Forums are fine but not page after page for search term. I can see some but not most of the sites listed in top 2 pages.
Exactly. They seem more interested in profit than in providing a good search experience. They're also alienating many webmasters like myself who now recommend Yahoo to their clients. The whole "viral marketing" thing depends on webmasters and users who respect the product. Google is losing some of that.
Well, I still use google for search, but its becoming where you need to become a certified searchologist to find what you are looking for there. If you are a newb to the internet, you'll get a lot of spam no matter where you search. Once you know how google, or the other search engines for that matter, thinks then you can find what you need, which most webmasters here should have mastered This new image-video-news dump is certainly a waste of google's bandwidth, just from my experience in recent searches. They really should leave them where they were; links at the top of the search pages. I can understand your frustration with the relevant sites dropping, especially when one of those sites might be your own. But the real traffic really does come from google. Having a site with key terms in the number one spots across all three big players tells me so anyhow. I don't use MSN other than to check ranking and wouldn't use it for anything else. I seem to get totally skewed search results from Yahoo, thus the reason I don't use them either. What can you do but search like a search engine thinks and hope your site visitors learn this way also, which is very doubtful.
Well search engines are not only the way to get traffic nowadays. The web is changing and so will the ways people search. Moreover search engines do not always get targeted results. I have done this many times. You can have crappy content with properly optimized keywords and you can still get good rankings. Search engines can not index flash and other form of media which will be the foundation of web in the future.
Yes, sometimes Google is really difficult to understand, just recently my site was lost in Google for two days, depriving me of some few adsense earnings. But that's the kind of Google that we have right now, so I guess we should educate ourselves more on how to deal with it.
In terms of traffic that equates to about 50 - 60% of overall. Be aware that wikipedia editors don't like spam links, they have to be relevant to the article, and they also hold no weight in the PR algo, even so it's very useful.
This is one of the reasons i stopped using googles search. Its too flawed. That entire pagerank thing just doesnt work. spam sites get to the top while real sites get thrown way to the bottom, i hate it.