The same thing happens every 3-5 years. HowStuffWorks, About.com (now like 10 different domains), many IAC acquired properties, RedVenture sites, even random sites like LiveStrong.com will be wildly prominent when the domains historically aren't relevant or authoritative for a given niche.
Even recently, sites like CNN were using subdomains with affiliate offers managed by third parties(1). These sites weren't being de-ranked algorithmically-- someone at Google would have to apply a manual action to remove them from the SERPs. What incentive would there be to do so if a prior agreement was in place?
Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content. They are either being risk averse (avoiding potential spammers, junk AI content) by favoring trusted domains, favoring brands who are likely to spend on display or search ads, or maybe a combination of these.
A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
Here is what I mean. Photos apps used to let you search through your photos using filters.
The same kinds of things are happening on the web which already happened to apps (desktop and mobile).
In the modern world, some marketing company wants to tell YOU which of YOUR photos you wanted, so they can sell you some prints, harvest your data, or something.
I would like any apps that have to do with collections of files, photos, music, etc to be more of a deterministic DATABASE and less of a nondeterministic algorithm.
> A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
You just described what I missed about the older software. Older software gives users control over sorting and show data in a tabular format. Modern software sorts data with an algorithm, with ads mixed in, and shows data in a card format, making it a lot less usable.
Exactly. My related observation: half of the SaaS products I see would be more useful and ergonomic for the user if they were implemented as an Excel sheet.
(I actually worked for one of such "better off as an .xls file" startup in the past, and its main competitor was an incumbent that sold the same stuff as an Excel extension. Trying to replace that with a React app is not a worthwhile use of life.)
Algorithms are fine. I'll happily apply the most advanced ones I can get. The problem is with who applies them to what - as you and GP said, it's about user control - or, currently, lack of.
I wonder if being a more powerful backing data store for Excel is one of the remaining reasonable uses for Microsoft Access, at least for users of the Windows desktop version of Office? Access is still included in many editions of that (although not on Mac or web or mobile). Officially it’s even still supported and not deprecated, although of course it’s very much not emphasized by MS any more.
Other options might be SQL Server Express or SQL Server Express LocalDB, the latter of which seems conceptually very much like SQLite within the MS ecosystem, and both of which are usable for production purposes at no cost within the technical limitations that differentiate them from paid editions.
The SaaS I am now working for is a react app + some fancy intelligence.
We are not front-end people, so the app is built with the expectation that people will be doing their filtering, searching and using the intelligence we provide, but in their home turf (excel).
Our app also lets users "track" certain events, and we do not use push notifications, rather we respect our user's attention and email them a short summary, and link to a csv that they can use!
That immediately made me think of the digital TV switchover. The elderly father of a friend of mine would spend much of his time in front of the TV, and could operate it without assistance, thanks to the simple 1:1 mapping between buttons and functions.
After the digital switchover, there was now a set-top box, and electronic program guide and three-figure channel numbers thrown into the mix, as well as stateful aspect such as whether the TV was set to AV or still trying to use its now-obsolete tuner.
For someone with poor eyesight, limited feeling in his fingers and limited ability (and admittedly willingness, too) to build a mental model of how the menus worked and how they can be navigated, it spelled the end of his unsupervised access to TV.
The big difference for me between database-query-driven and algorithmically-driven is that the latter makes it very hard to know when you've completed an exhaustive search. Indeed for the likes of meta and tiktok that's a feature, not a bug, since their goal is to keep you engaged and plugged into "their" content forever.
I have a "Roku TV". It has many pointless problems. But the biggest is that it takes a very long time to turn on. If you turn it on by remote control, there is no indication that anything has happened until the TV finally starts showing something. You just have to hope that the signal got through. It's fairly frequent that we fail to turn the TV on because we assume that it just isn't done getting ready to turn on yet.
You can avoid this by using the physical power button, which is conveniently located behind the TV. It will still take forever to turn on, but there's no ambiguity over whether you've started the process.
I still have trouble believing the device was allowed to reach customers in this state.
Not every change is for the better. You gotta admit that TVs used to be able to switch channels much faster then they do now. And analogue controls in cars are safer and better then touch screens for everything.
A lot of change is for the better, but quite a lot is a regression.
I have access to around 1000 "channels", if you include live broadcasts and network-like apps. How exactly were old TVs better at helping navigate that?
For one thing, the clicker seems to work instantly for analog TV because it will sync up on the next frame, which is 0.03 sec which is less than the 0.2 sec it takes the human mind to perceive two events as two different events.
With digital broadcast TV and cable whenever you switch to a different carrier there is a long delay (at least 0.5 sec) for the radio and the rest of the processing train to sync up. With streaming you have to do multiple network round trips to establish a stream. Either way you don't have the immediacy that old TVs had.
The question of UI in modern TV is interesting. 15 years ago the 500 channel problem looked difficult, my impression was that Comcast Xfinity (2010) was the first really good STB interface for the digital age.
I have a NVIDIA Shield which has an Android TV interface that convincingly makes FAST services like Pluto, Plex and Tubi look like linear TV on an STB. What you find though is that going "back" from one of those channels can put you, disorientingly, in the app for those channels, and also that you can usually navigate better if you start out with the FAST app (and have a more consistent experience watching FAST on a computer, tablet or XBOX) Except for those things which, for some reason, are easy to find in Android TV but hard in the app.
> 15 years ago the 500 channel problem looked difficult
Knowing what was on 500 channels may have been difficult, but that's equally difficult now. The problem of navigating 500 channels was solved more than 25 (not 15) years ago by remote controls that had numpad buttons on them. You navigate to channel 351 by pressing buttons 3, 5, and 1 in sequence.
Modern TV interfaces are way better at navigating 1000 channels, but whether or not having 1000 channels available through one TV interface is highly debatable. It's also not a given that the current way most TVs use is anywhere close to the optimal one (especially when you have multiple devices that all have to work together because the cable provider insists on their own box, made even worse when a helpful family member installs a sound system with its own dedicated remote).
It takes ages till the channel switches. I had already more channels then I needed, so more channels add nothing to it. There is no difference between having 800 vs 1000 channels. And when the TV is slow to change them, the discovery process becomes painful enough that I just go to do something else.
The problem is with cataloging and discoverability. After a certain number of photos (or movies, songs, whatever), finding what's relevant is non-trivial.
Or the problem is what's relevant, such as Spotify's 'what the user likes and is in our bargain bin for plays'. If the photo algo wants you to get multiple prints which mostly happen when you are sending them to others it's going to push group photos and baby pictures not that epic moonrise.
Deterministic software puts the user in control of the product. Nondeterministic algos put the products in control of the user. Naturally companies want the latter and under guises of the ‘now better’ give the user worse and charge them more. A new generation isn’t even aware they’re being fleeced because they don’t have anything to compare with. And the frog boils slowly…
This entire thread reads like multiple people circling around product opportunities. There are users out there who want control and will pay for something no-frills. You might not get big VC money to build this, but you could build this.
I think of your suggested idea of objective reviews and classifications quite often, but the problem ends up being discoverability. There have been a handful of sites that were highly useful by aggregating price and consumer sentiment/recommendations from Reddit. They get initial visibility and search traffic, then get penalized by Google. Froogle/Google shopping gets priority and is the only aggregator that Google really wants to include.
Look at defunct sites like Nextag that were moderately useful in the space-- they had free and paid placements. They were steadily growing search visibility until Google started pushing their own product (Froogle, free product listings in 2014ish) and Nextag suddenly "violated Google's policies" and lost 90%+ of their traffic rather quickly (probably 1MM daily visits to under 10k basically overnight). Google shopping technically offers "free product listing placement", hidden well below the ads-- likely as a defense to anti-trust on monopolization of that specific space.
Brickseek and CamelCamelCamel are the two most successful/long lived tools in the space-- and they grew their visibility from the now defunct but once huge deal site FatWallet and SlickDeals. Walled garden subreddits frequently disallow posting of specific tools, so it makes organic growth super challenging-- given that pretty much all commercial queries start with Google or Amazon.
I was speaking more generally than reviews or classification sites. I really meant virtually any application. It's just that it's a long, slow grind to build the reputation and differentiation from the big tech products you're competing with.
Consumers can't pay. Part of the grift has been the concentration of capital in the hands of the highest wealth-holders, who all seem to have the same idea as to where to put their money (hence, uncomfortably, the bidding up of tech compensation to where it is now). So, no, you're not going to be able to Adobe/Autodesk-style price gouge. However, if you show customers the value proposition (generally some aspect of longevity or portability that prevents expensive upgrades or lock-in), they'll pay when they can. And until sanity returns to the economy, partnering with a credit facility of some sort might be wise (for you, not the customer).
Okay, no, we don't have to go down this nobody-can-afford-anything rabbit hole.
There are people out there that will pay. The issue is not that there isn't willing consumers to pay for it, it's that you're undiscoverable until word-of-mouth builds around your product among people(like those in this very thread) know and talk about your product going against the grain.
Reminds of Windows and search. I am not anymore even sure if there is some nice dialog where I could put some pattern and folder or list of folder and have it run through it for me...
It's just enshitification. It's pretty funny when I search for putty and get the help doc, or my email client and get some windows setting option. I switched to powertoys search to get around it but wonder if anyone responsible for maintaining this feature actually uses it.
I got so frustrated trying to find some shelves recently that I ended up building them myself. It used to be that I could use Google to find some furniture stores, but now they all require me to throughly vet them to make sure they aren’t just reselling stuff from China or scam sites. Ikea still works, but that’s about it unless I go to big designer brands where a shelf will cost me a gazillion DKR. Unfortunately Ikea didn’t have any shelves that I liked, which is why I build them out of some wood I purchased in the local hardware store.
It’s so annoying that it’s almost impossible to find a legitimate store. Well maybe that’s not the correct way to word it. It’s so frustrating that it’s almost impossible to know whether or not the top shops you get in your search results are stores you want to use or not.
It's bad enough that manufacturers in China might start complaining about it as the best manufacturers there have a reputation to protect.
There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a forklift (see https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)
There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China that make innovative and value-conscious products (like this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures like you've never seen: https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in customer support. They post real manuals to their web sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA, they don't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for whom they won't support your product if you bought from them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods but takes more like four days to respond.
If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business I very much want to support them.
I borrowed a Laowa 100mm macro lens (Venus Optics) for a little while. The only reason I didn't buy one is it disabled TTL since it lacked the required electronics.
It depends what kind of shooting you are doing. I depend on autofocus for a lot of the work I do (sports) but I have more fun shooting with my manual 7Artisans lens with the aperture ring than I do with a Zeiss 55mm/1.4. The 7Artisans lens has weaknesses that show up when you try astrophotography with it (definitely some light goes the wrong way and bright stars turn into weird shapes) but it also takes great shots like
which requires manual metering to save more than $100 off one which has TTL metering as I am using it for studio work where I am going to set it up once and take 20 shots.
At this point everything you buy is from China in some way or the other. From iPhones to Nikes, from your electronic batteries to garlic. At this point stuff from China isn’t exactly a bad thing, considering how poorly things made elsewhere are doing. I have had so many issues with American made things that I almost prefer items made elsewhere. From cars to refrigerators.
I don’t mind products from China as long as they live up to EU regulations. If they are resold from places like Temu and similar then they’ve been found to be out right dangerous in some cases and in most they don’t live up to any of our safety standards. This isn’t an issue with “normal” stores which do their due diligence in their supply chain. Yes, it sometimes goes wrong, but it doesn’t happen often and when it does they inform you and recall products.
I can’t tell the authentic stores with legitimate quality control apart from the ones which will shut down and reopen with a new name next month.
Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time. For refrigerators, you can look at consumer reports and wirecutter--and you can reasonably do some evaluation at your local big box appliance store. I wouldn't buy based on a random web search though.
> Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time.
Yes. Refrigerators, at least, are made by a relatively small number of companies with established brands. They have EnergyStar ratings, and there's some objective evaluation.
For mattresses, the whole industry is a scam. Mattresses actually cost about US$50 to US$80 in bulk. Search Alibaba. Almost all consumer-facing companies are resellers. Markups are huge. Essentially all the mattress review sites are paid promotions.
I imagine that the logistics of moving a bunch of stupidly large items is also part of the markup.
Sure, I can buy a mattress from a factory in China, but getting it to my door is a whole other thing.
Last time I bought a mattress, admittedly, an overpriced one. I got to test out a sample at the store, and then a truck with two guys showed up, put on special booties to keep my house clean, carted away the old mattress, placed the new one, etc. I even took advantage of their 90 day guarantee to swap to a slightly less firm mattress, and the whole process was repeated for no cost.
Hiring a truck and two men to deliver a large item, and then haul another large item to the dump, and then pay the dump fee for a mattress (a lot more than standard dump fees), is something that would cost a few hundred dollars otherwise.
I'm sure that they made a profit off of me, but I have my doubts that there are riches to be made in the mattress industry given that there seems to be VERY low barriers to entry.
Yeah, even if there are often explicit delivery/disposal/installation charges, large deliveries are often not just a matter of shipping something to your door sight unseen and no reasonable recourse if you're not happy.
Pillows as well. Mike Lindell (the My Pillows guy who sank himself with "election
manipulation claims") didn't get his fortune from nothing. The markup is insane there as well... if you want decent pillows go to Ikea.
I'm sure it was marked up still, but the best and last pillow I've ever bought is buckwheat hulls. Basically a fancy sack of grain, but I'd guess procurement was more costly than filler plastic fabrics/foams. It was an immediate cure for neck pain from side sleeping and it's quite cool, too. For me, anything stuffed with fabric is going to be a waste of money anymore.
Wirecutter's gone downhill after the NYT purchase as well. The Spruce seems somewhat better (but is also part of a huge web site family, so caveat emptor)
Either you do deep research, or you find a trusted friend to advise you. The Internet is largely useless at this point.
I think Wirecutter is still a decent source; they probably won't steer you too far wrong if you're not too picky. But nothing, including your trusted friends, is an all-knowing oracle if only because their tastes and priorities are probably different from yours. Certainly pre-Internet there were few enough reliable sources of recommendations--maybe some specialist magazines but even those were far from perfect.
I think you hit the nail on the head. They won't steer you far wrong, but they also may neglect excellent options. For example, they recently published a "best water bottle of 2024" list. They chose to rate Hydroflask #1 and mentioned Yeti in a brief comment about "other bottles to consider" near the bottle. No mention of Kleen Kanteen at all. Yet they do cover the current trendy options of Owala & Stanley Quencher. I don't think it's really objective -- not in the same way that rtings.com is for the electronics categories they review.
That's almost certainly true. Depending on your preferences, there are just a ton of perfectly serviceable options out there, including what you're handed at trade shows. I have some Nalgenes that are sort of the standard for hiking (and fit my water bottle parkas) and otherwise mostly random stuff I've been given.
Probably also hard to test. I was an analyst for many years and, if you generally hated on a company for reasons that you thought were valid, they were unlikely to hire you.
I think there's an opportunity here for a review platform that only shows you reviews from individuals that you personally trust. "Find a trusted friend" but for the internet.
The problem with reviews from individuals (trusted friends or complete strangers), is that for major purposes they only get to deeply evaluate a single product. So they could tell you if they are happy with the fridge they bought, but they wouldn’t be able to do a detailed comparison between multiple fridges.
This will lead to you getting a product that’s good enough, but there may be a superior quality/value option that you don’t know about
Could have been an interesting application for social networking. (Friend of a friend)^n. I’d probably trust most of my friends, and most of their friends, not to be bots. Probably want to see the links, past that.
It has always felt to me that Wirecutter focuses on only one end of the Pareto curve ("what is the very best XXXX that money can buy, within reason") and ignores the middle of the curve where most people are actually shopping ("what is the best XXXX that I can get for $XXX"). It also seems to reliably ignore brands from Mainland China (Hisense, Midea, etc). I guess It makes obvious sense to court rich (or at least price-insensitive) readers.
Whether or not it started that way, yes, it makes sense to recommend brands that New York Times subscribers are familiar and comfortable with. I'll buy a GE Profile refrigerator or Bosch dishwasher. Not some Chinese brand I've never heard of and have no idea what the service situation will be with. Makes perfect sense to me and I'm in that demographic. Especially with major appliances and things I can buy at the local big box store seems to make perfect sense to not buy things you have to go to Alibaba to obtain.
It's not about being price insensitive but recommending things that are relatively mainstream and that don't seem risky, especially for major purchases that have to be installed and potentially serviced.
