Andem - 4:26 am on Oct 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hey Ted. I didn't really want to make this thread about Maps or anything else (except for the 'brokenness') in particular. I was just making some observations about Google Search and the services it is inevitably connected to, or rather integrated with. With that said, I think G Search is broken, and the connected services are seemingly also affected.

The effects of Panda 2.0 were immediate and when I couldn't find unique information that only we offered, I was worried. To this day, I can't find anything relevant to many search terms we were always in the top 7 results for. Needless to say, my guys at Google Adsense have been in constant contact wondering what the hell has happened.

With that said and beyond my own connection with Google, I really haven't been able to find anything relevant to my own searches within the past few days (and infact, the past several months). I was really surprised when a few days ago, Google Maps directed me to 'walk' via a very popular landmark. If I didn't live here and know where this landmark really was, I would suggest that even perhaps over 100,000 Android users per year with G Maps are misled by the directions Google Maps gives.

Disregarding maps, news is another story. Forget about Android and the strange redirects I've been getting lately, the actual results from Google News over 2-3 days (let alonge weeks) have been erratic. Why would a forum thread with 1 sentence and a link to the original source as a "Read More" link be considered the original source when the original page with 6+ paragraphs is readily available and linked to, also as a long time Google News source. The original could only be found under a duplicates search.

There are far too many threads on WebmasterWorld which cite the prevalence of rubbish results outranking the originals. What hasn't been addressed yet in detail is the possible (and IMHO definite) corruption of other Google servics with similar "Panda" algorithms and indeed, the effects of the apparant removal of 'advanced search' functions.

My other half is a professor and asks me sometimes to fix grammar mistakes in English (I'm a native English speaker living in a non-English-speaking EU country). I sometimes get asked whether something is grammatically correct. I recently tried to use quotes in a Google search to figure out one of these conundrums but it was literally returned nothing relevant. A mere 15,000 results, completely disregarding my quotes or even what I was looking for... absoltely nothing relevant. A BING search gave me exactly what I was looking for but with over 750,000 results, with the quotes.

My complaints really aren't only my own.