chiyo - 5:55 pm on Sep 30, 2002 (gmt 0)

Bobmark said:

"Let me give you an analogy so you get it."

Chiyo says "shucks - thanks very much Bob!"

Bobmark said:

"Do you think TV Guide ever said to NBC (or Turner or you name it):
"We think your listings are too wordy and use too many attention grabbing words like "sex" so we won't carry your listings this month. This penalty will be in effect until we feel like lifting it and we won't even tell you precisely what our criteria is to carry your listings in the future."
Or how about:
"We have decided that Turner Network shows are less relevant to our readers than those from The Basketweaving Channel. Starting this month, we are placing your listings on our 64th. line and have moved The Basketweaving Channel to the second line."

Chiyo said:

Well that would mean that TV Guide would lose their readership, and lose out to their competitors. I also think that TV Guide (USA?) is probably owned by the networks anyway so NBC would just get them sacked. Someway or another i think the networks PAY to be listed (either through part ownership or ads on the side), so they should have some say in how they are listed.

I honestly cant see any problems in SERPS in terms I search for. I listed about 20 of them in another thread so wont repeat them. Some of them got even better! Now thats a small sample, but none of us individually could hope to get even close to an infetemsial proportion of all Google queries. Many people here i feel are generalising from perceived bad listings in their fave keyword areas and thinking that ALL of Google has gone bad!

to me it just got better!

Now, my (perhaps bad) assumption is most problems are in highly competitive, higly commercial areas while i was looking at economic, business, and country stats information.

Ive always beleived that Google can never be a good engine for higly commercial categories, as the whole priciple of Page Ranking and link popularity just does not work with competitive comemrcial entities (try getting yoru competitor to link to you!) Il'd not be totally surprised that that part of the index is having problems. If i wanted to buy something II'd go to overture, or MSN or Amazon or Shopping directories anyway. However I will click on an Adword is its relevant to my search and provided in context with more objective information on the left!