(Did have a service issue on my recent GE Profile refrigerator but it took one phone call and was a no-brainer.)
But you're probably right in general. Wirecutter mostly doesn't recommend unknowns it thinks are potentially bargains. Which I probably wouldn't do in its position either.
One problem with this kind of strategy is that brands often become enshrined when you aren’t looking. While the last time I was looking for kitchen appliances GE was pretty good, how do I know that in the past few years they haven’t been bought out by a private equity firm and started having their brand slapped on random low quality products?
If I want to buy something like that I set an alert on slickdeals.net Like everything else it used to be better years ago, but there are still some genuine great deals and lots of insight if you’re willing to sift through the comments.
When I was looking for a fridge a year or so ago I heard that Samsung was trying to fix their bad appliance rep and quality of parts had gone up, but I went with a different brand.
There’s been an issue the last few years of fiberglass escaping through the cover on memory foam mattresses. If I was mattress shopping I’d probably still get foam, but look for one without fiberglass or find some kind of allergy cover to at least contain it.
It's not a bad idea to pair that with lawsuits related to such warranties.
Costco and Samsung are big enough that you can achieve reasonable signal.
When your local car dealer offers you a full drivetrain warranty though (assuming it's a full warranty and not one of the other ways people are often fleeced), will they honor it when the lemon they sold you breaks the first time? the 2nd? the 3rd? Will they, instead, note that most people buying that car don't have much money (or, if you used any form of dealer financing, know for a fact you don't have much money) and require you to retain a lawyer and sue them to recover any damages?
Not sure if your car example was meant to be general or specific, but Lemon Laws are extremely common across the states and are very easy to take advantage of without needing to retain a lawyer. For example, in Texas you fill out a form, pay a $35 filing fee, then bring your evidence to mediation.
It's a bit of both. Generally the idea holds. The example isn't that bad either. O(100k-1M) people have dealer-fraud related problems every year in the US, usually without happy outcomes. A few ways this might happen relating to my use of the word "lemon" include:
1. Colloquial use of "lemon" differs from the legal definition. In the given example, this might include a 15yr old vehicle (far outside any normal "manufacturer's" warranty) with numerous defects both known to the dealer and lied about to the consumer. The dealer would likely lose any civil complaint, but in Texas, and most states, this doesn't count as a "lemon." You're protected, if at all, by the fact that the salesperson warranted a thing, and perhaps any actual written "warranty" (really insurance, not that it necessarily matters) the dealer might have sold you. You usually waive the warrant of merchantability, so the fact that the car is a dud isn't enough by itself for you to have any damages (all state-specific, consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction).
2. Picking on Texas, since you brought it up, if you only bring the car in 3 times for a major defect covered under the lemon law, it's not a lemon yet. If the dealer refuses to deal with you on the 3rd instance then you'll have to sue with some other justification.
3. In the vast majority of states, you don't have an automated (minus filing fees) hearing process pertaining to lemons. Even in those which do, you're much more likely to succeed with the help of an attorney. In either case, in most states, attorney's fees are not part of the damages you can claim, and when squabbling about a $5k used car it can easily cost more in attorney fees (plus incidentals like renting a car and missing work for the actual hearings -- usually not covered even in states granting damages for incidentals (including rentals and missing work in other contexts) arising from the lemon), often making it not even worth pursuing.
...
Usually, even with moderate legal protections, you don't want to enter into an agreement where you expect to have to rely on those protections. Your best-case scenario is that you waste a bunch of time and still have only as many resources as you started with. You'll usually do even worse. Why take a losing gamble?
I got a mattress last year using Consumer Reports rec for most the mattress with the least synthetic chemicals. I am not going to say its name lest it look like I am shilling for them. I will say, it has been great.
If it's in a verifiable external source (Consumer Report for instance, not some lady's Amazon affiliate links blog), then I would say it's never shilling.
Having bought a mattress recently, it might be worth going to a mattress store. The sales process sucks, but if you want to find a mattress you like, it's hard to beat actually laying down on one.
It also can help you identify the kind you like (coil, latex, etc) and composition you like (layer style and thickness).
Then you just search for those two things online.
That's how I found an amazing natural latex cooling mattress online.
And the best part is that most online mattress retailers have 90 day try out periods. We didn't like our first one, and instead of having us ship it back they told us to donate it and sent us the next to try. So now we have a really nice spare bedroom mattress as well as the perfect mattress in our bedroom.
This is common. Most online retailers don't have the means to recover and remediate used mattresses (if it's even legal). Most are essentially just branded drop-shipping companies hocking products manufactured in Asia (often from the same factories, with minor differences between "models"). If you have the money to purchase the mattress initially, then you can just keep doing 90-day trials until you get one that the seller asks you to dispose of yourself when you try to return it. Bam, free mattress. Manufacturers and retailers can afford to do this because the markup on materials+labor+shipping is insane.
I'm surprised that people haven't caught on yet. Maybe something to do with the nature of the purchase. In a better world, even a "luxury" mattress would cost a couple hundred bucks, at most, but then be extremely difficult to return.
In my defense, we did call multiple agencies that work with low-income folks on finding housing and household goods. Due to the possibility of bedbugs, none of them are taking bedding or mattresses anymore.
I want to add in case people think this is strictly a Google thing. DDG is equally terrible at finding this kind of thing. I didn't realize until I read this thread that I was suffering this same kind of issue. Its so painful trying to find on the internet.
It’s the same for pretty much any product category now. Affiliate marketing and Google using its monopoly to prioritize ads over search results has basically ruined search. It’s in their best interest to lower the quality of results because the ads get more useful comparatively.
Gmail is next I predict. They have a monopoly over consumer email, so it’s revenue growth just waiting to be unlocked when times get tough. A higher percentage of your inbox is going to become paid Gmail ads and there’s nothing you’re going to do about it. Nobody wants to go to the hassle of changing their email address (the amount of boomers still on Yahoo mail is staggering).
May I ask why you use search engine for buying something like a mattress or refrigerator? I dont mean to sound that as an insult. I'm genuinely curious. I or anyone I know of will just go to a nearby store and checkout these items to buy. For things like these one would already know who sells these items, even online. So why not directly checkout those stores, either online or physical?
I get flashbacks to the exodus of Digg, when the admins basically said "Look, we get a lot of junk content and a lot of common source content so we are going to start fast tracking the common source content from trusted providers"
This is so true. I remember when Demand Media was crushing it on Google in the early 2010s. Seem like they were everywhere, and then one day they weren’t.
??? I've always found wikihow superbly curated, clear, direct, readable, with simple clear diagrams and almost no fluff. At least for how-to-do guides, not buying.
Can you post a link to a low-quality wikihow article or two?
Forbes as a whole basically sold its soul for clicks. It used to be one of the three top business magazines depending on your preferences. After the web became dominant, at some point after Malcolm Forbes died, you ended up with a ton of blog writers--with plenty of biases and axes to grind--and essentially advertorial content.
One of the Forbes "contributors", Gordon Kelly, used to generate an enormous volume of posts for every single minor Apple software release, in addition to regurgitating every rumor published by Mark Gurman and other journalists.
Apparently he passed away last year, after "authoring 2,511 articles in sum and accumulating over 174 million page views in just one year, 33 million of which were gained within a single month."
Apple-focused journalists have historically been especially egregious. Nilay Patel and Josh Topolsky took their maddening approach of covering the Engadget homepage in inane, separate articles for every minute detail of a product announcement (starting with the iPad) to The Verge, and its "success" caused the strategy to propagate onward. No more concise write-ups; it's all about keeping you in a deathloop on the platform. Gotta milk those cult clicks, you know.
Certain topics, and Apple is certainly one of them, can be essentially guaranteed to generate a ton of traffic. HN is by no means immune. And some writers have made a career of taking advantage of that fact.
Meanwhile, a founder of one of the major 80s-era minicomputer companies that even had a book written about them passed away a few weeks ago and I would have not even known except for my Facebook groups.
Edson de Castro (Data General as in Soul of a New Machine). But you could name just about any luminary from important commercial computer companies from that era and it would be the same story. The computer industry just wasn't in the public spotlight at that time.
It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname. At some point if you sell your company, you are putting the surname of all your descendants in the hands of some other entity outside of your/their direct control.
>It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname.
That relationship can work in the opposite way sometimes. John McAfee seemed to be getting a gleeful kick out of embarrassing the security company that had invested in the right to use his name.
Usually because he was doing zany and sketchy and potentially criminal, while expertly courting media attention. But he also used that power for good sometimes by criticizing their bad products.
>I’m pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes family is still perfectly OK with the association
The writers, editors and other business partners who built their reputation by contributing to Forbes previous good reputation are probably very not OK with it
The question was whether to name it after a person or not. Those people would be equally upset if it was named Bisclock, so them being upset at the current site is not relevant to the naming discussion.
For the amount of money involved, and all joking aside, you can have my first and last name. You can name a horrible flesh eating disease after me. It doesn't matter.
I get the feeling the family doesn't care while they lounge around on their stacks of cash?
Bit of a microcosm of the entire business world nowadays. Forbes made something - a magazine that produced enough good content to gain a reputation. In the new school of business, that's an asset, and assets are things we turn into cash as quickly as possible, so now Forbes sells CBD, and now anyone who sees "forbes.com" in the URL knows it's useless crap, but hey, someone made some money, and now they can go find the next thing to flip for a couple bucks.
I bought a pair of Doc Martens boots a while back. And they're shit. I remember them from the 80's and they were really solid, good leather, well made, etc. The modern ones are crappy leather and fell apart after only a few months. But they still cost a decent amount because they're Doc Martens.
My friend pointed out that Doc Martens are primarily worn by teenage girls these days, and are almost "fast fashion". My expectations based on the brand are not matching with reality, because the brand has moved on from being the de rigeur footwear for the entire 80's alternative scene.
From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The point being that Doc Martens, like Forbes, are trading in their reputation for quality. In ten years time they will be known as shitty boots that used to be worn by edgy teenage girls, and the brand will be worthless. But the shareholders will have made significant bank from the destruction of that brand. Late-stage capitalism win, I guess.
Sure but that seems to have been predictable from:
- 2003: DM came close to bankruptcy, moved all production from UK to China and Thailand, laid off UK workers
- 10/2013: private equity company Permira acquired R. Griggs Group Limited (owner of DM brand), for £300m. Hired former brand president of Vans as CEO.
- 2019: declining quality reported for previous years
- 1/2021: floated on London Stock Exchange for £3.7 billion.
> From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The problem is, it may be cash efficient in theory for an individual, but for society at large it's a significant cost - animal lives (for the leather), fossil fuel consumption (for the plastic parts and synthetic leather, also transport), human time lost in production and sales...
Project Farm on youtube does a lot of comparison videos between a bunch of brands of the same type of tool. He's sometimes able to snag an antique craftsman (before Sears sold it to china) and includes it in his tests. It's always amazing how much better US made craftsman tools are compared to anything currently made in china (including the current version of craftsman).
I think that the trick is to try to find new and upcoming brands that have a reputation for quality, and learn what high quality looks like so that you can confirm personally that the product is good.
This is difficult and requires ongoing work. Fashionable young people tend to do it but I certainly don’t blame anyone who decides that it isn’t worth the effort.
This used to be what brand was all about - that you could trust the brand to produce high-quality stuff because it was a quality brand. All Doc Marten boots were well-made and solid, would last a decade at least, because it was a quality brand and the price tag came with that.
I know what high quality looks like; I wore my first Doc Martens for a decade. I trusted the brand when revisiting my youth and buying a new pair.
It seems someone figured out that the price tag goes with the brand, not the quality. So you can charge high prices for cheap boots if you put the DM tag on them. And make bank.
I think this will accelerate, and the "new and upcoming" brands will get shit at exactly the point where people like me discover them. Because, as you say, it's not worth the effort to keep up with this rapid churn.
Hence the Inverse Vimes solution: stop trying to buy quality and instead accept that everything is shit and deal with that reality; buy cheap and often.
This is only a problem with really big and popular brands, where they leverage their brand at scale to generate more revenue.
You can find smaller brands that have been doing high quality stuff for a while, and they're unlikely to blow up in popularity or to reduce quality.
Docs are not my style so I don't know a good small brand that does boots like that, but I like Buttero, Crown Northhampton and John Elliott for boots/shoes. Beckett Simonon is a good brand for more formal shoes. Morjas is another brand for more formal shoes that looks really good, though I haven't bought anything from them yet.
I prefer the Costco solution 90% of the time. If and when the Costco solution does not work, then I do the research to figure out what might be better.
For example, I like to wear $30 Costco shoes. I can usually get at least a year out of them, but even if not, they’re only $30. I can buy 3 in a year and come out ahead. And I don’t waste time researching shoes.
Its not late state capitalism. Its hidden inflation. The market for actual high quality boots is much smaller than you are thinking. Including your own desire. The reality is doc martins are selling for <$180 max, basically mid-high sneaker (non collectable) territory. Actual quality boots like the doc martins of the 80's probably cost over $1000 dollars now. Are you willing to pay over $1000 for boots? Because that is what quality boots cost now.
Doc martin didn't sacrifice the brand. They realized that people would never pay $1000 for doc martins so they just jettisoned the company name by rebranding into fast fashion before they totally disappear. It was probably the only choice by the time it was decided. There were probably some missteps along the way where they may have been able to keep their prices up enough to keep the quality but they missed it.
High quality boots definitely don't cost >$1000, and definitely not boots that are on par with the quality of DM from the 80s. DM from the 80s were "fine", but they still weren't really high quality and their soles were definitely not very durable.
Even today you can find excellent quality, resoleable boots, for $200-300. Just look at Redwing, Thursday, Wolverine and many, many others.
You can get boots that function as boots for $300. The thing is everyone has forgotten what high quality actually is. High quality boots are north of $700 starting price and can last 20 years.
This is of course a massively opinionated subject about price/quality so no one will ever agree but there are plenty brands north of $1000 now that probably are around as big market as doc martin was in the 80s. I'd consider that to be the more accurate comparison.
I have a pair of custom-made boots I bought a few decades ago for $500 and which have been repaired once. Don't wear them much now because they're so heavy. So, yeah, they're not really for me today but that's what high quality is.
Certainly not. You can buy great boots for 250$. I bought my Salomon boots 5 years ago, I wear them a heck of a lot in the Canadian winter, and they're good as new. Much more comfortable than a Doc Martens boot, even in their prime, resolable with a Vibram Megagrip sole, has a carbon fiber backing plate that will never wear out, etc...
What happened is that technology advanced, and now good quality boots don't look like Docs anymore. The market for high quality, vintage construction boots is tiny, because people who only care about quality won't buy them anymore, which is why they are expensive : only a special kind of people who care a lot about quality and looks/nostalgia are going to buy them.
People who need high quality boots just won't be satisfied with heavy, fussy, non-breathable leather and rubber boots.
I think I paid $300AUD for mine. I was very poor in the 80's, I would not have been able to afford the equivalent of $1000USD. I have vague memories of them costing around 80 GBP, which would be ~350 GBP now, so about half that $1K (but definitely more than I paid for them now, so your point is at least partially true).
And yes, I would be willing to pay that kind of money now for a pair of boots that would last me a decade again.
It was also kinda the point back in the 80's; your Docs were an investment. They cost decent money, but they'd last a decade and became part of your identity. Practically a physical extension of your body; I had a flatmate who regularly fell asleep in his and eventually developed trenchfoot from doing that. The boots were fine, his feet weren't. Most of my friends back in the day had one pair of shoes; their Docs. It was worthwhile investing in them because that was all you needed.
I think you're also right that the brand itself has changed and moved down-market, so they're charging less than they used to for a lower-quality product. But this is kinda my point; the brand is now being cannibalised and turned into a low-quality fast-fashion product marketed with a high-quality brand. This is obviously not going to work long-term, as people realise that Docs are now shite. As I said, in ten year's time the brand won't be worth anything.
Although Docs have almost given up making in Northampton, you'll still find a number of shoemakers producing good quality boots that should last a decade or more. You'll be paying £250-£500 as you guessed.
Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern management movement have caused worker pay to drop in real terms. Cut forward another decade or so and the entire retail landscape discovers people can no longer afford their products.
> Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern management movement have caused worker pay to drop in real terms.
This isn't well established as the cause and there is reason to expect that it isn't. To start with, the Housing Theory of Everything fits better.
