when you search for information, not pure products or companies, Google's results are less relevant than Yahoo and even MSN.
Seems to be that the main reason (re: the reason underneath all the reasons you've stated, ahem ) for people dissing Googs is that they went through all this trouble to "optimize" their site and what do you know, Google rewards sites that are older than theirs. You know, how Google prefers sites that have been here awhile, to Joe Blow's 2-day old Adsense site that's SEO'ed up the wazoo? At least that's what I'm detecting. /shrug
i just know that when you pull up spammy sites in the serps, they have adsense plastered all over it. i'm just making the point that the adsense program has fueled the growth of spammy sites.
you detect wrong pal. i am what you get when you're feeling lucky at google. this is not because i'm a genius or anything. google is easy to game because they were stupid enough to brag to the world about how their system works. so you have tons of sites and forums (like this one) chockablock with info about how to fool google. which is of course why it's full of crappy results (except mine, of course ;-) ). even the sandbox is easy to get out of if you use your brains a little bit. i have no idea how msn filter out the crappy scraper sites and sites that are devoid of content but have been optimized to death... but i sure hope they keep their formula secret. and knowing microsoft, well, i think we can count on that. bottom line: make money from adsense, use msn for search
where is the thumbs-up smiley on this forum? i agree 100% with your post. beyond that... running adsense won't help when google decides to kick your ass in the serp's... there should at least be a mechanism wherein publishers can pay to get a live human being to tell us why we got killed in the rankings... don't change anything, just tell us what to change, so that we can fix the problem... it'll make more money for both us and google.
My sites never do well in Google SERPS. Likely because I design my websites for people.. not spiders. Google should take all that money they just got and actually design a crawling engine that can read REAL content. No just pages and pages of keywords with more keywords in titles and < h1 > tags etc. So much technology these days with flash and shockwave etc. but none of that can be read by spiders... so we don't use it. So much for the media revolution where multimedia rich content will reign supreme. It still amazes me that a 'jump page' with 250 keywords, NO CONTENT WHATSOEVER and nothing but 'adsense' and 'popups' ranks in the top 25 while one of my sites (an actual business page) with 100% original content -- chock full of information -- free software downloads -- nicely designed ... ranks 1,284,482 Go figure. Call me anti Google... but really I'm anti monopoly when it's something that controls the world. I believe the Internet's TOP search engine should be a non-profit company who has the best interests of the world in mind. Not themselves and making their friends rich.
That is not my experience at all. If anything, it's the reverse. For most things, Google is far superior in my experience.
How is Google a monopoly? I think Yahoo, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, etc., might be rather surprised to hear that... You mean like DMOZ?
Google still delivers most of the traffic for most of my websites (some exceptions apply though). A website that is established since 2002 gets about 2000 referrals from Google a month and 8 (!) from Yahoo and maybe 250 from MSN. This is a website with tons of information about the local community I live in with events calendar and other frequently updated information. I have SE-friendly URLs in place. The site has a PR2 due to me never caring about PR for it until recently. If Google can deliver so much traffic - why does Yahoo as an example ignores the site? So, looking for relevant referrals from a search engine - it is not as easy to say "Google sucks" or "Yahoo sucks". There is apparently much more that comes into play. Christoph
Google results are all commercially driven now. Blogs are the only thing that are not suppose to be commercial but...we all know otherwise. Anything that starts to make money from Google just gets cloned and spammed. It's not googles fault they are #1 and to make money you have to rank well with them. I am getting rather tired of going through multi serps and trying new search keywords to find decent results. MSN results have been better at information.