Was Jagger worth it?

As 99% of us all ready know, Jagger caused our sites to fall into the depts of SERPs and spam sites appear on the top of search engine results. A quick example, today I was searching for "firefox clear temp files". Google gave me a site to download a software that will "Free disk space, make your computer run better/faster and protect your privacy - all in one easy solution. All for free!".

While that is great and all I would perfere a quick 'how to' on how to clear firefox's cache. I enter in the same search query in MSN and lo and behold I was given a site to "Delete Temporary Internet Files (clear cache)".

When Jag3 has ran it's course, the quaility of google's search results will most likely return back to normal, or even better.

My comment is why!!! Why push such out a crappy update to production. Jagger should have stay in the DEV enviroment until all 3 phases have ran its course. I have never concider supplementing my searches with MSN, but thanks to jagger I have now gain faith in MSN, oh my god did I just say that, shoot me now. The only rational I could see, is that Google screwed up this update and jag2 and jag3 is their attempt to clean up thier mess.

 

Here are my theories:

- Google screwed up the algo/index/coffee machine royally and are scrambling to fix it.
- This update was intended to push crappy, spammy results to the top so that users would send in spam reports.
- Google intentionally screwed us for weeks and then when the results finally return to pretty much what they were like previously we will love Google even more i.e. we will feel 'lucky'. Psychology no?

 

Here is my theory:
Google wants to boost its 4th quarter earnings. So they do and update, the results are now no good so people click on the ads more. They get some quick cash for a month or so then change it back to how it was. They claim it was a long update, and they had some problems so no one figures it out and gets mad at them. Everyone goes back to using google, no hard feelings. Six months later repeat the process.

There is no way anyone can tell me it take 50+ day to do a proper update.

 

Help me here, I thought the update was for PR, and SERP's are constantly being updated; so the two don't really go hand and hand. Or, did things change?

Thanks for helping,

tom

 

Your right, some people think this is an algo change/tweek though.

 

The more you suffer
The more it shows you really care
Right? Yeah-eh-eh
---Offspring---

 

I get this as page 1:

They don't look spammy to me or poor quality to me - it looks to me like Google gave you what you asked for.

 

And I get this from MSN:

Different? Yes. Better? I'm not so sure.

There are a LOT fewer results returned by MSN though.

 

Jagger 3 will roll out across the DC's in the next 24 hours and I welcome it, seems to have removed a lot of irrelevant sites/dross from a few sectors that I monitor.

 

I guess that just brings up the question of quantity vs. quality. Is it worth it to have 1,000,000 results come back with a lot of spammy sites mixed in? Or 1,000 results that are VERY relevant to your search.

 

As a whole, I think the MSN results are better for that particular search. Being said, why isnt the firefox page the #1 for that? if you have that question - seems their site would be the best place to go.

I just did the search on yahoo and its the worst of the 3 IMHO

 

Have another look at page 1 for each of those SEs, posted above. Where is this "spam" you're talking about? I see 10 listing relevant to the search query on both Google and MSN? Where do you see the additional size of Google's index creating "spam"?

 

Seems to me that in both cases there is a compromise. My guess it's about anchor text again for Google... most links to the firefox home page probably do not include the words "clear temp files" whereas I believe that MSN places more emphasis on page content that does Google.

Which is better? That almost certainly depends on what you're searching for and how many crap sites are in that list. Remember that the initial big advantage Google brought to the SE playing field was devaluing on-page content, which was felt to be too easily manipulated in the results of other SEs.

 

I agree with minstrel. I've do think they've improved the results, and I'm also pleased because I've personally seen gains while the spam sites that were above me seem to have moved down.

One thing I will say is that I have done a few searches where the results weren't what I was looking for, but it's only been on a select few subjects. Nevertheless I think it was a decent update.

Ian

 

Results improved? Hell no.
Almost 3 weeks before this jagger happened there seemed to be another major update which (at least for my site and my site only) cleaned up lost/supplementals.
During jagger and now post jagger all of those supplementals have returned. These are supplementals that have not been linked to in over a year AND do not exist.
One funny example:
Yesterday I was googling for a game called monkey shine for the odyssey 2 platform. So to narrow my results I searched "monkey shine" odyssey
http://www.google.com/search?hs=Agr...ficial_s&q="monkey+shine"+Odyssey&btnG=Search
What happened? #1 result was for MY site cached Feb 19, 2005.
This page has not even existed since February 20th yet outranks the much more relevant results. This has been the case for me since jagger and I am now finding it VERY frustrating using google. I've begun using yahoo which I've seen as even less useful and msn which is just utter crap for specific results. I'm ready for something new unless google fixes whatever they've done :s

 

Don't forget that 99% of the webmasters out there still think that SPAM means "sites positioned above me"

 

well I finally broke down and bought some adwords

 

Exactly! So, your site got hit... get over it! Go buy some adwords and work on your sites and get ready for the next update, that is the perfect attitude.

I have a campaign all set up and ready to go live as soon as the new Jagger 3 results start propagating and send my site down to #354

 

Exactly.

 

Agreed... And I would add that until SEs find a way to get searchers to be more specific in what they're asking for, results will never be completely satisfactory.

To make the point, instead of searching for 'firefox clear temp files' search for 'firefox clear cache'. G results are right on.

In my view, very few searchers give much thought to their search terms. Some anal types (like me) do, but that is a small minority. I think the proof is in my referrer log. It blows me away to see what some people use as search terms.

/*tom*/