The rant is not so much about laser printers, but about search engines and crappy SEO. I mean, it starts with a laser printer problem he has, but he doesn't blame his printer. He blames Google for not helping him find a better laser printer.
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.
It's the same everywhere. Amazon and Google are absolutely worhtless for anything that is slightly not mainstream.
What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them. I am probably not getting the best deal, but it's better than no deal whatsoever or exhausting myself searching for a solution, or buying something in the internet that is not worth it.
I've done this succesfully for thousends of items. This is a lot of time and headaches I did not have to endure in front of my PC.
If I was him I would look for some distributor or just go where these laser printers are used and ask.
> What I personally do is, when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them.
You are a little naïve if you think that will work with IT (or any electronics).
The IT industry is a box-shifting industry. It resolves solely and exclusively around the world of sales targets and sales promotions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not telling the truth.
For example, an IT reseller is not "Microsoft Gold" (or similar for other brands) because they are awesome and always put the customer first. No, they are "Gold" because they've hit the sales targets (sure there are other "requirements" such as a minimum number of trained staff, but "requirement" number one is ALWAYS hitting the sales targets.)
So if you walk into your local shop, more likely the advice you get will be based on a combination of:
1) If they keep stock, what they have in stock
2) What the manufacturer promotion of the day is and/or if they need a push to get over the line with some manufacturer's targets
Maybe, but what are your alternatives? You won't find anything in Google or Amazon. If you're lucky you find a niche forum or reddit sub with enough activity. If you don't you're better off a distributor.
> Maybe, but what are your alternatives? You won't find anything in Google or Amazon. If you're lucky you find a niche forum or reddit sub with enough activity
Depends what you're buying.
If its a highly commoditised product like an average PC then it basically doesn't matter. Most commodity PCs are (basically) identical and its largely a case of "you get what you pay for", so your budget will do most of the dictating on what your outcome will be.
If its something more niche or more expensive (e.g mid-range/high-end commodity servers), then you've got two alternatives:
1) If you've got a group of trustworthy friends who either work in tech or are "techies" then the old-school word-of-mouth to find yourself a trustworthy reseller (there are some truly independent resellers out there, but they are a rare species, especially in places like the US or Europe).
2) As you say, do your own homework via niche forums / reddit / youtube videos / slack channels / discord / whatever you prefer. Remember that the goal here is not necessarily to know exactly what you are buying, but to make yourself an "informed consumer" so at least you know broadly what your options are.
Its a tough position to be in, I agree. I think the way the IT industry operates is ghastly and does nobody any favours.
> when I need some hardware I go to a local hardware shop for professionals and ask/buy from them
I don't think that I would get good buying advice that way. E.g. I was looking at eink Android tablets. The information I got from reddit, HN and youtube reviews was so niche that I'd have been suprised if a random electronics store salesman would have had it.
For that maybe, for laptop chargers and batteries, cables, electronic components etc I've got better luck at that store. Keep in mind that they are not a general public storem you don't buy consumer electronics there, but for professionals. Technicians of all kinds go there to buy, so they are not just salespeople.
This. High quality advice from an expert at a shop, who knows where to find even bigger experts, is absolutely worth paying extra for. The problem is: how do I know which shop has that expert?
And sadly, a lot of companies which have built up a stellar reputation over the years, at some point turn to cutting cost while milking their reputation into the ground.
Same here, the printers for my home, my office and wife's office come from the same printer shop. Yeah they won't have thousands of models but from the hundred they can provide I got things very usable - and the price difference was fully worth my economy of time.
> article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers
The top non-ad article I get on DDG is a top-10 article that includes 5 lasers, 1 LED printer: Canon MF741Cdw, Brother HL-L8360CDWT, HP M182, HP M479fdn, Brother MFC-L3710CW (LED), HP M404dn.
I did not check all of the printers in the list, but the top 4 are all ink jet printers. You're right that lower down the list there are some laser printers as well, but as a list of the top 10 best laser printers, the article is useless.
As is becoming apparent, there is no "large format [color] laser printer" that are in production right now. There are large format printers, color printers, and laser printers, but no printers that meet all three criteria at the same time. They are part mutually exclusive qualifiers.
These generated spam contents are indeed problematic, but if done correctly, should contain zero printer anyway.
That site is nothing but a ad-ridden, affiliate link stuffing, spam site with zero quality. A good search engine would not list useless garbage like that.
He can't know, but I'm the original commenter and it was the same article. Apparently it wasn't all ink jet printers, but just the top 4 of the list. Still not great for a list that claims to be explicitly about laser printers.
You can filter domains, at least. You can add "-pinterest.com" or just "-pinterest" to clean a lot of crap out of your searches. But I've always wanted a regexp search. Just a regexp, absolutely no algorithmic "help" of any sort whatsoever, and I've wanted that since Alta Vista was the go-to search engine.
I would like to be able to vote on search results and add certain sites to my default blocklist. I don't understand Google doesn't do that; crowdsourcing is exactly their thing, and this would be something that provides tons of valuable info to them yet would also be loved by their users.
I suspect such a system would be quickly gamed by spammers. With the bot-nets and other resources they have at their disposal, they would be able to flag and drown out legitimate sites or competitor sites in order to boost their own. Then the problem changes to being able to differentiate legitimate/regular users from spammers/black-hat SEO practitioners.
Maybe, or maybe there are ways to identify and eliminate the bots and spammers.
For example, it could be linked to accounts, and dishonest accounts get removed, together with all their votes. Or the votes are kept, but because they're so different from real people's votes, they only count for the search results shown to other bots and spammers.
And at the very least, your own votes should override anyone else's votes, so for regular users who actively vote, the search results will still be close to what they want.
I'm also thinking about classifying results by different contexts. A page might be very relevant in one context, and not at all in another. But do let users control those contexts.
Kagi allows you to set the priority of domains, as well as some other tuning. Though it is in beta at the moment, and the plan to charge for use eventually.
I suspect that most such articles are written by some poor soul living in an area where the best available jobs are writing garbage click farm articles. I wouldn't be surprised if some were even generated largely or entirely by machine. Calling them "crap articles" downplays the fact that they are not even really content, they are just a pretense to fill a page with affiliate links.
I tried with "laser printer", and the results were simply PERFECT.
Now, this may depend on one's location, but for me (here in Europe) it works perfectly well (and I'm not Russian), I just ignore the site language, since the results are mostly English anyway.
I tried the top several results (searching for "large-format laser printer" as per Adam Savage's rant). Most of the results contained no large-format laser printers and no useful advice on finding or choosing them. The most promising was an e-commerce page almost all of which was other things but one of whose items was indeed advertised as a "large-format laser printer". Unfortunately it was actually a "computer to plate" machine, suitable if you want to print very large numbers of identical copies of something, prices starting at a mere $20k, almost certainly in no way suitable for Adam Savage's needs.
(An earlier version of this comment listed the actual results and commented separately on each. Unfortunately, while trying to refresh one of the result pages which hung without displaying any actual content I accidentally refreshed the HN "Add Comment" page, which threw away everything I'd written, so what you get is the summary above. Sorry.)
Just looking at the domain it already looks like a massive failure in results. Clicking into the site it looks like a content farm. The top articles are:
And I checked: DuckDuckGo has a different top result, but the same problem: an article about top 10 laser printers that contains only ink jet printers. These are crap articles that lie intentionally and search engines should filter them out.