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Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

Their links are shit outside of the US as far as I can tell. At least they are in the Netherlands. It constantly links to US/UK stores (amazon) which are useless for me, since I'm not paying thrice the product price for shipping.

It also doesn't know about most of the sites that actual Dutch price comparison sites (tweakers.net/pricewatch) know about, which always give me a better deal.

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I agree the products in the shop results are pretty bad. But i don't need the EU to protect the few dozen commercial comparison sites in the netherlands. At least google is honest about the links being sponsored. Tweakers is not.

How so? If something is advertising it is clearly labeled and green at the top, right? Or is there more going on?

Sorry to burst your bubble but all prices on pricewatch are paid for.

"Tweakers.net brengt 24 uur per dag, 365 dagen per jaar informatie over technologie, consumentenelectronica en daaraan gerelateerde onderwerpen. De bezoekers van Tweakers.net hebben een bovengemiddeld groot budget voor de aankoop van hardware, software en consumentenelectronica. Om deze mensen te informeren over de laagste prijzen en beste aanbiedingen worden deze bijgehouden in de Pricewatch. In 2014 werd de Pricewatch door het Nederlandse publiek uitgeroepen tot Beste Vergelijkingssite. Op dit moment bestaat de database uit ruim 800.000 producten met 2.5 miljoen prijzen bij ruim 350 winkels. Heeft u een webshop en wilt u deze graag aansluiten bij de Pricewatch? Neem dan contact op met onze verkoopafdeling via pricewatch@tweakers.net of telefoonnummer 020-204 2133"

That's just a sales pitch to have companies (proactively) push their current prices to Tweakers. Where do you see anything about paid listing there?

Any price not paid for is automatically removed after only 3! days. So effectively > 99.99% are being paid for but they still maintain the illusion that it is user generated content.

"Om de Pricewatch actueel te houden vervallen handmatig toegevoegde prijzen na automatisch na drie dagen. Bedrijven met een Pricewatch Manager abonnement kunnen een onbeperkt aantal prijzen toevoegen."

Yeah but it is still sorted based on price and they have a lot of meta data on the products and the stores. I don't see any problem. In the end they link to the sites themselves so it's not like you pay more via Tweakers.

There is no problem. It a great site! I prefer it over any other comparison site and google shopping big time.

The problem is the EU 'protecting' these commercial enterprises by fining Google 2.24b euro. A bit high and bit unfair because google at least discloses the links as sponsored unlike the sites being protected.

Then we fully agree ;)

My impression has always been that comparison sites have affiliate deals for everything they link you to. They're certainly not transparent about that (I'm sure it's in small print somewhere), but I assume it must be the case.

They're not doing it for charity, that's for sure. Not forgetting also one of the biggest affiliate networks in Europe has connections with a media company that has been very active on the lobbying front.

I'm not a fan of the shopping ads but I don't think anyone is mistaking these for anything other than what they - which is paid ads. Comparison sites, oth, in general don't do a good job of disclosure or even comparing prices.

tip: I never use "google search". I get far better results when I search on google maps instead, as I usually want to find something "here and now" and google maps helps on that, and as a bonus, it doesn't display any ads ;)

If I am to do a proper search while at home, on my desk-lap-top I use DuckDuckGo or go straight to Amazon, Argos, Maplin, etc websites depending on the item category.

It might be beta because I had never seen it before, but I got a 'sponsored pin' in google maps the other day. Identical to other location pins except a different colored and marked as sponsored.

I also never ever use it, I always opt for local price-comparison sites (like tweakers.net's pricewatch in the Netherlands).

Yep, Germany too.

That's not my impression - Google rarely shows me non-german shopping links. However their regular results results often tend to be a little too german / national for my taste.

One example are reviews (as in "{some product} review") - I often find that my search results are biased towards german reviews while I'd really prefer to see international reviews from the people most qualified to do so.

I disable country redirection by visiting http://google.com/ncr (once -- it sets a cookie, so beware[1]), but now I'm in the same boat as the gp -- I never get search results tailored for my location. Still better than the alternative.

[1] I've been doing this since forever. The earliest reference I could find for the feature is from 2004. Incredible: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/769/google_goto_generic_engli...

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