I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links.
I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable.
How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I want to see? Some combination of clicks and time-spent in a page through Google Analytics?
I would rather add a couple of buttons after each search result to provide feedback and the feedback I provide is valid just for my user (so it cannot be gamed). Two buttons with "this is crap" / "this is fine". Then Google can learn from that feedback instead of guessing through AI.
That, plus a "I'm not joe-six-pack" mode toggle, where Tools->Verbatim is enabled
and finds exactly what I am looking for, without assuming I'm misspelling or confused.
If there was any other obvious way to influence google it would instantly be gamed. Both my companies tried to increase their relevance in certain keywords and by competitors reporting their websites.
> I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links.
I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.
While not exactly what you've asked, check out uBlacklist add-on. It adds "Block this site" link next to search results in Google, Bing, and a couple of others. You can block a specific url and it this add-on will remove it from the search results page.
Using google is so much more frustrating than say 10 years ago. And generated websites is just a small problem with that. In the past google didn't try to be that smart and gave you more control. Now it's optimized for users asking full sentences instead of search queries. Now it's incorporating your location and perceived language into the query. Age of the document plays a huge role. Popularity of words in different context can skew your results towards some random topics.
Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.
In my experience the quoted search does work. Google will report it can't find what I asked if there are no such pages with the exact quote:
No results found for "...".
Results for ... (without quotes):
It's just very cumbersome, the old +/- syntax was more usable.
Actually, I'd prefer if each word I write would just default to being a hard requirement. I could then manually allow more creative interpretation with a specific syntax, like ~word, or exclude specific words alltogether with -word.
That works for the case you described. It will still ignore typos, dialects, or in my case a completely different language from the same language group. It will happily highlight different words that it deems to be equal to something I put in quotes.
It's infuriating when I search in Ukrainian on YouTube and all the top results are Russian. Using words dissimilar with Russian helps, but that's not always an option. More and more today, I'm fighting with services that want to show me engaging, trending content. It's as if they're holding the real gems hostage, only giving them up grudgingly when I fail to succumb to cat videos or [insert trending content].
The solution for consumers are product/price comparison sites like gh.de and idealo.de (german). I don't know the US equivalents of those, but here they get the prices from many sellers and you can compare including shipping, filter by many spec criteria and even find the cheapest solution for a basket of items, split by seller and including shipping which I believe is a NP hard problem (knapsack or traveling salesman?).
I was just looking at laser printers in Idealo yesterday, didn't bother even looking at Google because I share the same experience as Adam. There many cases like this just from my search history. Point is: Google is not the best indexer to shop.
Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.
The rant is really about how bad Google went or how good SEO experts are today. Google search results are basically unusable for some subjects and Google should fix it, if it doesn't want to end up like Altavista!
Altavista (AskJeeves, Yahoo, pick your poison) existed in a market space where there was real competition to be had. The Google of today does not.
The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.
it's not just SEO, they removed essential features like verbatim search, they constantly autocorrect uncommon search terms and they keep trying to optimize searches to only look for results within your bubble
Google once started out with the goal to index all human knowledge so people could find anything, but they seem to have settled into only helping people find the obvious easy to find stuff, while actively hiding anything that's slightly out of the ordinary.
I think this is the best description of what's happened. The only thing I really use Google for any more is if I have a development or design issue. I no longer use it for shopping or literally anything else I would use it for because of what you're talking about.
A five years ago, I noticed most of the results were all paid ads, at the top and bottom of the page and in the right hand column. Then you'd have a long list of Amazon product links. By the time you finally found the company or product you wanted, you were five pages deep and wondering why it was so hard to find something that just a few years earlier would be in the first couple of results.
I just gave up using it - to me its become completely useless. Its a last ditch resource I use if I really need to find something.
It's the investing that ruined Google search. Instead of search it's super smart, and as a result super annoying. It would be so much better if they kept it as is and just worked on removing spam.
Doesn't always work. For example Google seems to "auto correct" Gasgerd, a widely used nickname for former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder to Gasherd with and without quotes.
> Google won't end up like Altavista since any alternatives will be faced with the same issue.
They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.
Part of the problem is the word "laser". Large format laser-driven xerographic printers are somewhat obsolete. A long bar of IC LEDs can be used instead of a laser, which avoids the mechanical problems of scanning a long distance with a rotating mirror. It's still xerography, with powdered toner and heated fusing, but it's not "laser".
The Kyocera KIP series printers are good examples of that technology.
There's a somewhat exotic technology used for sign and panel making - UV-cured inkjet printing.
Here's a specialty flatbed printer for very thick (up to 10cm or so) stock. [1] This is often used for large advertising posters, because UV cured inks can survive bright sunlight. Hit hard by UV, the polymer strands crosslink and the liquid ink turns into a hard solid. (It doesn't "dry"; it's not solvent evaporation that's makes this work.)[2] Same concept as dental fillings and stereolithographic 3D printing.
Front Panel Express offers UV-cured inkjet printing on metal as a service. That may be overkill for a prop maker - it's used to make real front panels for heavy use. Front Panel Express preps the blank panels in a plasma furnace before printing for better ink adhesion. After printing, a clear coat can be applied.[3]
So, yes, there's an SEO problem here, but part of the problem is that printing technology has moved on and searching for "laser" is less useful.
(I used to make steampunk props. So I've faced similar problems of surface marking.[4])
The rant is not so much about laser printers, but about search engines and crappy SEO. I mean, it starts with a laser printer problem he has, but he doesn't blame his printer. He blames Google for not helping him find a better laser printer.
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
It's the same everywhere. Amazon and Google are absolutely worhtless for anything that is slightly not mainstream.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
> What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
1) If they keep stock, what they have in stock
2) What the manufacturer promotion of the day is and/or if they need a push to get over the line with some manufacturer's targets
Maybe, but what are your alternatives? You won't find anything in Google or Amazon. If you're lucky you find a niche forum or reddit sub with enough activity. If you don't you're better off a distributor.
> Maybe, but what are your alternatives? You won't find anything in Google or Amazon. If you're lucky you find a niche forum or reddit sub with enough activity
Depends what you're buying.
If its a highly commoditised product like an average PC then it basically doesn't matter. Most commodity PCs are (basically) identical and its largely a case of "you get what you pay for", so your budget will do most of the dictating on what your outcome will be.
If its something more niche or more expensive (e.g mid-range/high-end commodity servers), then you've got two alternatives:
1) If you've got a group of trustworthy friends who either work in tech or are "techies" then the old-school word-of-mouth to find yourself a trustworthy reseller (there are some truly independent resellers out there, but they are a rare species, especially in places like the US or Europe).
2) As you say, do your own homework via niche forums / reddit / youtube videos / slack channels / discord / whatever you prefer. Remember that the goal here is not necessarily to know exactly what you are buying, but to make yourself an "informed consumer" so at least you know broadly what your options are.
Its a tough position to be in, I agree. I think the way the IT industry operates is ghastly and does nobody any favours.
> when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them
I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
For that maybe, for laptop chargers and batteries, cables, electronic components etc I've got better luck at that store. Keep in mind that they are not a general public storem you don't buy consumer electronics there, but for professionals. Technicians of all kinds go there to buy, so they are not just salespeople.
This. High quality advice from an expert at a shop, who knows where to find even bigger experts, is absolutely worth paying extra for. The problem is: how do I know which shop has that expert?
And sadly, a lot of companies which have built up a stellar reputation over the years, at some point turn to cutting cost while milking their reputation into the ground.
