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The post florida G returns information sites for a commercial search in some areas. Why not just accept that commmercial searches should return commercial results? This is better for the people who want to buy.
No search engine can read minds. If you want ONLY pages written in English on France use the Advanced search an tell it so.Pre-Florida, I would have disagreed with you.
And I think you misspelled :o
I guess it means 'big nose' or something :)
If I type my query in english from an english speaking location it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure I want my results in English
No, like I said it takes a mind reader. They wouldn't have all these fancy tools if they could read minds.
You type one single word "France" and get *some* unwanted results, another types France and get's the same results and his happy. Why are you right and the other wrong?
Are you actually serious? What "english speaking location" (sic) do you refer to? I live in the United States. Where I happen to work there are multilingual US born people who speak French, Spanish and German that I know of. Along with a woman from Iran who also knows Farsi. And 2 Nigerians and a Zambian who also speak a language common in their country (at the moment I can't recall the name of those languages.) And, I happen to live in a college town where the college has 44,542 enrolled students, and according to the official college website they have students from 125 different nations. In the nation I live, people here speak MANY different languages.
And if you want to say what is relevant to your post is the query in English, many languages commonly adopt English language words and terms. Do you know what they call a "Big Mac" in French (including France) "Le Big Mac". Not "Le Mac Grand." With most search queries being just a few words, quite often very difficult to know what language the person would want results in. Particularly as what characters comprise an English word also could be a word in many other languages.
If you want results in English only, then learn how to use Google properly to get that. And don't whine if you don't and there are foreign language results.
[edited by: rfgdxm1 at 2:23 am (utc) on Dec. 21, 2003]
I can read English, Hindi (and a few dialcts) and Japanese (not that fluently, though) and when I search for a term like 'Tokyo' and sites in Japanese language show up, I don't mind that at all.
Course not when I'm looking for a site about The Lord Of The Rings.
Seems like people have become spoiled. A few results on the first page they don't like and they're miffed.
Anyway, top ten results is good for a "quick fix". Anything more serious or in depth and you will have to look further (that is, if you care to be thorough).
In the case of a search on "Costa Rica" I'm actually doing a search on two spanish words, so I really have trouble complaining about some spanish reasults.
And if you run a travel site for Costa Rica, you have no right complaining if some spanish sites come back in the SERPs, because anyone traveling there will suddenly find themselves confronted with spanish wherever they go in that fine country.
>> Why not just accept that commmercial searches should return commercial results?
Personally i have no problem accepting that. I also keep getting commercial results when i do commercial searches, but nevermind... of course i don't get all sites and i'm not sure it's the right ones, although they do seem to meet my criteria consistently. Perhaps i'm just a more experienced searcher then the average Joe or perhaps i'm just lucky, who knows?
>> the guy that works the hardest on link building/buying/swapping, content building or whatever
Here i disagree. Imho, link buying or swapping should not be a criteria for evaluating the quality of a site - it's too easy that way. I mean, if you spend your advertising budget on buying links, then that's fine, but that is advertising - it does not need to have anything to do with the quality of your site.
>> the one who has the resources to do it and has the resources to deliver and should be #1.
That's far better - the guy/girl that invest the most ressources in making the very best site on his/her topic should be #1. Regardless if the site is "commercial", "infomercial", "informative", "news", or just "entertaining", or whatever.
>> something interesting happens to the layout of the Google results page
We're onto something here. When a query can mean different things to different people, having one long list might not be the best way to present the selected results, especially when there's only 10 places on the first page.
Google is now presenting a selection of different types of sites for a lot of queries, and a simple ranking in terms of "overall value" does not serve this purpose very well, as the searcher might be more interested in a ranking within these types/groups.
Personally, i'd suggest a column layout or maybe a set of (boxes with) topical headlines in stead, so that the user could see what was selected/presented more clearly, but Google is not on my customer list - anyway, they can get that little piece of advice for free right here ;)
/claus
Absolutely, as long as it's relevent.
For commercial searches, you may have 1000 sites selling the same product. The hardest working/smartest should get the top 10 slots - the way it's always been.
The others can buy advertising.
Instead, we get totally irrelevent results (epinions - with ZERO actual listings for the products, Kelkoos (which is of no value to the U.S.), Dealtime (which also has ZERO actual listings for the product), and several sites which warp us to eBay.
Now we all get to buy advertising because of piss-poor results. Cool. I could even live with that (because Google owes me nothing), except for one thing...
