>Just skip to page 10.

I thought that was the running joke:

Q: Where's the best place to hide a body?

A: Page ten of Google.

But, joking aside, you can install greasemonkey/tampermonkey and get the googlemonkeyr script to manage your search results to be a bit more effective.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/31607-googlemonkeyr-fix-ju...

Get out, that script is huge. I could install small convenience scripts that I can audit, but this monster is 3K+ lines. Too risky.

> What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10.

This is a big problem with Google, today. Say I want to search for something - not to buy it - just some facts. The immediate first pages are all sites on how to buy, costs, online stores. I have to go to 8 or 9 to start seeing what I want.

This is today's Google.

I find myself just searching what I want + "reddit", to avoid the seo crap.

Can you trust reddit, though? There's plenty of social media campaigns out there that have people plugging stuff on reddit to promote some company or agenda.

Reddit is very useful for niche results that are normally functionally impossible to find any information on at all. If that is not the case, it's not really the shilling that's the biggest trouble, it is that people on Reddit have just become a cross-slice of regular society now. That means that when they answer questions about anything that even remotely requires domain knowledge, you can be entirely certain that they will be wrong in ways that you do not expect.

Try it and see. It’s good for fixing many problems that relate to coding too, but are of the type closed on Stack Overflow. Sure, the problem is basic, but when I’m stuck a ‘duplicate closed’ is unhelpful.

the per-community moderation makes marketing spam much harder

Blatant spam, yes, but if it’s like what’s being discussed here I’d be hesitant that it goes much better than amazon reviews. It’s just too easy to create fake accounts and you don’t need to be that smart to avoid telegraphing this.

Yes but at least Reddit has downvoting. I still take the results with a grain of salt, but most times the Reddit user points you in the right direction.

> What I've learned from this is that if you Google for some popular product, the first 5 pages are going to be SEO-optimized shilling sites. Just skip to page 10.

Is a less SEO-optimized site less likely to be a scam?

If shilling sites are more likely to be SEO-optimized, yes. One of the implications of Bayes' Theorem is that if observing A makes B more likely, then observing B also makes A more likely. A worked example:

Given:

P(shill) = P(!shill) = 0.5

P(optimized|shill) = 0.8

P(optimized|!shill) = 0.6

Then:

P(optimized) = P(shill) * P(optimized|shill) + P(!shill) * P(optimized|!shill) = 0.4 + 0.3 = 0.7

P(shill|optimized) = P(optimized|shill) * P(shill)/P(optimized) = 0.8 * 0.5/0.7 ≈ 0.57

P(shill|!optimized) = P(!optimized|shill) * P(shill)/P(!optimized) = 0.2 * 0.5/0.3 ≈ 0.33

Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default. It takes time to do so. And time is money. And 99% of the time, those who are willing to spend a lot of time to get on the first page of Google are doing it to gain money, not to spread knowledge.

I don't disagree with your main point, but spreading knowledge and making money aren't mutually exclusive.

> Yes, because knowledge isn't SEO-optimized by default.

Isn't it? I thought Google was trying to optimize their search engine for finding useful information, so if someone were to make an honest website that just tries to provide useful information (anachronistic as that may seem) wouldn't they hypothetically have the full manpower of Google's search team optimizing for finding it?

> Just skip to page 10

Results not from top 1M (1K, 10K, 100K) sites: https://millionshort.com/

Is it really easy market? I thought about running a VPN service, but how do I deal with abuses? People would use VPN for all kinds of things including bad ones. And investigators will come at me.

They will come at you, and you will help them or go to prison. That is the be-all end-all of running a VPN. If that bothers you, don't run one.

How do other companies deal with it?