Same here, the printers for my home, my office and wife's office come from the same printer shop. Yeah they won't have thousands of models but from the hundred they can provide I got things very usable - and the price difference was fully worth my economy of time.
> article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers
The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
I did not check all of the printers in the list, but the top 4 are all ink jet printers. You're right that lower down the list there are some laser printers as well, but as a list of the top 10 best laser printers, the article is useless.
As is becoming apparent, there is no "large format [color] laser printer" that are in production right now. There are large format printers, color printers, and laser printers, but no printers that meet all three criteria at the same time. They are part mutually exclusive qualifiers.
These generated spam contents are indeed problematic, but if done correctly, should contain zero printer anyway.
That site is nothing but a ad-ridden, affiliate link stuffing, spam site with zero quality. A good search engine would not list useless garbage like that.
He can't know, but I'm the original commenter and it was the same article. Apparently it wasn't all ink jet printers, but just the top 4 of the list. Still not great for a list that claims to be explicitly about laser printers.
You can filter domains, at least. You can add "-pinterest.com" or just "-pinterest" to clean a lot of crap out of your searches. But I've always wanted a regexp search. Just a regexp, absolutely no algorithmic "help" of any sort whatsoever, and I've wanted that since Alta Vista was the go-to search engine.
I would like to be able to vote on search results and add certain sites to my default blocklist. I don't understand Google doesn't do that; crowdsourcing is exactly their thing, and this would be something that provides tons of valuable info to them yet would also be loved by their users.
I suspect such a system would be quickly gamed by spammers. With the bot-nets and other resources they have at their disposal, they would be able to flag and drown out legitimate sites or competitor sites in order to boost their own. Then the problem changes to being able to differentiate legitimate/regular users from spammers/black-hat SEO practitioners.
Maybe, or maybe there are ways to identify and eliminate the bots and spammers.
For example, it could be linked to accounts, and dishonest accounts get removed, together with all their votes. Or the votes are kept, but because they're so different from real people's votes, they only count for the search results shown to other bots and spammers.
And at the very least, your own votes should override anyone else's votes, so for regular users who actively vote, the search results will still be close to what they want.
I'm also thinking about classifying results by different contexts. A page might be very relevant in one context, and not at all in another. But do let users control those contexts.
Kagi allows you to set the priority of domains, as well as some other tuning. Though it is in beta at the moment, and the plan to charge for use eventually.
I suspect that most such articles are written by some poor soul living in an area where the best available jobs are writing garbage click farm articles. I wouldn't be surprised if some were even generated largely or entirely by machine. Calling them "crap articles" downplays the fact that they are not even really content, they are just a pretense to fill a page with affiliate links.
I tried with "laser printer", and the results were simply PERFECT.
Now, this may depend on one's location, but for me (here in Europe) it works perfectly well (and I'm not Russian), I just ignore the site language, since the results are mostly English anyway.
I tried the top several results (searching for "large-format laser printer" as per Adam Savage's rant). Most of the results contained no large-format laser printers and no useful advice on finding or choosing them. The most promising was an e-commerce page almost all of which was other things but one of whose items was indeed advertised as a "large-format laser printer". Unfortunately it was actually a "computer to plate" machine, suitable if you want to print very large numbers of identical copies of something, prices starting at a mere $20k, almost certainly in no way suitable for Adam Savage's needs.
(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
Just looking at the domain it already looks like a massive failure in results. Clicking into the site it looks like a content farm. The top articles are:
It seems like maybe both large format and laser printer is such a niche product that any site actually talking about it does not have enough SEO juice to overpower these spam sites despite relevancy. The sad thing is these articles seem to be just keyword stuffing because those printers mentioned on that website are all literally not laser printers despite the text saying they are...
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
I find it curious that everyone trots out this idea that Reddit is a google killer etc.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
Even if you manage to bypass the problems you mention (by bypassing the popular subreddits), Reddit has become a terrible source of information in general.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
I feel like this is a product of Reddit's built-in recency bias, where unless a thread is sticky then no one really sees or uses older threads. Classic web forums were a lot better at this; old threads with in-depth technical info and discussions would keep rising to the top, where "hey look at this keyboard I just bought" threads would get one or two replies and be quickly forgotten.
> It's been downhill since all the subreddit bans a couple years ago.
Out of the list on Wikipedia [1], the utter majority of banned popular subreddits were far-right, terrorist, violence-oriented or dealt with questionably or outright illegal sexual material (jailbait, fappening).
As for r/consumeproduct, there's a Google doc floating around detailing its links to the far-right and transphobes [2]. Doesn't sound surprising to me that they got banned.
The vast range of content being banned (largely by subject and tone) created a chilling effect throughout the entire site. Also, a lot of good posters were also bad posters, so after they left because they couldn't talk about how much they hated fat people, they also stopped posting detailed reviews about e.g. laser printers.
I think Reddit is just a symptom. I don't think it's going to be a Google killer but the fact that people are looking to it to fix Google's problems is a sign of the problem at hand. They are abandoning something bad for something slightly less bad at solving the problem at hand, or just desperate for any method. And Reddit is definitely unintentionally doing this. The only reason Reddit isn't gamed (or maybe it is?) is because it's a new phenomenon so far.
What you're complaining about has nothing to do with the reason reddit is actually more useful than google.
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
Reddit is a cesspool compared to what? Certainly not here. Sure, r/gaming is garbage, but overall my experience with Reddit is fairly positive. Especially if you’re looking for things like product advice, but it’s also the main source for eg. trans surgery and fashion advice. Things that are literally scary to discuss here.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
I don’t think you’re leveraging Reddit correctly. I use Google, search for something like “Kokatat icon drysuit site:Reddit.com” and am going to find far more useful human, real-world info than if I just use google to search the naked Internet, where the results would be half a page of ads and half a page of marketing, SEO-optimized sales or affiliate sites.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
The general idea is that Reddit has small communities that care about niche topics. If you want to know about mechanical keyboards or looking after a rare pet, you'll find a community there that talks about it. They'll probably ban you if you talk about anything other than the specific topic, you regularly see stern warnings added whenever a topic escapes the niche area and gets exposed to the wider Reddit audience, but that's why they are useful.
Could it depend on the types of subreddits you visit? In my experience, Reddit is pretty nice. Not great perhaps, but fairly tolerant, friendly and supportive. But quite often focused on a specific topic and moderated to stay on topic, that is true. Some moderators are definitely more restrictive than others, but if they overstep, people leave and form new subreddits to compete with the old one.
Odds of searching for "[obscure proper noun] [issue in fewest words] site:reddit.com" solving a problem is good. "site:5ch.net" sometimes works too for certain deeper topics by the way, and Reddit is a sunny day in a park compared to 2ch.net/5ch.net.
Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
> The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.
Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.
On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.
The karma system is definitely the difference that mostly influences the quality of the discussion and visibility of non mainstream topics.
Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.
> a niche product that any site actually talking about it
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
When Pagerank was invented the internet was a lot nicer and less spammy. I think its showing its age and maybe Pagerank just doesn't work for commercial content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
It gets into a conspiracy theory territory a bit, but it makes more than zero sense if all the Google services ~2007 had been a civilian clone of an existing, "non-cooperative" library indexing system for spy agencies. There will be a huge accumulation of documents of unknown importance, and occasionally needs arise to extract information with a word or a phrase as a key.
Google Search and Books does exactly that.
And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.
