The other day I read this article from The Guardian claiming that users “are beginning to find that when they try to do searches to evaluate or buy consumer items - such as dishwashers, or iPhone 4 cases - or to find a site that will give them some useful answers, that Google’s results are awash with spam.”
I hadn’t considered it a problem, although at least one SD poster ran into it while looking for calendar software:
The search engine Blekko got mentioned in the Guardian. The results I got on the samesearch terms (excel calendar) turned up the same top result and actually the remaining Blekko ones look less useful than the Google results (for instance, Blekko had no results from Microsoft on the front page). Also, Blekko was slow.
Anyway, is spam a real problem for Google search? Any advantages to another engine?
As far as I know, Google keeps it’s spam pretty well segregated from the rest of its results. The only exception is if you search for something so esoteric that one of those parked websites is actually the most popular page about it. But I don’t know what Google can do about that.
People are inevitably going to figure out how to exploit a search engine. Google will do its best to fix the problems when they show up, but it can’t do it ahead of time.
I would definitely say that the best non-spam search engine is Google. The only way it could be better is if you go back to man-made directories again.
As for trying to buy things: that’s what Google Shopping is for. And I’ll admit that it has a ways to go, as it will often misrepresent the data on the page: For example, if you search for a certain model of laptop, you will be told there are some that are really cheap, but it turns out that the seller is only selling a part, like the screen or charger.
IMO, It is definitely worse than it used to be, and as other people have said is much worse when any part of your search term is something that could potentially be sold to you. Jeff Atwood actually just did a post on his blog about this as well: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/