Google content, is it still good?

Is quality Google content is getting worse

[webmonkey]

I am finding the quality Google content is getting worse, it use to be excellent up to a few months ago and now I tend to find a lot more directory type sites indexed higher therefore forcing me to troll through many pages before I get to the sites which actually holds decent content.

Is anybody else finding this?

G

[Rodney]

Actually, I find just the opposite. As more and more sites are added to the index, I find myself being able to find the information I'm looking for with only one search, instead of 2 or 3 as in the past.

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], webmonkey.

I think that if you use good word combinations to search with, then Google is at least as good as ever. As Rodney points out the index is bigger, and in some ways that helps PageRank to do its job better.

One thing that people may not realise is how important word proximity is, especially when searching with popular words. If the relevant pages are likely to contain "wordA wordB wordC" in that order, then you can get better results searching for "wordA wordB wordC" than for "wordC wordB wordA".

[webmonkey]

Nice to have everybody's views. I have been using search engines for some time so I am aware of different options avaialble for composing your search criteria.

I don't know what this proves but lets take a look at it anyway:

What do I want: Good Tutorial for sending email using DotNet

I tried:
dotnet send email tutorial
[google.com...]

and got some very poor content pages

I then tried:
dotnet send email tutorials
[google.com...]

Which came back with loads of directory type pages and buried in there some very good articles

I then tried
dotnet send email tutorial code sample
[google.com...]

and once again I got huge list of directory type pages.

Do you see my point. Am I being silly and expecting too much. What I would like is to see some code examples not another directory.

G

[vitaplease]

webmonkey,

I have not checked your search query results, but you probably answered your own question.
Add "code example(s)" (try single and plural) to your original search (in the sequences as Ciml pointed out) and you might get what you wanted.
You can also try the minus sign (-) for the word directory.

Also check Google groups for that information

[edited by: vitaplease at 4:19 pm (utc) on Sep. 4, 2002]

[corpuscle]

I usually do a mixture of Google Web and Google Groups searches to get the right keywords to search for.

I also try to use fewer keywords than you've tried. Taking your example for instance, I tried:

[google.com...]

note there's no "tutorial" in the keywords - that's such a likely keyword for a useless page to use.

This gave a few results, but since I know nothing about the topic, I did the same search on Groups too:

[groups.google.com...]

This gave some very relevant information. Looking at the first result thread, I found a good keyword - SMTPMail - which is a dotnet class for sending email.

So, I refined the Web Search to:

[google.com...]

or

[google.com...]

if you want vb instead of c#. Both of these give what appear to be good results.

I find that a combination of usenet (via Google Groups) and the web usually leads to much better quality search terms for anything technical especially. I also often find good web links in usenet.

Perhaps Google will one day make use of the high-quality usenet content to evaluate the relevance of each keyword within a *web* query - that would be cool. As long as usenet remains high-quality of course :)