Sure but most of the time reddit is completely unable to provide a decent answer to any non banal search. And whenever I tried to directly ask something specific in a dedicated subreddit it always ends up in one of the following:
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
I agree it's far from perfect, but I'll happily take the hivemind over SEO spam, especially if I know very little to begin with.
Anything "non banal" and I'm more likely to go read a book or consult a professional. Tradesmen on reddit don't owe me answers for my hard to google DIY question.
It is frustrating navigating the sea of people who want to help but are also just googling, but you get an eye for that after a while.
It’s been said the best way to get answers promptly online is to provide an incorrect one. Maybe a strategy to overcome the attention span issue would be to open a sockpuppet account to intentionally seed misinformation until someone catches it and feels compelled to respond?
But to aulin's fifth point, often you won't get answered with the correct information. Instead you will get "corrected" with the local mythos, as the most repeated answer to a question usually becomes the preferred knowledge of a group.
just trying to go directly to the main manufacturers websites... it's really hard tot find a large format laser printer. So it seems anything talking about large format printer is going to dominate, and any mention of "laser" on those pages is going to do well if you search for laser also. I get lots of hits on the large format page where "laser" is another menu option. I found some on xerox, surprised that didn't rank better.
I think the idea is that "laser" should have filtered out the results he was seeing, but it didn't. Furthermore the content on the pages is explicitly lying about the fact that they are laser printers and drowning out the pages that aren't lying. It could just be that Pagerank doesn't work for this type of information organization anymore. It may not be a Google problem but an internet search and Pagerank problem, especially if Bing and Duck Duck Go aren't any better in this regard.
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
I don’t understand why this is so hard for google. Allow end users to flag links as SEO spam. It’s very easy for a human to figure out. I can tell in maybe 1/4 a second that a page is just SEO shit. The keyword stuffing, the irrelevant fluff before and after any relevant content (if it’s there at all), the annoying ads that take up the whole screen, etc. Let us flag it, remove it from the index. Take a snapshot of the page at the time it was removed so if the owner wants to appeal Google can say why it was removed.
If I was a motivated SEO booster, I would just pay a room full of people somewhere in the world to "downvote" all of my competitors search engine results. The problem still exists. As long as there is an incentive to be gained from SEO spammers, they will find a way to influence search results. This transcends Google or DDG or any specific search engine susceptible to SEO abuse.
Because SEO firms would LOVE to go though marking all real sites as spam. They are _much_ more motivated then end users so the vast bulk of report will be false.
I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or real.
Of all the companies in the world google will be the last to employ real humans to verify anything. Look online for the shear amount of forum threads full of people disgrunted with the their poor support response and lack of humans in the loop.
I know, my point is that if they just take a small amount of their $50 billon in profit every year and hire a team of actual people to go through this stuff it would probably be a lot cheaper and more effective than constantly tweaking their ranking algorithm
Coming up with new algo's gets you promoted in google's structure, proposing and managing an army of support people is not 'elegant' and nobody would want to work on it.
And then spammers or unscrupulous competitors will flag legitimate sites as spam, pushing the signal-to-noise ratio to the point of uselessness. Plus, few users will actually flag correctly. Most will simply not notice, or not bother, others will flag perfectly legitimate results as spam just because Google wasn't psychic enough to know exactly what they want from their vague query.
And Google already has a pretty good metric in the bounce rate without the need to add a "flag" option. That is, if you go back to the search page shortly after clicking a link, that link is probably irrelevant. I guess that SEO spammers found a way around that.
> Google can easily afford to have people verify a link should be taken down before doing it.
Google is super rich, they probably can if they want to dedicate a huge amount of resources to that. It is hard for humans to win against bots in this game.
> If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
It is something spammers do. They make the page attractive using psychological tricks (like typical clickbait). They make it informative by copying parts of Wikipedia or StackOverflow. It does not make the world a better place, and it is something Google fights against, with mixed success.
Or at least allow the user to flag such links to be added in his own, individual corpus of unwanted spam. They do the exact same thing with email already, so why not extend it to web pages.
And, yes, allow the user to permanently filter out domains from their search results.
I use an extension for that. There used to be the collaborative "WoT", but that got issues after it got bought up by a venture capital firm. In general I think the individual use (blocking sites I will never want to see in search results) is more important than the social use, so I just use uBlocklist, which injects a "block this site" link after every Google search result.
It can not be at Google scale because of massive incentives to mark your competitor's sites as spam.
But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)
I like this idea. So how would you prevent company X from flagging all their competitors as spam sites - and just in general how do you deal with the abuse of such a feature?
Can't wait for real people's personal accounts to get flagged or banned. Google Maps has companies lying about their info and people correcting those will get their accounts shadowbanned with no recourse.
Anything A3+ (13” x 19”) or smaller in the commercial printing industry is pretty universally considered “small format”. (Some places consider anything sheet-fed as small format and sheets come a lot bigger than A3+.)
It’s not surprising that searching using a specific industry term that’s different from your understanding of it would bring results for that larger-than-you-thought category of product.
Further, the smallbiztrends article that comes up first for me, that Adam claims “not a single one is an actual laser printer”, contains several printers that use the same dry toner, electrostatic process as laser printers and that most people outside of printing, if asked to name the printing tech, would call a “laser printer” (because they’ve never heard of an LED printer). The print quality issues that started his search were likely fuser-related not laser-related, meaning these colloquially incorrectly called laser printers would have been fine.
Search engines have problems, but this video isn’t hitting on them for me.
I think your take is a bit generous for that website.
Take this blurb for example:
> HP Designjet Z9+ PS Large Format Color Inkjet Printer
As one of the most expensive printers on the market, this HP DesignJet Z9+PS provides exceptional color control with a secure wireless connection and fast printing. Without a doubt this is a large format laser printer of the highest quality which can produce prints up to 44 inches wide.
It's literally written in a way that is completely lying and designed to mislead and keyword stuff. It's not even trying to hide the fact that it's lying to a human reader since it contradicts itself immediately by calling it an Inkjet printer (which it is). It makes more sense when you realize it's not trying to trick the human reader at all! It's trying to trick Google bot!
The title of the article implies it is about laser printers or at the least laser-like printers, but the list contains inkjet printers, making it somewhat useless even if some of the results are in fact laser-like printers because it forces the person to continue to sift through the spam for what they need.
The whole article is garbage information and just because it accidentally actually included one or two laser printers does not mean it is a relevant result! Why are you nit-picking on Adam Savage being wrong about how there is indeed a laser printer when the literal whole article is mostly lies.
So a printing industry professional looking for a web printer wouldn’t at all be upset with getting procedurally generated listicles about inkjet printers?
Clearly the problem here isn’t Adam’s lack of industry knowledge. Had he been served the correct results for his query he would have instantly learned what large format means in the industry and would have adjusted his query accordingly. The problem is that Google helps scammers and spammers at the expense of legitimate creators. Just like removing the like/dislike ratio on YouTube, which of course has caused a big increase in generated spam.
For a huge pile of things that aren't consumer goods, google is pretty good at figuring out what you're looking for even if you use imprecise terms, especially if the particular imprecision is common among non-specialists. That's sort of the selling point of google search and why the primary interface to just about all general-purpose web search engines isn't what used to be called 'keyword search'. It's definitely a search engine quality problem
Are there even lasers in the large format (50cm+ x roll of paper) realm? I thought it was all ink plotters/printers, at least that's all I've seen in print shops or design places. A lack of lasers might contributes to the SEO spam for the odd terms.
