Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
"Go to Google and enter the name of a London hotel for which you'd like the homepage. You'll be confronted by pages and pages of hotel reseller aggregator websites, all offering to make the booking on your behalf. No, I just want the website of the actual hotel please, so I start scrolling down the list. I count myself lucky if I find the right URL within the first ten pages of hits.Let's try something else - some computer or home hi-fi product. Again I get a vast number of irrelevant websites, many of which are aggregators of not only Google but also Amazon or eBay. Tearing my hair out, try to dive into the search terms to find a way to stop it giving me all this unnecessary rubbish. And it isn't easy to do, since Google is giving me all this stuff deliberately.
I understand from fellow contributing editor Davey Winder that there are some magic incantations I can add onto the search terms to knock out a number of these aggregators. But this isn't the long term solution. The reality is that Google has thrown the baby out with the bath water for my daily searching, and I confess that I've gone back to Yahoo! for the time being. It's far from perfect, but I find things quicker. ...
... I don't know the definitive answer. What's clear is that the current model isn't working. And it's really sad to see a once-great product such as Google become corroded, polluted and rendered ineffective by third parties and its own internal workings.
So there you have it. This is the opinion of a respected pro magazine. If the rest of the business press pick up on this and it snowballs we could see Google being rattled severely. Could this be the thin end of the wedge?
As someone who has taken around 100 trips the last 4 years, I KNOW the se's are all but useless at travel related searches. For someone to complain that the se's are good at finding sites related to the most spammed out sector of the web, doesn't carry much weight - especially an oped peice by someone who obviously hasn't done alot of travel related searching. The same story has been run in magazines for 5-7 years running. There is nothing new here - ssdy (same story - different year)
Seriously (lol - hey, keep it light. lol), I too get a bit tired of the "pump/pan" cycle that everyone throws at the se's (regardless of who it is, but being the current top dog, Google gets everyones best shot).
You know this thread really isn't about google at all. The same thing is true for all the engines.
> Another magazine
You guys really are just waking up to this? Where where you all last year? It was open season on google for most of last summer. What is going on now, is jut peanuts by comparison. The noise factory over "there" about how Google is on the verge of collapse is just nonsense. This was the exact same thing that was said during allegra, and then during the ipo, and then during florida, and then when g lost yahoo. Well guess what - whether we like it or not, they are still the top dog on the heap and we have to deal with them. Carpet bombing a bunch of baseless flames on sites about google only speaks of the author and not about Google.
All the se's have had, and continue to have serious problems with the travel sector - it is the vast wasteland of the web. It has been bad forever and will remain bad. The number of quality sites related to travel can be counted on basically 1 hand.
> learn to use an se
sorry - you were right - that was too harsh (that was a <i>pre-coffee</i> 4am offense on my part ;-)
For an se to take a one, two or three word query like "london hotels" and turn that into something useful out of millions of pages with that phrase on it who are dead set on gaming the engine, is next to an impossible task. The fact that they can come up with ANYTHING valuable in the top 10 at all, is a testomony unto itself.
You know this thread really isn't about google at all. The same thing is true for all the engines.
Brett, you may have hit the nail right on the head with that statement. Google no longer stands out amongst the rest and that is a fact. That was the point Jon Honeyball made and the reason for his critique
You guys really are just waking up to this? Where where you all last year? It was open season on google for most of last summer. What is going on now, is jut peanuts by comparison. The noise factory over "there" about how Google is on the verge of collapse is just nonsense.
I would take you to task on this. Until very recently Google was all that was good. You had to search very hard to find anyone criticising them (outside of this and other forums that is.) Popular magazine articles slagging them off were very hard to find.
For an se to take a one, two or three word query like "london hotels" and turn that into something useful out of millions of pages with that phrase on it who are dead set on gaming the engine, is next to an impossible task. The fact that they can come up with ANYTHING valuable in the top 10 at all, is a testomony unto itself.
The search he mentioned was not for "London Hotels." AFAIK it was for Widget hotel London. If they cannot find the actual Widget hotel London website amongst the scum that their algo has filtered to the top that is a testimony unto itself.
Let's face it. Google is still quite good but it is not now really any better than the rest. That is a fact that could be proven if anyone had the will to put it to the test. All we get in here is people who are pro Google singing its praises and others condemning them. What we need is some scientific testing. Any volunteers?
I just tried "Ritz Hotel London" and then "Savoy Hotel London" and the #1 result for each search is the official site.
Maybe this only works for hotels that for a one-night stay would eat half a year of my wages?
Remember...Google search is the platform they are using as their leverage point deeper into the marketplace ... so as they move aggressively to leverage this valuable platform..(google search)...and build out all sorts of services (gmail, froogle, their own browser?, a network based OS?...etc...etc...etc..).. they may get stretched a bit thin along the way and have some difficulties...
This is much like how MS has attempted (several times) to use their dominant PC Desktop market hold to penetrate other sectors...(with some failures along the way)...
