ianama - 12:10 am on Jan 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

PhattusCattus. I Agree.

This is the classic case of Google cutting off its nose to spite its face. Now I'm clearly seeing barely in the ballpark results in the SERPs at the top in some areas, with more relevant stuff at least 5-10 pages down.

Check this out: today I wanted to buy an electronics item as a birthday present for our my live-in nanny from a company I did business with previously and had a top notch shopping experince with. So I type in companyurl manufacturer, and I see only shopping comparison engine pages at the top where the google blurb indicates company used to advertise its products, but when I click, I realize those listings expired. I also see one more-than-year-old news story mentioning the company url and the manufacturer.

I then go to Yahoo and type the same thing in, and guess what, the main company url is the 1st result, and a product sold by that company from the manufacturer I seek is result #2. Clicked on the 2nd result, called them to make sure they had the product I want in stock and bought it online.

Now if wanted to comparison shop I would go to comparison shopping sites (as spammy as they are these days), and if I wanted news stories I would go to the news search. But I think my query in no uncertain terms indicated what I was looking for, and not only was it not at the top in the SERP(like it should have been in this case), but it was nowhere to be found.

All this over-intellectualizing and statisitical modeling I read in that PDF paper reminds me of Myron Scholes and LTCM ([en.wikipedia.org ]])

Now overall google is still probably the best search, but its really beginning to suck in some areas. It's like they think they know what is best for the user.