There are digital presses in B2 size using dry toner indirect (“laser”), liquid toner indirect (also “laser”), and inkjet processes. They are available in both sheet-fed and web-fed (“rolls”) configuration. (B2 sheet is 514x728mm, ~20x29”, or think “home/small poster size”; it’s sometimes called “half sheet”)
I work in this space (as a consumer of this equipment); all opinions here are my own, not my employer’s. For that reason, I’m reluctant to link to any specific vendor products, but if you’re interested, googling/YouTubing “b2 digital press” will give you some cool “how it works” videos.
A3 lasers certainly exist. But A3 is not wide format.
I've never heard of a true wide format laser (A2 and larger), and I suspect the technology doesn't exist to make an affordable one. You'd need super-precise optics, an absolutely huge toner/fuser system, and a supply chain for all of the above.
And there would be limited sales. Wide format printers are used for high quality art/photo printing, signage and ads, and sometimes for fabric printing.
Lasers are optimised for office document printing. You don't often need an A2 or larger office document. And when you do - cartography and blueprints - you're probably going to use a plotter.
He is not looking for a large format laser printer. True large format would be called a plotter and will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce who was bought out by Canon. Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18" and duplex so a booklet can be cut down to 11"x17" with full bleed. Both are industrial equipment and are expensive and require service contracts. Now what's interesting is the building industry has the same problem that Adam Savage has, the prints (plan sets) must be able to get wet without the ink/toner bleeding. That has been solved with ink jet technology that uses a wax based ink. Cartridges full of wax balls in the standard process colors, an example would be a Canon colorwave.
As someone who has supported printers for decades, and has a friend who owns a print shop, almost nothing in this is true.
> True large format would be called a plotter
No, plotters are devices with pens. Layman may occasionally refer to a large format printer as a "plotter" because of its resemblance and it's faster to say, but nobody in the industry refers to them as plotters.
> will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce
You're describing large-format photocopiers. They operate exactly like an old-school optical-only photocopier which photographically exposes the drum (versus printers and digital copiers which image the drum via LEDs or a laser.) They are often called "plan copiers." Said friend's print shop has one and it is in fact made by Oce.
> Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18"
Many, many copiers can handle 12x18 paper. "Digital press" usually refers to enhanced paper storage, speed/volume, and finisher capabilities beyond what a typical office copier/MFC offers, often coupled with some sort of software and workstation for managing the print jobs. Often a "digital press" is indistinguishable from a heavy-duty copier with finisher units
> Now what's interesting is the building industry has the same problem that Adam Savage has, the prints (plan sets) must be able to get wet without the ink/toner bleeding.
Toner does not bleed.
> That has been solved with ink jet technology that uses a wax based ink. Cartridges full of wax balls in the standard process colors, an example would be a Canon colorwave.
Colorwave uses melted 'toner' and sprays it, like an inkjet, onto a page.
You're confusing Colorwave with the Phaser printers made by Xerox, which use dyed wax. Phaser prints used to be cutting edge back in the 90's for proofing work, but have long since been eclipsed by every other printing technology. The wax can be scraped off the page. If the page is bent too much, it crinkles. It's easily damaged by even slight heat. It's dye based not pigment based, so the prints fade and color shift very quickly. The technology is such garbage that Xerox has tried renmaing it - they now call it "colorcube" or something similarly stupid. They push per-page figures, while ignoring the machine's horrific TCO (they consume massive amounts of electricity and require a lot of service work; if disturbed too much while at operating temperature, molten wax gets into places it shouldn't be and requires an expensive service call. Etc.)
"Toner does not bleed." I know but I was describing the needs not that toner bleeds. I have worked in printing plan sets and the old way for color was ink jet usually the HP 5000 series. The industry moved to the colorwave because the ink jet prints would bleed when wet.
Yes, the colorwave uses toner but I was told it was in a wax medium. The toner balls certainly felt like wax if you handled them...
Seems like you are being a tad pedantic and not entirely correct...
It's been many years since I've ran plan sets, so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but we would occasionally get old school plot files. The Canon RIP that controlled the plotter would covert them automatically.
Yeah ... this rant is kinda more about the author than anything. He's mixing information by constructing a nonsense query. "Large format printing" is at least 18 inches wide, on a roll. He's looking for 11"x17", which is just "a printer". The Google results for the query `11x17 laser printer` are much better. At least for me all the carousel ads on the top, the top (and only) text ad, and the first organic results are all direct hits. There is some SEO junk further down, of course.
This is a garbage-in, garbage-out situation where both the web and the query are garbage and Google is doing what it can.
It's all advertising lingo. I have certainly seen machines that claim to be 'large format' when the largest they support is 11x17 (or A3). But others that support roll paper with widths > 24". HP sells a number of these under the designjet brand and calls them plotters.
While traditional plotters used pens (aka pen plotters), I think a more accurate definition might be something that uses a set of motors to move a printing toolhead (be it pen, ink jet, knife, laser, router or whatever) along a medium (paper, vinyl, wood, etc) in a continuous line in the x and/or y direction. Where a traditional printer only moves the paper through in one direction and realizes the image 'line by line' across the perpendicular dimension.
Owning several vintage plotters (mostly pen) and a couple of modern pen plotters (axidraw, custom built). I have no problem imagining the same general mechanism driving any toolhead.
The HP7580, HP7475a, AxiDraw, every laser cutter i've seen, shopbots, modern hp designjets, etc .. All plotters.
Those definitions seem normal and right to me. I would say that the early plotters I used in the 80s had the pen on one axis and the paper moving on the other axis in both directions (HP 7470, for example).
There are other plotters around that time, roland's for instance, that used a more obvious cartesian model. IE a 'print head' sliding on an x-axis rail, that slides on an y-axis rail. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uECs0F8Txj0, the roland dxy-1200)
Obviously if you use a roll of paper you need to run the paper itself back and forth unless you want to build something as big as a shopbot style table. I think the design for the 'roll-paper' plotters drove the design of much smaller plotters like the 7475a (which also moves the paper on one axis). Perhaps HP had a patent on that 'paper moves on one axis, pen moves on another?
I searched for a particular piece of music gear using the shopping tab on Google the other day and they show you the results starting from the cheapest price, well the 1st result was like half the rest of legitimate shops and it was this stupid blog which was linking to Amazon with affiliate links that was worthless because the price was wrong.
A large format laser printer is horribly expensive. And most of them are only black and white. It's quite hard to make what the industry calls "large format" in a toner-based printer machine. Just getting a belt that wide, or rollers that wide, or a fuser to heat evenly that wide, is going to be super hard and hence super expensive.
But it sounds like he doesn't actually want what's called "large format" in the industry, he just wants an A3/tabloid size printer that doesn't suck. A3/tabloid is not "large format" in the printing industry. Large format means like A1 or A0 sized paper, usually on a roll.
Probably the best way to get a cost effective high quality A3/tabloid size printer is going to be to buy a used commercial machine that's roughly 10-15 years old. You'll still be able to get parts and toner for it, these things normally last a few decades. But it won't be small and it won't be electrically efficient.
Adam's rant adds yet another red-flag to anyone paying attention. "There is more noise than signal" has been increasing to the point that the tech is ripe for disruption. When the disruptor comes along and does the thing that the user wants without fuss, people will switch.
Well, reports about the relative uselessness of modern search engines was bound to hit the general population at some point.
I've suggested that people try Bing or DDG rather than Google for some searches, but it seems it's more a question of luck rather than anything else nowadays.
I've tried using Ecosia for their good environmental work but I frequently get a server error when searching but also it seems like searching for programming content rarely returns the right stuff, which might be page 1 on Google.
