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How Price Comparison Site Results in Google Hurt Consumers

Started by Devindra Hardawar · 10 months ago

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digg_url='http://digg.com/gadgets/Why_It_s_Impossible_To_Find_Good_Tech_Gadget_Reviews_With_Google';




Ask yourselves this, when last have you been able to find a decent tech review on Google? Sure, sometimes you may come across one or two reviews f ... Continue reading »

19 comments

  • Angela

    2 years ago

    <del>As an online shopper, I LOVE price comparison sites and don't see the harm in allowing online consumers to participate in online one-stop shopping. Personally, my morning isn't complete until I've checked the daily deals at www.---.com or their sister site www.---.com That's the first place I go if I'm looking for a specific item, since the filter allows me to not only see which retailer has the item the cheapest, but any current promotional coupon codes that are valid on that purchase. If saving time and money is wrong, I don't want to be right...</del>
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  • Devindra

    2 years ago

    Angela is a plant, but I'll bite for now: I'm not saying I don't find these sites useful, but do they really need to get in the way search of results as they do? If only Google had some sort of filter to turn these things off, then I would have no reason to complain. Hell, you should understand my pain being affiliated with some comparison sites and all ;)
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  • Wing

    2 years ago

    Angela, the thing about price comparison sites is that they offer price comparisons. Sometimes (most often) I don't want that. In fact I only want the price of something at the end of my purchase-making decision. They just shouldn't show up when I Google for a review or other articles. The worst thing they do, as Devindra said, is that they mascarade themselves as review sites, and that is not only annoying but also wrong.
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  • Coupons

    2 years ago

    I guess I'd rather see a price engine show up than those funky ad sites where they scrape the world and and it's bareley legible.
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  • Devindra

    2 years ago

    What does that even mean? We want legitimate reviews to show up when we search for them. Sites like yours, (*cough* www.DEALTAKER.com)</i>, just make that entire process difficult. Linkfarms are annoying in their own right, but at least I usually only have to see them when I mistype a URL. I see sites like yours every day amongst my general searching and they never cease to be annoying.

    I'm a fan of deals as well, I'm totally in love with <a href="htttp://www.bensbargains.net" rel="nofollow">Ben's Bargains and Techdeals, but they also don't get in my way when I need to get legitimate searching done.
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  • PENIX

    2 years ago

    But what makes a good reviewer? User opinions are frequently unreliable. One man's trash is the next man's treasure. Often times I've seen bad reviews when the user was clearly using the product wrong. "Expert" reviews can't be trusted either.
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  • Andy

    1 year ago

    we use powerreviews to allow consumers to review products. The thing I like is even if we reject a review because it is off topic to the product, etc. all reviews for powerreviews will be posted at www.buzzillions.com. There are a lot of companies getting on board and soon if not already I expect to see buzzillions being the place to get unbiased reviews from consumers.
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  • Rob

    1 year ago

    When you are searching for Samsung 906BW or any other "keywords" like this you get results with price comparsion sites. But when search phrase contains many, many words like 'Samsung 906BW black silver 19 inches canada' than very often all what you see is spamblogs without any content but adsense. This problem is much bigger in my opinion.
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  • Julian

    11 months ago

    I couldn't agree more, Devindra. However, it's not just these price comparison sites that are the culprits. One major piece of open source e-commerce software - OSCommerce - used by thousands upon thousands of online retailers, always put the word "review" on every product page. This "review" of course refers to customer reviews, but how to distinguish them from "expert" reviews? And the annoying thing is that these keywords show up even if there are no reviews.

    As a site owner and author of many "expert" reviews (and I use that term in all humility), it is very disheartening to see these "empty" search result show up before articles and content which you've worked so hard to produce, which you know can benefit others but is being hidden in the spam.
    reply
  • Adrian

    11 months ago

    You should check out http://www.gmbmg.com which tries to filter out some of that crap in your google searches.
    reply
  • elGordo

    11 months ago

    You can also try to filter your Gooogle search by using the minus sign. For example, search for "Samsung 906BW review -price". The -*criteria* in this case will automatically remove any search results that contain the word price. Exclude different terms for some slight variations on your results.
    reply
  • Rajan

    11 months ago

    reply
  • Devindra

    11 months ago

    @Rajan Try another search?! Blasphemy!

    Honestly though, thanks for bringing up Live search. I've heard good things, though I'd still rather Google fixed their own search results.
    reply
  • dumb

    11 months ago

    How many damn price comparisons do we really need though? I am SICK of trying to find information about a product and can only find keyword spammed price comparisons. They don't even have the product half the time. Kill 'em all I say!
    reply
  • sunflower

    11 months ago

    The real answer is to use a search engine other than Google. A better search may exist... someday. I've used Yahoo search more recently for some things.

    Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo? The better answer is to simply build a better search engine, with a clean interface like Google.
    reply
  • Heofz

    11 months ago

    Check out this then:

    http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/

    That site was put up specifically for this reason :)
    reply
  • Margaret Seymour

    11 months ago

    Point taken. But I doubt our collective "vote-ups" have the power to do anything about it.
    reply
  • gene haynes

    11 months ago

    The problem of overadvertising can be addressed.

    If consumers organized large-scale boycotts of specific products or services, we could 'take back the streets' from the market bullies.

    It is deflating to hear people say over and over in America, 'there's nothing we can do.'

    It's time for savy Americans to stand up for what they want instead of watching our ownership dwindle. The public owns the market. The market should not own us.
    reply
  • Aaron

    11 months ago

    They appear to have taken it down unfortunately, but there used to be http://mindset.research.yahoo.com which had a slider for 'buy' or 'find out information' and it reorganized the search results based on where you put the slider. I used it a couple of times when it came out and it was pretty nifty.
    reply

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