flicker - 12:38 am on Feb 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

By and large, my Google searching experience has been excellent since the Florida thing. I've had no problem locating academic and informational material with Google. Did some pleasant and easy e-shopping for the holidays, too.

Searchers looking for a topic, related to the topic of the educational site I work on, yet not covered by our site, have been showing up at our site lately and sending us a lot of email asking for information about the topic we don't cover. They're probably getting sent our way because the Google algorithm isn't sophisticated enough yet to realize that our site is an authority on one but not both of these related topics. I imagine this sort of thing will improve with time. In the meantime, I just added a subpage to our site redirecting people looking for the second topic to a bunch of sites that do cover it in depth.

A whole bunch of the old-school spam is completely gone from the educational searches I do most often. There is one pernicious new kind of spam that's been taking horrible advantage of whatever theming/stemming thing is going on at Google, and my hopes that Google is going to be able to do anything about it are diminishing--every time they seem to plug one hole, more of the same type of spam pops in the next week. It's not at all relevant; in fact most of what I'm seeing is adult oriented doorways spamming common schoolkid queries. Sure hope the children all have safe search turned on.

A few things are worse, in other words, but many things seem better. I think Google is in transition right now. I expect that by this time next year, they'll have worked all the kinks out and it will be better than anything I've seen before at finding information for searchers. Sadly, I also expect that the serious spammers will all have changed from the old, ineffective spam style to the new and apparently effective spam style, and the net change in real spam will be nil.