What's Happening To Google?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Is Google losing the war with the rising tide of crud on the internet?

Google is the best place to search for information on the web. But what’s gone wrong with it today? I’m trying to do some research and it seems that an increasing number of the first 20 results turn out to be links to crappy, advert infested, link pages from “search sites” (<- please note heavily sarcastic quotes). Pages that provide zero useful content and heaps of irrelevant adverts. And what happens if you click on the links they provide, the ones that appear to be what you really want? Does it take you straight there? No, of course not, first it spews up a dozen cookies onto your computer, and then gives you the desired pages in a sub-frame, just in case you were thinking of leaving them. Can’t let you get away with a few more banner Flash adverts!

But wait! That’s only if the link they’re giving you is even remotely up-to-date. 50% of the time it’s broken. And don’t get me started on advertising link sites that link to further advertising link sites.

Either way, it’s taking 10 times as long to find the actual information I actually want.

Has anyone else noticed this?

2

I’ve noticed that as well, I have a terrible time finding anything useful, a lot of the times the sites that come up have nothing to do with the search words I’ve entered.

3

Google will go public shortly for @25 BILLION DOLLARS. When someone offers you a sackfull of money to be a whore, wear appropriate clothing and brush your teeth…

4

Well if it’s providing search results that don’t link to actual content, but only to useless “search engines” that are piggy backing off it, I’d say it’s value is rapidly heading downhill.

5

I may not have my facts entirely straight on this, so apologies if I get this wrong, but I believe that companies can pay to have their site listed first. So, when you search for something, the first sites you see paid to be the first. I believe I saw that someone in France is suing Google because another company paid to have their site listed first whenever someone searched to a brandname owned by the first company. Trademark infringement. I’ve noticed those “search engines” as well, and I’m assuming they are paying to be listed where they are.

6

Try Teoma.com, it’s supposed to be better and use a better algorithm.

7

Dudes. After a bit of time, it’s easy to spot 99% of the search engines before you click on the link.

8

That’s why I ask Jeeves.

9

You don’t have your facts straight :wink:

Google’s search results are not sponsored in any way. Instead you can buy relevant “adwords” which are listed on the right side of search results (and are clearly marked ‘Sponsored Links’).

The recent rash of misleading search engine results is probably caused by people manipulating their rankings thorugh bogus pages, link farms and the like. Google’s always tweaking their search algorithms, so I don’t see this as a symptom of general quality decline, but something that’ll be handled eventually.

I also seriously doubt they’re whoring themselves out in anticipation of an upcoming IPO. People will be falling all over themselves to get a piece of Google, they hardly need to sell out to suspect third parties.

10

Twenty-five billion dollars? That’s $25,000,000,000. Enough to make everybody in a smallish city pretty rich.
How does that work? Does someone actually hand someone else the money?

And yes, there does seem to be more paid stuff among the “hits”.

11

Relaying what I could understand from a radio interview with a Google employee a while back:

Site ranking in a Google search is determined by that site’s importance - effectively a measure of how many other sites point to the site in question, only it’s not just the number that matters, but the weight of the referencing sites (i.e. how important they are by the same criteria) and the geographic distribution of the referencing sites (so if you have a large number of large sites from a variety of domains pointing to your site, you will list higher). There is logic in the ranking algorithm to filter out self-referencing sites, and also those sites with affiliates who exist just to point to each other.

All in all, they’re pretty effective at filtering out sites which attempt to be listed high in the ranking by fooling the system - it takes a lot of money to artificially establish a framework of internet sites to make them list high, whereas for truly important sites, it happens quite naturally.

12

I believe in an Initial Public Offering, they sell shares. I heard or read somewhere the 25B figure…Of course I could Google it…

13

They also sometimes appear above the regular results. For example, I plugged in “recliners” and received this result:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=recliner&btnG=Google+Search

JCPenny and PriceGrabber have sponsored links abve the regular results, with a bunch of other sponsored links to the right. Either way, as Petter says, they are very plainly marked.