If this was about management practices then in competitive markets things would still be fine, you would only need one company to not do that and everybody would buy from them. But things still kind of suck even there, so what's that about? Housing costs would explain it. People spend more money on rent so they have less money to spend on other things, meanwhile companies have to pay higher rents too, so their customers have less money and simultaneously their business has higher costs. Somehow they have to lower prices while covering higher costs and the somehow is by enshitifying their products, i.e. that is the symptom rather than the cause.
But the Housing Theory of Everything is slightly off, because the real problem is a generalization of the theory. Housing is expensive because supply is artificially constrained, and it's artificial supply constraints -- insufficiently competitive markets -- that are the general underlying cause. Housing is a major example of this, probably the largest and most important, both because it's such a large proportion of personal expenses and because the restrictive zoning that imposes the constraint is so widespread.
But it's the same problem when you need a medical imaging scan and there are Certificate of Need laws that expressly prohibit new competitors from providing the service when the incumbents are charging inflated prices, and then those high costs get incorporated into health insurance premiums and Medicare taxes and reduce real wages by increasing the cost of living.
Regulatory capture has to be undone or it will be our undoing.
fortune.com too. same thing . these brands realized they can cash in on their domain authority to create content farms full of ads. scales really well too
Fortune's case was mostly the whole Time-Life magazine empire going to the dogs partly by way of TWB. Forbes just kind of faded away post-Malcolm (and with a distracted Steven Forbes).
But, in general, the magazine and journalism businesses aren't what they were so most of the relatively mass market magazines pretty much cashed in on their brands to the degree their owners decided to keep them around.
Consumer reports that you pay for, or at least websites that have a policy of avoiding or declaring conflicts-of-interest, seem to be the reasonable middle-ground.
I noticed recently actually seeing "Consumer Reports Best Buy" listed in ad copy for some products.
For decades they were extremely assertive about not licensing that sort of stuff out, to the point where advertisers used to say "A leading consumer magazine" if they wanted to hint about that.
Some magazines have been able to maintain quality better than others. Especially if there was outside funding from someone who had a real connection/passion. I'm not sure there was anyone at the helm of Forbes who cared at that point.
Very good article. Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful. Possibly they are starved of human generated content kept to a certain quality level. But it's very strange to see sites leveraging a legacy brand to expand far beyond their expertise. Forbes is the most prominent example.
One of the commenters on wheresyoured seemed insightful: "wonder if organic search results being worse generates more ad clicks, as the ads are more likely to be more useful than the actual search results".
Someone once described the state of mobile gaming on Android like this. Games that are good make less money. Games that are just good enough to get you to open them but are also just shitty enough that when you hit an ad in-game, you click on it and leave, make more money.
In the short-term. But google is training a whole generation that everything they touch is shit. I know a lot of engineers who won't touch chrome if they aren't testing something. I have the same feeling about android games.
They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
> They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
Both Google and Apple. If you go to the App Store all games are ad ridden to the point where you can't play more than a minute without interruption or constant nagging to buy. Where are the apps where you pay a sum agreed from the start and use the damn app without restrictions? Some games will even trick people into buying $20/week subscriptions. I can only trust Apple Arcade for my kid. What a wasteland, probably no more than 1000 decent apps in millions. And they have the nerve to pretend App Store is some curated collection of software we can trust. It's no better than "shareware" before 2000's.
Shareware at one point was really try before you buy without restrictions--even if mostly people never bought before software really didn't have trial periods etc.
"Free to play" is really awful in general though. But I guess people won't in general pay up-front for a lot of things.
Conspiracy theory: one or more companies are background manufacturing Google hate.
Chrome is amazingly well engineered and the Chromium team seems to have avoided the worst shittification. Having watched other products dive into the cesspit of advertising I'm not quite sure how the team does it. Somehow Chrome seems to add useful features (while being hated for that). Maybe I'm the fool in the room.
And the code is open source. A gift to humanity yet so strongly hated. So open source that most of the competition uses it! There's some magic going on somehow.
I just don't understand how anyone that calls themselves an engineer could hate Chrome that much. Firefox doesn't feel well engineered, and Mozilla has a strong taint of scuzzy executive vampires. Safari has its good points but when I was developing for it, it consistently had major flaws. Safari certainly has some amazing engineering. But Chromium mostly has better engineering from what I could tell as a JavaScript developer.
Engineers are just as vulnerable to branding and anti-branding as everyone else.
Microsoft, Google, Apple. Try to order them by evilness.
It is astonishing to me that people click ads in general, but especially ads in a game. At least ads on websites, you were probably just mindlessly scrolling…
Some mobile game ads are actually advertising for decent other games. Or a few weeks ago, some shipping company on Instagram closing down one of their locations and selling off stuff at a heavy discount, got about 1200€ worth of stuff for barely 400€.
The key thing is the luck to get shown such ads... about 95% IME are utter garbage, and Google should go and not just mandate that game ads show actual gameplay but also that what the ads show must be the main part in the game, not just some irrelevant side quest.
Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO. Pagerank was one of the best for awhile (number sites that link to your site, weighted by their rank). Whether it be clicks, time on page, percentage of people who clicked onto the page then ended the session, etc it all gets gamed.
Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies, books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people on hn think that the internet should be any different?
> Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO
Nor will it ever happen, at least as long as search is a Google monoculture. One effective player in the search space means that everyone sets their sight on the same target. Which naturally leads to SEO being an extremely one-sided arms race not in favor of Google - "good content" is hard to quantify, and whatever proxy (or combinations thereof) Google uses to estimate that quality will be ruthlessly uncovered, reverse engineered and exploited to its last inch by an unyielding, unending horde of "SEO optimizers".
The only way that Google maintains search quality is if it properly accounts for the fact that websites will adopt the path of least resistance, i.e. put in the least amount of effort to optimize only specifically the things that Google measures. Which means that the heuristics and algorithms Google uses to determine search rankings must always be a moving target whose criteria needs to be vigilantly updated and constantly curated by people. Any attempt to fully automate that curation will result in the cyber equivalent of natural selection - SEO-optimizing websites adapting by automating the production of content that hits just the right buttons while still being royally useless to actual visitors.
I think today we can use LLMs to decide what websites are shit. The wheel is turning. SEO artists will have to provide actually useful, non-spammy content. If Google doesn't do it, some uBlock like service will implement it on user side. Or we'll just use chatGPT with search and not see the cesspool at all. You can edit its system prompt to avoid shit in search results.
Since there is no competition and people will keep using Google whatever happens, might as well push the ad-filled garbage site than the ad-free handwritten blogpost. The former probably makes them more money, everything else humanity holds dear be damned.
Complacency? Google has such a dominance in search that their name is used as a verb. Combine that with their culture of automating everything to an extreme degree. And the end result seems to be: search that is just good enough that people keep using it and requires little human fine tuning/curation making it cheap at scale.
Not to mention how flawed the current search tool really is. If you search for something, page 1 shows results from page 7 to some infinite number. But click on that large number, and you find out that the last page was page 3.
> Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful
This was in response to the millions of SEOs flooding the SERPs with ever increasing amounts of low quality / incorrect / harmful AI generated content. Google didn't know how to keep the SERPs clean except over index on authority. The highly authoritative websites abused that to shill CBD oil, air fryers, mattresses, etc.
Because Google makes money through all this. These move ads. That's all they care about at this stage. I had stated a few years back Google is dying. It will take a while and it's going to be painful but we will get over this soon. 20 years is a good run.
It has to do with these old brands exploiting domain authority, plus buying tons of backlinks. Investopedia.com is another example of this. Google assigns too much weight to authority domains. Google doesn't actually penalize paid backlinks for old domains, I think.
The second best feature is that you can specify rewrite rules for URLs in results, using regular expressions. The example one is the most important one for me: rewriting reddit.com to old.reddit.com.
Their "collapse listicles" setting is probably one of the best features when trying to search for products, they squeeze all the listicles together in their own list (usually just below the fold). If you want them, they're there, and if you don't, they take up hardly any space.
An aside about Forbes: I used to be subscribed to a few of their newsletters. About two years ago, I would notice that nearly all the newletter content would say something along the lines of "as reported by The Information" and I realized that a huge portion (>60%) of the newsletter content was just summarizations or rephrasing of articles from The Information. Which, I mean, great that you're citing your sources, but are you really providing a service here?
There are 2-3 very detailed articles on how only a few media companies that own top few hundred domains have spammed SEO and hijacked top spots in search results. I made a list of block-able domains (dot dash meredith sites only). I have roughly explained how I searched these domains.
https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6573b27441d99a0a0c792431...
Just copy paste this list to UBlacklist (or other tool). Need to sit down and search and add more sites including forbes someday.
It's coming for all the old "legacy" web names with strong domain ranking and decades of backlinks. Private equity is snapping them up as fast as possible, loading them with ads, and bleeding the brand dry.
I implemented something similar years ago for the publisher I worked for. Like 2006ish. It was after Katrina, I'd never had a full time dev job, and I created it as a POC to show to my employer that they could invest in me full time as a developer (I was helping put their magazines together when I wasn't working on their CRM).
I created a marketplace with finely tuned SEO for my employer to advertise (and charge) companies in niche industries. My SEO was better than the SEO of the developers who worked on their sites, and our audience was obviously much larger than theirs, so we ranked higher. Any time you would search for the company name or the product type in a certain geographic area, you'd find links to our pages dominating the search results.
One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
> One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
This well predates Google, though; it was a common trick for placement in the (physical) phone book.
When online directories were still relevant, this issue was already a common occurrence. For example, DMOZ, and the number of spammy directories that existed for link building purposes.
Google basically destroyed itself when it decided to become an ad network rather than a dumb pipe you pay to access. You have to pick a base to sell to. Selling to two different bases at once (advertisers/seo and actual users) means both resent you and neither respect you.
When google gets split up the whole world will cheer.
We'll never know because nobody tried. The internet is too broken now to bother searching. For a group of people that claim to love empirical analysis people on this site sure do love writing off anything but the current state of affairs.
Meta comment: I consider myself pretty adept at finding things people don't want to be found in securities filings, registration records, et cetera. The author is uniquely competent at this as well.
When I am using Chrome on the phone to read the Google Discover news feed I am often horrified how shitty the experience is. Popups, cookie warnings, almost no article is visible initially, and some of them actively make it hard to scroll to the text. It looks like there is no use friendly news site left in Google's feed. I prefer LLM slop, thank you very much. The only attractive proposition is the fresh and targeted feed. Probably Google is not allowed to offer a reading mode that hides the cruft.
It's not just Forbes that is using this strategy. Many traditional media sites, including CNN and USA Today are running the same type of content. And of course they'll not report on this issue, which might just well be why Google is doing this, a kind of kickback for traditional media.
The dirty secret is those are also run by Marketplace, it’s the same team under the hood once you get past the handful of people dedicated to each brand.
The model has proven very successful and these brands are happy to lease their reputation for a cut of the profit and none of the work.
As you can see this is a throwaway since I don’t want to identify myself, but a wrote a lengthy comment elsewhere in the tree describing how the company has changed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466#41598797
The aforementioned companies in the parent comment have partnerships with Marketplace to replicate the Forbes model. I didn’t mean to imply everyone who does this thing is using Marketplace.
> I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.
I guess what benefit do you get out of ratting out the company you work for?
Is it that you don't feel you have enough of a voice to change anything or to help improve things?
Nothing specifically. Just maybe give some context to the post here, since this article is rightly pretty harsh and I used to be somewhat proud the work I did with the company.
I wouldn’t say I’m ratting them out because these partnerships aren’t literally a secret, just that they aren’t widely known and are similarly obfuscated like the relationship with Forbes. Ultimately like I said leadership does everything in a silo and unless you’re high up in the ladder you’re not really getting a say. So probably yeah just felt a bit powerless
sounds like things have changed a lot over the years you've been there? Interesting hearing how editorial and business teams have interacted—always feels like a tough balance when growth kicks in.
do you think the culture shift was just bound to happen as the company got bigger, or were there some key moments where things really started to shift?
I’m on the Editorial team at RV - so know the finance and insurance space well, and we deal with similar dynamics with the sales side, so I get where you’re coming from. I’ve seen stuff like this play out before, but curious to hear how it unfolded on your end.
I don’t think it was bound to happen. The company did a pretty good job maintaining the culture as we grew. Obviously as more layers of bureaucracy are added and things settle into more standardized procedures, you’re going to lose some of that scrappy feeling. Up until the end of last year, at least the energy really hadn’t changed too much.
I think the algorithm change mentioned in the article precipitated a lot of the culture shift. I think it was a failure of leadership to not have planned for something like this, and two rounds of layoff really shattered a lot of the energy that had been cultivated over the years. There isn’t much discussion these days about brand integrity or responsibility, especially from the top down. It’s very clearly coming from leadership to pursue growth and SEO is steering the ship with everyone else on the sidelines, subject to their whims. I hear from my colleagues in edit and data about some truly wild pieces they’re told to write/research. It doesn’t help with leadership being, as mentioned before, basically invisible outside of quarterly town halls (which are hilariously lacking in transparency, they refuse to even show revenue numbers to the employees).
There’s been other aspects too that contributed. They’ve built up a massive operation in India which offshored a lot of company functions. I had colleagues who had their growth paths with the company essentially halted because they decided to hire new people in India to build out teams rather than advance them and have to pay them more. There were headaches last year with hiring where management basically refused to do US hires for most teams because the UK had lower labor costs, even though a significant portion of the existing company was US based. This caused some of the cross-functional breakdown because it made it more difficult for teams to collaborate across the major timezone gaps. The India buildout exacerbated this too so stuff generally began to take longer.
It all ultimately stems from what is Leadership’s stated “growth above all” mindset. I can’t say they’re wrong from a business perspective. Obviously they’re doing extremely well and taking in a ton of revenue (little of which makes it into our paychecks based on our raises last year lol). It definitely wrung whatever joy or spark people had to try and put together something good. It’s an SEO machine at this point.
From my experience following Forbes Advisor (being a close competitor), the content actually seems to be of good quality, with experts contributing to different sections. They seem to really invest time and money into making it work, which stands out compared to other affiliate-driven sites. The editorial expertise in areas like insurance and finance is pretty evident, with professionals leading the charge.
Despite some of the concerns raised about leadership decisions and outsourcing, the quality of the content hasn’t taken a hit from what I can see.
Are they truly outsourcing everything as cheaply as possible? Or is it more nuanced, with key areas of expertise retained in-house.
It’s interesting that there’s a lot of frustration about revenue numbers being hidden. But let’s be honest, if they did expose the revenue, wouldn’t the first move be to shout it from the rooftops? People love to complain about a lack of transparency, but sometimes those same people are the first to use that info to stir things up even more.
"So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches per month in 2021." Is this real? That averages out to 40m searches, so .75 per. It seems insane to get close to $1 per search. I figured the return was closer to a penny or even a fraction of one.
When I did search (AdWords) for Thomas Cook, a now defunct but then major travel agency, we'd pay £10 or more to Google for a single click sometimes. (Full story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046731)
Great Article it's been pretty sad with google for a while, poisoned ad networks thanks for sharing.. I was wondering if you could give your input about nature.com as well they seem to post on hackernews all the time seems like a ranking game as well. cheers
Just searched "best pet insurance", am inside Europe. Forbes is #1. I distinctly recall seeing this from time to time. Interestingly they're also the #1 for pet insurance on duckduckgo.
For me in the UK "best pet insurance" is squatted by The Telegraph and "best cbd gummies" has Forbes top and The Independent second.
I assume all media companies that have a "trusted domain" and are already involved in aggressive SEO are using this as a revenue generator.
The sites that turned exclusively into link farms like about.com could be whacked by Google eventually and everyone was happy. But if they try that with well known media brands there will be cries of censorship--whether it is collateral damage to some genuine journalistic content, or Google "taking away" a revenue stream.
To your point, my theory is that all their other tech efforts - that are very often sunset'ed in a couple+ years - are merely a smokescreen of the ad monopoly. Worst case, if they have to: "Tech is hard and competitive. Look at how many other businesses we started and were unable to be successful at. Search + ads is one click away from slipping away from us. We're not a monopoly. We're alone and very scared for our future..."
In Turkey, all searches hits to newspaper sites. Its like a sad joke. Related page is full of repetitive garbage where information is hidden somewhere.
BlackHat SEO's have insiders at many of these companies that'll publish your article for $X amount of money. Or edit existing articles and insert your URL.
This man is surprised that his google results are terrible. I have to assume this is a frog boiling thing and he's only just noticed the water heating up. Having switched to Kagi years ago, I'm immediately horrified by the state of Google if I ever end up on it. It's appalling and has been for a few years now.