Google do have a lot of headstart over other search engines. Maybe what we need is a Developers search engine which weights results towards programming sites and also downgrades those drivereasy type posts which have a lot of fluff followed by "download drivereasy to sort all your problems".
I am afraid that if you are optimizing for ads revenues this is exactly what you will get. Results with relevant ads at the top and results below that are not relevant at all.
For me the quality of result on Google have been constantly going down. I sometimes find that among the first 3 results there is nothing that answer what I am looking for.
I know for sure that around 2008 Google had humans evaluating both the quality of a website and how well it was satisfying the query. As far a as I know, they stopped doing that a while back. Maybe it's time to resume that practice?
No. For that canary you would have to identify the signal associated with companies stopping big expensive ad campaigns. This process can go on for an extremely long time after Google becomes useless for those searching the web. The primary clients of Google are those with big budget ad campaigns, not the people actually using it for search.
> Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
Those of us old enough remember, there was a time when online search existed in a goldilocks zone [0] of accuracy, productivity, and reliability.
In 2010-2012, google results were peak content farm stuff too. Then they fought it actively, in 2013 they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results. Content farms that worked by stuffing keywords and working in rings to boost their page rank went away almost overnight.
And then dark SEO found its way around it again. And now we have a new cesspit, but it looks like Google doesn’t give a shit anymore. They only change the number of ads interspersed among search results.
Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess.
I subscribe to this filter, and while it's useful, it only covers a subset of the content farms out there. We really need a general purpose filter list for this sort of stuff. The sites I've been seeing more of lately are Q&A pages that have a few dozen questions with no rhyme or rhythm, and whose answers seem to be GPT-3 generated or scraped from other sites.
My guess would be that they are working on it. At their scale, it is hard to imagine them having technical difficulties removing SEO garbage from results.
It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
> It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
I think a regular, non-adblocked google search may result in almost the entire first page being ads. At this point, the ads are probably more relevant to the average user than whatever seo-spam "top x of y" would have been there on the first page.
At least ads lead you to the product directly rather than make you visit another shady ad-infested site in the interim.
> they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results
There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well).
I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure.
Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.
Would better filtering of procedurally generated pages and ecommerce sites help?
It feels like they drown out all the useful information when I'm searching for stuff. I usually resort to constraining searches to forum sites but that rejects a lot of blogs and other useful sources of information.
I got a result for 'best laser printer' which was actually a retailer of laser printers. It was #8 but better than I expected.
I am far from being a Google fan boy - quite the opposite - but I can also be pragmatic and understand that this may be an unfixable problem.
The lesson here is that retailers of such products should be optimising for these kind of search terms. Of course there is going to be some bias but they will have at least some understanding of what they are talking about.
And, people using such terms also ought to expect a lot of SEO junk. I mean, when has anyone ever gotten a result that is anything other?
Seriously though, who is going to take the time and trouble to curate a list of the best laser printers who doesn't have a financial interest in doing so?
Wow, even if you put "large format laser printer" in quotes, and put Google in verbatim mode, that smallbiztrends crap comes up first, followed by useless results.
This is not only with printers, but with everything you search for, it makes me so sad! Everything is just full of SEO optimised nonsense. In the past it was so easy to search for something and actually find it. Now you only find crappy sites, full of ads, pop ups and brain-dead content optimised for SEO. It looks like Google has stepped away from reputation based scoring to a score that is too much focused on the textual content of sites. I hope this creates opportunities for new players in the market that are able to solve this and can outperform Google. That would be good for the internet.
All printers suck. I've tried every range and type of printer imaginable over the last 35 years and every single one has made me hate my life.
I just threw a laser out of the window because it got to the point where it would only print one page before jamming. I bought a Canon inkjet and that has lasted a couple of months, but now you have to push each piece of paper in to get it started, and a couple of weeks ago it stopped printing the left side of the paper, so I have to make sure everything I print is only on the right. So, this printer is going out the window as soon as the cartridge runs dry.
I have an HP m377dw laser and this exact thing was happening when I printed on card stock. TIL via the comments of this video that there should be a paper thickness setting in the driver.
Yeah, paper thickness, color, paper type, and any coatings on the paper. All these things should matter for a proper setting of the fuser temperature the printer uses. If your printer is advanced enough, it should run the fuser at the proper temperature for the stated paper.
Google has excellent AI and these is no application of it to their search to remove spam. Google needs competition or it'll never be fixed. Search is important
I see a lot of inkjet printers in the results, but literally the first printer on the first result page is OKI C844dnw A3 Color which looks to be a laser printer.
Back to the old days when you had to learn from working in the industry what the best equipment is and how to use it. We used to have to read trade magazines to find out about new developments. Probably you need to subscribe to whatever the trade magazines are for the reprographics industry and browse their archives to find out what machines are available then you need to speak the sales team of the relevant company.
This is because there's no such thing as large format laser printers anymore. There are large format LED printers, and it is basically the same technology sans scanning mirror and actual laser. If you click first Google result - first link on that page is what you want.
15 years ago I bought a laser printer and it just worked. Printed on just about anything I put in it. No annoying pop-ups about running low on paper or toner and buying now. No driver issues or bloatware. It all just worked. What do we have now? Non of the above....
... large format laser printer, like A2 and up, in full color? Looks like there are few full-sized office photocopiers that can handle it as well as few models sold as drafting plotters, but the failed print he is holding in the video is an A4 sheet. Any lasers can do A4 just fine, some A3 as well.
Does he really need to hold up a botched A2 printout to prove that he needs non-botched A2 printouts?
Surely those are orthogonal requirements, the size of the sheets and the ability to successfully fuse the toner? Can’t we in all fairness take him at his word that he sometimes wants to print at a larger size?
I think most large format printers are open pedestal roll feed design that takes A0(2.8x3.9ft) or A1(1.95x2.76ft) rolls so material is like 3ft wide paper towel. I know because I borrowed one back in University to print out Apollo control panel for myself, which in hindsight probably wasn't allowed.
I know Adam Savage is an ex-ILM professional propmaker and legendary Mythbusters host, but if he by million to one chance would call me to procure an A0 laser printer to print on special plastic sheets, I'd ask him if he mean it.
there is some strong business lessons here. printer manufacturer trashed their user experience all the way, from your first google search to the last hit with a baseball bat in the woods.
The SEO optimized site, smallbiztrends.com, lists six large format laser printers though! Their title is for eight of them though, and two of them are inkjets, and I'm assuming they didn't change their list in response to the video.
The site is full of Markov chain garble using random products as seeds to useless copy in order to sell ad space and affiliate links. There's no person who would even want to update the site.
Meta: this is a video with Adam Savage (perhaps most widely known from hosting Mythbusters on TV) from Tested.com. Perhaps would have been worth at least naming him in the title, since the source of a video rant can influence one's interest in clicking.
Sure, but have you seen just how bad manufacturers of anything expensive and technical are at actual presenting their product catalogs in a clear and informative manner that lends itself to comparing with the competition?
I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable.
How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I want to see? Some combination of clicks and time-spent in a page through Google Analytics?
I would rather add a couple of buttons after each search result to provide feedback and the feedback I provide is valid just for my user (so it cannot be gamed). Two buttons with "this is crap" / "this is fine". Then Google can learn from that feedback instead of guessing through AI.
That, plus a "I'm not joe-six-pack" mode toggle, where Tools->Verbatim is enabled and finds exactly what I am looking for, without assuming I'm misspelling or confused.
I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...
Now Google thinks their last suggestion was obviously a success.
Some time ago you were able to search for things you knew you saw online. Not a chance today. Google will ignore even quoted queries and simply show you different results than those you asked for. It's really annoying at times.
Actually, I'd prefer if each word I write would just default to being a hard requirement. I could then manually allow more creative interpretation with a specific syntax, like ~word, or exclude specific words alltogether with -word.
sample listing for laser printers: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=prl
Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Amazon, Lazada and Shopee.
Laser printer listing: https://hinta.fi/g28/tulostimet?l=1&fq=Laser&fg=1
Many product categories don't have an extensive filtering available tho.
https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=prl&xf=3309_A3
The sad reality is that there's no incentive for Google to "fix" searches like this, and indeed it's not even their stated goal to do so anymore. They've been more focused on creating searches that take in "natural language" and provide results based on what they think you're looking for.
Google just needs to invest more in stopping SEO.
A five years ago, I noticed most of the results were all paid ads, at the top and bottom of the page and in the right hand column. Then you'd have a long list of Amazon product links. By the time you finally found the company or product you wanted, you were five pages deep and wondering why it was so hard to find something that just a few years earlier would be in the first couple of results.
I just gave up using it - to me its become completely useless. Its a last ditch resource I use if I really need to find something.
Putting just one term / word in quotes makes it an non-optional search term btw.
They won't, until momentum shifts enough to make the investment in SEO on alternative search platforms profitable. That might be enough of an opening for a competitor to exploit.
The Kyocera KIP series printers are good examples of that technology.
There's a somewhat exotic technology used for sign and panel making - UV-cured inkjet printing. Here's a specialty flatbed printer for very thick (up to 10cm or so) stock. [1] This is often used for large advertising posters, because UV cured inks can survive bright sunlight. Hit hard by UV, the polymer strands crosslink and the liquid ink turns into a hard solid. (It doesn't "dry"; it's not solvent evaporation that's makes this work.)[2] Same concept as dental fillings and stereolithographic 3D printing.
Front Panel Express offers UV-cured inkjet printing on metal as a service. That may be overkill for a prop maker - it's used to make real front panels for heavy use. Front Panel Express preps the blank panels in a plasma furnace before printing for better ink adhesion. After printing, a clear coat can be applied.[3]
So, yes, there's an SEO problem here, but part of the problem is that printing technology has moved on and searching for "laser" is less useful.
(I used to make steampunk props. So I've faced similar problems of surface marking.[4])
[1] https://www.sackel.com/products/sackel-corporation-uv-led-sa...
[2] https://www.piworld.com/article/uv-curable-ink-works/
[3] https://www.frontpanelexpress.com/fpd-doc/en/index.htm?fpd_g...
[4] http://www.aetherltd.com/aesthetic.html
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
A phone call is more useful than a search engine.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
Depends what you're buying.
If its a highly commoditised product like an average PC then it basically doesn't matter. Most commodity PCs are (basically) identical and its largely a case of "you get what you pay for", so your budget will do most of the dictating on what your outcome will be.
If its something more niche or more expensive (e.g mid-range/high-end commodity servers), then you've got two alternatives:
Its a tough position to be in, I agree. I think the way the IT industry operates is ghastly and does nobody any favours.I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
Their website is absolutely awful though: https://www.cetronic.es/
And sadly, a lot of companies which have built up a stellar reputation over the years, at some point turn to cutting cost while milking their reputation into the ground.
The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
https://plumbaroakland.com/best-large-format-laser-printer/
These generated spam contents are indeed problematic, but if done correctly, should contain zero printer anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31477038
For example, it could be linked to accounts, and dishonest accounts get removed, together with all their votes. Or the votes are kept, but because they're so different from real people's votes, they only count for the search results shown to other bots and spammers.
And at the very least, your own votes should override anyone else's votes, so for regular users who actively vote, the search results will still be close to what they want.
I'm also thinking about classifying results by different contexts. A page might be very relevant in one context, and not at all in another. But do let users control those contexts.
https://yandex.ru/
https://yandex.com/
Except it doesn't help any single bit because the top result it's exactly the same "smallbiztrends.com" that was mentioned in a rant.
Russian Yandex is not any different than Google because their primary income is exactly the same: ads.
I tried with "laser printer", and the results were simply PERFECT.
Now, this may depend on one's location, but for me (here in Europe) it works perfectly well (and I'm not Russian), I just ignore the site language, since the results are mostly English anyway.
(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
I got (for UK/English settings)
Google: 5 Ads followed by https://smallbiztrends.com https://www.printerland.co.uk
DDG: 1 Ads followed by: https://plumbaroakland.com https://smallbiztrends.com
Mojeek: https://foodisforfuel.com https://www.cadtutor.net
>top result is for https://foodisforfuel.com
Just looking at the domain it already looks like a massive failure in results. Clicking into the site it looks like a content farm. The top articles are:
Do Justin Boots Run True to Size?
Air Duct Cleaning Services in San Antonio
Where to Find a Fireworks Store in Chicago
The Advantages of Being a Social Entrepreneur
Why You Should Choose a Cannabis SEO Agency
The problem is Google has no competition, and thus no incentive to improve the product. However, if my understanding of the Chinese market is correct, the Chinese Google (Baidu.com) doesn't seem to hold hostage the Chinese internet the way Google does. I'm not sure exactly why but maybe the Google killer isn't a general web search engine at all. It's looking more and more like Reddit could even be the Google killer, albeit unintentionally.
I also want to give another anecdote: one of our biggest marketing categories revolves around pets, and despite it actually being a large chunk of our sales (and therefore implicitly relevant), when you search google for keywords relating to our product and "pets" we don't even show up until page 7 or 8 despite being exactly on topic. The people who do end up finding about us are searching for other keywords unrelated to pets and converting to paying customers. This is implying if they searched "on topic" they aren't getting the results they want. While there are other keywords where we do show up, it pretty much shows how poor Google is at actually ranking websites these days unless one specifically pays for SEO (buying links on spam sites for popular keywords).
So for a commercial keyword "[our product] + pets" there's so much spam we're lost in the fray. But for a non-commercial keyword that we also have relevancy for "AI + [our product]" we actually rank easily on the first page for, since nobody is selling anything. Maybe the key here is to just create a better search system for commercial products and services, since Google works relatively well when on topics where there is no incentive to spam.
Are people serious? Nearly every time I go to Reddit it is a toxic cesspool of hate and intolerance. In the occasional times I land in a subreddit that is not, it is either some totalitarian echo-chamber that is moderated to within an inch of it's life, or its just full of low-quality posts or automated bot spam.
Am I just unlucky? Or is that as good as it gets?
It is a shame as I loved Reddit in the old digg-era, but the quality nose-dived IMHO shortly after they introduced the subreddits and I never really go back any more if I can avoid it, mainly due to the community.
The old "site:reddit.com" trick doesn't work that well anymore. Well, it returns old results, so there's that.
Smaller Subreddits have not only become echo chambers, but they now seem to cater to people trying to get into the field rather than the previous mix of professional and semi-professionals. And I have the impression that 90% of the advice being give is being done by amateurs who never earned any money from the field they're giving advice of and are rehashing echo-chamber advice. It's like a worse Quora.
When there is any sort of equipment involved, they seem to have become an Instagram feed, with only photos of the acquisitions. There's rarely any insight into the product itself, it's always people posting things right after opening the box, sometimes from their car, rather than "playing" with it and posting something more insightful afterwards.
