How Google is killing independent sites like ours

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
  
  They can't. Google is their main source of income.
  
  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.

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.
  
  Even a junk made-up answer would be an improvement over the results I recently got after trying both Google and DDG to search up a random question that came to me. I wanted to find a list of animals with vertical pupils, and all I got were pages with headlines like "Why do some animals have vertical pupils?" that didn't answer my question or even the question in the headline!
- Search should be social, not commercial.
  this would be gamed by companies in the same way social media is used to advertise businesses.
  
  Potentially, but there is a reason adding "Reddit" to the end of a search is so common. It's basically up-voted search results.

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.

How can I find more of these kind of sites?
- Honestly, right here, that's the beauty upside of the fediverse, we are slightly bigger than the general internet bubble and that's enough to watch content not bound by it, Iyk what I mean.
- 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.
- Wirecutter used to be good, but they've pretty much entirely sold out to whoever pays them I think. The Spruce Eats seems maybe slightly better than them these days for that sorta household stuff?
  TechGearLab and OutdoorGearLab are still good.
  Project Farm on YouTube is top tier testing for tools and whatever else catches his eye, though I wish it was a little easier to see the results in a spreadsheet instead of having to screenshot the video.
  
  I still think Wirecutter is testing and better than the fake review sites but yeah I'd agree that I think they tip the scales from time to time.
  One example, Fitbit has been their fitness watch recommendation forever and their charge watches have been ewaste garbage for years.
- Google it. scnr

If it's any consolation, I haven't used Google in years and I still haven't heard of this site.
- Found the Bing user
  
  Quacks in Duck Duck Go. 🦆

- Serious eats 😢 RIP
  
  What happened to serious eats?
- 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.
- Thanks!
- Aw maannnn not the spruce...

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.
- Go to Amazon and filter by one star, then try to ignore the crazys.
  This is underrated. This is where you find out management switched over and changed policies, that quality is great but they have trouble delivering, or their returns require arcane rituals on the third blood moon.
- There is a dodgy car rental brand in australia, nz, usa and canada that i had used, and exclusively markets to overseas tourists, but not locals - presumably because locals would know that they should not rent a car that failed the technical inspection and is illegal to drive, which to the surprise of nobody happens a lot with cheap, 20 year old rental cars. It's very hard to find organic customer reviews of the company, because their own SEO drowns out any authentic customer voices:
  Their links come from "paid blog posts" (they pay the blogger to write some fluff piece) in private travel blogs, advertising banners, forum posts and articles on big travel sites like trip advisor
  Their own "travel tips for #country#" websites which offers the same info as other tourist sites, but where they exclusively mention their own business. They have a whole network of their own sites, each for a different country they opperate in, a different language for the customer nationality they are targeting and the age group/price level they want to serve
  social media channels of course
  In forum posts where the company is mentioned in a bad way, some new account pops up defending the company, or the thread is deleted soon afterwards.
  Same with online reviews on google maps, where the company sits at a 4.5 score, but some bad reviews about deposits not being paid out after the car was returned have magically disappeared.
  tl;dr: the internet is all ads!
  
  Don't suppose we could get you to name the company?
- I can't believe I ever trusted consumer reports after I read up on how they purposely distorted their Suzuki samurai testing. The CR own record video shows they were determined to roll it.

- 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.

Nice article, cool company
- I was looking forward to seeing more reviews from the company, then saw they only have reviews of air purifiers, humidifiers or dehumidifiers, and a few sensors. That’s pretty niche, and even if they maybe should be used more they probably need to branch out into more categories to get more attention. But it looks very thorough and useful if you need those items.
  
  I definitely went down the rabbit hole after reading the article posted, which was very well compiled. Their testing and reviews are very high quality and it looks like they can apply their test results to multiple curated use cases. Their tests also seem repeatable, which is important for this niche. To branch out, they would have to build out very specific testing environments, which is not a small investment, depending on what they are testing. If I ever need an air purifier, I know where to look now I guess. Like some say, if your going to do something, focus on doing one thing and do it well.

Nothing in that article is a surprise, its almost as bad just looking up general info lately. I have been doing some searching in both google and yandex and often get better results in yandex.

Ban commercial Ads from the web.
Illegalize selling of user data without consent, at minimum.
The majority of online enshittification stems from profit motivation. Removing the incentive will fundamentally change how the internet is used and will likely change it for the better.