14

I was doing some searching on Google the other day for some products, and ended up getting a ton of links to eBay, but the links were disguised. They were cleverly disguised to, as I got a large amount of them, and went through a number of different ones all pointing to eBay auctions before I just gave up on my research and moved on.

I haven’t been getting as many links to blogs lately though, which is a relief. I had heard they were working on a separate engine system for blog links but I don’t know what happened to that.

15

This is in reference to rumrasin and Lisa-go-Blind’s comments.

Teoma is owned by Ask Jeeves, and probably serves as the Ask Jeeves back end. I was just playing around with it, and in their little “How It Works” infoblurb page they talking about Relevance as the “Holy Grail” of search engines. They use the phrase Holy Grail twice.

The thing is, I tossed some random things in there just to see what it spit back out and noticed two problems. In one result, it listed a message board I visit. This is a no-no. The MB has a robots file requesting not to be spidered. Having a search engine trying to download every single page you have. especially when a bunch of them are dynamically generated will murdalize your bandwidth and possibly cause your server to fall over under the load. This is not being a good member of the web community.

Another thing, for several of the terms I put in (my username here, specifically) I got back a bunch of search results relating to the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. While I thought it was cool that all of the results in the first page were related to M.A.M.E. I don’t grok why a search for 1010011010 would get that as a result. Also, since I was not even thinking about M.A.M.E when I made the search, the results were very much irrelevant.

Anyway, Teoma looks like it could be really useful when it works the way you want it to, but if it decides that you’re not searching for what you think you’re searching for, rather than getting a bunch of results, many of which may be irrelevant, you’ll end up getting nothing bunch a bunch of links that are relevant, sure, just not to what you’re looking for. So, yeah. Needs some work.

And back to the subject at hand
The recent case in France deals with the services Google offers to paying advertizers. If you buy adspace in Google results you get to specify a list of search terms that will bring up your site in the “sponsor” section of the links. E.G. If you’re a Ford dealership in Wisconsin, you might have “Ford” and “Wisconsin” in your list of paid for terms. The French case deals with, say, a Chevy dealership having “Ford” in it’s search terms… though in the case it’s rather more specific than that.

Anyway, I have noticed my Google results being a little odd lately, but I don’t think it’s due to external users trying to game PageRank. I’ve tried to find specific things lately, and though they used to come up in the search results, they don’t anymore… So I’m thinking they’ve lost some of their stored index, or are otherwise having some internal problem.

16

I haven’t noticed any difference in Google results – they are always excellent. Yes, there are ads, but those are clearly marked and separate from the main listing.

As for “Ask Jeeves,” I have never seen a worse search engine, unless your idea of quality is for it to return nothing but irrelevant links. Often, the links it gave me didn’t contain ANY of my search terms. What a waste.

17

Google used to be great, now it is just average and quickly turning to crap. I don’t know that it will ever be as horrible as Ask Jeeves though.

I have had pretty good luck with DogPile.com lately. Does anyone else use it?

18

Dogpile is a good meta search engine, because it’ll check many disparate engines simultaneously. I’m not sure if it’s on the same level as Google, as far as searching breadth goes.

19

I think it’s not a case of Google doing anything on purpose, more evidence that money-grubbing ‘search sites’ are getting better at fooling Google’s algorithm. I always thought that Google’s algo was heavily weighted towards sites that provide useful content and are linked to by other content-rich sites.

The sites that are just traps aimed at pulling in surfers and throwing adverts at them are winning this particular war and Google needs to re-think parts of its algo. I’d start with disregarding any page that is nothing but a search edit box and a list of links, but suspiciously manages to have lots of other links pointing to it.

But perhaps the stuff I was looking for yesterday was just a bad example.

Try this one :13 of the top 20 results are to totally useless search sites

20

The Register has been producing a huge number of news stories on Google lately. They’ve become a little obsessed, but the gist of it seems to be that the Google PageRank algorithm has been stumped by weblog links. As a result, I’ve seen some stories that claim Google has abandoned its original search algorithms and is desperately seeking an alternative. Some pretty draconian workarounds haven’t exactly endeared the company to users either.

As for the IPO –