Alleged poor, spammy SERPs don't affect end users

Users vote Google most reliable brand

[Chris_H]

Google, along with the BBC Website, has been voted the most reliable website, according to a survey conducted by YouGov, a market research group in the UK.

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

Despite our complaints about deteriorating results in the Google index, it seems that end users do not experience (or recognise) the problems that many on this forum have to live with day in, day out.

[steveb]

One statement doesn't lead to another. It just means they are better. The one-eyed man in the land of the blind thing.

[tedster]

I think this is an essential point for all us web marketers to take in. We are perhaps too well informed and look at Google from too close a personal-interest slant. Quarter after quarter, Google's share of the search market goes up. The general pubic has no current problem, across a broad spectrum anyway. Reminds me of the old days when AltaVista was "do or die" -- except AV seemed a lot easier to play with.

It can be a bitter pill when we feel that we've been "done wrong" by the big G and our bank account is draining. But this is the reality within which we work. It's a massive collection of data and painful stuff does happen. Google clearly is working for better communication with us, warts and all, but the job is not easily scaled up to cover everyone.

I for one appreciate hearing reports from forum members about what seems to have gone wrong, what steps they've taken to fix things, and how that all works out. I particularly like the "here's what I am doing" posts. Many times they mean something a year later, when I didn't have a real world parallel in front of me at the time.

But clearly, for the moment, John Q Public is speaking loud and clear. They do like Google, whether all the websmasters do or not.

[trinorthlighting]

I think the public in general expects a certain amount of spam and irrelevant content served up by the search engines. Google still seems to still serve up relevant results for the most part.

Another thing that googles homepage loads fast on computers because there is less clutter. That is a big benefit for people with slow computers or dial up connections.

[simonmc]

If your site goes missing, google still has thousands of sites to take your place. To the public there is no problem.

The only issue the public may have is if they search for something one day, find YOUR site and visit. The next day they do the same search but your site is now gone. They can't find it again. This of course though does not happen often enough for there to be a percieved problem from the end users perspective.

The bottom line is that google has thousands of sites just like yours looking to take your place. One webmaster is bitter and one is happy. Google loves that :)