The worse part: when there is any marketable skill related to the niche, the only discussions there will be about how to market it. RIP music production and game development subreddits.
I feel like this is a product of Reddit's built-in recency bias, where unless a thread is sticky then no one really sees or uses older threads. Classic web forums were a lot better at this; old threads with in-depth technical info and discussions would keep rising to the top, where "hey look at this keyboard I just bought" threads would get one or two replies and be quickly forgotten.
Out of the list on Wikipedia [1], the utter majority of banned popular subreddits were far-right, terrorist, violence-oriented or dealt with questionably or outright illegal sexual material (jailbait, fappening).
As for r/consumeproduct, there's a Google doc floating around detailing its links to the far-right and transphobes [2]. Doesn't sound surprising to me that they got banned.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IdBsrh8FS6k85XsrpqDjmqPe...
The problem with google is that for any query remotely commercial or product related the results are useless garbage.
Reddit is better in that respect because subreddits devoted to hobbies or sections of industries have real people who somewhat know what they're talking about and are moderated to suppress the spam/shilling.
Is it perfect? No. Is it way better than whatever the hell google is doing? Oh yes.
But also community? People really over use that word. There is no Reddit (or HN) community. Some subreddits to communities, but most are just strangers passing each other in the fog. And that’s fine. I’m trying to buy a touring bike and plan by gender affirming surgeries, not find friends.
So I don’t think the paradigm people are referring to is going to Reddit and browsing about (Reddit’s own search engine is pretty crap, too), it’s targeted searches using Google but constraining results to a particular resource, in this case Reddit, but it works with any sufficiently good community, whether hacker news or f150forums.com, for example. It’s about going where the real users are.
Obviously ymmv depending on what you’re searching for. Insanely broad topical searches like “inflation” probably will yield crap results and dick pics from Reddit.
Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on.
Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from the start. It also allows for better formatting.
The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.
I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.
Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.
On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.
Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.
Say you make such a site, to review the 8 machines as mentioned by Adam. You're probably out $12-$15k just to get your hands on a decent set. Whereas the seo parasites that google refuses to stop enabling (largely because they get google paid; weird how that works, eh?) pay someone $10/page to spew content.
Yet another thing google and amazon have ruined by monetizing/incentivizing ultra-low quality leadgen masquerading as content.
Even if you did not actually review the machines and simply mentioned a list of actual large format laser printers that was on topic, there is no way to rank that website on relevancy alone. You'd have to get people to link to you which you can do by 1) paying them or 2) being interesting enough to get organic links. For niche topics, 2) pretty much never happens because there's too much consolidation in websites now and people don't make their own home pages on their own domains anymore (something that was popular when pagerank was invented). To rank you'd need to get independent domains that are currently ranking as authorities on the topic to link to you, and since those are just other spammy websites with commercial interests they definitely won't do that (they're not going to help a competitor rank). This pretty much leaves 1) the only viable option, which means you're out $10-$15k just to buy links, and you're not going to do that unless you're also another spammer with profit seeking in mind to offset those costs.
Google Search and Books does exactly that.
And it collapses the moment its "enemy" becomes aware of the system and starts to knowingly populate the library with false information or score skewing tactic - which sounds like exactly what had happened.
- I'm violating one of their moderator rules
- wrong subreddit try this one, you try that one and they recommend the first
- not enough upvotes for the question to be seen by anyone
- short attention span, if you don't get an answer in a couple of hours your question won't be seen by anyone
- hivemind bandwagoning, each subreddit has its set of default recommendations and everyone just repeats those forever
- US centric, especially frustrating for DIY searches where you can find only information specific to US common practices and regulations
Anything "non banal" and I'm more likely to go read a book or consult a professional. Tradesmen on reddit don't owe me answers for my hard to google DIY question.
It is frustrating navigating the sea of people who want to help but are also just googling, but you get an eye for that after a while.
People add Reddit to their searches specifically to add some social context to this information retrieval, rather than purely spam-filled Pagerank-based information retrieval.
There's a great talk by Anil Dash that I like titled "The Web We Lost" that centers around on this topic - https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/
Of all the companies in the world google will be the last to employ real humans to verify anything. Look online for the shear amount of forum threads full of people disgrunted with the their poor support response and lack of humans in the loop.
And Google already has a pretty good metric in the bounce rate without the need to add a "flag" option. That is, if you go back to the search page shortly after clicking a link, that link is probably irrelevant. I guess that SEO spammers found a way around that.
If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
Google is super rich, they probably can if they want to dedicate a huge amount of resources to that. It is hard for humans to win against bots in this game.
> If we forced spammers to make web pages attractive and informative to humans instead of crawlers we’d be in a much better place
It is something spammers do. They make the page attractive using psychological tricks (like typical clickbait). They make it informative by copying parts of Wikipedia or StackOverflow. It does not make the world a better place, and it is something Google fights against, with mixed success.
And, yes, allow the user to permanently filter out domains from their search results.
But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)
It’s not surprising that searching using a specific industry term that’s different from your understanding of it would bring results for that larger-than-you-thought category of product.
Further, the smallbiztrends article that comes up first for me, that Adam claims “not a single one is an actual laser printer”, contains several printers that use the same dry toner, electrostatic process as laser printers and that most people outside of printing, if asked to name the printing tech, would call a “laser printer” (because they’ve never heard of an LED printer). The print quality issues that started his search were likely fuser-related not laser-related, meaning these colloquially incorrectly called laser printers would have been fine.
Search engines have problems, but this video isn’t hitting on them for me.
Take this blurb for example:
> HP Designjet Z9+ PS Large Format Color Inkjet Printer As one of the most expensive printers on the market, this HP DesignJet Z9+PS provides exceptional color control with a secure wireless connection and fast printing. Without a doubt this is a large format laser printer of the highest quality which can produce prints up to 44 inches wide.
It's literally written in a way that is completely lying and designed to mislead and keyword stuff. It's not even trying to hide the fact that it's lying to a human reader since it contradicts itself immediately by calling it an Inkjet printer (which it is). It makes more sense when you realize it's not trying to trick the human reader at all! It's trying to trick Google bot!
The title of the article implies it is about laser printers or at the least laser-like printers, but the list contains inkjet printers, making it somewhat useless even if some of the results are in fact laser-like printers because it forces the person to continue to sift through the spam for what they need.
The whole article is garbage information and just because it accidentally actually included one or two laser printers does not mean it is a relevant result! Why are you nit-picking on Adam Savage being wrong about how there is indeed a laser printer when the literal whole article is mostly lies.
Clearly the problem here isn’t Adam’s lack of industry knowledge. Had he been served the correct results for his query he would have instantly learned what large format means in the industry and would have adjusted his query accordingly. The problem is that Google helps scammers and spammers at the expense of legitimate creators. Just like removing the like/dislike ratio on YouTube, which of course has caused a big increase in generated spam.
Maybe `a3 laser` or `wide format laser` ?
I work in this space (as a consumer of this equipment); all opinions here are my own, not my employer’s. For that reason, I’m reluctant to link to any specific vendor products, but if you’re interested, googling/YouTubing “b2 digital press” will give you some cool “how it works” videos.
I've never heard of a true wide format laser (A2 and larger), and I suspect the technology doesn't exist to make an affordable one. You'd need super-precise optics, an absolutely huge toner/fuser system, and a supply chain for all of the above.
And there would be limited sales. Wide format printers are used for high quality art/photo printing, signage and ads, and sometimes for fabric printing.