95% of the people ignore the paid ads. Guess Google thinks they can FORCE people to start looking at the ads.
If so, it ain't workin'.
I don't understand why there seems to be this belief that a commercial result to a query can't be the most informative.
No one said that commercial sites can't be informitive or even the most informative. But go read the first post
Why not just accept that commmercial searches should return commercial results?
I was personally questioning the definition of what is a commercial search.
Most people with e-commerce sites optomize for product names or product categories, which is as it should be. But is a search for "ford mustang" or "search engine optimization" necessarily people looking for those services, or could those searcher be looking for information on mustang rallies, or how to optimize their own website.
Now I can accept that most people that shop for "ford mustang dealer mytown" are searching for specific commercial information, and that should be given a high priority. Though I would still want to see news reports about how Wacky Wally's Ford dealership has been brought up on charges for selling demo cars as new.
If you are really talking about very specific commercial searches, where there is now way to mistake them for anything else, then I will agree, that it really should return the best commercial sites. If it is a search that in any way can be construed as non-commercial, then Google should retun what they consider the best sites.
A site could easily be classified as "commercial" on a percentage scale (0% not .... 100% definitely) by looking at various factors: Examples, do they:
Sites that are mis-over-classified as commercial (or vice versa) and don't like it, will be able to apply a new set of magic SEO rules to tone down (or up) their commerciality.
And those of us who don't want to see commercial results while reseaching hotels and travel will have a choice.
The way it worked was you had to go out and "find" sites to add to the categories that you signed up for. The more work you did for go.com the better your site ranked.
I see that the same can apply here in some sort if way. I have 3 people working for me on links only. I have another one for content + 3 people for html. I am working hard to get my commercial sites to #1. I deserve it more than a subdomain with one relevant page from a huge site which I can see now on my serps.
There has to be some commodity that makes you more than the next guy. I do this on adwords by spending more than the rest to get to #1 and I do this by getting links for SEO. IMO there is nothing wrong with me getting a load of links to be #1 for my commercial searches. It shows that I am working/spending the most and my site will be relevant.
Now the top then containes a long anecdotal story about somebodies montain trip, and somewhere in the frings the word widget is mentioned, but hte story isnT' about widgets and provides no info about widgets. This is result #3. The remaining results are sites (commercial sites no less), which sell widget-free wodgets, and gadgets that don't include any widget.
So by what wierd logic can you justify a top ten result for "buy widget" that only provides sources explicitly NOT includign widgets? simply because the word "widget" appears in hte title "widget-free wodgets".
SN
Semantics. CommercialRank. Google already algorithmically identifies commercial sites for inclusion into froogle.
You can't hide a commercial site - all the technology is in place to identify them (isn't Froogle supposed to crawl the web for products and prices from sites that haven't even given a data-feed?)
Some top sites on commercial search terms appear to be there because their index pages are much like doorways, and contain no crawlable commercial terms. In many cases this is probably not deliberate, but even if you attempted to engineer your commerce site like this, it can't be long before Google plugs this hole.
Froogle is the way ahead with Google for commercial searches - there's probably no way around it. But in many parts of the World Froogle isn't really an option at present (and I include the UK in this.) Google will therefore take a big hit in its popularity where Froogle designed SERPs roll out on Google in regions where folks can't use the new shopping 'functionality'
Seems like a hell of a gamble to me. There's a tremendous amount of search engine 'stickiness' - when I started to use the Internet we all used Altavista - it took me a couple of years to prise this out of my Favourites and start using Google. If G can't provide decent commercial SERPs soon, they might lose their 'stickiness' - I've already seen a massive shift in sales coming from other SEs - and even small directories - in the UK.
[edited by: superscript at 3:54 pm (utc) on Dec. 21, 2003]
Google already algorithmically identifies commercial sites for inclusion into froogle.
Well, it identifies commercial merchant sites for inclusion in Froogle. Commercial affiliate sites are a different story.
It's pretty easy to identify a page with a shopping-cart link as being "commercial." Things get trickier when an algorithm has to determine whether a page is an "affiliate site page" or an "information page" with an affiliate link. (That doesn't mean differentiation is impossible; certain layout features or the presence of duplicate content may suggest boilerplate affiliate pages, for example.)
You can "hide" High CR(CommercialRank) sites in the SERPs, which is perfectly OK, but I think to be fair to the consumer you need to be honest. The normal solution is disclaimers.