Try those same search terms in Kagi and you'll see Forbes at the top of the results. I use Kagi and like it a lot but you should be aware that most of their results come from Google.
how to get rid of roaches -site:forbes.com -site:usnews.com -site:nredwallet.com -site:usatoday.com -site:businessinsider.com -site:marketwatch.com -site:bankrate.com -site:money.com -site:fool.com
What's the issue with all these websites? Is it simply that you have a distaste for affiliate sites in general?
It’s worth noting that Lars Lofgren’s own affiliate site (the person that wrote this article), hradvice.com, was impacted by a Google update in August, so there might be some personal bias and motive here.
But I’m curious—what exactly are the criticisms you have towards platforms like NerdWallet and Bankrate? Would love to better understand.
It's getting closer to the point where we will compare Google to Kagi like web-browsing without an ad-blocker. It's hell surfing the web with ad-blocking off.
Lol, guess you can't really escape. One benefit of Kagi is you can block websites from appearing. Maybe website blocking lists will appear similar to ad blocking lists. Maybe Kagi already lets you do this.
Google does a lot of personalization of search results. But if you don't give it your searches, it won't know what you want. So when you come back after switching, it's much worse.
While there’s definitely optimization for search, it doesn’t appear to be purely about that. A lot of the content, particularly on Forbes Advisor and Forbes Health, seems user-driven and genuinely helpful. If you spend some time exploring those areas, you’ll notice well-researched, in-depth guides aimed at offering practical advice.
And it is not that different (albeit at a smaller scale) from what websites like mini partition wizard has been doing. Their sitemaps are full of articles that don't relate at all to their tool:
Damn, didn't realise that Forbes Marketplace was run separately to Forbes itself. Knew it was always a parasite SEO operation, but the idea of it being a separate company entirely (and how much they tried to hide the fact) is really interesting here.
But yeah, it's still crazy that this site is even allowed in Google, and that they've shown no signs of cracking down on these types of parasite SEO schemes.
I’ve worked here a while. He’s a bit aggressive about it but a lot of what he says is on point.
The relationship with Forbes has always been a weird one. The understanding I’ve had was the company was spun off from an effort that kind of started in Forbes but they didn’t really want to deal with themselves.
It was always an SEO driven content strategy but for a while we had a pretty sizable content apparatus. Really big editorial teams for each vertical, a bigger cultural emphasis on the quality of the content and more collaboration across teams. The editorial teams had a lot of voice in what got published and tried to respect that we were using the Forbes brand and what that meant when we made recommendations or wrote about something. The only thing I’ll say to our (meagre) defense is there are panels of experts that are consulted for recommendations on a lot of products, and the teams that do research for the actual written content (not the affiliate/partner garbage that often takes up sponsored slots) do try and work hard to provide data to meet the demands of the SEO and BD teams.
A lot of that has changed over the years. The company has grown explosively in the time that I have been here. The company something like tripled its size last year alone. I went from being a newbie on a team of less than ten to a senior member on a team in the mid double digits in the space of a year. The culture has become increasingly bureaucratic and disconnected. We’ve always been a fully remote team but it used to be much more collaborative and cross-functional.
We don’t hear much at all from leadership. It’s always been a fairly insulated operation from one vertical layer to the other. There have been two pretty big layoffs this year which came out of the blue. Editorial teams have been gutted across every vertical and the strategy has pivoted more and more towards shovelware content and partner posts. The latter being especially frustrating because they are handled by a completely separate team from the editorial team but are formatted to look like our written content even though they’re actually sponsored posts. At a team meeting after the last layoffs the CEO answered a question about the company’s plans and said something to the effect of “if we’re not growing we are dead” which I think is obviously seen in how the company is re-shaping itself.
It’s been disappointing to say the least. I don’t think any of us ever operated under the illusion we were doing important journalism or anything, but we all seemed to strive to make something good of the system we were working in. I’ve seen and heard of a lot of things I find commendable of my co-workers. Editorial and mid-level leadership have worked for a long time to ensure a separation of biz dev and edit so that they don’t have influence over the written content. I heard of times when BD really tried to push, however indirectly, for partners to get higher rankings in content. As edit gets increasingly sidelined in the business by the SEO content teams I’m not sure how much this is being maintained but I don’t work in that side of the business so I can’t speak specifically.
All of this is to say. He’s right, we are just ultimately doing our jobs. Unfortunately, I’ve outlasted a lot of people who were hired after me, and up til the layoffs it was very rare for someone to quit. Now more and more of the people who have been here since the early days (even before me) are peeling away. Those of us who stay are seeking more and more checked out. Honestly the benefits are excellent and I think that’s what keeps most of us around but no one is passionate these days.
That was a super rambling post, but I don’t ever see anyone talking about this place I’ve been at for a while. I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.
It is interesting that there's a huge rush to grow; the bigger and lower quality you get, the more incentive Google has to change the algorithm. The business could completely evaporate overnight.
It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.
We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
While greed, short term vision etc are universal, Asia is not (yet) as bad. Take banks for example, say Singapore. How many Singaporean banks have failed vs American? Asian banks are way more conservative (relatively at least) and don't play aggressive with their customers' money.
My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the west and in Asia).
It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.
> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."
That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.
Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition. Google has every incentive to maximize the amount of money that search makes them.
Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of the problems.
> Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition.
Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2) be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
> Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
You break Google Search out of Google and break Google Search up into two (or more) companies. Now, they have an incentive to compete against one another.
Before Google became a monopoly, SEO optimizations were somewhat restrained because something which was super-optimized for Google would generally hurt your search on Yahoo and vice versa. If the results got too shitty, people would start to switch.
The fact that switching doesn't happen anymore is prima facie evidence that Google is a monopoly.
Even if the majority prefer free or cheap, that doesn't mean there isn't a market for better and more expensive search. Those who don't want to pay can stick with Google and get what they pay for. Just like with any other product.
Being a more expensive premium product can even be more lucrative than being the cheaper majority product. Look at Apple, the only company to even try making a high quality laptop i the last 10-15 years. I'd say the same about smart phones, but the latest Samsung phones are actually high quality.
> We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value.
We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer to not leave much of value behind.
I’m not sure how this applies to the conversation. The challenges being discussed here are centred around managing compliance and long-term sustainability within specific platform ecosystems. It’s about navigating policies, ensuring longevity, and minimising risk rather than short-term shareholder gains. The generational divide you’re mentioning doesn’t really seem relevant in this scenario.
Big companies have been owned by shareholders for hundreds of years. Most companies being plundered right now were created by selling shares to initial investors. These shareholders held a sense of responsibility towards customers, towards employees and towards their community, which made the companies long term successful.
Blaming shareholders has no relevance unless you look at what has changed about the shareholders. It's a new generation of elderly who never grew up and never learned to think long term.
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
> Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
This is not universally true. For one thing, it has changed over time as expectations shift. Presumably our expectations have been forced downward by the diminishing quality and increasing costs of consumer goods. There is also cultural variation, with Japan as an example.
I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to the completely opposite side. Every product is either turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality anymore.
I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.
Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion long before that).
It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class action lawsuits.
> As for oversight, Forbes only has 2 board seats. And really it only has one.
It doesn't matter though. They have permission to use the name and domain, Forbes clearly knows what they are doing and why. If it wouldn't be ok with them, they'd revoke the permission (I'm not sure, but I assume they can, right?) So, yes, you can claim there is an oversight. If anything, Google's definition is a bit clunky, since it doesn't grasp the essence of the problem. But it also shouldn't matter, since it should be pretty obvious there is a problem indeed.
Now, why Google is ok with that (or didn't notice that) is another and very valid question. I mean, great, Forbes can host whatever bullshit they see fit, but then it would be appropriate for the whole domain to never appear on the first page of Google. Or second. Or tenth.
But then again, it doesn't seem like Google really tries to battle other, lesser doorways and LLM-generated content. And it's easy to see why.
The same thing happens every 3-5 years. HowStuffWorks, About.com (now like 10 different domains), many IAC acquired properties, RedVenture sites, even random sites like LiveStrong.com will be wildly prominent when the domains historically aren't relevant or authoritative for a given niche.
Even recently, sites like CNN were using subdomains with affiliate offers managed by third parties(1). These sites weren't being de-ranked algorithmically-- someone at Google would have to apply a manual action to remove them from the SERPs. What incentive would there be to do so if a prior agreement was in place?
Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content. They are either being risk averse (avoiding potential spammers, junk AI content) by favoring trusted domains, favoring brands who are likely to spend on display or search ads, or maybe a combination of these.
1) https://searchengineland.com/google-begins-enforcement-of-si...
It's really frustrating. I currently want to buy a mattress and a refrigerator. The results for those are so awful as to be useless.
A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
Here is what I mean. Photos apps used to let you search through your photos using filters.
The same kinds of things are happening on the web which already happened to apps (desktop and mobile).
In the modern world, some marketing company wants to tell YOU which of YOUR photos you wanted, so they can sell you some prints, harvest your data, or something.
I would like any apps that have to do with collections of files, photos, music, etc to be more of a deterministic DATABASE and less of a nondeterministic algorithm.
> A lot of classic software essentially worked more like a database. In the last 10-15 years it's all moving to an algorithm.
You just described what I missed about the older software. Older software gives users control over sorting and show data in a tabular format. Modern software sorts data with an algorithm, with ads mixed in, and shows data in a card format, making it a lot less usable.
Exactly. My related observation: half of the SaaS products I see would be more useful and ergonomic for the user if they were implemented as an Excel sheet.
(I actually worked for one of such "better off as an .xls file" startup in the past, and its main competitor was an incumbent that sold the same stuff as an Excel extension. Trying to replace that with a React app is not a worthwhile use of life.)
Algorithms are fine. I'll happily apply the most advanced ones I can get. The problem is with who applies them to what - as you and GP said, it's about user control - or, currently, lack of.
Excel is great until it you need to do something that takes up more space than a single screen. Then it isn't.
Sending sqlite databases to the users which they can interact with using both sql and a viewer is where it's at.
I wonder if being a more powerful backing data store for Excel is one of the remaining reasonable uses for Microsoft Access, at least for users of the Windows desktop version of Office? Access is still included in many editions of that (although not on Mac or web or mobile). Officially it’s even still supported and not deprecated, although of course it’s very much not emphasized by MS any more.
Other options might be SQL Server Express or SQL Server Express LocalDB, the latter of which seems conceptually very much like SQLite within the MS ecosystem, and both of which are usable for production purposes at no cost within the technical limitations that differentiate them from paid editions.
The SaaS I am now working for is a react app + some fancy intelligence.
We are not front-end people, so the app is built with the expectation that people will be doing their filtering, searching and using the intelligence we provide, but in their home turf (excel).
Our app also lets users "track" certain events, and we do not use push notifications, rather we respect our user's attention and email them a short summary, and link to a csv that they can use!
> Older software gives users control over sorting and show data in a tabular format
I'm old and tend to agree, but I suspect this is similar to "you used to have a knob on the TV that showed the channel it's on".
That immediately made me think of the digital TV switchover. The elderly father of a friend of mine would spend much of his time in front of the TV, and could operate it without assistance, thanks to the simple 1:1 mapping between buttons and functions.
After the digital switchover, there was now a set-top box, and electronic program guide and three-figure channel numbers thrown into the mix, as well as stateful aspect such as whether the TV was set to AV or still trying to use its now-obsolete tuner.
For someone with poor eyesight, limited feeling in his fingers and limited ability (and admittedly willingness, too) to build a mental model of how the menus worked and how they can be navigated, it spelled the end of his unsupervised access to TV.
The big difference for me between database-query-driven and algorithmically-driven is that the latter makes it very hard to know when you've completed an exhaustive search. Indeed for the likes of meta and tiktok that's a feature, not a bug, since their goal is to keep you engaged and plugged into "their" content forever.
I have a "Roku TV". It has many pointless problems. But the biggest is that it takes a very long time to turn on. If you turn it on by remote control, there is no indication that anything has happened until the TV finally starts showing something. You just have to hope that the signal got through. It's fairly frequent that we fail to turn the TV on because we assume that it just isn't done getting ready to turn on yet.
You can avoid this by using the physical power button, which is conveniently located behind the TV. It will still take forever to turn on, but there's no ambiguity over whether you've started the process.
I still have trouble believing the device was allowed to reach customers in this state.
Not every change is for the better. You gotta admit that TVs used to be able to switch channels much faster then they do now. And analogue controls in cars are safer and better then touch screens for everything.
A lot of change is for the better, but quite a lot is a regression.
"Better" and "regression" are purely subjective.
I have access to around 1000 "channels", if you include live broadcasts and network-like apps. How exactly were old TVs better at helping navigate that?
For one thing, the clicker seems to work instantly for analog TV because it will sync up on the next frame, which is 0.03 sec which is less than the 0.2 sec it takes the human mind to perceive two events as two different events.
With digital broadcast TV and cable whenever you switch to a different carrier there is a long delay (at least 0.5 sec) for the radio and the rest of the processing train to sync up. With streaming you have to do multiple network round trips to establish a stream. Either way you don't have the immediacy that old TVs had.
The question of UI in modern TV is interesting. 15 years ago the 500 channel problem looked difficult, my impression was that Comcast Xfinity (2010) was the first really good STB interface for the digital age.
I have a NVIDIA Shield which has an Android TV interface that convincingly makes FAST services like Pluto, Plex and Tubi look like linear TV on an STB. What you find though is that going "back" from one of those channels can put you, disorientingly, in the app for those channels, and also that you can usually navigate better if you start out with the FAST app (and have a more consistent experience watching FAST on a computer, tablet or XBOX) Except for those things which, for some reason, are easy to find in Android TV but hard in the app.
> 15 years ago the 500 channel problem looked difficult
Knowing what was on 500 channels may have been difficult, but that's equally difficult now. The problem of navigating 500 channels was solved more than 25 (not 15) years ago by remote controls that had numpad buttons on them. You navigate to channel 351 by pressing buttons 3, 5, and 1 in sequence.
Modern TV interfaces are way better at navigating 1000 channels, but whether or not having 1000 channels available through one TV interface is highly debatable. It's also not a given that the current way most TVs use is anywhere close to the optimal one (especially when you have multiple devices that all have to work together because the cable provider insists on their own box, made even worse when a helpful family member installs a sound system with its own dedicated remote).
It takes ages till the channel switches. I had already more channels then I needed, so more channels add nothing to it. There is no difference between having 800 vs 1000 channels. And when the TV is slow to change them, the discovery process becomes painful enough that I just go to do something else.
The problem is with cataloging and discoverability. After a certain number of photos (or movies, songs, whatever), finding what's relevant is non-trivial.
Or the problem is what's relevant, such as Spotify's 'what the user likes and is in our bargain bin for plays'. If the photo algo wants you to get multiple prints which mostly happen when you are sending them to others it's going to push group photos and baby pictures not that epic moonrise.
Deterministic software puts the user in control of the product. Nondeterministic algos put the products in control of the user. Naturally companies want the latter and under guises of the ‘now better’ give the user worse and charge them more. A new generation isn’t even aware they’re being fleeced because they don’t have anything to compare with. And the frog boils slowly…
This entire thread reads like multiple people circling around product opportunities. There are users out there who want control and will pay for something no-frills. You might not get big VC money to build this, but you could build this.
I think of your suggested idea of objective reviews and classifications quite often, but the problem ends up being discoverability. There have been a handful of sites that were highly useful by aggregating price and consumer sentiment/recommendations from Reddit. They get initial visibility and search traffic, then get penalized by Google. Froogle/Google shopping gets priority and is the only aggregator that Google really wants to include.
Look at defunct sites like Nextag that were moderately useful in the space-- they had free and paid placements. They were steadily growing search visibility until Google started pushing their own product (Froogle, free product listings in 2014ish) and Nextag suddenly "violated Google's policies" and lost 90%+ of their traffic rather quickly (probably 1MM daily visits to under 10k basically overnight). Google shopping technically offers "free product listing placement", hidden well below the ads-- likely as a defense to anti-trust on monopolization of that specific space.
Brickseek and CamelCamelCamel are the two most successful/long lived tools in the space-- and they grew their visibility from the now defunct but once huge deal site FatWallet and SlickDeals. Walled garden subreddits frequently disallow posting of specific tools, so it makes organic growth super challenging-- given that pretty much all commercial queries start with Google or Amazon.
I was speaking more generally than reviews or classification sites. I really meant virtually any application. It's just that it's a long, slow grind to build the reputation and differentiation from the big tech products you're competing with.
