Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself

Re:Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself by tadfisher on Thursday March 21, 2013 @12:36AM (#5412948)

For things like that, such a service makes complete sense. But for things that I spend real money on, I've already developed a filter in my brain to weed out anything that looks like paid shilling. This is why I stopped using Google Shopping after it went paid-only, and why I skip the first page of Google Search when researching products.

Now if they could make this a social thing, where real, authenticated, non-paid people recommend a good place to eat or get my suit tailored, I would be on board. Sadly, there is no money in that sort of service, as Yelp found out pretty quickly.

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Re:Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself by cliffu on Thursday March 21, 2013 @10:18AM (#5415155)

I find that even for topics related to money the top hits on Google are all completely useless spam. I was looking for information about companies selling software components and just found a bunch of "sellyourappnow.com" offering Fruit Ninja clones for a few hundred bucks.

For whatever reason businesses that love their margins more than their customers find it's much more convenient to astroturf services like Yelp than to actually provide something worth buying.

And services like Yelp always seem to find that it's more lucrative to extort money from businesses in exchange for reorganizing their ratings.

I'd love to have a way for regular people to recommend things that was invulnerable to astroturfing but I have no idea what it would look like.

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Re:Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself by tadfisher on Thursday March 21, 2013 @12:27PM (#5416324)

Stack Exchange gets pretty close, with its robust reputation/moderation system.

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