Search engines only provide relevent content if it is easy

Constantly as a web site builder I am reading how search engines want to provide relevant search results. They seem to be able to do that if the search is more than on word and less than 3 or 4. Recently I typed in "why would the Jews not want to go back to Egypt" I did this because in the bible the Jew were constantly wanting to return to Egypt after God brought them out because life in the desert was hard and they missed the fruit in Egypt. My results were nothing to do with the subject.

Then I typed in sometime like women bonding with men and again I got stuff like information on gay men bonding, women bonding with women and even less relevant stuff. All this was on google who everyone says puts a lot of effort on good searches. I also found no good results for
" get a woman to delay Karen, wanting a committed relationship" and got nothing that related to this.

From my perspective search results on google and the others are not any better than they have been in the last 10 years unless you put in some simple terms and then all you have is about 15 good choices which are the same thing on most search engines. Another frustrating problem is despite everyone saying people are searching for information (articles and so on) most of the results are products or books you have to pay for. From my perspective search engines do not live up to what they say they will do. If this is true how can we as web builders ever score? We are thinking they are doing things one way and they are really doing things some other way and they are much less able to get decent results. Comments are welcome.

I get plenty of complaints from the average searcher who think the results are paid for and who ever pays the most gets the best position so search engine's images are hurt by not truly providing what we want. What really bugs me is how you get the same results for certain keywords knowing that there are many other sites I might like I never see especially when I see thing like there are millions of sites competition for those same keywords.

Along the same subject when I search for small niches the same problem comes up. You would thing when I do a search for 1960's airchecks (a radio tem for edited down versions of a dj's show there would be more than 2 or 3 sites come up and that there would be different ones each time I search. (aircheck is one word in the radio world). Another frustrating thing is the results are the same on most engines. It is frustrating to read so much about relevant content and niche sites when it is so hard to find and even harder to find it you don't want to pay for it. This undermines what most web builders are told will give them ranking. Even if you can't tell me what the deal is with all this at least tell me some ways or search engines who actually do what they claim the are trying to do.

 

do you know the algorithm of reach engine? its hard to understand.

I think if I get the logic of the algorithm of the SE i can think of

other ways to get a good ranking in SE and not only good ranking

but rank # 1. So i'm making a research about that.

 

Search Engines are polluted by the supposed riches of Optimization. Take the finances out of Search Engines and everything would fall into place.

There was a Dateline or 60 Minutes Story (They are all the same to me) about the Nigerian Scammers. The USA postal inspectors intercept 6 million counterfit checks a year from Nigeria.

Why? because in Nigeria the amount of money they can make working is a pittance compared to the amount they can make from a single scam. If I recall they said something like $1 a week!

So they have a literate intelligent population with ZERO real opportunity. So they turn to the net.

Think of that many times over by all the poor countries that have computer literate individuals.

Now factor in all the young people who are computer literate with crappy jobs. Then those who look at it as a game. Then the crime groups. Then...

So you have millions of people worldwide doing everything they can to manipulate search rankings.

How tough is it to spam PHPBB? Not tough at all. How tough to post to university servers, libraries? How hard to post to blogs?

There is spam everywhere, there is cloaking, etc.

The reasons the search engines are not returning relevant results is due to the onslaught of manipulators. 10 years ago there was not as much financial incentive.

The Advertising Dollars are huge! So the scammers are at work. And the Search Engines have to stay ahead of them.

So if you need to place blame, place it squarely on Human Greed. The rules apply to everyone else.

 

Excellent insight, could not have said it better myself.

The problems with search is that it really pays well to manipulate the results. Because of that it appears that the engines are treading water. In fact, they are light years ahead of where they were a decade (or even a year) ago. Bad (or spammy) results still show up because us geeks are light years smarter than they were a year ago.

I think the true answers are the meta engines. They provide a hybrid of results so the algo's are less skewed and more diverse. Other than that the only advise I can give you is to learn to feed an engine a good query.

good - quantum physics lecture notes
better - "quantum physics lecture notes"
best - "quantum physics lecture notes" site:edu

The list goes on an on but some other modifiers that work great are:
- (does not allow this word in search)
inurl: search term is evaluated in url
inanchor:for links to sites using your keywords
site:in just 1 site
intitle: requires that your search words are a part of the title

To summarize: Learn to work the search engine better and you will not constantly be down on the engines. They do an amazing job with the googel (that's 100 0's) of spammy sites that exist.

 

Excellent insight from both of you thanks for sharing.