Consumers want lots of things but they don't want to pay. They pay indirectly via advertising.
Consumers can't pay. Part of the grift has been the concentration of capital in the hands of the highest wealth-holders, who all seem to have the same idea as to where to put their money (hence, uncomfortably, the bidding up of tech compensation to where it is now). So, no, you're not going to be able to Adobe/Autodesk-style price gouge. However, if you show customers the value proposition (generally some aspect of longevity or portability that prevents expensive upgrades or lock-in), they'll pay when they can. And until sanity returns to the economy, partnering with a credit facility of some sort might be wise (for you, not the customer).
Okay, no, we don't have to go down this nobody-can-afford-anything rabbit hole.
There are people out there that will pay. The issue is not that there isn't willing consumers to pay for it, it's that you're undiscoverable until word-of-mouth builds around your product among people(like those in this very thread) know and talk about your product going against the grain.
Reminds of Windows and search. I am not anymore even sure if there is some nice dialog where I could put some pattern and folder or list of folder and have it run through it for me...
> nice dialog where I could put some pattern and folder or list of folder and have it run through it for me
Everything from Voidtools is a dialog window, accepts patterns and is really fast.
https://www.voidtools.com/
And Stardock's Start11 adds EveryThing's search to your start menu.
It's just enshitification. It's pretty funny when I search for putty and get the help doc, or my email client and get some windows setting option. I switched to powertoys search to get around it but wonder if anyone responsible for maintaining this feature actually uses it.
I got so frustrated trying to find some shelves recently that I ended up building them myself. It used to be that I could use Google to find some furniture stores, but now they all require me to throughly vet them to make sure they aren’t just reselling stuff from China or scam sites. Ikea still works, but that’s about it unless I go to big designer brands where a shelf will cost me a gazillion DKR. Unfortunately Ikea didn’t have any shelves that I liked, which is why I build them out of some wood I purchased in the local hardware store.
It’s so annoying that it’s almost impossible to find a legitimate store. Well maybe that’s not the correct way to word it. It’s so frustrating that it’s almost impossible to know whether or not the top shops you get in your search results are stores you want to use or not.
It's bad enough that manufacturers in China might start complaining about it as the best manufacturers there have a reputation to protect.
There is a mushroom grower in Shanghai, for instance, which grows very inexpensive but tasty beech mushrooms in a giant vertical farm where workers only touch the mushrooms with a forklift (see https://www.finc-sh.com/en/about.aspx#fincvideo)
There are numerous photography equipment vendors in China that make innovative and value-conscious products (like this inexpensive manual focus lens which takes pictures like you've never seen: https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05) that excel in customer support. They post real manuals to their web sites where you can easily find them, they correspond to you with email and not a ticket system behind a CAPTCHA, they don't have a huge list of unauthorized vendors for whom they won't support your product if you bought from them, etc. I hear back from them in 24 hours most of the time compared to an Italian vendor that makes great tripods but takes more like four days to respond.
If Chinese vendors are working that hard to get my business I very much want to support them.
I borrowed a Laowa 100mm macro lens (Venus Optics) for a little while. The only reason I didn't buy one is it disabled TTL since it lacked the required electronics.
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-100mm-f-2-8-2x-macro...
There are also several Chinese graphics tablet companies that Wacom still doesn't realize it's in competition with.
It depends what kind of shooting you are doing. I depend on autofocus for a lot of the work I do (sports) but I have more fun shooting with my manual 7Artisans lens with the aperture ring than I do with a Zeiss 55mm/1.4. The 7Artisans lens has weaknesses that show up when you try astrophotography with it (definitely some light goes the wrong way and bright stars turn into weird shapes) but it also takes great shots like
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111077882869934997
(freakin’ at night!) I bought this ring flash
https://godox.com/product-d/MF-R76.html
which requires manual metering to save more than $100 off one which has TTL metering as I am using it for studio work where I am going to set it up once and take 20 shots.
I was looking for a product recently. I wanted to buy from a UK business.
I found countless Web stores pretending to be UK businesses complete with founder stories and convincing copy... All turning out to be Chinese fronts.
They know the tide is against them and see starting to employ some shady tactics to get sales.
At the same time the big money in China is buying westernised historic brands to trade through.
I'm not anti-China for goods and services, but I am against the deceptive practices I've been seeing.
> they aren’t just reselling stuff from China
At this point everything you buy is from China in some way or the other. From iPhones to Nikes, from your electronic batteries to garlic. At this point stuff from China isn’t exactly a bad thing, considering how poorly things made elsewhere are doing. I have had so many issues with American made things that I almost prefer items made elsewhere. From cars to refrigerators.
I don’t mind products from China as long as they live up to EU regulations. If they are resold from places like Temu and similar then they’ve been found to be out right dangerous in some cases and in most they don’t live up to any of our safety standards. This isn’t an issue with “normal” stores which do their due diligence in their supply chain. Yes, it sometimes goes wrong, but it doesn’t happen often and when it does they inform you and recall products.
I can’t tell the authentic stores with legitimate quality control apart from the ones which will shut down and reopen with a new name next month.
Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time. For refrigerators, you can look at consumer reports and wirecutter--and you can reasonably do some evaluation at your local big box appliance store. I wouldn't buy based on a random web search though.
> Mattresses have been especially bad for a long time.
Yes. Refrigerators, at least, are made by a relatively small number of companies with established brands. They have EnergyStar ratings, and there's some objective evaluation.
For mattresses, the whole industry is a scam. Mattresses actually cost about US$50 to US$80 in bulk. Search Alibaba. Almost all consumer-facing companies are resellers. Markups are huge. Essentially all the mattress review sites are paid promotions.
I imagine that the logistics of moving a bunch of stupidly large items is also part of the markup.
Sure, I can buy a mattress from a factory in China, but getting it to my door is a whole other thing.
Last time I bought a mattress, admittedly, an overpriced one. I got to test out a sample at the store, and then a truck with two guys showed up, put on special booties to keep my house clean, carted away the old mattress, placed the new one, etc. I even took advantage of their 90 day guarantee to swap to a slightly less firm mattress, and the whole process was repeated for no cost.
Hiring a truck and two men to deliver a large item, and then haul another large item to the dump, and then pay the dump fee for a mattress (a lot more than standard dump fees), is something that would cost a few hundred dollars otherwise.
I'm sure that they made a profit off of me, but I have my doubts that there are riches to be made in the mattress industry given that there seems to be VERY low barriers to entry.
Yeah, even if there are often explicit delivery/disposal/installation charges, large deliveries are often not just a matter of shipping something to your door sight unseen and no reasonable recourse if you're not happy.
> For mattresses, the whole industry is a scam.
Pillows as well. Mike Lindell (the My Pillows guy who sank himself with "election manipulation claims") didn't get his fortune from nothing. The markup is insane there as well... if you want decent pillows go to Ikea.
I'm sure it was marked up still, but the best and last pillow I've ever bought is buckwheat hulls. Basically a fancy sack of grain, but I'd guess procurement was more costly than filler plastic fabrics/foams. It was an immediate cure for neck pain from side sleeping and it's quite cool, too. For me, anything stuffed with fabric is going to be a waste of money anymore.
Eh. I've bought some from a boutique quality down sleeping bag/comforter manufacturer. They've been great and have lasted decades.
Wirecutter's gone downhill after the NYT purchase as well. The Spruce seems somewhat better (but is also part of a huge web site family, so caveat emptor)
Either you do deep research, or you find a trusted friend to advise you. The Internet is largely useless at this point.
I think Wirecutter is still a decent source; they probably won't steer you too far wrong if you're not too picky. But nothing, including your trusted friends, is an all-knowing oracle if only because their tastes and priorities are probably different from yours. Certainly pre-Internet there were few enough reliable sources of recommendations--maybe some specialist magazines but even those were far from perfect.
I think you hit the nail on the head. They won't steer you far wrong, but they also may neglect excellent options. For example, they recently published a "best water bottle of 2024" list. They chose to rate Hydroflask #1 and mentioned Yeti in a brief comment about "other bottles to consider" near the bottle. No mention of Kleen Kanteen at all. Yet they do cover the current trendy options of Owala & Stanley Quencher. I don't think it's really objective -- not in the same way that rtings.com is for the electronics categories they review.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-water-bottle...
That's almost certainly true. Depending on your preferences, there are just a ton of perfectly serviceable options out there, including what you're handed at trade shows. I have some Nalgenes that are sort of the standard for hiking (and fit my water bottle parkas) and otherwise mostly random stuff I've been given.
No affiliate link = less likely to be a star pick?
That's probably a testable hypothesis, with a little screen scraping and some time.
Probably also hard to test. I was an analyst for many years and, if you generally hated on a company for reasons that you thought were valid, they were unlikely to hire you.
> or you find a trusted friend to advise you
I think there's an opportunity here for a review platform that only shows you reviews from individuals that you personally trust. "Find a trusted friend" but for the internet.
The problem with reviews from individuals (trusted friends or complete strangers), is that for major purposes they only get to deeply evaluate a single product. So they could tell you if they are happy with the fridge they bought, but they wouldn’t be able to do a detailed comparison between multiple fridges.
This will lead to you getting a product that’s good enough, but there may be a superior quality/value option that you don’t know about
Yeah, but it might be a satisficing approach. Most of us don't really need to optimize an appliance purchase, just not get screwed.
Could have been an interesting application for social networking. (Friend of a friend)^n. I’d probably trust most of my friends, and most of their friends, not to be bots. Probably want to see the links, past that.
That review platform is called "the phone", "hanging in the pub", "having a get-together".
Friendship requires regular contact anyway. We don't need somebody to intermediate that.
It has always felt to me that Wirecutter focuses on only one end of the Pareto curve ("what is the very best XXXX that money can buy, within reason") and ignores the middle of the curve where most people are actually shopping ("what is the best XXXX that I can get for $XXX"). It also seems to reliably ignore brands from Mainland China (Hisense, Midea, etc). I guess It makes obvious sense to court rich (or at least price-insensitive) readers.
Whether or not it started that way, yes, it makes sense to recommend brands that New York Times subscribers are familiar and comfortable with. I'll buy a GE Profile refrigerator or Bosch dishwasher. Not some Chinese brand I've never heard of and have no idea what the service situation will be with. Makes perfect sense to me and I'm in that demographic. Especially with major appliances and things I can buy at the local big box store seems to make perfect sense to not buy things you have to go to Alibaba to obtain.
It's not about being price insensitive but recommending things that are relatively mainstream and that don't seem risky, especially for major purchases that have to be installed and potentially serviced.
(Did have a service issue on my recent GE Profile refrigerator but it took one phone call and was a no-brainer.)
But you're probably right in general. Wirecutter mostly doesn't recommend unknowns it thinks are potentially bargains. Which I probably wouldn't do in its position either.
Their top pick for an air conditioner is a Midea: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-conditio...
Oh, I had that very model and it very quickly got moldy in places that I couldn’t easily clean. Absolutely wouldn’t recommend it…
That's not true at all.
They usually have a midrange "top pick", followed by a "budget pick" and an "upgrade pick".
It's not "the best money can buy" at all -- that's what they reserve their "upgrade pick" for. E.g. look at humidifiers:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-humidifi...
Also it's full of Chinese brands. The top two humidifiers are Levoit, from Shenzen. Or if I look at dehumidifiers, Midea is their #1 pick:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-dehumidifier...
So I don't think anything you said is true. Maybe for some individual products, but certainly not for the site as a whole.
I think it's fair that they don't offer real off-brand budget recommendations. I do think they offer a generally reasonable array of choices.
Well, nor should they because those items tend to disappear from the market within months and not be widely available. So that's a feature not a bug.
You don't want to research and recommend a product from a random seller on Amazon that won't be available six months from now.
Their budget recommendations are, correctly, products that have proven to be reliable and available.
Totally agree. The budget recommendations tend to be reliable budget and not a questionable "steal."
Check out Tech Gear Lab. (I have met the owner)
They are a great review site, and normally do categories like "absolute best", "best value", and "best budget".
They are very thorough, and always buy their own stuff, never take sponsorships or freebies.
It's easy, browse to GE on big box hardware website. Select the model you want. Avoid everything else.
One problem with this kind of strategy is that brands often become enshrined when you aren’t looking. While the last time I was looking for kitchen appliances GE was pretty good, how do I know that in the past few years they haven’t been bought out by a private equity firm and started having their brand slapped on random low quality products?
I might add a couple other brands but, yeah, you probably won't go too wrong.
if there is a trial period better get cheapest and highly reviewed mattress. Even if it's a scam you get to know it within x days and can return it.
I try to buy natural materials like latex or cotton - which cannot and are not mass produced (difficult to roll and transport from across the world)
Saatva mattresses raised the bar. They are amazing.
Try visiting a hotel that uses them, for reference.
If I want to buy something like that I set an alert on slickdeals.net Like everything else it used to be better years ago, but there are still some genuine great deals and lots of insight if you’re willing to sift through the comments.
When I was looking for a fridge a year or so ago I heard that Samsung was trying to fix their bad appliance rep and quality of parts had gone up, but I went with a different brand.
There’s been an issue the last few years of fiberglass escaping through the cover on memory foam mattresses. If I was mattress shopping I’d probably still get foam, but look for one without fiberglass or find some kind of allergy cover to at least contain it.
The only signal I use is warranty. So I tend to go to Costco, and avoid Samsung.
It's not a bad idea to pair that with lawsuits related to such warranties.
Costco and Samsung are big enough that you can achieve reasonable signal.
When your local car dealer offers you a full drivetrain warranty though (assuming it's a full warranty and not one of the other ways people are often fleeced), will they honor it when the lemon they sold you breaks the first time? the 2nd? the 3rd? Will they, instead, note that most people buying that car don't have much money (or, if you used any form of dealer financing, know for a fact you don't have much money) and require you to retain a lawyer and sue them to recover any damages?
Not sure if your car example was meant to be general or specific, but Lemon Laws are extremely common across the states and are very easy to take advantage of without needing to retain a lawyer. For example, in Texas you fill out a form, pay a $35 filing fee, then bring your evidence to mediation.
It's a bit of both. Generally the idea holds. The example isn't that bad either. O(100k-1M) people have dealer-fraud related problems every year in the US, usually without happy outcomes. A few ways this might happen relating to my use of the word "lemon" include:
1. Colloquial use of "lemon" differs from the legal definition. In the given example, this might include a 15yr old vehicle (far outside any normal "manufacturer's" warranty) with numerous defects both known to the dealer and lied about to the consumer. The dealer would likely lose any civil complaint, but in Texas, and most states, this doesn't count as a "lemon." You're protected, if at all, by the fact that the salesperson warranted a thing, and perhaps any actual written "warranty" (really insurance, not that it necessarily matters) the dealer might have sold you. You usually waive the warrant of merchantability, so the fact that the car is a dud isn't enough by itself for you to have any damages (all state-specific, consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction).
2. Picking on Texas, since you brought it up, if you only bring the car in 3 times for a major defect covered under the lemon law, it's not a lemon yet. If the dealer refuses to deal with you on the 3rd instance then you'll have to sue with some other justification.
3. In the vast majority of states, you don't have an automated (minus filing fees) hearing process pertaining to lemons. Even in those which do, you're much more likely to succeed with the help of an attorney. In either case, in most states, attorney's fees are not part of the damages you can claim, and when squabbling about a $5k used car it can easily cost more in attorney fees (plus incidentals like renting a car and missing work for the actual hearings -- usually not covered even in states granting damages for incidentals (including rentals and missing work in other contexts) arising from the lemon), often making it not even worth pursuing.
...
Usually, even with moderate legal protections, you don't want to enter into an agreement where you expect to have to rely on those protections. Your best-case scenario is that you waste a bunch of time and still have only as many resources as you started with. You'll usually do even worse. Why take a losing gamble?
Samsung appliances are awful. I'd rather do my own dishes or put my food in a cooler.
I got a mattress last year using Consumer Reports rec for most the mattress with the least synthetic chemicals. I am not going to say its name lest it look like I am shilling for them. I will say, it has been great.
If it's in a verifiable external source (Consumer Report for instance, not some lady's Amazon affiliate links blog), then I would say it's never shilling.
Having bought a mattress recently, it might be worth going to a mattress store. The sales process sucks, but if you want to find a mattress you like, it's hard to beat actually laying down on one.
It also can help you identify the kind you like (coil, latex, etc) and composition you like (layer style and thickness).
Then you just search for those two things online.
