Google really is off the rails!

This is turning into a fascinating discussion as everybody here is right and at the end of the day it is the collective thoughts of many that will shape the way search engines go.

Although I can see the reality of the search giving sites that include books about a subject, like Shawn, I have serious doubts about the rational, as for, eg "property in france" you would end up with pages of books, magazines first as they are "authority" sites.

So what would give the average punter what he wants if that case was to stay?

The punter would have to change his search query to be "more intelligent" that is to put in a question that the search engine would return the answer that he wants.

That is just not logical it is the job of the search engine to meet the requirements of the client - not the other way round.

Whilst I agree that the SE will always have this "problem" the fact is that Google had it right before Florida [for you pure Real Estate guys] and "not" after and had it right before Austin, wrong after but then back again after Austin and now wrong again, from other points of view.

So Google can do "it" [get it right] for the search phrases but seems to be meddling too strongly at the moment and people just will go elsewhere to more stable search engines giving more relevant results like Yahoo - the amazon pages are still there but are further down and the first pages are in fact much more relevant to finding "property in France"

 

I do not think that adding the word "books" to a search is asking any great deal from a user who does, in fact, wholly or mainly want books on a subject returned as the answer, and that is putting aside the fact that Amazon is virtually a book-search engine in itself.

If a user makes a search and does not include in it the word book (or books), what I would consider reasonable behavior by a search engine would be to include books, if any at all, well down the list.

As I think has been pointed out, for most searches, unless almost comically narrow, there would be enough well-on-topic books to fill the first several pages of hits; an engine returning books must needs select--almost arbitrarily, as there will usually not be significant differences in relevance--some few or else thoroughly clutter the responses with books. Putting it another way, logically it is virtually an "all or none" situation, and absent books in the search, my two cents is on "none".

 

Spot on Owlcraft

Isn't there a book titled the "Fox and the Owl" or something

 

Isn't there a book titled the "Fox and the Owl" or something

The Owlcroft designation is not entirely fanciful:

http://owlcroft.com/owlcroft/index.html

 

Interesting Site Owlcroft - go look at this one

Timber Frame Homes

Your house encourages me

Thankyou

 

I have always felt that living in a home one did not design oneself is like wearing another person's shoes. The modular-timber idea is a nice one for people who want to have a hand in the design but are not able to dedicate the time to becoming, effectively, "instant architects".

Me, I'm a compulsive. I designed that house myself (my second) down to specifying what types of nails to use where. By and large, after four years in it, we are pretty happy with the result. This winter, we had a night that got down to -30, so our total heating bill for the season was 1/4 of a cord of wood instead of 1/5 like last year. Love that solar!

 

How did this thread get so far off topic?

Is Google off the rails or not? I personally don't think so. I still go there first for all my searching and rarely if ever move to another search engine.

 

Google is the only SE I use for my regular searches. I tinker with the others (yahoo & MSN mostly) from time to time just to see what they're up to, but never for a "real" search.

I still think, hands down, Google brings the best results.

 

Hey! GuyFromChicago. You are going to have to stop agreeing with me so much. People will talk

 

No they won't.

Hows that?

 

We got off the rails in just the same way as you are now - just chatting

Sorry

But back to the subject

The trouble is that we use it, Google, because of market dominance that came out of relevancy that the public at large, not us, detemined, and the directories such as Yahoo followed in order to keep in the game, give them some breathing space, which is/was determined by the executive based on commercial practice not too disimilar to ourselves.

However the public does not understand the "global" picture and only sees what it sees and if that doesn't give then what they want they will go elsewhere - which is why we need to watch Yahoo figures.

Searchwise for myself I still use Google - for two reasons

1. It is in my Browser and

2. It is still the biggest

BUT

I now watch Yahoo a lot - which I never used to do and, increasingly, I use it for, yes wait for it, relevancy even though I have to load the search page first.

 

I fail to see the logical connector between the propositions "we mostly use and prefer Google" and "Google is doing a great job".

If I'm interested in gas mileage and I own two cars, one of which get 9 miles to the gallon and the other 7, I'll drive the one that gets 9 mpg, but that scarcely means I'm driving a fuel-efficient vehicle.

There are entire web sites, not frivolous, dedicated to analyzing what's wrong with Google. We don't have to accept every claim they make as gospel, but neither can we handwave them all away as irrelevant or nonsensical.

Google has become the M$ of search engines, and correspondingly acquired the M$ attitude: "we don't care--we don't have to." That is why the emergence of Yahoo as a viable alternative is so important to the entire internet community, which nowadays is to say the entire world. Already the potential competition has sent Google scrambling to wallpaper over some of the worst cracks in the plaster. If Yahoo takes off and acquires a solid market share, we will all benefit: that's how a marketplace works. If it does not (nor M$ itself), Google will be no better than it has to be.

My limited experiences with Yahoo suggest that they have some rough edges yet to sandpaper--one should never see crude and obvious search-engine spams high in any results--but those samples, albeit limited so far, have shown me notably more relevant results than Google is yielding.

 

What have you seen specifically in Google's behavior that convinces you that they have adopted a

position?

I'm not a Google defender or apologist. But it seems to me they have always cared more than the others. MSN is a bit of a joke and Yahoo didn't care enough to even have their own search engine until very recently.

So yes competition is a good thing, but just because you may not like where Google ranks your site doesn't mean they don't care????

 

My opinion - Google "cares" as much if not more than Yahoo or MSN.

Yahoo and MSN decided to take search seriously after Google started whooping their backsides. If either of these companies really "cared" about search and improving it they would have invested years ago in improvements, but they didn't. They were both interested in providing free e-mail and selling ad space on their portal pages.

