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http://headphones.techcrunch.com/

by benologist • 13 years ago

71 42 13 years ago

headphones.techcrunch.com

minimaxir2• 13 years ago

Related: FindTheBest's case study on TechCrunch: http://www.findthebest.com/partner-with-us

Odd that AOL chose to partner with FindTheBest, considering that AOL already has a business partnership to gdgt through Engadget.

rhizome• 13 years ago

Is this in addition to those silly "Elsewhere on the Web" "You may also be interested in" garbage units every half-assed news site and blog runs?

minimaxir2• 13 years ago

That's usually either 1) a stupid Wordpress plugin that everyone uses since no publisher cares about UX or 2) Disqus, which opts into displaying ads with comments, for fortunately is easy to opt out of.

leokun3• 13 years ago

No he's talking about Taboola or Outbrain. Taboola shows up everywhere now. It's those little images at the bottom of pages like on VentureBeat that have nothing the fuck to do with anything and are just noisy bullshit that make the internet worse. There's usually some kind of cleavage or weird picture to get you to notice and click. It's bullshit and no self-respecting sites would never add such a thing.

alexeisadeski3• 13 years ago

Thank god for theverge and Ars...

pstack• 13 years ago

Oh, no. Now how will we discern the regular shitty content from the new fusioned shitty content?

cpncrunch3• 13 years ago

What the fuck are you talking about? It's a buying guide, like the title says. I guess it's cool to put the knife in techcrunch on HN.

benologist3• 13 years ago

The thousands of (syndicated) machine-generated pages with scraped product reviews from CNET [1] stuffed with affiliate links, ending with tastefully concealed links to every "[manufacturer] headphones" [2], with no actual relevance or relationship [3] with anything TechCrunch reports on x 5 "guides". It's pretty conventional spam.

[1] extra irony: they nofollow all the CNET links to avoid making the links valuable to their competitor

[2] http://i.imgur.com/hgVaH3k.png

[3] http://techcrunch.com/tag/headphones/

cpncrunch3• 13 years ago

And why exactly is that bad?

Basically they use FindTheBest, which takes info from various sources (not just cnet). I guess AOL either owns FindTheBest or they have an agreement with them.

If that is bad, then what do you think of google? Their search engine is a machine-generated series of scraped website snippets, laced with adverts that track practically every site you visit.

Also, what do you think of linkedin (which I see you have an account on?) I can't even view your full profile because linkedin want to screw me for some money to even view anyone's profile now. Also they offer to tell you who has viewed your profile if you pay them money. That seems a lot more shitty than what AOL/Techcrunch is doing in my opinion.

I think all large companies are evil in some way.

crumblan• 13 years ago

I thought the purpose of TechCrunch was content farming and search engine spamming for startups they have a vested interest in.

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

Can we page Matt Cutts? Would like to hear his thoughts on something like this...

tristanperry• 13 years ago

I think that Google are aware of this. As above, small and large businesses used to do this sort of thing. The animal updates then killed off small businesses who done this, but there was no real negative impact on the bigger guys/the brands. I'm sure it sounds cynical, but I don't think this was a coincidence.

marban2• 13 years ago

Yes, it's an unethical, poisonous, money-grabbing pattern that should be banned but aren't there enough folks on HN that are actually making money off of something like this? Talk about the many scraping, passive-income, etc. threads.

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

Used to work until 2009 or so. Even NYT had shopping.com/ Mysimon /Pricegrabber style sections with borrowed content. The idea is that since NYT is trusted everything there ranks high, and it did. Now it does again since the pendulum has gone so far on the "big brands can do no wrong" side. It's all Google induced and Google cannot find the power to penalize big brands, other than a half-assed 2 week or so demotion.

Today, US Today has eHow powered sections for examples and they rank extremely high.

marban2• 13 years ago

...rank extremely high

For broad terms or real long-tail stuff?

kbar13• 13 years ago

sort by user ratings
see http://headphones.techcrunch.com/l/904/Razer-Electra
close tab and never visit that website ever again

fastball• 13 years ago

What's wrong with Razer Electra Headphones?

sp332• 13 years ago

That's odd, since the bars below the 5-star rating claim no one has rated the headphones yet.

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

Why they do it? Because it works (until it hits HN front page).

From my experience, running client sites, Google is blindly trusting anything from big brands, screwing the small business sites. It's almost like content quality doesn't matter at all, especially after all the animal updates (Panda, Penguin etc.) Small sites are desperate as they have lost as much as 90% of traffic for no apparent reason.

It must be profitable for Google too, their earnings have skyrocketed since then, even as they hit a plateau in market share. Occam's razor and all.

Edit: The competing theories as to why Google does it are that Google wants to shake small business into advertising, considering that brands already do. Once you lose traffic you can advertise or close doors. Another one is that so-so search results are better to increase ad clicks. Considering that Google has a monopoly and still a strong brand, the second theory cannot be ruled out.

eksith2• 13 years ago

If the shakedown theory is true, and I'm not sure that it is, that's an order of magnitude beyond the evil threshold.