That's how I found an amazing natural latex cooling mattress online.
And the best part is that most online mattress retailers have 90 day try out periods. We didn't like our first one, and instead of having us ship it back they told us to donate it and sent us the next to try. So now we have a really nice spare bedroom mattress as well as the perfect mattress in our bedroom.
This is common. Most online retailers don't have the means to recover and remediate used mattresses (if it's even legal). Most are essentially just branded drop-shipping companies hocking products manufactured in Asia (often from the same factories, with minor differences between "models"). If you have the money to purchase the mattress initially, then you can just keep doing 90-day trials until you get one that the seller asks you to dispose of yourself when you try to return it. Bam, free mattress. Manufacturers and retailers can afford to do this because the markup on materials+labor+shipping is insane.
I'm surprised that people haven't caught on yet. Maybe something to do with the nature of the purchase. In a better world, even a "luxury" mattress would cost a couple hundred bucks, at most, but then be extremely difficult to return.
I like how you donated it to the spare bedroom lol
In my defense, we did call multiple agencies that work with low-income folks on finding housing and household goods. Due to the possibility of bedbugs, none of them are taking bedding or mattresses anymore.
I want to add in case people think this is strictly a Google thing. DDG is equally terrible at finding this kind of thing. I didn't realize until I read this thread that I was suffering this same kind of issue. Its so painful trying to find on the internet.
Is DDG not just a whitelabel Bing?
Wait, is it? I didn't think it was..
It’s the same for pretty much any product category now. Affiliate marketing and Google using its monopoly to prioritize ads over search results has basically ruined search. It’s in their best interest to lower the quality of results because the ads get more useful comparatively.
Gmail is next I predict. They have a monopoly over consumer email, so it’s revenue growth just waiting to be unlocked when times get tough. A higher percentage of your inbox is going to become paid Gmail ads and there’s nothing you’re going to do about it. Nobody wants to go to the hassle of changing their email address (the amount of boomers still on Yahoo mail is staggering).
sleeplikethedead.com
Fantastic site. There's a Mattress Selector which seems just grand [1] Will definitely be using this next time I'm in the market.
[1] https://www.sleeplikethedead.com/mattress-selector.html
Try naplab.
How do we know you're not an ad?
May I ask why you use search engine for buying something like a mattress or refrigerator? I dont mean to sound that as an insult. I'm genuinely curious. I or anyone I know of will just go to a nearby store and checkout these items to buy. For things like these one would already know who sells these items, even online. So why not directly checkout those stores, either online or physical?
>The same thing happens every 3-5 years. [...] Google doesn't really care about discoverability for smaller domains that may have good content.
What's galling is that (ostensibly) they used to care. So much for "organizing the world's information" and "don't be evil".
Well they are certainly organizing the world's information, and continue to be incentivized to do so. Deeply. For advertisers.
I get flashbacks to the exodus of Digg, when the admins basically said "Look, we get a lot of junk content and a lot of common source content so we are going to start fast tracking the common source content from trusted providers"
We all know how that went over.
And then the exodus ruined Reddit. Eternal September dominoes.
“The same thing happens every 3-5 years.”
This is so true. I remember when Demand Media was crushing it on Google in the early 2010s. Seem like they were everywhere, and then one day they weren’t.
Investopedia is another one. Same for bankrate.com Other ones included wikihow and genius.com
??? I've always found wikihow superbly curated, clear, direct, readable, with simple clear diagrams and almost no fluff. At least for how-to-do guides, not buying.
Can you post a link to a low-quality wikihow article or two?
https://www.reddit.com/r/disneyvacation/
Sure, people can submit low-grade garbage or vandalize pages, but that doesn't mean the site doesn't also have useful content, like: https://www.wikihow.com/Category:Computers-and-Electronics
They never can yet complain all the time based on the perception of the brand and people complaining - same thing as those on Twitter/x
Wikihow is crap.
No it isn't, not in the moderated sections with lots of viewers: https://www.wikihow.com/Category:Computers-and-Electronics
Sorry but what are you talking about?
Forbes as a whole basically sold its soul for clicks. It used to be one of the three top business magazines depending on your preferences. After the web became dominant, at some point after Malcolm Forbes died, you ended up with a ton of blog writers--with plenty of biases and axes to grind--and essentially advertorial content.
One of the Forbes "contributors", Gordon Kelly, used to generate an enormous volume of posts for every single minor Apple software release, in addition to regurgitating every rumor published by Mark Gurman and other journalists.
Apparently he passed away last year, after "authoring 2,511 articles in sum and accumulating over 174 million page views in just one year, 33 million of which were gained within a single month."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2023/10/05/tribute...
Apple-focused journalists have historically been especially egregious. Nilay Patel and Josh Topolsky took their maddening approach of covering the Engadget homepage in inane, separate articles for every minute detail of a product announcement (starting with the iPad) to The Verge, and its "success" caused the strategy to propagate onward. No more concise write-ups; it's all about keeping you in a deathloop on the platform. Gotta milk those cult clicks, you know.
Certain topics, and Apple is certainly one of them, can be essentially guaranteed to generate a ton of traffic. HN is by no means immune. And some writers have made a career of taking advantage of that fact.
Meanwhile, a founder of one of the major 80s-era minicomputer companies that even had a book written about them passed away a few weeks ago and I would have not even known except for my Facebook groups.
What person do you have in mind?
Edson de Castro (Data General as in Soul of a New Machine). But you could name just about any luminary from important commercial computer companies from that era and it would be the same story. The computer industry just wasn't in the public spotlight at that time.
It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname. At some point if you sell your company, you are putting the surname of all your descendants in the hands of some other entity outside of your/their direct control.
>It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname.
That relationship can work in the opposite way sometimes. John McAfee seemed to be getting a gleeful kick out of embarrassing the security company that had invested in the right to use his name.
Usually because he was doing zany and sketchy and potentially criminal, while expertly courting media attention. But he also used that power for good sometimes by criticizing their bad products.
For anyone in the thread that's not seen "How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus" by John McAfee, you are very, very welcome [0].
Content warning: it was made in his Alpha-PHP era, and contains a lot of sex and drug references. It's mostly sex and drugs IIRC.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg
It's crazy how in our modern world people still might get offended because of something as common and natural as sex.
I don't think OP is offended, just, there's a lot of us who are in locations where we can't be watching someone yap about sex and drugs
I’m pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes family is still perfectly OK with the association
>I’m pretty sure in the grand scheme of things the Forbes family is still perfectly OK with the association
The writers, editors and other business partners who built their reputation by contributing to Forbes previous good reputation are probably very not OK with it
The question was whether to name it after a person or not. Those people would be equally upset if it was named Bisclock, so them being upset at the current site is not relevant to the naming discussion.
For the amount of money involved, and all joking aside, you can have my first and last name. You can name a horrible flesh eating disease after me. It doesn't matter.
I get the feeling the family doesn't care while they lounge around on their stacks of cash?
Jardine is still a name in trading, at least in the west, not China, where they are not fondly remembered for their 19th-century "import activities".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jardine_Matheson_%2.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jardines_(company)
If they really care about it they can just change their name though.
The Forbes family tree or the publication?
The family. They'd be far from the first ones to have the actions of their forebears damage their family name.
Bit of a microcosm of the entire business world nowadays. Forbes made something - a magazine that produced enough good content to gain a reputation. In the new school of business, that's an asset, and assets are things we turn into cash as quickly as possible, so now Forbes sells CBD, and now anyone who sees "forbes.com" in the URL knows it's useless crap, but hey, someone made some money, and now they can go find the next thing to flip for a couple bucks.
I was talking to a friend about this recently.
I bought a pair of Doc Martens boots a while back. And they're shit. I remember them from the 80's and they were really solid, good leather, well made, etc. The modern ones are crappy leather and fell apart after only a few months. But they still cost a decent amount because they're Doc Martens.
My friend pointed out that Doc Martens are primarily worn by teenage girls these days, and are almost "fast fashion". My expectations based on the brand are not matching with reality, because the brand has moved on from being the de rigeur footwear for the entire 80's alternative scene.
From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The point being that Doc Martens, like Forbes, are trading in their reputation for quality. In ten years time they will be known as shitty boots that used to be worn by edgy teenage girls, and the brand will be worthless. But the shareholders will have made significant bank from the destruction of that brand. Late-stage capitalism win, I guess.
Sure but that seems to have been predictable from:
- 2003: DM came close to bankruptcy, moved all production from UK to China and Thailand, laid off UK workers
- 10/2013: private equity company Permira acquired R. Griggs Group Limited (owner of DM brand), for £300m. Hired former brand president of Vans as CEO.
- 2019: declining quality reported for previous years
- 1/2021: floated on London Stock Exchange for £3.7 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Martens#History
Thanks, useful detail :)
9/20/2024: the stock is currently worth £51.65, market cap is £617m. That's 80% down from the IPO. Downward trend for last 3 years.
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/stock/DOCS/dr-martens-pl... https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/docmf
> From this, I have come up with the "reverse Vimes" theory of boots. That actually the most cash-efficient approach to footwear is to buy cheap K-mart shoes, expecting them to last for a year, instead of buying expensive branded shoes which are actually made just as badly as the cheap ones and still only last a year.
The problem is, it may be cash efficient in theory for an individual, but for society at large it's a significant cost - animal lives (for the leather), fossil fuel consumption (for the plastic parts and synthetic leather, also transport), human time lost in production and sales...
Project Farm on youtube does a lot of comparison videos between a bunch of brands of the same type of tool. He's sometimes able to snag an antique craftsman (before Sears sold it to china) and includes it in his tests. It's always amazing how much better US made craftsman tools are compared to anything currently made in china (including the current version of craftsman).
I think that the trick is to try to find new and upcoming brands that have a reputation for quality, and learn what high quality looks like so that you can confirm personally that the product is good.
This is difficult and requires ongoing work. Fashionable young people tend to do it but I certainly don’t blame anyone who decides that it isn’t worth the effort.
This used to be what brand was all about - that you could trust the brand to produce high-quality stuff because it was a quality brand. All Doc Marten boots were well-made and solid, would last a decade at least, because it was a quality brand and the price tag came with that.
I know what high quality looks like; I wore my first Doc Martens for a decade. I trusted the brand when revisiting my youth and buying a new pair.
It seems someone figured out that the price tag goes with the brand, not the quality. So you can charge high prices for cheap boots if you put the DM tag on them. And make bank.
I think this will accelerate, and the "new and upcoming" brands will get shit at exactly the point where people like me discover them. Because, as you say, it's not worth the effort to keep up with this rapid churn.
Hence the Inverse Vimes solution: stop trying to buy quality and instead accept that everything is shit and deal with that reality; buy cheap and often.
This is only a problem with really big and popular brands, where they leverage their brand at scale to generate more revenue.
You can find smaller brands that have been doing high quality stuff for a while, and they're unlikely to blow up in popularity or to reduce quality.
Docs are not my style so I don't know a good small brand that does boots like that, but I like Buttero, Crown Northhampton and John Elliott for boots/shoes. Beckett Simonon is a good brand for more formal shoes. Morjas is another brand for more formal shoes that looks really good, though I haven't bought anything from them yet.
I prefer the Costco solution 90% of the time. If and when the Costco solution does not work, then I do the research to figure out what might be better.
For example, I like to wear $30 Costco shoes. I can usually get at least a year out of them, but even if not, they’re only $30. I can buy 3 in a year and come out ahead. And I don’t waste time researching shoes.
Its not late state capitalism. Its hidden inflation. The market for actual high quality boots is much smaller than you are thinking. Including your own desire. The reality is doc martins are selling for <$180 max, basically mid-high sneaker (non collectable) territory. Actual quality boots like the doc martins of the 80's probably cost over $1000 dollars now. Are you willing to pay over $1000 for boots? Because that is what quality boots cost now.
Doc martin didn't sacrifice the brand. They realized that people would never pay $1000 for doc martins so they just jettisoned the company name by rebranding into fast fashion before they totally disappear. It was probably the only choice by the time it was decided. There were probably some missteps along the way where they may have been able to keep their prices up enough to keep the quality but they missed it.
High quality boots definitely don't cost >$1000, and definitely not boots that are on par with the quality of DM from the 80s. DM from the 80s were "fine", but they still weren't really high quality and their soles were definitely not very durable.
Even today you can find excellent quality, resoleable boots, for $200-300. Just look at Redwing, Thursday, Wolverine and many, many others.
You can get boots that function as boots for $300. The thing is everyone has forgotten what high quality actually is. High quality boots are north of $700 starting price and can last 20 years.
This is of course a massively opinionated subject about price/quality so no one will ever agree but there are plenty brands north of $1000 now that probably are around as big market as doc martin was in the 80s. I'd consider that to be the more accurate comparison.
I have a pair of custom-made boots I bought a few decades ago for $500 and which have been repaired once. Don't wear them much now because they're so heavy. So, yeah, they're not really for me today but that's what high quality is.
Check out rose anvil on YouTube, the guy cuts boots in halves to check the build quality, and has some good recommendations
Certainly not. You can buy great boots for 250$. I bought my Salomon boots 5 years ago, I wear them a heck of a lot in the Canadian winter, and they're good as new. Much more comfortable than a Doc Martens boot, even in their prime, resolable with a Vibram Megagrip sole, has a carbon fiber backing plate that will never wear out, etc...
What happened is that technology advanced, and now good quality boots don't look like Docs anymore. The market for high quality, vintage construction boots is tiny, because people who only care about quality won't buy them anymore, which is why they are expensive : only a special kind of people who care a lot about quality and looks/nostalgia are going to buy them.
People who need high quality boots just won't be satisfied with heavy, fussy, non-breathable leather and rubber boots.
I think I paid $300AUD for mine. I was very poor in the 80's, I would not have been able to afford the equivalent of $1000USD. I have vague memories of them costing around 80 GBP, which would be ~350 GBP now, so about half that $1K (but definitely more than I paid for them now, so your point is at least partially true).
And yes, I would be willing to pay that kind of money now for a pair of boots that would last me a decade again.
It was also kinda the point back in the 80's; your Docs were an investment. They cost decent money, but they'd last a decade and became part of your identity. Practically a physical extension of your body; I had a flatmate who regularly fell asleep in his and eventually developed trenchfoot from doing that. The boots were fine, his feet weren't. Most of my friends back in the day had one pair of shoes; their Docs. It was worthwhile investing in them because that was all you needed.
I think you're also right that the brand itself has changed and moved down-market, so they're charging less than they used to for a lower-quality product. But this is kinda my point; the brand is now being cannibalised and turned into a low-quality fast-fashion product marketed with a high-quality brand. This is obviously not going to work long-term, as people realise that Docs are now shite. As I said, in ten year's time the brand won't be worth anything.
Although Docs have almost given up making in Northampton, you'll still find a number of shoemakers producing good quality boots that should last a decade or more. You'll be paying £250-£500 as you guessed.
It’s also late stage capitalism.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern management movement have caused worker pay to drop in real terms. Cut forward another decade or so and the entire retail landscape discovers people can no longer afford their products.
> Since the late 70s, policy changes and the modern management movement have caused worker pay to drop in real terms.
This isn't well established as the cause and there is reason to expect that it isn't. To start with, the Housing Theory of Everything fits better.
If this was about management practices then in competitive markets things would still be fine, you would only need one company to not do that and everybody would buy from them. But things still kind of suck even there, so what's that about? Housing costs would explain it. People spend more money on rent so they have less money to spend on other things, meanwhile companies have to pay higher rents too, so their customers have less money and simultaneously their business has higher costs. Somehow they have to lower prices while covering higher costs and the somehow is by enshitifying their products, i.e. that is the symptom rather than the cause.
But the Housing Theory of Everything is slightly off, because the real problem is a generalization of the theory. Housing is expensive because supply is artificially constrained, and it's artificial supply constraints -- insufficiently competitive markets -- that are the general underlying cause. Housing is a major example of this, probably the largest and most important, both because it's such a large proportion of personal expenses and because the restrictive zoning that imposes the constraint is so widespread.
But it's the same problem when you need a medical imaging scan and there are Certificate of Need laws that expressly prohibit new competitors from providing the service when the incumbents are charging inflated prices, and then those high costs get incorporated into health insurance premiums and Medicare taxes and reduce real wages by increasing the cost of living.
Regulatory capture has to be undone or it will be our undoing.
[dead]
fortune.com too. same thing . these brands realized they can cash in on their domain authority to create content farms full of ads. scales really well too
Fortune's case was mostly the whole Time-Life magazine empire going to the dogs partly by way of TWB. Forbes just kind of faded away post-Malcolm (and with a distracted Steven Forbes).
