Has Google (SERPs) become Less Relevant

[! !]

More Search Engines Results are becoming more relevant - with less spam - as a result of the competition to survive with Google...

Some have added new features such as: FTP, Discusssion, video/audio search etc...

Possibly, to alleviate SPAM SERPs - Google has become too emphatic about Backlink - hypertext - keywords, so that only the largest Companies - or the best SEO'd sites are visible at the top...

Besides Google - have you INCREASED your use of the following:
:o

--> Yahoo!
--> MSN
--> AltaVista
--> AllTheWeb
--> Meta Search Engines
--> "Invisible Web""

[Daedalus]

I've been using Yahoo! more and more if I can't find what I'm looking for on Google. With Yahoo! I've been getting more relevant results than I used to.

[creativecraig]

I use Yahoo more and more, even used MSN the other day to do a search.

What you are talking about is being discussed in great detail here: Filthy Linking Rich (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2063)

[Nacho]

You're first asking the question and then making conclusions on your post. IMO, you need to do a lot of testing before making a statement like that. Can you please provide with more proof of Google's relevancy falling?

[randfish]

The reason I see Google's relevancy failing is their insistence that older sites are better than newer sites - especially when I search for obscure recent news articles or events, I have to parse through several pages before I find what I'm looking for.

Yahoo! and MSN are not as good only because the size of their index and the frequency with which they crawl is vastly inferior - otherwise, I like Yahoo's results much better - more recent sites can actually rank near the top - which makes more sense, especially when you're searching for recent information.

Google has also stagnated because their filters against spam have pushed a lot of good, relevant websites out of the index - I see blogs and personal sites falling away from the index, as more big-time commercial sites take over for even the most irrelevant of searches.

I also don't like that Google will show a site that has nothing to do with a search, just because they are an 'important' site. A prime example would be W3C.org showing up for thousands of searches they have no relevancy for, because someone e-mailed them a long time ago about a topic, and now all their old e-mails are online... SEOChat forums was having this problem too, but Google seems to have manually fixed it.

I don't know how someone would have the free time to actually do critical research that could hold up to scrutiny on something like this, but I konw my personal experiences - Google is getting worse...

[rcjordan]

Andy Beal at Battelle's Web 2.0 last week:

"I suggested that the past 3-4 years had seen inbound links as the main driver of relevancy. I pointed out that this system had been proven unreliable over the past few months."

http://www.searchenginelowdown.com/2004/10/web-20-search-engine-execs-chat.html

Ummm, it's been a little more than the 'last few months' but Andy was probably just being polite. Or, maybe this is a little more mainstream since the blog community got first-hand knowledge of what a script could do to their comment section (and why). But it's getting to the point where even Joe the Bagboy knows that those algos that depend on linkpop are getting hammered.

"Weiner did say that 'linking relevancy is flawed as the sites that sit at the top of the search results, tend to get linked-to the most and end up staying at the top.' I wish Google had been on the panel to hear that comment!"

Hey, Mike Grehan, Weiner is stealing your stuff.

[creativecraig]

Something that was brought up from the Filthy Linking Rich thread was that old links still have as much relevance as a new link to a site. But as we know, sites change themes, hands and some times get picked up by multi-colured hat wearers ;) but in the eyes of Google, if that link is still pointing to my site it can still holds as much weight what ever has happened to the site since the link went live, this came damage the relevance of a search.

I,brian puts it in a better way:


counting older "votes" doesn't necessarily add any relevance - and could detract from it.

In practice, I figure that's why Alta Vista ranks higher than Google for the search term "search engine", even though Google has dominated for years and Alta Vista has been effectively dead in the 21st century.

Old "votes" can damage relevancy. And it's certainly not democratic.

[wiseMouse]

1. I still think Google got some of the most relevant results (together with Yahoo).
2. Google's index is the freshest, as far as I can tell (here Yahoo lags a bit behind).
3. I think Google's relevancy only improved wince they're more rigorous about spam. Those pages that have genuine content still rank highly... Yes, there's a bias towards large companies, but this is nothing new... this is the way the system works (if you start with giving traditional authorities like the BBC, universities, or governments a high relevancy per se....) Saying this, large companies often di have relevant content :rolleyes:

Summa summarum: there are currently two highly relevant search engines: Google and Yahoo.

[seo]

Web Images Groups News Froogle Local Scholar more »

Now Scholar has been added the the main page

- perhaps Google sees that the Invisible Web may be an asset to their overall relevancy - perhaps it is too difficult to contantly Sandbox and Experiment with new SERPs Algos - as queries get more complexed and expectations more focused

[niceland]

Wise Mouse, you say Google is the freshest. I redesigned a site a week ago, I removed the dead content via "remove pages" in Google, added the new sitemap to the new sitemap feature and the day after everything was removed from Google except few pages and nothing new has been added for 10 days from this site. All done correctly by the Google "book" The site is 6 years old and well established. So much for the freshness.

