As a user, not webmaster, how are the Google search results today vs. prior to this update?

I have been doing some research for a book I am working on, and I have had to refine my queries considerably in order to find non-commercial sources of information (including specific government statistics sites).

In another project, I have been looking for less popular Web sites and have had a problem getting to them, even if I click 18 pages into the search results because Google is repeating a lot of listings (or including multiple pages from large sites in a somewhat random fashion).

And some sites which I used to be able to find regularly are not coming up at all.

So, for me as a user, the Google experience has not been very good. However, when I perform similar searches at MSN, I find the results are even worse. Yahoo! has occasionally pulled my fat out of the fire where Google has failed me.

Google is no longer providing the kind of search results that led people to believe that they were the best search engine on the planet. Those search results are gone and have been for a while now - even before this current 'update'. Now I still search Google out of habit but often don't find what I am looking for in Google but do in other search engines.

How "good" or how much more relevant?

Michael makes a fair point - Google is still the better search enigne, but it's been been losing out on relevancy. I would suggest that as part of an ongoing process, though, rather than simply due to the existing update issue. Still, the other SE's have some ground to catch up.

Here is a thought...

Maybe it is the Internet marketing communities fault that search and search engines in general have been diluted. In fact I am sure it is. While everyone's definition of spam will differ, doorway pages, information pages, heck even product pages in many cases are diluting search results because so many people are reporducing the same low quality content. Then when you toss in things like affiliate marketing, prepackaged websites and other autogenerated materials the web has become a store house of not only information but also of redundant poor quality information.

I can only imagine that there are millions upon millions of webpages that could and should be removed because they serve no further purpose, but as long as they exist in cyber space they will continue in most cases to be crawled and often indexed into the search engines.

I think the reduction in relevancy is more a result of the Internet marketing communities response to a desire to manipulate Google and the other search engines more so than anything else. And while I am as guilty as the next person on things I have done, do, and most likely wil continue to do, we might very be the ones most responsible.

Even though Google has hundreds of brilliant minds full of PHDs and other things those few men and women are competing against the world and I am sorry they are just out gunned and under manned.

My opinion. They started getting worse / less relvant in December and now are about equal to Yahoo. What I mean is that Yahoo is superior for certain results and Google for others. I too am now starting to break the habit and I am using the others much more today than I did 6 months ago. I even installed the other toolbars.

Maybe it is the Internet marketing communities fault that search and search engines in general have been diluted. In fact I am sure it is. While everyone's definition of spam will differ, doorway pages, information pages, heck even product pages in many cases are diluting search results because so many people are reporducing the same low quality content.

I think it balances itself out. Real white hat SEOs will only create relevant anchor text, titles and content because they know that relevancy is the key to conversion and making money. If you use PCC to drive traffic, you know what I am talking about. I would rather payt $.50 /Click for a high converter than $.01/Click for a no converter.

I'd think search engines, particularly Google, are the ones to be blamed. They rely heavily on link analysis to rank search results. This encourage SEO community (i'm not a marketer) to spam search egnines. The fallacy of link analysis is that links doesn't alter the page content. It only helps search engines to rank results.

I think it balances itself out. Real white hat SEOs will only create relevant anchor text, titles and content because they know that relevancy is the key to conversion and making money. If you use PCC to drive traffic, you know what I am talking about. I would rather payt $.50 /Click for a high converter than $.01/Click for a no converter.

There are powerhouse SEOs who rarely if ever participate in these types of forum discussions any more. Many of them were outted by another forum operator some years ago and they found their sites going into blacklists.

The big guns who manipulate results on a massive scale can insert thousands of pages into the mix on a daily basis. They have unquestionably affected search engine design decisions for years.

My opinion. They started getting worse / less relvant in December
I'd suggest June 2003.

Before then, Google was a search engine famed for its relevancy, with reliable "dances".

Since then Google has seemed more intent on spending time tackling "spam" than "relevancy".

There are powerhouse SEOs who rarely if ever participate in these types of forum discussions any more. Many of them were outted by another forum operator some years ago and they found their sites going into blacklists.
Any links covering that would be interesting for those of us who missed it.

Any links covering that would be interesting for those of us who missed it.

LOL!

I can only say that I was privy to some private information. Happily, I am no longer privy to those kinds of discussions.

While there are some anomolies I just ran a batch of searches on both popular and obscure terms and in every case at least 9 of the first ten pages were relevant.

Just because Google doesn't show your favorite sites does not mean the results are bad, it just means that other pages have replaced them for one reason or another.

IMO if you are looking for a particular site, why use a search engine, just put the URL in the search bar.

Getting some kind of relevancy isn't the big difficulty, though, if search engines in general are anything to go by - it's getting "best relevancy" that's the key problem.