One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads. I feel some people are far too concerned with getting onto the top of Google rather than improving the scaffolding to their sites and driving organic traffic back.

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

If the shakedown theory is true, and I'm not sure that it is, that's an order of magnitude beyond the evil threshold.

Now I believe it is true, would not have believed it a few years ago. This Larry Page era is full of surprises, and lets remember that all his pet projects (Android, Google+, X etc) are tolerated by investors because earnings are being increased by 20%+ a year. So Google has to do all it can to increase CPC and number of clicks. The ads on pages have been maximized and then some so they need to resort to tricks and penalties for sites. IMO, this is done at senior level Google execs and then Search execs find the excuse to match search algorithms with what's most profitable for Google. So the lowly search engineer is "changing the world" as the execs count the ad clicks, CPC--and their stock options.

Who wrote this: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. " ? Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in academia.

> One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads

The problem is that a lot of people use search to find companies, services and products. Getting frozen out of that is a major handicap. We should support alternative SEs so we have a healthy competition.

acoyfellow2• 13 years ago

I've seen SMB sites get "getting screwed" by Google, because they had hired an SEO guy who got them backlinks that ended up getting taken away. Or they still have bad on-page SEO.. Most of the time it was a one time hire kind of thing, and they just expected the traffic to always stay the same with no effort.

This guy named Glen runs an incredible SEO blog, and he's got case studies of brand new sites/page [1]. He explains how single page sites and YouTube videos are beating out big established sites. His SEO work and breakdowns on his blog are outstanding, and there is great information on there. The marketing departments of every startup should be on this guys mailing list. I have 0 affiliation with him.

I've never seen anyone bring his name up on HN, and it's about time someone does. He has been saying all year: 2013 has been awful from Google's standpoint. People are gaming the system harder than ever, and maybe theres some smart people on HN who could use bits and pieces of what Glen does/preaches.

Since Google is always changing the algo, Startups tend to avoid considering using SEO as a way to get immediate results.. But there is still some time left in 2013, and instead of all the information marketing spammers benefitting, I believe it should be HN (legit businesses & startups)!

[1] http://www.viperchill.com/google-storm/

pothibo• 13 years ago

This is crazy. Just subscribed to his mailing list. Thanks!

Thereasione2• 13 years ago

This whole analysis is bad and sensationalistic. His observation is based on 1 search term. In order to make right conclusion someone should analyze at least tens of thousands (or even hundred of thousands) search terms. He also analyzed 1st page results only. He didnt even try to see what sets apart 1st page results from 2nd/3rd/4th. He points to single factor, totally disregarding other factors and their relative importance as part of whole algorithm.

Thereasione2• 13 years ago

They dont even rank: http://i.imgur.com/mO1DTYq.jpg

distantparts• 13 years ago

In my experience, the animal updates and other recent changes definitely favour the big brands. My main car reviews site (established 1997) was hammered by Panda, and has never recovered, while the big brands I competed with have been left untouched, despite having content that is often lower quality.

While I think Google has done a really poor job of helping smaller sites who've been unfairly hit by these changes, I don't think there is anything underhand going on. I just think Google decided to tune their algorithms to minimise the number of bad results they show.

They appear to be happy with results that favour big brands that they trust, while excluding most of the worst content farms, even though the cost of that is potentially failing to deliver high quality results from smaller sites. I'm sure they have user satisfaction statistics that justify this trade-off they're making. No malevolence or greed is required from Google in this scenario.

In the short term, this is probably good for Google's users, but in the long term, it's creating a two tier web, where new entrants will find it more difficult than they should to compete with established brands.

p.s. There seems to be a similar tradeoff made in terms of newer pages being favoured over older, more relevant pages. It makes sense in some cases (news for example), but in my view, the newness signal is too strong at the moment, and it's hurting the quality of their search results.

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

Wow, what a lovely product description for headphones...

"Grado PS1000 The Grado PS1000 headphones cost $1695, which is the most of all Headphones Additionally, the Grado PS1000 have a sensitivity of 98 dB, which is 6 dB lower than the average for all Headphones. "

iaskwhy• 13 years ago

I'm sorry but I really don't understand what the issue is. I can understand if the problem is that they are using the content from http://head-phones.findthebest.com/ under http://headphones.techcrunch.com/ , not sure if this is ok or not. But about the actual content, is there a problem with a summary of the most important stats of a given list of products?

contextual• 13 years ago

So we're upvoting this spam content on the front page of HN?

anaphor• 13 years ago

head-fi is still my go-to source for headphone discussion :)

belowlightsblue• 13 years ago

AOLs and content farms are nothing new: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/02/you-may-not-like-it-b...

Here's more context about Findthebest with someone from there trying to claim that they have a large editorial team that hand edits the lists http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo

induscreep• 13 years ago

Audio Technica ATH-M50 no there.

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