Submitted 10 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Paging FTC, FTC. It’s gotten near impossible to find honest reviews that aren’t driven by affiliate links anywhere. So many news outlets hocking products outright, I stopped paying attention after nyt bought wirecutter.
Then there’s shit like Forbes writing lifestyle clickbait about pets and dogs all the while advertising pet insurance.
“who do you trust, when everyone’s a crook?” -‘revolution calling’ (queensryche)
Even “honest reviews” aren’t all that honest. My mother is an Amazon Vine affiliate, which is a program where they send you stuff for free and you write a review and get to keep it. They aren’t overt about it, but they make it fairly obvious that you’re supposed to write reviews that are positive overall.
Im in the Vine program (basic not the premium tier) and they are actually very explicit that you need to review the product fairly and how you actually feel about it. Ive given out 3 and two stars before for cords that weren’t as advertised, shitty build, etc.
Granted, they DO want you to pump out a review for it within a month which is bad for longevity testing.
Operation Mindcrime is a gem!
It is one of my favorites too:)
Probably the best thing about Verge covering this is simply signal boost, getting the story out to a wider audience.
I’ve been using the internet since before the web existed.
I could swear there was a time that it didn’t suck, but I can’t remember when that was.
Of course, it sucks more now, but…
It sucked back then, but it sucked happily. Now it’s just sad.
Back then it was messy, you couldn’t find anything, but at least everything worked as intended. Hell you could do a whois on something and actually get data back. You could email the netadmin of whatever place you had trouble with. Now it’s just a wasteland of content free corpo sites.
I think it works as intended now, but it’s just that the intended audience has changed. We all work for advertisers now.
At least if you follow the mainstream web experience. Luckily there are still nice places like this! :)
The Internet has been gentrified. Sure, there were some tough places that you had to be careful about wandering into, but there were great experiences. Now it’s this homogenous, cultivated experience.
Although at least your computer doesn’t slow to a crawl every time you go to the wrong Geocities or Tripod page with a million gifs and a custom cursor. Also, would you like to install Bonzi Buddy?
Also, for all of you who lived through the Eternal September, “me too!”
Power corrupts. And those corrupted by power then redirect it to corrupt all they don’t outright conquer.
There was a pre-Google search that was really bad. Then Google raised the standard by optimising for good results. The trick was to stay one move ahead of SEO devs. First people spammed keywords, then people spammed backlinks, etc.
The issue is now that it’s very outdated and the best thing for websites to do is go spam AI articles about everything. The obvious move would be to move websites with higher specificity to the search query up.
The problem is that Google can do that and optimise for fewest actual clicks on links instead of needing to click 3 to get a result. Instead it’s better to click 3 pages with 3 sets of ads then hopefully do it in the goldilocks “enough to be interested but not to stop”. More screentime is more ads, more ads is more money.
This is peak capitalism guuuys
I dunno, I had this conversation in another thread recently. I was 13 in 2000. The web was a disaster then. Sure, there were good parts, but every website was an outright attack on your computer. Java and Flash were everywhere and they were so easily exploited. I’d go to websites and they’d pop up 100 different windows of hardcore porn, audio on, the whole nine.
But yeah, it’s just a different suck now.
Like you, I was using the internet before the web. The time before monetization. IRC. USENET. GOPHER. IRC replaced my interest in ham radio - I figured: “what’s the point? With a modem, I can talk around the world and don’t need thousands of dollars and a tower in my back yard!” packet radio, which I used to send and receive messages to my parents, evaporated.
Even when the web first came to being, it was special. HoTMaiL, the free html mail client, took off like wildfire. There weren’t even ads, because the ad industry didn’t know what to do with this new medium. Search found relevant interests, people were expressing themselves on ISP-hosted websites, and angelfire and geocities gave a more feature-rich experience.
The initial banner ads were easy enough to ignore. The pop-ups, scareware, and security hell hole that was the early/mid-2000’s was the precipice that the web stepped off and here we are.
But even back in the IRC and USENET days, there were plenty of asshole Nazis and petty arguments and such that it made the internet pretty unpleasant quite often if you didn’t watch where you contributed.
1995-2010 were the halcyon days. I miss the shit out of the web back then. And I’ve been around long enough that I set up some of the first mail relays and usenet mirrors when I was a teen, besides having one of the largest BBSs in Canada.
Do people who don’t follow this kind of stuff realize how dog shit google results have gotten? I accidentally googled (new phone) a Costco wine earlier and all the links were marketing garbage. DDG gives me actual reviews within 5 results.
