Dave_Hybrid - 4:09 pm on Jun 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

I posted this over a month ago, long before matt cutts confirmed anything, seems i was pretty spot on, which is reassuring that my seo knowledge is not half bad. But i still stick by my point, matt says its deliberate, it's not, Google is broken, the results are appalling, i cannot use it for non-webmaster stuff anymore, it's totally unrelevent and at best a junk search engine. You had a good run Google, but seriously, from a non webmaster angle, your search engine is crap, the worst search engine i have used in a decade in it's current state.

Google is broken. For example; I'm planning some travel soon so off comes the webmaster hat and on goes the regular user hat. Pretty much every search Ive done tonight is bringing up scrapers, hub spam, social networking spam, etc. Complete junk, thin articles, first posts ripped from forums into wordpress outranking the the forum it was ripped from, content ripped from Yahoo answers outranking Yahoo answers. This has been going on a while but i've never seen it this bad. All of the junk on the first page too. I've lost count how many times this has happened, so many different searches. I never need to go past page 1, now I'm on 4-5-6. This is the worst Ive seen Google, and no this is not from a biased webmaster view, this isnt my niche, this is purely from a normal searchers view. I've spent hours genuinely researching travel tips, destinations and so on and I'm finding utter junk time after time. Some filters must be missing, my bet is it's the junk sites getting the traffic loss, hopefully this will be sorted soon. I genuinely had the worse user experience I have ever had using a search engine today, in 15 years of using the Internet. I'm well aware of some great sites in this niche, and not one of them showed up today, it's like they all lost authority and the crap has risen up past them. *edit It's also worth noting this was long tail searches that i was doing, 4 or 5 word stuff. It's bad from where I'm sitting, spammy and also very irrelevant serps. I'm searching for pretty clear stuff and getting results on totally irrelevant topics. I'm not even clicking on lots of searches as I can see from the titles and snippets it's not anywhere close to what I'm searching for. I'd hedge my bets lots or traffic is also going nowhere, except getting bored and turning on the TV.