
Hm, this is not really news, but perhaps it's the first time I consciously think about it.
The article is right. I used to search Google for what the best X is. At some point. Indeed, I also used to search amazon and read the reviews.
Now, and for what feels like a while, I am not doing that anymore. Like, at all. And this is not a decision I consciously made.
If I want to know what the best dishwasher is, I am not going to amazon. I am not putting it into Google, simply because it's all affiliate links all the way down.
I either read professional reviews (like non-profit and established test companies, like Warentest here in Germany) or I ask the community somewhere.
Google and Amazon have conditioned me to subconsciously not use them anymore for that purpose.
It gets even worse / weirder - I've found if you search for products that might not even exist, you get made up lists of products.
A while ago, I wondered if there were such a thing as a microwave + toaster oven combo (there are several convection oven + microwave combos on the market, but none can toast like a toaster oven).
Sure sounds like there's at least 10 of these items in existence for me to choose from - but none of the items in these lists are actually both microwaves and toaster ovens.
I think this is a positive outcome. Google and Amazon are driving people to shop locally with their tricks.
Same thing happened to me and I couldn't be happier I bought an electric bike from a local shop. I probably paid a little more, but I made a new friend. The local shop owner is a really cool guy who was interested in meeting my needs, not in selling me his most profitable bike.
Affiliate links are the reason anybody even makes a website anymore. The era of personal websites made for intellectual curiosity and expression are long gone.
It's not just websites though, Youtube and IG are filled with them as well. Basically, if you have any audience at all, it's time to cash in on them by polluting your online presence with these dumb links.
Whenever I want to make a purchase online, I search for "best _____" and add reddit as a keyword. Reading through a few threads on reddit will typically give me a pretty good idea of where to start.
But you raise a much more important point: if you query the web like a stupid person then you'll get stupid results.
The OP shouldn't have searched for "under 500" because good bikes under 500 are called used road bikes from a local shop or craigslist owner (as the author revealed and I discovered myself when I was younger c. 2006) so saying "under 500" is sort of like saying, "show me the cheap mass market bicycles please", because the number of people who want good bikes is small, but it's a really devoted group, who are willing to pay what people like us would pay for a good PC or even a car, so if you've already decided you want the chromebook of bikes, then amazon and google aren't doing you that much of a disservice, let's be fair.
I think the fundamental problem is that any sufficiently influential system which provides consumer information on products or services becomes an obvious target for those sellers and service providers to try and game.
I think there are basically only 2 ways around this
1) a consumer reports type model were consumers must trust a central authority to be inviolable.
2) legislation that harshly punishes companies who try to influence their own reviews. These would likely be ineffective unless they were incredibly stringent.
Is there a more reasonable model that can avoid being gamed though? I feel like more and more I have to rely on word of mouth about products which isn't great for different reasons.
I think a bike is one of those items that you have to try out before you buy it, so I would not buy it online and I also would not go to Google to research it (at least initially).
When I was in the market for a new bike a few years ago, I looked at Yelp to find the 5-6 bicycle shops with the best rating in my city. Then I went to each shop and told them what I wanted from my bike and my budget.
This process went very well. Not only am I supremely satisfied with my purchase, even after a couple of years, but I also found a new great bicycle shop that I go to for repairs and upgrades and stuff.
I agree with try-before-you-buy for bicycles - size, style, etc make a massive difference in utility and comfort.
But, how would somebody who only had a bike as a child know this? Google isn't telling them - it sends them to Amazon via listicles. If they happen to search "how to buy a bicycle" there are some potentially useful results. But, even if they do end up a bicycle shop, their likely to run into inventory problems - many bike shops simply don't have any bikes right now. So, it's back to Amazon, or Craigslist/FB Marketplace, or worse.
I think search is broken full stop for any search in the form "Best X in/for/under Y" - there are too many low quality sites publishing 'list' articles, which just link to items for sale that offer them affiliate commission.
For the example of "bikes under $500" it's often better to do a google news search to get magazine/newspaper articles where they are more likely to have done actual reviews.
A huge number of developers at Amazon and Google are clapping their hands with glee when the read this…. It’s their jobs to get exactly this outcome. They’ll show your post to the boss to lock in their bonus.
This is the prime purpose of these gigantic companies. Of course it works like that.
The smartest software developers in the world dedicate their working lives to advertising.
This sounds so familiar. I used to scour the internet for reviews before buying anything. Analysis paralysis is real, and I sometimes just give up buying at all.
Over the past years, I found more bad review websites than helpful ones.
I doubt there are any real unbiased reviews.
Go to google, enter the ad trap
Go to your local store, you have to deal with the sales target of the store.
Go to Reddit or a forum, and the people there just want to justify their purchase.
It is all fine as long as you know it.
The authors solution to just go to a local bike shop and buy a bike is in my opinion still a reliable best. I assume he got the opportunity to test ride the bike before purchasing it.
My new approach is to write down what I want from the product. This gives me clarity.
I still read reviews but take them less serious.
I either order online and once I receive my package I sent it back or keep it.
Alternatively I just go to a physical store and try it out before buying it.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
In retrospect, this was a profound failure of our imaginations back then. It's also somewhat damning that in the 25+ years since, nothing about the affiliate sales concept has been substantially modified to mitigate the weaponization of this by "best X for 202X" pages.
[+] [-] flenserboy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makecheck|4 years ago|reply
And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.
[+] [-] mustacheemperor|4 years ago|reply
These sites seem to have emerged in earnest over the last 5 years or so, designed to present the appearance of relevant content to the search engine but existing only to serve ads.
[+] [-] seoaeu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danuker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.
[+] [-] justnotworthit|4 years ago|reply
If you search "examples of bougainvillea not pruned", you get pruning tips.
Often the first page of results will already have the tag "Without: --keyword that changes everything but is inconvenient for the algorithm--. Force include this word?"
[+] [-] kderbyma|4 years ago|reply
it's to the point where I find what I want when I search torrent search engines.....and not via any search engines on the web.....
[+] [-] cainxinth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] typon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] admax88q|4 years ago|reply
What? That's the whole purpose of search algorithms isn't it? I'm not sure I understand your complaint.
[+] [-] iamben|4 years ago|reply
Exactly the same as when I ask my friend who's passionate about wine for his recommendation for a £15 bottle of red, and he'll happily waste 20 minutes of his day writing a list and sending me links. I know the pleasure he gets when I message and go "thank you! This is amazing!"
Also just to add - this is exactly why those "get paid to recommend things to your friends" startups never work. Because the minute we know that the 'friend' on Facebook who's shouting about the great bottle of wine is getting paid £1 per sale we deliberately don't buy it. (As opposed to the "next time you're in Tesco, pick up a bottle of XYZ, it's great" message - when we probably do.)
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|4 years ago|reply
For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.
[+] [-] FabHK|4 years ago|reply
Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge.
Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namlem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmccrary55|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
Does anyone think that this can possibly be at the core of Google's page rank anymore? Most pages don't have any significant number of links any more, and if they do, they are presumably garbage most of the time. Who is out there writing articles called "How to find the best bicycle for under $500" and providing links to excellent, current reviews of bicycles under $500? The answer might not be "nobody", but my instinct is that it's so small that it's effectively the same thing.
Consequently, at some point, Google switched from trying to leverage human judgement (i.e. how many other people link to a page), and have been forced (?) to replace that with their own assessment of a page based largely on its own content, metadata and outbound links.
Whereas in the 2000's, you could blame people for crappy results from a Google search ("why do people keep linking to that stupid article"), at this point it seems to me that everything, absolutely everything about Google results can be laid at Google's feet.
[+] [-] aparks517|4 years ago|reply
Of course the web has changed since then. And I think you're right on in thinking that the signal-to-noise ratio of links has gone way down. But it may not be fair to chastise Google for not getting good results just from page content. Has anyone ever done a good job of information retrieval in an adversarial environment without leaning on human judgment?
[+] [-] nwienert|4 years ago|reply
I believe the antidote to this is simply acknowledging small communities curate the best content, so essentially marry many small decentralized communities on a searchable platform. Anonymous but karma/identity weighted profiles, curating and debating lists of their favorite things around a single topic.
Aggregate them into a single master index with nice UI, then pay out equitably based on performance.
There’s a lot of questions on preventing spam and fraud, and I think the further away you get from “high ticket products” the more you avoid that problem, but it can’t be worse than Google: in one you’re relying solely on magical AI and links, the other you can have as much magical AI and links as you want, but you also have user accounts which maybe invited each other and can vouch for each other at a cost, votes that can be weighed by all sorts of factors, and basically a much richer graph of self-moderating people to back the index.
Working on something like this at the moment!