MSN on the other hand has updated its index with the new content from the same site and the old removed, all within 2 days. That's fresh.

[mcanerin]

And yet, I posted 14 research pages on my site on the 4th, and Google (and ONLY Google) had not only visited, but was showing them as responses to queries already by the 10th. The site as a whole ranks very well for all search engines, naturally.

Yahoo, MSN and Teoma - nothing.

I think a lot of the "freshness" debate has to do with where and when you happen to publish your changed content in the crawling cycle for each specific SE.

Ian

[sootledir]

My big problem with Google is now they've introduced a "too relevant factor" and screen out pages that should rank for phrases.

I'm shocked that pages that are optimized for specific keyphrases are now being targeted for penalties.

[seo]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=security

This is a new strategy:

Not satisfied? See results for: home security



Google is starting its updating process again

[Pyrrhonist]

I was at a pub and had an interesting conversation with a gentleman who just happened to be in "Internet Marketing." His field was getting people travelling to tourist destinatations (specifically Orlando, FL) to sign up for timeshares. After a bit of conversation with him, I realized he was full of it - but that's beside the point.

I have always spent a lot more time looking into Google instead of Yahoo or MSN because that's where the raw numbers come from. What he said to me though was that visitors he received from Yahoo and MSN purchased 4.5x more often than those coming from Google. I am working on verifying these numbers to see if they hold water, but after finishing off that pint and running home to pull up my stats tracking, I did notice that Yahoo had a higher conversion rate for that day (about 50% higher).

I still perform most of my optimization for Google, but I'm definitely revisiting the Yahoo factor to see what I can find.

[AussieWebmaster]

I was at a pub and had an interesting conversation with a gentleman who just happened to be in "Internet Marketing." His field was getting people travelling to tourist destinatations (specifically Orlando, FL) to sign up for timeshares. After a bit of conversation with him, I realized he was full of it - but that's beside the point.

I have always spent a lot more time looking into Google instead of Yahoo or MSN because that's where the raw numbers come from. What he said to me though was that visitors he received from Yahoo and MSN purchased 4.5x more often than those coming from Google. I am working on verifying these numbers to see if they hold water, but after finishing off that pint and running home to pull up my stats tracking, I did notice that Yahoo had a higher conversion rate for that day (about 50% higher).

I still perform most of my optimization for Google, but I'm definitely revisiting the Yahoo factor to see what I can find.
higher conversion rate at Yahoo is interesting but how well is the site placed in Yahoo and Google SERPs?

[Pyrrhonist]

higher conversion rate at Yahoo is interesting but how well is the site placed in Yahoo and Google SERPs?
I can only respond in the quick check I did on my own site, however the gent that I spoke to was speaking about PPC, which is why it's merely piqued my interest instead of a full-blown investigation.

But for my quick comparison, the keyword was "spyware removal" and I was ranked #5 in both Yahoo and Google, and have seen slight fluctuations between the sample date (May 16th) while maintaining 1st page rankings (always going for more, though, right?).

[ThouShaltSeo]

his sites got penalized. What more do you need ? ;)

Can you please provide with more proof of Google's relevancy falling?

[Scottie]

Sure, you find Google less relevant when the sites you are working with don't appear on the first page... but do you really find it less relevant when you are searching for something on your own?

I still use Google 96% of the time and I almost always find what I need in the first page or two of results. Sure, I look at the other engines when working with client sites or other projects, but for my own searching, I'm not finding Google to be an issue.

A lot of that may have to do with the relevance of AdWords as well- often what I need is in the paid column.

[martinuboo]

Sure, you find Google less relevant when the sites you are working with don't appear on the first page... but do you really find it less relevant when you are searching for something on your own?<snip>
I used to use Google for a 100% of my personal searches. I just thought that it was normal (for certain information) to have to use very detail queries to find something and even then not always finding what I wanted.

Then Rustybrick launched his RustySearch (http://www.rustybrick.com/rustysearch.php) and this really made me look at searching in other engines.

Now, I still use G as my main SE, but as soon as I can't find something, instead of redefining my search query, I try Yahoo! (usually) and in about 80% of the cases, I find what I was originally looking for, in the top 10 with the same search query.

The searches that I seem to go to Y! for, are either quite technical or specific queries where there is one obvious "best result" that is not returned in G's top ten.

<added later> I removed the one example I could remember, because it is no longer a good one. Maybe G is making progress. :rolleyes: