SevenCubed - 1:56 am on Aug 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

The first 4-5 pages are littered with EMD's and other spammy sites.

I have been trying to talk a friend of mine into abandoning Google as her default search engine for a few years. She is a totally non-technical everyday user. I've explained so much to her in depth about Google's abuses and even though she understood what I was saying she couldn't be convinced. Every time her PC was brought to me to get all the gremlins out of it (spyware, etc) I would make a point of setting all toolbars and browser settings to Bing (with her grudging approval of course). But every time her PC ended back on top of my bench for it's regular purging of gremlins all defaults were back to Google.

So recently I gave up. Now a few weeks ago she brings up the topic without me prodding it and says lately she has noticed Google is bringing up "very bad results" as per her own words. So, a gleeful smile comes across my face as I had a vision of finally getting her to switch to Bing (or anything else). But, what she said next blew me away. She said she found a way around it -- she inputs her query then when the results come up she immediately skips ahead to page 5,6, or 7 randomly and begins reading results from that point on and totally ignores the first 4 pages. A grown man crying is not a pretty sight.

So whatever it's called these days (panda, penguin, pipe dream) the results are at their all-time worst for even a non-technical casual user to notice it.

By the way I've been unplugged from all this tech stuff for a bit more than a year until recently and only checked in for a quick browse once every couple months -- when did the panda become a penguin?