[+] [-] luckylion|4 years ago|reply
Yes, it is, and it still makes up the super majority of factors. It's the reason why people buy expired domains (that have links pointing to them), it's the reason why they pay lots of money to rent a subdomain or folder on cnn.com. It's the links, and it's only the links. And it works great.
The actual content on the site has little to do with the ranking. Yeah, sure, you need to have the keywords in there, but you don't need quality content, you just need quality links.
[+] [-] rjsw|4 years ago|reply
Some examples: Cycling Weekly for bicycles and AnandTech for computing stuff.
I don't go to their websites via Google search though.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jsnell|4 years ago|reply
I don't understand the logic here. Why exactly would Google want people to thoughlessly click on Amazon affiliate links from other sites? There's no short-term beneft, since they don't get a cut. And there's no long-term benefit, since it just risks teaching people to go straight to Amazon for commercial searches.
[+] [-] donmcronald|4 years ago|reply
I don’t think it’s specifically Amazon links, but if they’re mindlessly measuring metrics without thinking about “why” things happen, the affiliate link spam that dominates results might increase ad buys. Think about it. If you can’t rank on the first couple of pages due to affiliate marketing spammers, you might buy an ad. If you’re competing with some of those spammers for ad buys, you might pay more.
It’s just super poor leadership and a lack of critical thinking that has let it happen IMO.
[+] [-] nuker|4 years ago|reply
But they do? IMHO some of the SEO techniques use direct payments to Google for keywords, results placement, etc.
[+] [-] mrobins|4 years ago|reply
Google increasingly wants users to find what they want on Google itself and not have to click through to the direct search results. Featured snippets are the strategy and these affiliate site listicles are crafted explicitly to be hoovered up as such by the algorithm.
One hope is that long term Google improves quality-content detection and deprioritizes the garbage.
[+] [-] cat199|4 years ago|reply
but giving mediocre vs high quality results on the other hand forces you to use a particular search result page more and increases the likelyhood that you'll click through a paid search link in your frustration ...
[+] [-] JohnBooty|4 years ago|reply
Google has been utterly useless for "what is the best X?" product search stuff for years, for exactly this reason.
The result in my case is that I've learned simply to not use Google for these searches. That is not good for Google.
The author says "Google, like many of the other tech giants, benefits from an uninformed user base" but I fail to see how that is the case. They benefit from a happy userbase that finds Google useful and therefore trusts Google with their time and personal information.
Sure, Clueless Cletus or Simple Sally might buy a bike from that clickbait bike article but I'm not sure they're walking away from the experience feeling that Google was particularly useful or helpful and wanting to rely upon them in the future.
[+] [-] codingdave|4 years ago|reply
I also don't have a problem with affiliate programs. If someone posts links that are relevant to the topic at hand, there is little harm in them getting a few cents from a purchase I would have made anyway. If anything, it is funding content creation in a way that works.
That being said, the point of the article is 100% correct that low-effort, low-value review sites just to get affiliate links ranked in search results are problematic and annoying. I make a judgement call when I run into them - if they really did put in some effort and have decent reviews contrasting different items, I'll go ahead and click the link. They wrote content, the content was helpful, no problem. On the other hand, if it was just a list of links with no added value, I don't click the links. It is just as a easy to do my own search on a product name, or even copy the link and remove the affiliate tag.
Like everything else in the world, nothing is black and white. The presence of some problematic sites doesn't invalidate an entire mechanism for funding content creation.
[+] [-] nuker|4 years ago|reply
Affiliate programs distort content, to the point of being useless, or justify making of outright fake content.
[+] [-] SilkRoadie|4 years ago|reply
The user is actually looking for authoritative bicycle reviews to make a purchasing decision. Searching for “bicycle reviews” would give a far higher chance of finding what the user is after. They can then use the criteria on the review site to narrow down what they are after.
There is also a limit to what searching will get you. Going to a bike shop will allow an expert in this subject matter to assess your personal requirements and advise accordingly. For a lot of things, going out and talking to someone will yield far better results than Google ever will.
[+] [-] barrad0s|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwaps|4 years ago|reply
The article is right. I used to search Google for what the best X is. At some point. Indeed, I also used to search amazon and read the reviews.
Now, and for what feels like a while, I am not doing that anymore. Like, at all. And this is not a decision I consciously made.
If I want to know what the best dishwasher is, I am not going to amazon. I am not putting it into Google, simply because it's all affiliate links all the way down. I either read professional reviews (like non-profit and established test companies, like Warentest here in Germany) or I ask the community somewhere.