Getting some kind of relevancy isn't the big difficulty, though, if search engines in general are anything to go by - it's getting "best relevancy" that's the key problem.

Yes, and sometimes it comes down to link popularity. But I see too few people emphasizing the importance of content any more. I always try to emphasize for people just learning the basics that content should come first, and that they need to optimize the content for relevancy.

Many people actually do a poor job of organizing their content and then they try to bludgeon their way to the top on links.

It's certainly worth re-raising the issue of Filthy Linking Rich: (http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/Oct04/RichLinking.html)


When search engines constantly return popular pages at the top of the pile, more web users discover those pages and more web users are likely to link to them. This therefore means that currently unpopular pages (as such) are not returned by search engines (regardless of quality) so they are discovered by very few web users. And this, of course, is unfortunate for both the publishers of web pages and the seekers of their information. (Not to mention web marketers!)

What's worse is that if you then throw the concept of "authority domains" into the mixture, and suddenly you have a process that accelerates the problem of site pages ranking well on the basis of being on old domains, rather than best quality page content.

I appreciate that new sites have to earn "reputation" on the internet and no site should expect instant peer approval - but the fact that new sites are already heavily weighted against, not least through sandboxing, is very frustrating. It just means that to be noticed more aggressive SEO is required to even begin levelling the playing field. And that benefits nobody in the long term.

I'd think search engines, particularly Google, are the ones to be blamed. They rely heavily on link analysis to rank search results. This encourage SEO community (i'm not a marketer) to spam search egnines.
This forgets the fact that before link analysis was heavily used, search spam still existed. Indeed, link analysis is what saved the relevancy of crawler-produced results. It helped the popular pages with good content rise above the pages that were drowning them out because they'd reverse-engineered on-the-page criteria to rank well.

The problem today is that link analysis is no longer the wonder antibiotic to search spam that has become more resistant, as marketers have learned to game links, while links are also now far more widely bought and sold by all types of people, plus entire new link structures that have sprung up through things like blogging.

At its core, any search engine is constantly going to be vulnerable to search spam as long as it continues to effectively let anyone in the door through crawling. At the moment, there are three major things that will help save crawling at Google and elsewhere:

1) Vertical search
2) Personalized search
3) Human editing

Vertical search we see big time. At some point, you're not going to get 10 results that come from crawling the web but 10 results from a more specialized database where the content is more tightly controlled and then perhaps less vulnerable to spam. I've written about this coming for ages, but you can especially see how it is coming with the fact that Google now shows up to three OneBox results before web listings, as explained more here: Google Images In OneBox Display Further Supplant Main Results (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050207-082648).

Personalized search will help because it will multiple the "fronts" of the spam war many times. If thousands of us each see slightly different results, it becomes harder to spam. Not impossible, many are still going to get default results. But the time involved and lack of certainty may make gaming to get free results more expensive timewise than just buying results.

Human editing is something Google has never done, if you believe them, and I do -- that is, they don't go in an edit specific results for specific queries. That's too bad, because it used to be pretty effective for MSN Search when they had a team of editors. Ask Jeeves, too. But humans cost money, and if the crawler seems to work OK, let's fire them. But now that the crawlers aren't doing as well as they did, I think we'll see a return to this -- humans more in the mix for the top queries that really matter.

But now that the crawlers aren't doing as well as they did, I think we'll see a return to this -- humans more in the mix for the top queries that really matter.


1. What if Google created their own directory? If the site really isn't good, don't accept it. Don't use it as a money maker, but charge a minimal fee as a way to at least pay for human intervention and reduce spam If rejected, possbly give the owner a credit for Adwords. They could also start with ODP Data, have a team re-review and include what they thought was valuable. Also, have the team activley find good blogs and or informational sites that may not pay for submission.

2. Use Click Through Rate on Results to push the highest CTR to the top. Maybe they already use this.

3. Determine the amount of time someone spends on a page found in the serps. If a person has to initiate another search immediately after landing on a page, it must not be relevant. If you combine amount of time spent and CTR, you should be able to determine the most relevant results.

Back when there were only a few million Web sites, operating a quality directory was feasible. But look at Yahoo! today. They were never all-inclusive, but now their directory results are a secondary option. They hit the search engine database first.

Until someone comes up with a way to speed up directory creation and maintenance, the larger the Web grows, the less of an option human-edited directories will really become.

But look at Yahoo! today
I do. I use it quite a bit to find sites for a particular niche. Some directories are still the best way to find websites (not pages) about a particular topic. It is a great way to create a theme for a site.

Maybe 8 Billion pages is too many. How many web sites of value? Everyone with a PC can create a web page, but do you really want to know what Jimmy is doing this weekend in Topeka, KS.

The point is to get some human involvment in the decision making process. Unless AI is perfected and used widely, a computer will not be able to look at a page as a human does to see if it is any good.