But, in general, the magazine and journalism businesses aren't what they were so most of the relatively mass market magazines pretty much cashed in on their brands to the degree their owners decided to keep them around.
Maximizing engagement is antithetical to rational discourse.
Apropos of nothing: NYT's subscriptions transistioned from ~0.5m print to 10m digital. (More or less.)
Well what did you expect them to do? Magazine subscriptions fell off a cliff as the Internet matured and no one wants to pay for online content.
Consumer reports that you pay for, or at least websites that have a policy of avoiding or declaring conflicts-of-interest, seem to be the reasonable middle-ground.
I noticed recently actually seeing "Consumer Reports Best Buy" listed in ad copy for some products.
For decades they were extremely assertive about not licensing that sort of stuff out, to the point where advertisers used to say "A leading consumer magazine" if they wanted to hint about that.
Some magazines have been able to maintain quality better than others. Especially if there was outside funding from someone who had a real connection/passion. I'm not sure there was anyone at the helm of Forbes who cared at that point.
Not to become villains and scammers, obviously. That's the bare minimum of what you should not become no matter how bad your business is going.
Very good article. Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful. Possibly they are starved of human generated content kept to a certain quality level. But it's very strange to see sites leveraging a legacy brand to expand far beyond their expertise. Forbes is the most prominent example.
On why Google allows bad quality results nowadays:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Also discussed on HN earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
One of the commenters on wheresyoured seemed insightful: "wonder if organic search results being worse generates more ad clicks, as the ads are more likely to be more useful than the actual search results".
Someone once described the state of mobile gaming on Android like this. Games that are good make less money. Games that are just good enough to get you to open them but are also just shitty enough that when you hit an ad in-game, you click on it and leave, make more money.
In the short-term. But google is training a whole generation that everything they touch is shit. I know a lot of engineers who won't touch chrome if they aren't testing something. I have the same feeling about android games.
They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
> They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
Both Google and Apple. If you go to the App Store all games are ad ridden to the point where you can't play more than a minute without interruption or constant nagging to buy. Where are the apps where you pay a sum agreed from the start and use the damn app without restrictions? Some games will even trick people into buying $20/week subscriptions. I can only trust Apple Arcade for my kid. What a wasteland, probably no more than 1000 decent apps in millions. And they have the nerve to pretend App Store is some curated collection of software we can trust. It's no better than "shareware" before 2000's.
Shareware at one point was really try before you buy without restrictions--even if mostly people never bought before software really didn't have trial periods etc.
"Free to play" is really awful in general though. But I guess people won't in general pay up-front for a lot of things.
Conspiracy theory: one or more companies are background manufacturing Google hate.
Chrome is amazingly well engineered and the Chromium team seems to have avoided the worst shittification. Having watched other products dive into the cesspit of advertising I'm not quite sure how the team does it. Somehow Chrome seems to add useful features (while being hated for that). Maybe I'm the fool in the room.
And the code is open source. A gift to humanity yet so strongly hated. So open source that most of the competition uses it! There's some magic going on somehow.
I just don't understand how anyone that calls themselves an engineer could hate Chrome that much. Firefox doesn't feel well engineered, and Mozilla has a strong taint of scuzzy executive vampires. Safari has its good points but when I was developing for it, it consistently had major flaws. Safari certainly has some amazing engineering. But Chromium mostly has better engineering from what I could tell as a JavaScript developer.
Engineers are just as vulnerable to branding and anti-branding as everyone else.
Microsoft, Google, Apple. Try to order them by evilness.
> Conspiracy theory: one or more companies are background manufacturing Google hate
Personally, I believe that Google's issues are just a general issue of tech debt and creeping complexity that is common in all organizations.
That said, Amazon was a victim of a strategy similar to your conspiracy theory
In 2019, the WSJ [0] exposed how Walmart, Oracle and Simon Property Group were funding and astroturfing anti-Amazon groups.
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-grassroots-campaign-to-take-d...
You are amazed by Chrome, but it's still not good for your privacy. Firefox is way better.
It is astonishing to me that people click ads in general, but especially ads in a game. At least ads on websites, you were probably just mindlessly scrolling…
Some mobile game ads are actually advertising for decent other games. Or a few weeks ago, some shipping company on Instagram closing down one of their locations and selling off stuff at a heavy discount, got about 1200€ worth of stuff for barely 400€.
The key thing is the luck to get shown such ads... about 95% IME are utter garbage, and Google should go and not just mandate that game ads show actual gameplay but also that what the ads show must be the main part in the game, not just some irrelevant side quest.
Google team has long given up its user’s needs for incremental revenue goals. See the 10 ads that come before any result
The problem is lack of credible competition. There is no quality wise matching alternative for Google.
Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO. Pagerank was one of the best for awhile (number sites that link to your site, weighted by their rank). Whether it be clicks, time on page, percentage of people who clicked onto the page then ended the session, etc it all gets gamed.
Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies, books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people on hn think that the internet should be any different?
> Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO
Nor will it ever happen, at least as long as search is a Google monoculture. One effective player in the search space means that everyone sets their sight on the same target. Which naturally leads to SEO being an extremely one-sided arms race not in favor of Google - "good content" is hard to quantify, and whatever proxy (or combinations thereof) Google uses to estimate that quality will be ruthlessly uncovered, reverse engineered and exploited to its last inch by an unyielding, unending horde of "SEO optimizers".
The only way that Google maintains search quality is if it properly accounts for the fact that websites will adopt the path of least resistance, i.e. put in the least amount of effort to optimize only specifically the things that Google measures. Which means that the heuristics and algorithms Google uses to determine search rankings must always be a moving target whose criteria needs to be vigilantly updated and constantly curated by people. Any attempt to fully automate that curation will result in the cyber equivalent of natural selection - SEO-optimizing websites adapting by automating the production of content that hits just the right buttons while still being royally useless to actual visitors.
Pagerank worked as long as no one knew what the metric was and the old, hyperlinked web existed.
I think today we can use LLMs to decide what websites are shit. The wheel is turning. SEO artists will have to provide actually useful, non-spammy content. If Google doesn't do it, some uBlock like service will implement it on user side. Or we'll just use chatGPT with search and not see the cesspool at all. You can edit its system prompt to avoid shit in search results.
Your comment assumes both that current LLMs can scale to replace Google which seems unlikely from. both a business and compute perspective.
And if they do, you'll get maybe a decade out of them before they succumb to the same problems as Google have.
Since there is no competition and people will keep using Google whatever happens, might as well push the ad-filled garbage site than the ad-free handwritten blogpost. The former probably makes them more money, everything else humanity holds dear be damned.
Complacency? Google has such a dominance in search that their name is used as a verb. Combine that with their culture of automating everything to an extreme degree. And the end result seems to be: search that is just good enough that people keep using it and requires little human fine tuning/curation making it cheap at scale.
Not to mention how flawed the current search tool really is. If you search for something, page 1 shows results from page 7 to some infinite number. But click on that large number, and you find out that the last page was page 3.
That was there for many years
> Not clear to me why Google has let parasite SEO become so successful
This was in response to the millions of SEOs flooding the SERPs with ever increasing amounts of low quality / incorrect / harmful AI generated content. Google didn't know how to keep the SERPs clean except over index on authority. The highly authoritative websites abused that to shill CBD oil, air fryers, mattresses, etc.
Because Google makes money through all this. These move ads. That's all they care about at this stage. I had stated a few years back Google is dying. It will take a while and it's going to be painful but we will get over this soon. 20 years is a good run.
google search result can be shit and they will still make tons of money from 3rd party/publisher ads and youtube, cloud, gmail, atc.
It has to do with these old brands exploiting domain authority, plus buying tons of backlinks. Investopedia.com is another example of this. Google assigns too much weight to authority domains. Google doesn't actually penalize paid backlinks for old domains, I think.
One of the best things about Kagi search (https://kagi.com) is you can ban domains from search results. Forbes was one of the first I entered!
The second best feature is that you can specify rewrite rules for URLs in results, using regular expressions. The example one is the most important one for me: rewriting reddit.com to old.reddit.com.
You can disable New Reddit in reddit’s preferences. That puts old reddit back on reddit.com. No need for a redirect.
If you have an account. Rewrite works always.
Even without having Forbes explicitly blocked or downranked, their article shows up well below the fold on Kagi: https://kagi.com/search?q=best+pet+insurance&r=us&sh=ac3i1h1... (shared link, you don't need your own subscription for this preview)
Their "collapse listicles" setting is probably one of the best features when trying to search for products, they squeeze all the listicles together in their own list (usually just below the fold). If you want them, they're there, and if you don't, they take up hardly any space.
You can do a similar thing for Google with the uBlackList extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
This should come preconfigured with pinterest and quora blacklisted.
Haha :-)
I always feel bad if I click on any of those sites.
Indeed, but AFAIK you can't do the opposite (make results from certain sites show up higher in the results), which you can do with Kagi.
and pinterest; scourge of the web
I had honestly forgotten it existed until you mentioned it. Thanks, Kagi!
quora is even worse
[dead]
Kagi boosters:Google articles::SEO spam:Google searches
An aside about Forbes: I used to be subscribed to a few of their newsletters. About two years ago, I would notice that nearly all the newletter content would say something along the lines of "as reported by The Information" and I realized that a huge portion (>60%) of the newsletter content was just summarizations or rephrasing of articles from The Information. Which, I mean, great that you're citing your sources, but are you really providing a service here?
I just read The Information, now.
There are 2-3 very detailed articles on how only a few media companies that own top few hundred domains have spammed SEO and hijacked top spots in search results. I made a list of block-able domains (dot dash meredith sites only). I have roughly explained how I searched these domains. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6573b27441d99a0a0c792431...
Just copy paste this list to UBlacklist (or other tool). Need to sit down and search and add more sites including forbes someday.
It's coming for all the old "legacy" web names with strong domain ranking and decades of backlinks. Private equity is snapping them up as fast as possible, loading them with ads, and bleeding the brand dry.
Right. I get offers for my decades-old domains every day or two now.
bingo. this is 100% the reason
I implemented something similar years ago for the publisher I worked for. Like 2006ish. It was after Katrina, I'd never had a full time dev job, and I created it as a POC to show to my employer that they could invest in me full time as a developer (I was helping put their magazines together when I wasn't working on their CRM).
I created a marketplace with finely tuned SEO for my employer to advertise (and charge) companies in niche industries. My SEO was better than the SEO of the developers who worked on their sites, and our audience was obviously much larger than theirs, so we ranked higher. Any time you would search for the company name or the product type in a certain geographic area, you'd find links to our pages dominating the search results.
One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
> One of the interesting things is the shenanigans some of these companies would pull to show up first in our local results. A whole lot of A1 and AAA names began to spring up as they decided that if the list was going to be alphabetical by default, then they needed to be the first in their category.
This well predates Google, though; it was a common trick for placement in the (physical) phone book.
When online directories were still relevant, this issue was already a common occurrence. For example, DMOZ, and the number of spammy directories that existed for link building purposes.
Google basically destroyed itself when it decided to become an ad network rather than a dumb pipe you pay to access. You have to pick a base to sell to. Selling to two different bases at once (advertisers/seo and actual users) means both resent you and neither respect you.
When google gets split up the whole world will cheer.
>Google basically destroyed itself when it decided to become an ad network rather than a dumb pipe you pay to access.
It didn't destroy itself, it became one of the largest and most profitable companies ever.
Right! Imagine how big they'd be if they hadn't given up on microtransactions in the 90s. I'd guess not trying to be broken up by the DOJ.
Probably they'd have closed shop long ago, because someone else would've done ad-funded search, and it's nearly impossible to compete with free.
We'll never know because nobody tried. The internet is too broken now to bother searching. For a group of people that claim to love empirical analysis people on this site sure do love writing off anything but the current state of affairs.
Meta comment: I consider myself pretty adept at finding things people don't want to be found in securities filings, registration records, et cetera. The author is uniquely competent at this as well.
Do you happen to have a blog? This type of investigative journalism is really interesting and would love to read more.
Why would they not want what to be found?
I miss the days of a searchable internet
When I am using Chrome on the phone to read the Google Discover news feed I am often horrified how shitty the experience is. Popups, cookie warnings, almost no article is visible initially, and some of them actively make it hard to scroll to the text. It looks like there is no use friendly news site left in Google's feed. I prefer LLM slop, thank you very much. The only attractive proposition is the fresh and targeted feed. Probably Google is not allowed to offer a reading mode that hides the cruft.
Try Brave on iOS. It is a much better experience than Chrome ( Maybe because Brave comes with Ad blocker installed, but not 100% sure )
It's not just Forbes that is using this strategy. Many traditional media sites, including CNN and USA Today are running the same type of content. And of course they'll not report on this issue, which might just well be why Google is doing this, a kind of kickback for traditional media.
The dirty secret is those are also run by Marketplace, it’s the same team under the hood once you get past the handful of people dedicated to each brand.
The model has proven very successful and these brands are happy to lease their reputation for a cut of the profit and none of the work.
Is there a source for this?
I work here.
What do you do there? And how would you know all this? I find it hard to believe this to be the case
As you can see this is a throwaway since I don’t want to identify myself, but a wrote a lengthy comment elsewhere in the tree describing how the company has changed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466#41598797
The aforementioned companies in the parent comment have partnerships with Marketplace to replicate the Forbes model. I didn’t mean to imply everyone who does this thing is using Marketplace.
Ok understood and read that now.
> I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.
I guess what benefit do you get out of ratting out the company you work for?
Is it that you don't feel you have enough of a voice to change anything or to help improve things?
Nothing specifically. Just maybe give some context to the post here, since this article is rightly pretty harsh and I used to be somewhat proud the work I did with the company.
I wouldn’t say I’m ratting them out because these partnerships aren’t literally a secret, just that they aren’t widely known and are similarly obfuscated like the relationship with Forbes. Ultimately like I said leadership does everything in a silo and unless you’re high up in the ladder you’re not really getting a say. So probably yeah just felt a bit powerless
sounds like things have changed a lot over the years you've been there? Interesting hearing how editorial and business teams have interacted—always feels like a tough balance when growth kicks in.
do you think the culture shift was just bound to happen as the company got bigger, or were there some key moments where things really started to shift?
I’m on the Editorial team at RV - so know the finance and insurance space well, and we deal with similar dynamics with the sales side, so I get where you’re coming from. I’ve seen stuff like this play out before, but curious to hear how it unfolded on your end.
I don’t think it was bound to happen. The company did a pretty good job maintaining the culture as we grew. Obviously as more layers of bureaucracy are added and things settle into more standardized procedures, you’re going to lose some of that scrappy feeling. Up until the end of last year, at least the energy really hadn’t changed too much.
I think the algorithm change mentioned in the article precipitated a lot of the culture shift. I think it was a failure of leadership to not have planned for something like this, and two rounds of layoff really shattered a lot of the energy that had been cultivated over the years. There isn’t much discussion these days about brand integrity or responsibility, especially from the top down. It’s very clearly coming from leadership to pursue growth and SEO is steering the ship with everyone else on the sidelines, subject to their whims. I hear from my colleagues in edit and data about some truly wild pieces they’re told to write/research. It doesn’t help with leadership being, as mentioned before, basically invisible outside of quarterly town halls (which are hilariously lacking in transparency, they refuse to even show revenue numbers to the employees).
There’s been other aspects too that contributed. They’ve built up a massive operation in India which offshored a lot of company functions. I had colleagues who had their growth paths with the company essentially halted because they decided to hire new people in India to build out teams rather than advance them and have to pay them more. There were headaches last year with hiring where management basically refused to do US hires for most teams because the UK had lower labor costs, even though a significant portion of the existing company was US based. This caused some of the cross-functional breakdown because it made it more difficult for teams to collaborate across the major timezone gaps. The India buildout exacerbated this too so stuff generally began to take longer.
It all ultimately stems from what is Leadership’s stated “growth above all” mindset. I can’t say they’re wrong from a business perspective. Obviously they’re doing extremely well and taking in a ton of revenue (little of which makes it into our paychecks based on our raises last year lol). It definitely wrung whatever joy or spark people had to try and put together something good. It’s an SEO machine at this point.
From my experience following Forbes Advisor (being a close competitor), the content actually seems to be of good quality, with experts contributing to different sections. They seem to really invest time and money into making it work, which stands out compared to other affiliate-driven sites. The editorial expertise in areas like insurance and finance is pretty evident, with professionals leading the charge.