Google and Amazon have conditioned me to subconsciously not use them anymore for that purpose.
Very interesting.
[+] [-] evancordell|4 years ago|reply
A while ago, I wondered if there were such a thing as a microwave + toaster oven combo (there are several convection oven + microwave combos on the market, but none can toast like a toaster oven).
Here's the top non-sponsered result: https://www.chefspencil.com/10-best-microwave-toaster-oven-c...
And the second result: https://thebrilliantkitchen.com/best-microwave-toaster-oven-...
Sure sounds like there's at least 10 of these items in existence for me to choose from - but none of the items in these lists are actually both microwaves and toaster ovens.
[+] [-] okareaman|4 years ago|reply
I think this is a positive outcome. Google and Amazon are driving people to shop locally with their tricks.
Same thing happened to me and I couldn't be happier I bought an electric bike from a local shop. I probably paid a little more, but I made a new friend. The local shop owner is a really cool guy who was interested in meeting my needs, not in selling me his most profitable bike.
[+] [-] scwoodal|4 years ago|reply
This usually gets me the quality information I’m looking for.
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
It's not just websites though, Youtube and IG are filled with them as well. Basically, if you have any audience at all, it's time to cash in on them by polluting your online presence with these dumb links.
[+] [-] paulvnickerson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jart|4 years ago|reply
Try https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=best%20road%20bikes... If you search Million Short then the top two results are (1) an actual bike store and (2) an actual bicycling magazine that's 100+ years old instead of seo spam.
But you raise a much more important point: if you query the web like a stupid person then you'll get stupid results.
The OP shouldn't have searched for "under 500" because good bikes under 500 are called used road bikes from a local shop or craigslist owner (as the author revealed and I discovered myself when I was younger c. 2006) so saying "under 500" is sort of like saying, "show me the cheap mass market bicycles please", because the number of people who want good bikes is small, but it's a really devoted group, who are willing to pay what people like us would pay for a good PC or even a car, so if you've already decided you want the chromebook of bikes, then amazon and google aren't doing you that much of a disservice, let's be fair.
[+] [-] only_as_i_fall|4 years ago|reply
I think there are basically only 2 ways around this
1) a consumer reports type model were consumers must trust a central authority to be inviolable.
2) legislation that harshly punishes companies who try to influence their own reviews. These would likely be ineffective unless they were incredibly stringent.
Is there a more reasonable model that can avoid being gamed though? I feel like more and more I have to rely on word of mouth about products which isn't great for different reasons.
[+] [-] hesk|4 years ago|reply
When I was in the market for a new bike a few years ago, I looked at Yelp to find the 5-6 bicycle shops with the best rating in my city. Then I went to each shop and told them what I wanted from my bike and my budget.
This process went very well. Not only am I supremely satisfied with my purchase, even after a couple of years, but I also found a new great bicycle shop that I go to for repairs and upgrades and stuff.
[+] [-] alistairSH|4 years ago|reply
But, how would somebody who only had a bike as a child know this? Google isn't telling them - it sends them to Amazon via listicles. If they happen to search "how to buy a bicycle" there are some potentially useful results. But, even if they do end up a bicycle shop, their likely to run into inventory problems - many bike shops simply don't have any bikes right now. So, it's back to Amazon, or Craigslist/FB Marketplace, or worse.
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|4 years ago|reply
For the example of "bikes under $500" it's often better to do a google news search to get magazine/newspaper articles where they are more likely to have done actual reviews.
[+] [-] bloniac|4 years ago|reply
This is the prime purpose of these gigantic companies. Of course it works like that.
The smartest software developers in the world dedicate their working lives to advertising.
[+] [-] elthor89|4 years ago|reply
Over the past years, I found more bad review websites than helpful ones. I doubt there are any real unbiased reviews.
Go to google, enter the ad trap Go to your local store, you have to deal with the sales target of the store. Go to Reddit or a forum, and the people there just want to justify their purchase.
It is all fine as long as you know it.
The authors solution to just go to a local bike shop and buy a bike is in my opinion still a reliable best. I assume he got the opportunity to test ride the bike before purchasing it.
My new approach is to write down what I want from the product. This gives me clarity. I still read reviews but take them less serious.
I either order online and once I receive my package I sent it back or keep it. Alternatively I just go to a physical store and try it out before buying it.
[+] [-] richardpetersen|4 years ago|reply