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Comment by juped | Hacker News Reader

This just works because Google is at a more advanced stage of decay into content farm dystopia than Reddit is.

Maybe. But content on reddit has better provenance data than content on the web in general; reddit has found a version of identity that strikes the right balance. You can take an arbitrary comment and be able to tell with reasonable confidence whether there's an at least somewhat "real" user behind it, in a way that you just can't for a random blog or a product review anywhere else.

That's what the marketers want you to think

your phrasing makes it sound like a conspiracy, but its really not.

Going on various social media platforms to decide on a purchase has already been an established pattern for more then 10 years. That's more then enough time for even the biggest corporations to act on.

Do keep in mind that the influencing agency doesn't actually have to write comments. Machine Learning is super good in determining if a given comment is about [topic], and wherever its a [positive] or [negative] comment.

I'm sure people already know that there are a lot of agencies around which sell you votes on relevant platforms, so any given company can - for peanuts(!) - just upvote positive 'real' comments and downvote the same for the competitors products etc.

There is very little you can 'trust' on the internet, as its just too profitable to spread propaganda through it. there have been several people that publicly admitted that their whole job was to derail critical conversations on various platforms. So even if you put in time and produce a quality comment... there are people who get paid just to write comments to make it look like misinformation.

True. I never want to look at articles directly from google because they're always full of bullshit with a low ratio of signal to noise.

Up votes make all the difference. They are relatively transparent while Google's PageRank isn't.

That doesn't really matter because both pagerank and upvotes are easily gamed.

Not Google, Internet.

I disagree with this sentiment.

The accuracy of Google's search results have gotten worse as time goes on. Once upon a time I could search for a specific system error code and get only results that contained that code. Now however, I am lucky if the search term I am looking for is on the same page, even after I add or try all the Search Modifiers.

Yes, the internet has gotten worse. Far more noise then signal. But if I search for: "Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7" I expect to find that within the results. Even if there are 0 results, that is valid feedback too.

If you actually include the quotes in your search term, you'll get the results you want, including zero results if there are no exact matches. Either of the following search terms will work:

"Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"

Error "98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"

In both cases, that search will currently return one page, this one.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Error+%2298yuasdvfnbi89yt7%2...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Error%3A+98yuasdvfnbi89yt...

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