Well, googling “Tiger’s eye pub” complete with quote marks generates nearly 200 hits, so it’s clearly fairly popular. Scanning through the first few pages, it actually seems as if a very large percentage of the hits are download.com’s various aliases (zdnet.co.uk, att.com.com, etc. etc.), which will no doubt be boosting the result’s importance, but that’s hardly the fault of the people who wrote the software. The extra hits will probably disappear after the next crawl now that it’s not available from those sites any more. As for 2-bit, Nethack isn’t exactly the pro development of the century, and that’s really really popular (223,000 hits). Free shareware distributions get linked a lot; it’s a fact of life, not a conspiracy.
Really though, what are you searching for, if not jewellery, games or golf? I’m curious now…
BTW for a lot of searches (when you don’t look for a term that appears on relatively few web pages but for relevant sites on a topic) using a directory is often preferable to using a search engine.
Next, I wasn’t shooting for anything. I pulled that string out of my ass just to see if a random search would come up with the same kinda results I’ve been getting lately.
The point is, like most Dopers, I use Google all the time. I am a bonafide Google groupie. It’s a marvelous tool. Which is why it pains me to see that more and more of my searches have a flood of spam to wade through.
Ok, then let me ask the question in a different way: Assuming that google were operating in a way that is acceptable to you, what search results, generally speaking, would you have expected?
The acceptability of google’s results are very much in relation to what you are searching for.
Believe me, there are lots of terms that it is practically impossible to get results back that are not over-run by “link farm” sites that have zero useful content, consisting only of further links (most of which are either out of date or further links to even more link farms) and totally irrelevant adverts.
These are almost always as a result of google bombing, spamdexing, searchjacking and other underhand methods that no doubt have silly names as well. It’s not so much a sign of goggle going down the pan, but the internet as a whole. It’s simply too cheap and easy to put online thousands and thousands of pages that have the sole task of sucking in browsers and throwing adverts at them. Google is in a constant war with this type of crud. Some weeks it looks like it’s losing.
