If you haven’t tried Google’s Toolbar yet, try it! I love google, if for nothing else than that. But I use Google for home and also for work – for link checking, when I can’t find the link our site says exists at some random address that moved a few weeks ago. Fun times.
But the FREE popup blocker is awesome. 4646 to date blocked since late August of last year. 4646 times I DON’T have to click X! and you can search the web or a specific site easily from the toolbar without going to their homepage.
ok, I sound slightly too enthusiastic about this. Oh well. I love google.
I agree Google is still the best out there and by a good distance, but it’s been compromised. I’m learning it’s called, “Google bombing.” It’s the exploit that was used in the “miserable failure” Bush prank. I’m assuming advertisers are taking of advantage of it and in the process sullying Google’s otherwise sparkling record. They need a fix, a filter, something.
Ironically, all the research for this post was done with Google.
Well, I tried but I keep getting shitty advert results :).
But yeah, you’re right, turns out there’s a bunch of things that do this - I sort of forget that running Opera I don’t come across nearly the amount of spyware that seems to infect my friends (this isn’t a Real Browser gloat, I promise). Spyware seems to have become a zillion times shittier since I last ran IE for anything but my online banking :(.
Blogs. The nature of blogs is that A) they get read by a lot of people, and B) they link each other a lot. That pushes them way up in the Google standings, out of proportion of their usefulness as research. I’ve been surprised the number of times I’ve searched for something and had my own blog come up as one of the top few hits. In fact, my site gets over 1000 hits a day from Google, and I’m pretty sure that most of those people aren’t looking for Happy Fun Pundit.
Fringe sites. I find this the most annoying. If I go looking for information on, say, the U.S. trade deficit, the results I get are heavily populated by commentary from the fringes on the right and left, as opposed to scholarly work from place like Brookings or AEI. This is true for most political and military topics.
I ran spybot and adaware, and removed about a gazillion pieces of garbage. I ran a search for “tigers eye” before and after and it was marginally better afterwards. Some of the ads were gone, a lot still remained. It looks like Google’s woes are a mix of Google Bombing and exploits on individual users systems. Whatever the case something has to be done about it… I want the old Google back.
Here’s a thought off the top of my head. What if Google totally segregated business and non business into different indexes. Google could search all the educational, government, and not-for-profit resources, and Froogle could deal with all the spam, porn, and people trying to sell you something.
Of course that wouldn’t solve the issues Sam’s brings up…
I’m confused. You do search for tiger’s eye and there is a page which, as far as I can see is 100% relevent. Everything on the page is about jewellery, a software company called “Tiger’s Eye Software” or “Tiger’s Eye” golf course.
What on earth do want? Some sort of psychic search engine that magically produces only sites which you wanted to exist?
CWS messes with google and changes most of the URLS to search pages. I just figured out I had this problem the other day.
Adaware and Spybot both missed it - I had to use hijackthis to find the problem.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd that 8 of the 10 most relevant pages happen to be selling something? I’m not looking for psychic accuracy, and am not above tailering my searches to avoid the spam. But even if you search for: “-tigers eye -ad -sale -buy -free -ebay” which cuts the number of pages found more than in half, the top ten are still 90% commercial sites.
“I’m feeling lucky,” is starting to take on a whole new meaning.
Maybe 8 out of 10 web pages that use the term tiger’s eye actuallly sell stuff? Online casinos are very popular. There’s a lot of people who like to play golf. You want google to exist purely for your own benefit? How is google supposed to know that you have no interest in jewelery if you don’t tell it?
Or do you want all commercial activity to stop on the web just because you don’t like it?
I still don’t understand what you are searching for. The Tiger’s Eye chemistry perhaps?
Just so we know, what sort of page are you looking for? I think you’re being unfair; it’s clearly a popular term, and has been used in a variety of contexts. If Google is simply reflecting the importance encoded in the web’s link structure, then there really can’t be a complaint. Like it or not, a large number of people go shopping and gambling on the web, so the importance of such sites will be boosted as such sites get increasingly linked.
Tiger’s Eye Casino isn’t available on Download.com any longer. How popular can it be? And look at the site, its clearly a two-bit operation. I can’t prove it, but their high marks in Google’s Page Ranking system looks a lot like bullshit to me.