Google’s broken. It’s been broken for a long time.
Searching for anything coffee or espresso related on Google turns up a bunch of content designed to separate people from their money as the first results.
Be it sponsored content at the top, Google’s re-write of a website’s content in the display results (in the form of quickly answering common questions), lots of shopping options for anything remotely resembling your search, the hardest thing to find on Google these days is honest, human written content. Google is no longer a search engine. It’s a drive money engine.
I mean, take a look at this search result to the right. “How to make the best espresso” returns sponsored links, shopping links, paid top placement content, and more sponsored content. No actual guides or independent, non-click-bait content by vendors anywhere to be seen.
Twitter, Instagram, most social media sites are also quite broken. Driven by algorithms designed to put ads in front of your eyeballs, the top search results you get on these websites are more often than nought some influencer paid a lot of money to hawk a product your way.
Reddit is breaking as I type this. Long a source for a wide variety of information on every topic under the sun (including a lot of dubious “anonymous expert advice”), there were ways and tools to filter through the bullshit and find actual, good content on coffee and espresso. That too, is going away.
AI is further breaking things. Clickbait has always been an issue on the Internet for anything you search for, but AI generated content – quite unbelievably, – has made things even worse. Now clickbait, affiliate link driven websites can auto generate “new” content every single day for just about every topic under the sun and coffee and espresso are not immune to this lying abuse by greedy people. And Google will happily rank these results at the top of their lists.
Google. Twitter. Instagram. Facebook. Reddit. Tiktok. All broken. All broken, when all you want to do is find interesting content, written by real people, who have had real experiences in coffee and espresso.
Finding real coffee and espresso content
So what can we do, to find real, valuable, informative content on coffee and espresso these days?
It can take a lot of work, it turns out. One of the primary ways is to get re-familiar with RSS (real simple syndication protocol), and subscribe, via a RSS reader, to actual websites that produce actual, real coffee and espresso content. A well managed and maintained RSS list of excellent coffee resources puts you in charge, and keeps the click bait away.
This post isn’t meant to be a tutorial on RSS, but if you aren’t familiar with the protocol, and are not sure what to do, there are plenty of great guides out there for getting started. Also, an investment in a good RSS tool is money well spent if you want to read real content by real people. I use Feedly, but there are others out there.
CoffeeGeek has multiple RSS feeds, baked into our website. Indeed, most WordPress driven website (and most websites in general) have them located at the /feed address off the main URL. So CoffeeGeek’s primary feed is at CoffeeGeek.com/feed/. We also have additional feeds for various sections; if you want to just subscribe to our new reviews, the address CoffeeGeek.com/reviews/feed/ is your source. Ditto for our guides and how tos, located at CoffeeGeek.com/guides/feed/.
Another way is to see if your favourite sources for coffee and espresso information have a newsletter. Chances are, they do, and they will send one to your mailbox every week or two highlighting the latest content on their websites. If you love coffee and espresso, and want real content by real people, this is one way to get timely content pushed your way.
We have a newsletter, and soon, a second espresso-focused one will begin in the spring of 2024.
Another excellent tool, when used properly, for finding great content on coffee and espresso is Flipboard, or more specifically, human curated content on Flipboard, via the Magazine feature.
Flipboard made a massive splash back in the early days of iPhones and Android phones by providing a very visual, magazine-like interface for all the RSS feeds out there on the Internet, on every topic imaginable. It was beautiful (still is!). It let you digest information in a very visual and clear way.
Like most other online content discovery tools, Flipboard too has fallen down the clicky baity, auto generated, affiliate link promoting pathways with its automated content. Right now I find the hashtag auto generated topics to be fairly useless for finding anything useful in coffee and espresso. Don’t take my word for it, go check out their coffee topic right now. I bet you’ll find a lot of “Check out this PRIME DAY sale on coffee gear!!!” stuff (I wrote this around Amazon’s Prime Day event).
But Flipboard has a human element that is still going strong, well over 10 years after the service launched. Actual human beings – unpaid by Flipboard, just doing it for the love of their hobbies – are curating magazines on the platform, finding awesome content that fits every hobby, interest, and passion imaginable. Flipboard also regularly does features on new Magazine creators; here’s a recent one.
It’s these Magazines that you want to be checking out and subscribing to. If you can’t figure out RSS, don’t want to go through the hassle of organizing and maintaining dozens of RSS feeds and then logging into your RSS reader every morning to read new content, this is an excellent option. Just find a regularly updated Flipboard Magazine that suits your hobbies and like, and every day you’ll have a visual, informative treat to enjoy on your smartphone, tablet, or even desktop computer.
Back in 2013-15, I maintained a Flipboard magazine called CoffeeGeek’ery. At its peak, it had over 100,000 subscribers. I had well over 3,500 content articles posted to it. Flipboard even featured it. But I let it lapse.
In the past month, I talked to my small writing team here at CoffeeGeek, and we decided to fire up the old magazine and bring it to life again. We have some new ground rules for the magazine:
- Any and all CoffeeGeek competitors will get listed. Daily Coffee News, Perfect Daily Grind, Sprudge, Barista Magazine, Fresh Cup, Roast Magazine, BeanScene, they’re all competitors but their content will be listed in this magazine. Because it’s about you, not about us driving traffic to CoffeeGeek.
- No video content (the video “reviewers” in the coffee sphere get enough traction already, via Google’s preference for video content)
- No AI generated content (with very few exceptions: mainly to make fun of, or poke at really bad AI coffee content)
- No “reviews” or content by vendors (again, they get all the traction and links they need via broken Google)
- Independent content gets priority. That means small blogs, fan sites, and other independent content not owned by some large company will be featured often.
- Not a promotion tool for CoffeeGeek. This means that we’ll limit the number of CoffeeGeek articles posted, and won’t use the space just to promote CoffeeGeek.
- All content will be read by the submitter, and have a descriptive lead in. We won’t post content that we don’t read and find interesting.
CoffeeGeek’ery is live and fired up again on Flipboard. Visit, subscribe, and I hope you enjoy this attempt to bring you real, honest content about coffee and espresso online, from a wide variety of sources.
