HouseFresh

Consumer Reports is the original here. I hope they have stayed true to their mission without getting sucked into the affiliate link stuff. I tend to go to YouTube to find videos where people buy a bunch of stuff and test them, like Project Farm. There are some that lean on sponsors and affiliates hard, which can call their integrity into question if the results are largely opinion based. If I don't hear any negatives and it sounds like someone is just ready marketing copy from the company, I disregard everything they say and don't go back to their videos. There are probably still some niche sites for some things, but they are getting harder and harder to find. HouseFresh wrote an article about this a while back that made a bit of noise[0]. [0] https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ and follow up https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

There was another article here on HN some time ago on how big media publishers are littering the web with spam recommendations https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451 (https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/) This listed review spam from Dotdash Meredith which I used a clue to search and block all sites by them using uBlacklist. Edit: Found another article saying the same thing there are only few big media giant's dominating search https://detailed.com/google-control/

Can anyone tell where this screenshot comes from? https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/best-air-purifiers-f…

1. UVA/UVB is more efficient in terms of $/watt than 222nm KrCl*, but they're FAR less efficient in terms of germicidal dose than UVC (both 254nm and 222nm). You have to output a LOT of UVA/UVB to kill pathogens at anywhere near the same rate as UVC. I would consider UVA to basically be only "technically" germicidal--it's just not in the same league at all. 2. They're technically considered a cancer risk because UVC is considered "actinic" and so has been grandfathered into that definition, but it actually seems like commonly used UVC wavelengths generally don't penetrate deeply enough into skin to plausibly cause cancer--and you have to keep in mind the difference between 222nm and 254nm. There's definitely no evidence that 222nm is a cancer risk,** but I'm even suspicious of some of the older 254nm studies that report tumors in hairless mice exposed to 254nm. 254nm UVC is produced by low-pressure mercury lamps, and they're *almost* monochromatic, but not quite--they also produce low levels of UVB, which is a serious skin cancer risk even at very low levels (see figure 6 in https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10643389.2022.2084315#d1e… My lab is currently trying to reproduce that result with a filtered/true-monochromatic 254nm lamp and we are just not seeing any tumors in those mice. Those poor bastards are being exposed to such high doses of 254nm that their skin looks super gross, cracked and bleeding, WAY higher doses than anything you'd encounter in a…

> A great deal of LLM-generated content shows up in comments on social media. True, but going after classifying the source (user's commenting patterns) is a better signal than the content itself. That said, for us (Kagi) it's a touchy area to, say, label reddit comments as slop/bots. There's no doubt we could do it better than reddit (their whole comment history is only 6TB compressed) but I doubt *reddit* would be pleased at that. And it's a growing issue for product recommendation searches -- see [1] at last section for example on how astroturfed reddit comments on product questions trickle up to search engine results. > Another interesting trend is false accusations of LLM use as a form of attack. Fair again, but the question of AI slop is much more about "who is using the tool how" than the content of the output itself. Also we're looking to stay conservative. False negatives > false positives in this space. > And the big state actors who are known to use LLMs in misinformation campaigns are battling the US for AI supremacy and so have an incentive to attack the US on AI since it's currently in the lead. Not wrong, we're especially going after the deluge of low effort slop, and cleaning up the internet for our users. Highly sophisticated attacks are likely to evade detection. > Especially if you're relying on volunteers, this seems prone to abuse in the same way, e.g. Reddit mods are. The human labelling/review aspect is expected to stay small and from trusted…

But repairable, cheaper to operate (power and consumables), and quieter for the CADR than Coway. https://housefresh.com/coway-airmega-250s-review/ https://housefresh.com/nukit-tempest-review/

The CR-boxes are rather bad in that regard, but the newer generation of PC-fan builds are significantly better than mainstream HEPA purifiers: https://housefresh.com/cleanairkits-luggable-xl-review/#the-cost-to-ru…

Such is the nature of probabilistic systems. Generally speaking, LLMs read the top N search results on the topic in question and uncritically summarize them in their answer. Emphasis on uncritically, therefore the quality of LLM answers is strongly correlated with the quality of top search results. Relevant blog post: https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/

Probably abysmal Since xslt is built dynamically in the DOM most crawlers don’t build the site and pick up the metadata. Although I’m not convinced chasing SEO is a useful endeavor any more https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/ I wonder if AI crawlers would have the same problem and pass over the site

The air purifier review site Housefresh dug into why sites like theirs were seeing less traffic back in the spring, and it amounts to a handful of companies buying up popular magazine/blog brands and using them as affiliate farms that cross-post to sites within their networks of brands to boost visibility: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ On HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239811 And their previous article mentioned in that post generated a lot of discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433451

I've seen some interesting articles lately on Forbes' transition from news site to content farm. I couldn't find the one I originally read, but this one seems to be covering the same bases. https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-farm-social-… Edit: I think this is the article I originally read, but I'm not 100% certain. https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

I’ve been happy with Austin Air purifiers. Most of the other brands help, but don’t handle most VOCs. If you have allergies or other issues, it’s better to stick with top quality brands. https://housefresh.com/austin-air-healthmate/

Thought this was a interesting read about Google's search result changes recently: https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/ > Unfortunately, Google’s documentation only deems “site abuse reputation” as spam when the site uses third parties to produce and/or publish pages to manipulate search rankings. The article argues that it will just shift the pattern of spam companies so that they can generate their own spam in-house.

Some of the articles linked, are basically issues I was already aware of (such as all product review sites are turning into copy-pasta). I at least have sympathy for the folks at: https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ However, mostly Google's included comment is personally hilarious. The weird craziness some people at Google must have to deal with. > Lily Ray, 'when we told our client, they said "that's literally not going to be possible"' > Google, 'Genuinely curious, what's impossible in guidance like "discuss benefits and drawbacks based on your own research"'

Yes really. Those listicles exist because Google became stricter about a different type of content- product reviews. https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ The business model of the listicles is: clicks from Google + commission from Amazon/similar = revenue for the website "In 2022, e-commerce accounted for nearly 19 percent of retail sales worldwide." So imagine if 19% of all retail decided they needed to rank highly on Kagi to get a slice of that huge revenue. Kagi's team wouldn't stand a chance against what they thought up.