Zeberdee - 8:27 am on Feb 9, 2004 (gmt 0)

The loyalty to Google I see here is impressive and there is nothing wrong with it. It is familiar and has served most people well for quite a while now.

It is a shame then, and it takes a bit of getting used to, when they begin to falter, which they are doing. I'm not in your SEO world, and neither are the other people I have discussed it with, and for us the results are now far less useful than they were. I am now much less likely to get straight to that definitive site using Google.

We don't want to go to an inner page that has only a passing reference to the topic. We don't want a page that just happens to have the words on it and seems to show because it is on a mega-site. We don't want a page that has links to pages that MIGHT have the content we want.

These are our experiences all too often now. This is why our webmaster changed the default search on the intranet to Altavista. He took a pragmatic decision which I think for now is the right one. Unless something changes I see more people doing that as time unfolds.