I also find that Y & M serps can get somewhat stale. Some will complain about Google's recent updates (Fl for example), but to me that shows a company trying to make serps better. Yea, Google serps have been a little shakey recently - but they are leading the field and pushing all the other SE's to get better, or try another business model.

If nothing else you have to give Google props for taking search to a whole new level. Even when competition was light they were constantly innovating and trying new things.

Is Google "perfect"? Nope
Is Google a better general SE than anything else out there? No doubt about it.

I guess that means G is getting 9 miles per gallon while Yahoo & MSN are still standing at the pump trying to figure out how to get gas to come out of it

 

Frankly, I sort of resent the implication that my qualms about Google derive from personal pique about "where Google ranks your site". My point is not my site's placement: it is that its niche is an arena in which I know exactly who and what the players are, and so can form some reasonable judgement of how well Google is doing in terms of relevance. (I think I do quite well enough for one person running, as a sideline, an amateur site that is, by design, a niche within a niche.)

So, when I play the part of an innocent seeker after knowledge and enter the appropriate terms into Google, I can say, with some right to an opinion, that there is something bizarre about the #3 hit being a site whose content relies on freshness for its significance but which has not been updated since August of 2002; the #10 hit being just a small links collection, 20 links, of which only one is even remotely relevant to the search; 6 of the top 20 hits being 3 pairs of repeated sites; the #18 site having not changed in almost two years save for a monthly feed it takes from another unrelated site; and so on. I am not complaining that the sites don't come out ranked in the order in which a knowledgeable human would rank them on content--getting serp that is largely independent of content is what seo is all about; I am complaining that even mechanical serp ought to be able to do better than this with stale sites and multiple closely related pages within the same site.

Yes, I agree that Google is still (probably) the best engine right now--after all, for a long time it was virtually the only one. Yahoo is essentially still in beta, though I daresay the various Yahoo shortcomings noticed elsewhere here will be cleaned up soon enough (though even as is, it gives satisfactory results, some looking, to me anyway, more relevant than Google's, and I don't mean just in my niche).

As for Google's attitudes, forget my remarks: you can--dare I say it?--Google up plenty from numerous other sources, at least some of which have some fair claims to expertise.

Nor do I think Google is pushing anyone else to get better: others are pushing Google to get better. Surely we don't imagine that all this frantic, seemingly hourly twiddling with their algorithms would have happened absent Yahoo's debut?

Just on today's news are stories from both
the Associated Press and Reuters
with numerous quotations from industry experts to the effect that Google's leadership position is on shaky ground.

When in doubt--as a wise old saying has it--follow the money. When I see a market expert saying that he does not intend to buy into Google's IPO, I think I have found out something significant.

 

Absolutely I do. Google has been constantly improving search, and everything about it, ever since they started. Yahoo, and maybe even MSN will catch up -but it won't be today or tomorrow. They have plenty of $ and name recognition though, so it won't take them 5 years either.

2004 will be interesting to say the least. Who knows, maybe I'll be doing my holiday shopping though Yahoo this December...nah

 

I apologize for the implication. I just wanted to challenge your unsupported assertion that Google had developed a "we don't care attitude". And I guess I was correct because so far you haven't shown any grounds for support.

 

I can say, with some right to an opinion, that there is something bizarre about the #3
hit being a site whose content relies on freshness for its significance but which has not
been updated since August of 2002; the #10 hit being just a small links collection, 20
links, of which only one is even remotely relevant to the search; 6 of the top 20 hits
being 3 pairs of repeated sites; the #18 site having not changed in almost two years
save for a monthly feed it takes from another unrelated site; and so on. I am not
complaining that the sites don't come out ranked in the order in which a knowledgeable
human would rank them on content--getting serp that is largely independent of content
is what seo is all about; I am complaining that even mechanical serp ought to be able
to do better than this with stale sites and multiple closely related pages within the
same site. ​

If they cared as deeply as we are supposed to believe about the relevance of their results, they would be more diligent in assuring that travesties like those described occur only infrequently. I suspect that as Yahoo ramps up, Google will take steps to assure that such goofiness becomes rare. But would they have otherwise?

Then, there are other sources of information:

Google Watch (which, I believe, now also has an archive of the curious "Scroogle" site). A Google on <Google problems> will turn up more. Is everything so found trustworthy? Of course not. Is some of it? Almost certainly.

None of this is hanging evidence in a court, at least not without a deal more investigation. But I think it more than suffices as some grounds for thinking the position, as a lawyer would put it, "colorable".

 

I'm a long way from being an expert regarding Google, but then who is?
However, being aware of how upsetting Florida was to numerous real estate webmasters -- and admitting that there were some ups and downs in the results for a while -- I'm certainly noticing that there now seems to be some decided logic in what's turning up and that things are being treated in distinctly different ways for two seemingly similar but, on due reflection, subtley dissimilar search phrases.
I haven't checked out locations other than those in my own geographical area but real estate st. catharines (or other community) brings up a succession of information and directory like sites that list agents serving the locale; whereas homes for sale st. catharines (ditto) produces a series of websites for individual agents operating in the particular field.
It seems to me that the algo tweaking that's been going on -- and I'm quite sure has yet to reach its end -- is adding to Google's worth. Before Florida, things were much more mixed up and, beyond question, they included spam entries. Now, though, I can either find out about the local market and who's serving it in general or I can learn who specifically to contact when I want to list or buy something.
Of course, I'm not so sure the public will recognize the difference, but I won't be surprised to eventually see Google (and for that matter all search engines) begin educating people about matching what's exactly in their heads with what precise results they're seeking.
Meantime, needless to say, we're no doubt going to suffer some more of Google's growing pains.
Duncan