Lasers are optimised for office document printing. You don't often need an A2 or larger office document. And when you do - cartography and blueprints - you're probably going to use a plotter.
> True large format would be called a plotter
No, plotters are devices with pens. Layman may occasionally refer to a large format printer as a "plotter" because of its resemblance and it's faster to say, but nobody in the industry refers to them as plotters.
> will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce
You're describing large-format photocopiers. They operate exactly like an old-school optical-only photocopier which photographically exposes the drum (versus printers and digital copiers which image the drum via LEDs or a laser.) They are often called "plan copiers." Said friend's print shop has one and it is in fact made by Oce.
> Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18"
Many, many copiers can handle 12x18 paper. "Digital press" usually refers to enhanced paper storage, speed/volume, and finisher capabilities beyond what a typical office copier/MFC offers, often coupled with some sort of software and workstation for managing the print jobs. Often a "digital press" is indistinguishable from a heavy-duty copier with finisher units
> Now what's interesting is the building industry has the same problem that Adam Savage has, the prints (plan sets) must be able to get wet without the ink/toner bleeding.
Toner does not bleed.
> That has been solved with ink jet technology that uses a wax based ink. Cartridges full of wax balls in the standard process colors, an example would be a Canon colorwave.
Colorwave uses melted 'toner' and sprays it, like an inkjet, onto a page.
You're confusing Colorwave with the Phaser printers made by Xerox, which use dyed wax. Phaser prints used to be cutting edge back in the 90's for proofing work, but have long since been eclipsed by every other printing technology. The wax can be scraped off the page. If the page is bent too much, it crinkles. It's easily damaged by even slight heat. It's dye based not pigment based, so the prints fade and color shift very quickly. The technology is such garbage that Xerox has tried renmaing it - they now call it "colorcube" or something similarly stupid. They push per-page figures, while ignoring the machine's horrific TCO (they consume massive amounts of electricity and require a lot of service work; if disturbed too much while at operating temperature, molten wax gets into places it shouldn't be and requires an expensive service call. Etc.)
They currently use Radiant Fusing technology: https://www.tavco.net/articles/bid/57020/see-the-advantages-...
"Toner does not bleed." I know but I was describing the needs not that toner bleeds. I have worked in printing plan sets and the old way for color was ink jet usually the HP 5000 series. The industry moved to the colorwave because the ink jet prints would bleed when wet.
Yes, the colorwave uses toner but I was told it was in a wax medium. The toner balls certainly felt like wax if you handled them...
Seems like you are being a tad pedantic and not entirely correct...
Plotter is a pen moving over paper drawing continuous lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter
I say this as someone with a Draftmaster II in the spare bedroom...
edit: well, when i think about it, it does change definition of word if everyone starts calling plotters "cars", but there has to be a majority.
"Get great looking technical documents with the black and white plotters"
The B&W machines are plotters. The color machines are printers and I don't see anything pen based at all...
This is a garbage-in, garbage-out situation where both the web and the query are garbage and Google is doing what it can.
While traditional plotters used pens (aka pen plotters), I think a more accurate definition might be something that uses a set of motors to move a printing toolhead (be it pen, ink jet, knife, laser, router or whatever) along a medium (paper, vinyl, wood, etc) in a continuous line in the x and/or y direction. Where a traditional printer only moves the paper through in one direction and realizes the image 'line by line' across the perpendicular dimension.
Owning several vintage plotters (mostly pen) and a couple of modern pen plotters (axidraw, custom built). I have no problem imagining the same general mechanism driving any toolhead.
The HP7580, HP7475a, AxiDraw, every laser cutter i've seen, shopbots, modern hp designjets, etc .. All plotters.
Obviously if you use a roll of paper you need to run the paper itself back and forth unless you want to build something as big as a shopbot style table. I think the design for the 'roll-paper' plotters drove the design of much smaller plotters like the 7475a (which also moves the paper on one axis). Perhaps HP had a patent on that 'paper moves on one axis, pen moves on another?
Regardless, both designs were present in the 80s.
But it sounds like he doesn't actually want what's called "large format" in the industry, he just wants an A3/tabloid size printer that doesn't suck. A3/tabloid is not "large format" in the printing industry. Large format means like A1 or A0 sized paper, usually on a roll.
Probably the best way to get a cost effective high quality A3/tabloid size printer is going to be to buy a used commercial machine that's roughly 10-15 years old. You'll still be able to get parts and toner for it, these things normally last a few decades. But it won't be small and it won't be electrically efficient.
I've suggested that people try Bing or DDG rather than Google for some searches, but it seems it's more a question of luck rather than anything else nowadays.
Google do have a lot of headstart over other search engines. Maybe what we need is a Developers search engine which weights results towards programming sites and also downgrades those drivereasy type posts which have a lot of fluff followed by "download drivereasy to sort all your problems".
For me the quality of result on Google have been constantly going down. I sometimes find that among the first 3 results there is nothing that answer what I am looking for.
I know for sure that around 2008 Google had humans evaluating both the quality of a website and how well it was satisfying the query. As far a as I know, they stopped doing that a while back. Maybe it's time to resume that practice?
Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
> Also we expect alot for nothing! There are consumer review companies you can join, for a fee, to get genuine reviews on consumer products.
Those of us old enough remember, there was a time when online search existed in a goldilocks zone [0] of accuracy, productivity, and reliability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone
And then dark SEO found its way around it again. And now we have a new cesspit, but it looks like Google doesn’t give a shit anymore. They only change the number of ads interspersed among search results.
Time to build a good bookmark collection, I guess.
There are uBlock filter lists that help filter out generated content from search results, such as https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
It also could be that search quality is no longer their sought after metric, but I find that hard to believe
I think a regular, non-adblocked google search may result in almost the entire first page being ads. At this point, the ads are probably more relevant to the average user than whatever seo-spam "top x of y" would have been there on the first page.
At least ads lead you to the product directly rather than make you visit another shady ad-infested site in the interim.
There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well).
I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure.
Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.
It feels like they drown out all the useful information when I'm searching for stuff. I usually resort to constraining searches to forum sites but that rejects a lot of blogs and other useful sources of information.
I am far from being a Google fan boy - quite the opposite - but I can also be pragmatic and understand that this may be an unfixable problem.
The lesson here is that retailers of such products should be optimising for these kind of search terms. Of course there is going to be some bias but they will have at least some understanding of what they are talking about.
And, people using such terms also ought to expect a lot of SEO junk. I mean, when has anyone ever gotten a result that is anything other?
Seriously though, who is going to take the time and trouble to curate a list of the best laser printers who doesn't have a financial interest in doing so?
I just threw a laser out of the window because it got to the point where it would only print one page before jamming. I bought a Canon inkjet and that has lasted a couple of months, but now you have to push each piece of paper in to get it started, and a couple of weeks ago it stopped printing the left side of the paper, so I have to make sure everything I print is only on the right. So, this printer is going out the window as soon as the cartridge runs dry.
They do 12,000+ pages on a cheap toner and are built like tanks.
They use Postscript so drivers are reliable and have wired ethernet just works.
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&q=large+format+laser+...
Surely those are orthogonal requirements, the size of the sheets and the ability to successfully fuse the toner? Can’t we in all fairness take him at his word that he sometimes wants to print at a larger size?
I know Adam Savage is an ex-ILM professional propmaker and legendary Mythbusters host, but if he by million to one chance would call me to procure an A0 laser printer to print on special plastic sheets, I'd ask him if he mean it.
Then I realised the irony.