Ed Zitron has a scathing piece about that (in the podcast version he’s seething) entitled “The Man Who Killed Google Search.” Worth checking out, it contains some quality righteous anger.
Just listened to it again. Highly recommend. The short of it is more searches == more ads == more $. There’s a conflict between a great search experience (landing not on google) versus the time you spend ON Google.
Great story and just terrible outcome.
I initially thought about installing UBlacklist on Firefox and block the spam, but then I had a thought? Let us do the HouseFresh.com test on Duck Duck Go and see how far up it is?
Apparently, Housefresh.com Behind world famous Air Purifier reviewers like:
Well, nevermind guess. I can have either HouseFresh and literally nothing else. Or an ocean of spam, intermixed with the rare human written article that was produced by the main branch of the publisher, rather than its SEO garbage chute.
The web search is a lost cause. No wonder Kagi keeps growing in popularity.
(Also keep in mind, in that giant list? Some of those websites are so GOOD at their Air Purifying review job that they get to be featured more than once, thrice even at times)
Yeah I have been using DuckDuckGo for about a decade. I noticed a drop in quality as soon as the Microsoft Bing partnership. Now it is mostly just a Bing clone. Which is really sad. They were really good and really cared about consumers privacy. I have been moving over to Startpage but have yet to do a full read up on its policies and do a full test of the quality of the search results. Though so far I am quietly optimistic.
Web today is three companies in a trenchcoat. It is bit sad that the innovation of late 90’s has almost disappeared. I do hope Fediverse/ActivityPub would create this next version of free web, which is impossible for companies to control.
You could find stuff, it was often a very tedious process though. You searched for: thing XYZ doesn’t work and found a lot of of forums with posts of people who had the same problem and with a bit of luck you found a two years old entry with an answer that actually worked for you. Now it’s 20 results from the company that created the product you have a problem with but offers no solution at all.
Might try this
Really need to start using DuckDcukGo exclusively
Duck Duck Go is also complete trash these days, just in different ways.
Another alternatives
Kagi Searx Startpage
Wha?? Duckduckgo is great. I love it. Get to know their bangs. duckduckgo.com/bangs
yeah I tried it and it was incredibly lacking. Any advice on alternatives?
Make a search on Bing, then make a search on DuckDcukGo. Compare the results. You’ll find out that DuckDcukGo is just a front end for another site that provides links to business affiliates.
Well damn what engine search CAN I use then?
I’m using a French search engine called Qwant. I find it gives very good results.
Just gave it a quick test drive it and it’s pretty promising, thanks for the tip.
Merci, je vais l’essayer
We need Yahoo back. Just a bunch of categories, where anyone can put their site under the right category.
Isn’t the head of Google search, Yahoo’s former head of search?
The Internet is so big nowadays that you pretty much need to have some kind of algorithm. A list of all websites in “the right category” would have way too many items in it most of which would be useless. We live in an attention economy: lots of people want as many people as possible to pay attention to them, but everyone’s attention is obviously limited.
No I don’t know how to fix this.
before:2023, choose a site, look for updated article.
asbestos@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I want a search engine addon that allows blacklists, specifically ones that blocks every site that pumps out AI generated stories, preferably crowd-sourced.
TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Kagi is a paid search engine. It allows you to uprank or downrank specific webpages. In that sense it’s very powerful.
asbestos@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’ve heard of it but I don’t like the idea of having search queries associate with my credit card, even though they say they don’t do that.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Yeah but aren’t they getting enshitified? There was a comment a long ago saying Kagi was looking for more ways to monetize or something
billiam0202@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This is exactly why people started appending “site:www.reddit.com” to their searches. It was much easier (but not guaranteed) to find organic discussion and reviews of products.
Of course, nothing gold can stay, and this tarnish appeared by way of pigfucker Spez making Reddit worse by allowing corporations to flood the site with bots in the name of boosting MAUs for the IPO. That said, I can appreciate the position Google is in- how do you get to be a search engine of such size that your users can trust your results you deliver to them, filter out SEO spam, and have the whole system automated due to costs?
Or rather, I would appreciate that position, if Google were more interested in quality search results than in spam advertising.
Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I would guess you could allow people to create custom search blacklists. People could upload theirs and people would vote them up or down.
br3d@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Have a look at marginalia.nu - it’s like a return to the old days
Paradox@lemdro.id 10 months ago
So you want Kagi
pearable@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
Looks like you can do it manually. Build your own Google flavor …stackexchange.com/…/how-to-filter-out-a-long-lis…
umbrella@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
im not aware of what you want, but ceo bullshit is usually made to trick google search. any other engine will be better, even bing is unironically superior to google rn.