"The majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam."
I came across as very rude, but… is this really even something for which there was the slightest shadow of doubt? I mean if a study were to be done proving that “water is wet”, and then an article written about that, and then a full-page feature ad asking me to subscribe to that newsletter slapped in front of it, how am I supposed to conclude anything other than that this was a waste of resources… and of our time for being asked to read it?
In science, a paper must usually pass the novelty test - if a study has already been done before, then it does not rise to the standard to appear in a high-quality, high-impact journal. High school studies or elementary school projects proving that magnetism exists or that plants need water to grow or some such do not quality - which is not to say that they are not CRUCIALLY important for getting young minds interested in how the world works, which itself is a crucial component (motivation) for funneling kids into STEM fields; but it is to say that such a project does not (usually) rise to the status of being worthy of a truly international/global report?
People all over the entire English-speaking world were given this article to read. Sorry/not sorry, but I am outright offended at seeing what it contained. No solutions, no laying the groundwork for future studies like “this will a good metric by which to measure this phenomena moving forward”, nothing beyond “we looked, and found what everyone who has ever used Google in the past 5 years already knows”… and btw which the CEO himself has already openly admitted (in the past I would have offered to dig up the article I am referring to, EXCEPT GOOGLE DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE!!!).
To clarify, I am not opposed to REAL studies being done on this effect. But an “investigation” should go even the tiniest fraction of a step beyond what is already known, or else it is merely clickbait to talk about imho. Whereas if the scientists who did this did not realize that the CEO of Google himself has already admitted that it is broken - which was at the time of the Reddit protests so has been quite awhile now already - then… perhaps they should read more, about the subject that they are trying to educate us about?
I think you underestimate the number of papers out there just to verify things that are already “known”, because it is worth formally verifying these things with lots of data and then having that data when you wanna move further.
People all over the entire English-speaking world were given this article to read. Sorry/not sorry, but I am outright offended at seeing what it contained
What do you mean given? The journalists simply wrote a summary of a study and put it on this site. No one is forcing you to read it.
There is a bunch of straw-man-esque argumentation going on here - e.g. I never said that we were “forced” to read anything - as well as a “shift the conversation” move as well. What I said was that (1) I found the results of this study to not be novel, and (2) the website did force me to hunt around for where to click to dismiss their full-page ad in order to continue reading the text on the page. Since you are neither stating that the results of this study ARE novel, nor are you denying that those advertisements exist, I conclude that you actually in fact agree with me, despite decrying so vehemently that you do not. I will further point out that I never “forced” you to read my comment either, I simply put it out there on this site (Lemmy) for all to see, and moreover, I did not put a full-page banner blocking you from continue to use Lemmy in order to get past it? So really, what is the point of arguing further - isn’t there enough to do in the world that would be a better use of both of our time? :-P e.g., perhaps you will write open-source code to replace Google with, and if so I very much look forward to seeing how that pans out! :-)
As the study says, there has been very little formal research to verify this idea
I came across as very rude, but… is this really even something for which there was the slightest shadow of doubt? I mean if a study were to be done proving that “water is wet”, and then an article written about that, and then a full-page feature ad asking me to subscribe to that newsletter slapped in front of it, how am I supposed to conclude anything other than that this was a waste of resources… and of our time for being asked to read it?
In science, a paper must usually pass the novelty test - if a study has already been done before, then it does not rise to the standard to appear in a high-quality, high-impact journal. High school studies or elementary school projects proving that magnetism exists or that plants need water to grow or some such do not quality - which is not to say that they are not CRUCIALLY important for getting young minds interested in how the world works, which itself is a crucial component (motivation) for funneling kids into STEM fields; but it is to say that such a project does not (usually) rise to the status of being worthy of a truly international/global report?
People all over the entire English-speaking world were given this article to read. Sorry/not sorry, but I am outright offended at seeing what it contained. No solutions, no laying the groundwork for future studies like “this will a good metric by which to measure this phenomena moving forward”, nothing beyond “we looked, and found what everyone who has ever used Google in the past 5 years already knows”… and btw which the CEO himself has already openly admitted (in the past I would have offered to dig up the article I am referring to, EXCEPT GOOGLE DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE!!!).
To clarify, I am not opposed to REAL studies being done on this effect. But an “investigation” should go even the tiniest fraction of a step beyond what is already known, or else it is merely clickbait to talk about imho. Whereas if the scientists who did this did not realize that the CEO of Google himself has already admitted that it is broken - which was at the time of the Reddit protests so has been quite awhile now already - then… perhaps they should read more, about the subject that they are trying to educate us about?
I think you underestimate the number of papers out there just to verify things that are already “known”, because it is worth formally verifying these things with lots of data and then having that data when you wanna move further.
What do you mean given? The journalists simply wrote a summary of a study and put it on this site. No one is forcing you to read it.
Also, btw, did you go through the actual study? https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf
There is a bunch of straw-man-esque argumentation going on here - e.g. I never said that we were “forced” to read anything - as well as a “shift the conversation” move as well. What I said was that (1) I found the results of this study to not be novel, and (2) the website did force me to hunt around for where to click to dismiss their full-page ad in order to continue reading the text on the page. Since you are neither stating that the results of this study ARE novel, nor are you denying that those advertisements exist, I conclude that you actually in fact agree with me, despite decrying so vehemently that you do not. I will further point out that I never “forced” you to read my comment either, I simply put it out there on this site (Lemmy) for all to see, and moreover, I did not put a full-page banner blocking you from continue to use Lemmy in order to get past it? So really, what is the point of arguing further - isn’t there enough to do in the world that would be a better use of both of our time? :-P e.g., perhaps you will write open-source code to replace Google with, and if so I very much look forward to seeing how that pans out! :-)
man you’re a weird fella