Despite some of the concerns raised about leadership decisions and outsourcing, the quality of the content hasn’t taken a hit from what I can see.
Are they truly outsourcing everything as cheaply as possible? Or is it more nuanced, with key areas of expertise retained in-house.
It’s interesting that there’s a lot of frustration about revenue numbers being hidden. But let’s be honest, if they did expose the revenue, wouldn’t the first move be to shout it from the rooftops? People love to complain about a lack of transparency, but sometimes those same people are the first to use that info to stir things up even more.
"So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches per month in 2021." Is this real? That averages out to 40m searches, so .75 per. It seems insane to get close to $1 per search. I figured the return was closer to a penny or even a fraction of one.
When I did search (AdWords) for Thomas Cook, a now defunct but then major travel agency, we'd pay £10 or more to Google for a single click sometimes. (Full story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21046731)
Seems likely that the articles in question include affiliate links to the products they're advertising
Many types of sites get ~$1 per visitor from search engines. Quite possible, yeah.
if they are doing affiliate marketing than it's realistic
Great Article it's been pretty sad with google for a while, poisoned ad networks thanks for sharing.. I was wondering if you could give your input about nature.com as well they seem to post on hackernews all the time seems like a ranking game as well. cheers
Actually googling some of the terms from his post and seeing Forbes up there is oddly surprising, even after reading it all.
Is this an US thing? This has to be an US thing, right? How come I've literally never seen this in the EU?
I usually search in English and find SEO spam somewhat often, but never from these brands.
Just searched "best pet insurance", am inside Europe. Forbes is #1. I distinctly recall seeing this from time to time. Interestingly they're also the #1 for pet insurance on duckduckgo.
For me in the UK "best pet insurance" is squatted by The Telegraph and "best cbd gummies" has Forbes top and The Independent second.
I assume all media companies that have a "trusted domain" and are already involved in aggressive SEO are using this as a revenue generator.
The sites that turned exclusively into link farms like about.com could be whacked by Google eventually and everyone was happy. But if they try that with well known media brands there will be cries of censorship--whether it is collateral damage to some genuine journalistic content, or Google "taking away" a revenue stream.
"best cbd gummies" is interesting for me. I get a mix of "health" and vendors with some old media brands.
I get Forbes 4th and 5th
Chicago Magazine is 9th
The Independent, Kirkland Reporter and The Observer are 12th, 13th and 14th
About 10th in the UK with that search, so probably this isn't across every geography.
Happens in India as well. Forbes is #1 for "best pet insurance"
People, Google is not in the Tech business....
Its tech powering an search and ad monopoly....
Things only change when ctr of ads and amount of ads displayed go down.
To your point, my theory is that all their other tech efforts - that are very often sunset'ed in a couple+ years - are merely a smokescreen of the ad monopoly. Worst case, if they have to: "Tech is hard and competitive. Look at how many other businesses we started and were unable to be successful at. Search + ads is one click away from slipping away from us. We're not a monopoly. We're alone and very scared for our future..."
To zero, I hope.
In Turkey, all searches hits to newspaper sites. Its like a sad joke. Related page is full of repetitive garbage where information is hidden somewhere.
BlackHat SEO's have insiders at many of these companies that'll publish your article for $X amount of money. Or edit existing articles and insert your URL.
You don’t need an insider for you know where to just buy the link. They hang their shingle out on at least one link buying marketplace.
I suspect that's how geeksforgeeks got so dominant with their student written drivel.
This man is surprised that his google results are terrible. I have to assume this is a frog boiling thing and he's only just noticed the water heating up. Having switched to Kagi years ago, I'm immediately horrified by the state of Google if I ever end up on it. It's appalling and has been for a few years now.
Try those same search terms in Kagi and you'll see Forbes at the top of the results. I use Kagi and like it a lot but you should be aware that most of their results come from Google.
You can block Forbes in Kagi search, but not in Google.
how to get rid of roaches -site:forbes.com -site:usnews.com -site:nredwallet.com -site:usatoday.com -site:businessinsider.com -site:marketwatch.com -site:bankrate.com -site:money.com -site:fool.com
What's the issue with all these websites? Is it simply that you have a distaste for affiliate sites in general?
It’s worth noting that Lars Lofgren’s own affiliate site (the person that wrote this article), hradvice.com, was impacted by a Google update in August, so there might be some personal bias and motive here.
But I’m curious—what exactly are the criticisms you have towards platforms like NerdWallet and Bankrate? Would love to better understand.
Interesting! Presumably I've downranked Forbes at some point over the past few years, I get useful results in Kagi.
It's getting closer to the point where we will compare Google to Kagi like web-browsing without an ad-blocker. It's hell surfing the web with ad-blocking off.
Reading this comment just above your comment is funny:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594450
Lol, guess you can't really escape. One benefit of Kagi is you can block websites from appearing. Maybe website blocking lists will appear similar to ad blocking lists. Maybe Kagi already lets you do this.
Google does a lot of personalization of search results. But if you don't give it your searches, it won't know what you want. So when you come back after switching, it's much worse.
Cory Doctorow article nails it https://doctorow.medium.com/the-specific-process-by-which-go...
It is Google "do no evil" to blame.
he really never misses
Just start browsing search results from the second page.
In the past I have wondered why Hacker News had so many articles from Forbes. Now I know.
And this from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871410
[Edit, add link to article about Forbes and Hacker News]
So, Google can kill their whole business if they simply stop giving Forbes unfair prioritisation in the search results.
Is it unfair though?
While there’s definitely optimization for search, it doesn’t appear to be purely about that. A lot of the content, particularly on Forbes Advisor and Forbes Health, seems user-driven and genuinely helpful. If you spend some time exploring those areas, you’ll notice well-researched, in-depth guides aimed at offering practical advice.
Just some quick research and Google searching:
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/financial-eme....
https://www.forbes.com/health/nutrition/diet/healthy-life-ex....
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/digital-wallets-payme...
Sure, and Google and FB have killed businesses before by changing algorithms. But what is fair prioritization? Non-trivial Q.
And then get negative press from Forbes for the next few years! Is that something useful for Google? No, better let them keep part of the money.
> negative press from Forbes for the next few years
Who the fuck reads Forbes anymore? You seen the garbage they're shilling on their website these days?
This is not just Forbes, most mainstream media sites are using the same affiliate scheme.
I just did the “best pet insurance” search and once reputable sites came up.
- US News and World Reports
- CBS News
- Forbes
- Motley Fool
The entire web is a shit show.
This is not that different from this guy who posted how he 'stole' CEO traffic from his competitor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433856
And it is not that different (albeit at a smaller scale) from what websites like mini partition wizard has been doing. Their sitemaps are full of articles that don't relate at all to their tool:
https://www.partitionwizard.com/news_en_sitemap.xml
https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic_en_sitemap.xm...
All these 'articles' pollute search engines.
Damn, didn't realise that Forbes Marketplace was run separately to Forbes itself. Knew it was always a parasite SEO operation, but the idea of it being a separate company entirely (and how much they tried to hide the fact) is really interesting here.
But yeah, it's still crazy that this site is even allowed in Google, and that they've shown no signs of cracking down on these types of parasite SEO schemes.
To be fair, Google HAS shown "signs" of cracking down on this; but they haven't actually done it in any useful capacity yet.
They call it "Site reputation abuse". https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
I’ve worked here a while. He’s a bit aggressive about it but a lot of what he says is on point.
The relationship with Forbes has always been a weird one. The understanding I’ve had was the company was spun off from an effort that kind of started in Forbes but they didn’t really want to deal with themselves.
It was always an SEO driven content strategy but for a while we had a pretty sizable content apparatus. Really big editorial teams for each vertical, a bigger cultural emphasis on the quality of the content and more collaboration across teams. The editorial teams had a lot of voice in what got published and tried to respect that we were using the Forbes brand and what that meant when we made recommendations or wrote about something. The only thing I’ll say to our (meagre) defense is there are panels of experts that are consulted for recommendations on a lot of products, and the teams that do research for the actual written content (not the affiliate/partner garbage that often takes up sponsored slots) do try and work hard to provide data to meet the demands of the SEO and BD teams.
A lot of that has changed over the years. The company has grown explosively in the time that I have been here. The company something like tripled its size last year alone. I went from being a newbie on a team of less than ten to a senior member on a team in the mid double digits in the space of a year. The culture has become increasingly bureaucratic and disconnected. We’ve always been a fully remote team but it used to be much more collaborative and cross-functional.
We don’t hear much at all from leadership. It’s always been a fairly insulated operation from one vertical layer to the other. There have been two pretty big layoffs this year which came out of the blue. Editorial teams have been gutted across every vertical and the strategy has pivoted more and more towards shovelware content and partner posts. The latter being especially frustrating because they are handled by a completely separate team from the editorial team but are formatted to look like our written content even though they’re actually sponsored posts. At a team meeting after the last layoffs the CEO answered a question about the company’s plans and said something to the effect of “if we’re not growing we are dead” which I think is obviously seen in how the company is re-shaping itself.
It’s been disappointing to say the least. I don’t think any of us ever operated under the illusion we were doing important journalism or anything, but we all seemed to strive to make something good of the system we were working in. I’ve seen and heard of a lot of things I find commendable of my co-workers. Editorial and mid-level leadership have worked for a long time to ensure a separation of biz dev and edit so that they don’t have influence over the written content. I heard of times when BD really tried to push, however indirectly, for partners to get higher rankings in content. As edit gets increasingly sidelined in the business by the SEO content teams I’m not sure how much this is being maintained but I don’t work in that side of the business so I can’t speak specifically.
All of this is to say. He’s right, we are just ultimately doing our jobs. Unfortunately, I’ve outlasted a lot of people who were hired after me, and up til the layoffs it was very rare for someone to quit. Now more and more of the people who have been here since the early days (even before me) are peeling away. Those of us who stay are seeking more and more checked out. Honestly the benefits are excellent and I think that’s what keeps most of us around but no one is passionate these days.
That was a super rambling post, but I don’t ever see anyone talking about this place I’ve been at for a while. I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.
Thank you for the inside view.
It is interesting that there's a huge rush to grow; the bigger and lower quality you get, the more incentive Google has to change the algorithm. The business could completely evaporate overnight.
Why Forbes brand is so powerful? Can anyone share their views on this?
This is such a big story and yet most of HN just doesn't care. It should make the WSJ though.
It isn't exactly news, though. This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue. Pretty much every single large company is actively being ruined by parasites. We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices. When that inevitably fails, every single part of the company including its name is being torn apart and sold piece by piece, until nothing is left but an empty shell with a lot of debt.
We're intentionally ruining our economies and praising the people doing it. If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
> If the "Western" world gets economically steamrolled by Asia in the next couple of decades, we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Implicit in that statement is that only the "Western world" has that "short erm shareholder value" ethos. I'd say that is quite debatable.
While greed, short term vision etc are universal, Asia is not (yet) as bad. Take banks for example, say Singapore. How many Singaporean banks have failed vs American? Asian banks are way more conservative (relatively at least) and don't play aggressive with their customers' money.
My fear is that it is only going to get worse (both in the west and in Asia).
> It isn't exactly news, though.
It's exactly news. It spots the issue, dives into it, exposes the source of it, and details the structure of how it came into existence. That's what news is. That you're not surprised by it is not material.
> we've got nobody to blame for it but ourselves.
Ironically you are the one who characterized this article as "not news."
> This isn't a Forbes issue, or a Google issue.
That's wrong. This is very much a Google monopoly issue.
Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition. Google has every incentive to maximize the amount of money that search makes them.
Simply busting up companies with monopolies would fix 80%+ of the problems.
> Google has zero incentive to improve search for users since there is no competition.
Not sure I buy this. People will overwhemingly choose 'cheap' over all other qualities. Anyone providing the sort of competition to Google will have to 1) do it for free, 2) be better enough to displace users, and 3) stay in business long enough to matter. Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
> Even if you broke Google up, who would be in a position to compete with their search platform?
You break Google Search out of Google and break Google Search up into two (or more) companies. Now, they have an incentive to compete against one another.
Before Google became a monopoly, SEO optimizations were somewhat restrained because something which was super-optimized for Google would generally hurt your search on Yahoo and vice versa. If the results got too shitty, people would start to switch.
The fact that switching doesn't happen anymore is prima facie evidence that Google is a monopoly.
Even if the majority prefer free or cheap, that doesn't mean there isn't a market for better and more expensive search. Those who don't want to pay can stick with Google and get what they pay for. Just like with any other product.
Being a more expensive premium product can even be more lucrative than being the cheaper majority product. Look at Apple, the only company to even try making a high quality laptop i the last 10-15 years. I'd say the same about smart phones, but the latest Samsung phones are actually high quality.
> We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value.
We're dealing globally and in every industry with almost all shareholders being either retirement funds, elderly individuals, or other organizations controlled by elderly individuals. And the current generation of elderlies want to benefit as much as they possible can from any wealth being created. They haven't much time left to live and they prefer to not leave much of value behind.
I’m not sure how this applies to the conversation. The challenges being discussed here are centred around managing compliance and long-term sustainability within specific platform ecosystems. It’s about navigating policies, ensuring longevity, and minimising risk rather than short-term shareholder gains. The generational divide you’re mentioning doesn’t really seem relevant in this scenario.
Big companies have been owned by shareholders for hundreds of years. Most companies being plundered right now were created by selling shares to initial investors. These shareholders held a sense of responsibility towards customers, towards employees and towards their community, which made the companies long term successful.
Blaming shareholders has no relevance unless you look at what has changed about the shareholders. It's a new generation of elderly who never grew up and never learned to think long term.
>We're dealing with a generation of CEOs / CFOs who were taught to care about nothing except short-term shareholder value. Quality and reputation doesn't matter anymore, so you replace your products with cheap garbage and hope nobody notices.
There is a line where you really do need to compromise on quality and even reputation to keep costs down, though. If you can't or refuse to do that, you end up stagnant and irrelevant like Japan.
Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
> Customers ultimately don't care how much sincerity and effort was infused into a product as long as it's past a certain "good enough" threshold.
This is not universally true. For one thing, it has changed over time as expectations shift. Presumably our expectations have been forced downward by the diminishing quality and increasing costs of consumer goods. There is also cultural variation, with Japan as an example.
I agree, but the economy as a whole seems to have swung to the completely opposite side. Every product is either turning into disposable one-time-use items, or into a subscription. Even "luxury" items aren't providing quality anymore.
I'm not calling for t-shirts that are guaranteed to last 20 years, but it would be nice if clothing didn't fall apart after a wash or two just because they saved 5% on material cost.
Yes, there's a lot of crap out there but I also don't want to pay a huge premium for everything so that it lasts a lifetime (and will probably be outdated or out of fashion long before that).
It is a big story if one can make it part of the anti-trust actions. Google having a monopoly which it leaves laying around as a weapon to be picked up by the next most corrupted big player to damage real businesses. The impact on the market is measurable (with naked eye), is distorting the market (which anti-trust is dealing with) and is an instance of escalating (making it actionable) domain reputation abuse. Google failing to police such blatant abuse might also open them to class action lawsuits.
Yes, this is a big deal, but most of us have simply stopped using Google and moved on to other tools.
> most of us have simply stopped using Google
Citation needed
Google has lost a small amount of market share, but nothing too significant to warrant "most of us have simply stopped using Google": https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-search-market-shar....
Damn this opened my eyes to a whole 'nother world of online marketing
Is there a way I can blacklist Forbes from my google search results?
So what? What’s missing is why I should care and what difference this makes to anyone other than the author.
> As for oversight, Forbes only has 2 board seats. And really it only has one.
It doesn't matter though. They have permission to use the name and domain, Forbes clearly knows what they are doing and why. If it wouldn't be ok with them, they'd revoke the permission (I'm not sure, but I assume they can, right?) So, yes, you can claim there is an oversight. If anything, Google's definition is a bit clunky, since it doesn't grasp the essence of the problem. But it also shouldn't matter, since it should be pretty obvious there is a problem indeed.
Now, why Google is ok with that (or didn't notice that) is another and very valid question. I mean, great, Forbes can host whatever bullshit they see fit, but then it would be appropriate for the whole domain to never appear on the first page of Google. Or second. Or tenth.
But then again, it doesn't seem like Google really tries to battle other, lesser doorways and LLM-generated content. And it's easy to see why.
I need the author to tell me again who runs Forbes Marketplace. I assume it's Forbes. It's not?