Is Google Search Becoming a Pain to Deal With?
Irrelevant results on the search pages in Google are nothing new, and we have had people criticizing it time and again. But that used to be a part of exceptions, not the average. I mean, the name Google is synonymous with search, right? It is the leader and authority when it comes to web search, and people expect it to deliver the most relevant results for each and every query.
Looks like it isn’t the case anymore. The quality of results that Google shows up have been deteriorating, and in the past week Google has drawn a lot of flak from all corners of the tech industry.
It started with Vivek Wadhwa’s post on TechCrunch on why we need a new and better Google. It’s an interesting post where he voices his frustrations on the Google search results, and how content farms and spammers have dominated it, thereby pushing out quality content from the first few pages.
It’s pretty alarming to find that Vivek’s students, who wanted to get the work history of certain company founders from Google, ended up abandoning it in favor of Blekko, a relatively new kid on the block.
While Vivek’s post was still hot, we had Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame talking about how duplicate content seems to rank higher than the original content in Google’s search result pages. He was taken aback when he found that content syndicators outranked his site Stack Overflow for the content that was originally published on his site.
Jeff also links to a number of articles in the recent past that talk about the decreasing quality of Google search results.
The problem here is that the people who are criticizing Google are not some Tom, Dick or Harry who don’t know what they are talking about. These are eminent personalities, who are far more tech savvy than you or me. And they know the nitty-gritties of searching on Google. They know things like intitle: or inlink:, and how to use them. So when they are saying something’s wrong, something IS wrong.
And I personally too find Google’s results less relevant then they were, say, a year back. Obviously, there are all kinds of spammers targeting Google, but the problem is that Google’s algorithm changes haven’t been good enough to weed them out.
So, I’d like to ask all of you – what do you think about this issue? Is there really a problem or has it been blown out of proportion? Are you able to easily locate what you want in Google? Or have you been dealing with the same problem?
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This is called evolution!! Google makes 200 tweaks to it’s algo every year and possibly more. Webmasters, including myself, are affected by things such as “May day” and related stuff.
There are plugins available on the Internet which allow duplicate content to rank higher. I can very easily use it, but I don’t. Those who do, justify that this is what evolution is all about.
If web spamming is increasing, it’s because on the whole, the use of Internet is increasing. Google is trying to adjust, but only little, and rightly so. They would not want to risk too much especially when Facebook is perceived as a rising thread. Imagine a Facebook Search Engine.
Anyways, my point is, that these things may be true but it’s one step closer to attaining perfection, which can only be pursued, can never be achieved.
Google Rocks and I love it. I know they will tweak it for the better, wait and watch !!
I agree with Abhijeet Mukherjee. I’m a university reference librarian with nearly 20 years’ experience searching all sorts of digital databases, and have also used Google from its inception. I regularly use allintitle and allintext and site:.edu etc.
Over the past year, I have found the results I get full of what librarians call “false drops” — that is, things that don’t fit the search criteria well. And, there are a huge number of secondary leads — for instance, when I try to look up a city’s name, or a person’s name, the first results I get just lead me to online services who will further look for me for a price, or at the least, by making me wade through pages of ad-filled junk.
Having offering web support for small businesses for a decade now, I also see an increase in irrelevant Google search results this past 6 months. Mostly useless results are especially noticeable searching for information about popular Android apps, for example.
Spammy results like this were also pervasive early in Google’s history but they recognized this was not useful to searchers and things greatly improved.
“Junk food” sites are often Adsense driven. These reduce the quality of search results, inflate Adwords costs and create a degree of separation from the product/service and the audience. But Google profits from both Adwords and Adsense so who is to discourage these irrelevant pages?
This year my clients are asking to shift from Adwords to Facebook ads, whose audience targeting ability is frightening. Since endorsement by a friend is supposed to be the most qualified advertising, Facebook will be giving Google a run for the money. I still trust an expert review as much or more than my highschool friend, personally, and I like Google so I hope better results are coming! Interesting times.
I just *really* miss being able to filter searches by country (“pages from ____”). The spam… meh, haven’t noticed.