Or a another good example is how Adobe is in the process of purchasing Macromedial...whick will catapult them right into the path of MS and its digital/print/web publishing initiatives..
These are becoming infinitely more interesting times then when I started doing Search back in 1997 (make sure you sound like an old geyser when you read out loud 1997)
Jon
<Looks like I stirred up some interesting discussion :-)>
Of course :-)
Thanks for visiting the thread.
This was the exact same thing that was said during allegra, and then during the ipo, and then during florida, and then when g lost yahoo. Well guess what - whether we like it or not, they are still the top dog on the heap and we have to deal with them.
IPO apart (I thought that was MS turfers & IPO early traders talking them down).
The only thing they can change is themselves. Florida, Allegra, etc. all show the same problem. They change the algorithm, roll it out, then optimise & cleanup the results in public. So we get a rushed result set, for 2-3 months you can't find squat, a whole load of bad press comes out and all its well deserved.
They should take more care, be more measured and get it right before they roll it out.
For an se to take a one, two or three word query like "london hotels" and turn that into something useful out of millions of pages with that phrase on it who are dead set on gaming the engine, is next to an impossible task. The fact that they can come up with ANYTHING valuable in the top 10 at all, is a testomony unto itself.
Either Google does it or someone else will because thats what the user wants & expects.
Isn't 'denial' the cause of collapse? A company doesn't respond to a problem, they go into denial, talk sophistry, then another company comes along and bingo, market flip. Look at Firefox eating at Internet Explorer for an example when MS failed to fix their security holes. I recall MS staff saying "security holes are inevitable, just a fact of life..." very much in the style you use when talking about searching for "travel" sites.
I could show you some numbers comparing conversion rates for some pages on our site for Google vs Yahoo. The Yahoo referrals convert much better. But then the search phrase that causes the page to come up is a lot different. The page targets "adjective event widgets", Yahoo matches it to "adjective event widgets", Google matched it to "adjective event". So someone looking for information hits our page and think they have a spam result from a widget vendor and doesn't convert.
That person registers a black mark against Google in their head. It's not the commentators & pundits that cause that black mark to be there, even if they shut up tomorrow it wouldn't help.
Not all criticisms of Google are turf from BHSEOs & competitors!
"People who found this page a waste of time also found these pages a waste of time..."
;-)
No public would ever be able to access the site. All of the bandwidth would be taken up with a "war of the bots".
Wouldn't it be interesting to start a search engine where the public could vote on the usefulness of a result and that would determine over time the position of the page in the se results? or is there one already?
For a while I thought they might have done exactly that with the vote buttons on the Google toolbar. But I've only ever seen those buttons used by SEOs to vote their own sites up and other sites down.
I know I was being harsh on google and could have made the point about other search engines too -- but given that google is the no 1 search engine in the eyes of the public, it seemed a reasonable target to go after :-)
In which case wouldn't it have been more accurate to discuss the search engine industry as a whole.
I want to see the widget sellers sites if I search for widgets, I don't want shopping channels ranging from mediocre to utter garbage, plus a whole lot of other affiliate and go-between sites, ..... wouldn't it be nice if for once the first 20 sites in the SERPS all turned out to be widget sellers not garbage affiliates, shopping crap etc .......
Jon's article was on the money even if he singled out Google. He did however qualify this later.
<Jon's article was on the money even if he singled out Google.>
Agree. Furthermore it stirred up some interesting discussion, as Jon mentioned in his first post on this thread.
I just go to the hotel's own website these days and book direct.
Wasn't the hotel's own website what Jon Honeyball couldn't find on Google and hence what this discussion was about? Am I going round in circles? :)
and seeing websites that are directories on top or sites that actually contain no information about our service.
And there is no shortage of these :(
ritz carlton london when spelt correctly gives the hotel website number one on google
also google is bringing up the hotels details for area searches including phone number at the top of the page and is doing so for free....
To me it seems bizarre that google will index 10,000's pages on a site with only a handful of inbound links. It's too easy to generate 10,000s of identical pages that contain only a few keyword changes, from a db. It seems to be the current trend to do this (as a way of optimising for location based searches especially) and most of the pages seem to contain no actual content of use. The aggregators seem to be the worst offenders for this. I know google is supposed to spot duplicate content but in reality it doesn't (or at least doesn't penalise them). Surely a genuine site with a high number of pages will contain a lot of natural links, many to deeply nested content (ie not just the homepage).
I'm sure google will have to do something about this at some point. Not only because the quality of the results are being diminised, but also because of the number of extra pages googles index will have to hold. How many 10,000+ page sites can google realistically store in an index of only 8,058,044,651 pages? I don't know for sure but I'm guessing that they are already struggling to increase the index size.
<i remember when these forums were good. Now its just a place for people to vent frustation at there bad ranking and to whinge about google.>
IMHO, these forums are still of very high quality and are a "MECCA" to those who wish to share, discuss and learn.
However, it just happen that you post on Google News Forum and should expect that people discuss matters related to Google, of course.