*We have returned filtered results to better highlight our sponsors for your search terms. If you would like a better selection, please use another search engine.
Crush (my brother for the record) said:
I deserve it more than a subdomain with one relevant page from a huge site which I can see now on my serps.
You might deserve it. Or you might just think so. Anyway Google could not give 2 hoots who deserves a ranking.
You sound like a schoolboy who wants the teacher to give him a star for working hard. In the end it's the product that counts not how hard you work. Do you buy something from the guy who spends the most on his shop? Of course not. You buy it from the guy who gives you the best service or the lowest price.
If Google could determine which sites were tops for service or price, that would be worth ranking higher. Google has just crawled an index page on a half built site of ours. It is full of dead links, yet ranks #1 for its keywords. That is the sort of ranking error Google should turn its attention to. Don't expect the spam report on this one GoogleGuy :)
You can "hide" High CR(CommercialRank) sites in the SERPs, which is perfectly OK, but I think to be fair to the consumer you need to be honest. The normal solution is disclaimers.*We have returned filtered results to better highlight our sponsors for your search terms. If you would like a better selection, please use another search engine.
It may be emotionally satisfying to accuse Google of filtering its search results to increase revenues from AdWords, but so far nobody has supplied any proof for such allegations.
Fact is, Google has a stated corporate mission of organizing the Web's "information" (Google's word, not mine) and making it accessible. If Larry Page, Sergey Brin, & Co. choose to define "information" in a way that favors .edu, .gov, or editorial pages over catalog pages and affiliate pages, that definition isn't necessarily intended to create additional revenue opportunities for AdWords. More likely, it's an attempt to reclaim Google's SERPs from the entrepreneurs and SEOs who made it harder for users to find information (as Google interprets that word) in a rising flood of commercial results. Let's not forget that Google's roots are in the academic world, and that the company brags more about its PhDs than about its MBAs.
It's true that emphasizing information over e-commerce will tend to encourage businesses to buy advertising (whether on Google or elsewhere). But that doesn't make AdWords revenue the driving force behind Google's desire for product improvement.
I don't think Google thinks as one like the Borg from Star Trek the Next Generation. Google is a company with many employees all of whom have their own objectives.
No doubt the Adwords Manager jumps for joy when results become less commercial. But that doesn't mean the search team did it to help him out.
On the other hand, if GoogleGuy went to the board and said "hey dudes, these results are way too commercial. I want to make them more broad because it would benefit searchers", Schmidt being the instinctive businessman might just say fine knowing the impact on the bottom line. Larry and Sergey being the techies might say fine because they believe in keeping the results pure.
My point is that there must be some people up top who have a different agenda to the public image of the company. We can't just say "Google wants" or "Google doesn't want".
Reality slaps you in the face when it's time to pay employees, and as much as we'd all like to have the best 'search experience' it takes a back seat to bringing in the buck$.
Why not just accept that commmercial searches should return commercial results?
Crush, that's fine with me and what I think Google should do.
The problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too.
SOD off....
:)
It's true that emphasizing information over e-commerce will tend to encourage businesses to buy advertising (whether on Google or elsewhere). But that doesn't make AdWords revenue the driving force behind Google's desire for product improvement.
Traditionally, businesses could catch the attention of Joe Surfer by either spending money to buy PR through directory listings, ads on on-line journals and SEO or buying adwords or some combination of both. From Google's revenue and founding philosophy point of view, adwords is the desired solution that serves the surfers well too by bringing in transparency in search results and making SEO less relevant.
Therefore, I do hope that all those attempts to do well on the serps (and I don't blame businesses for doing that - everyone is trying to survive) become futile on Google. Therefore, when I look for a keyphrase I will trust the results more. If I want to buy something, I will glance to the right columns or if the business has enough good will and information to land in top spots without considering all its bought PR, I will find it naturally in the serps.
I may be dancing in the dark (now for all you boss fans you KNOW where I'm from!) but it seems to me that Google's "mission" while publicly remaining the same is very different now from what they set out to do originally.
Reality slaps you in the face when it's time to pay employees, and as much as we'd all like to have the best 'search experience' it takes a back seat to bringing in the buck$.
Providing the best search experience is what brings in (and brings back) the users who produce revenue. Google is a media company, and--like any other media company--it won't remain successful unless it continues to deliver what its target audience is looking for.
