Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
But as a average user, I have been searching for various queries in (my) fav search engine GOOGLE, but the results which it has been throwing up were very vague due to which I had to go through 5 to 6 pages of the serach to get the content which I really needed.
Then I switched to Yahoo, using the same keywords and the search results was pretty relevant to what I needed on the first page itself.
My question do u feel that the serach in the google is deteriorating day by day.
The above example which i gave is not for just one search, I have been noticing this since 30 to 45 days.
what do u guy think about it?
Maybe we're just all being a little over-sensitive ;-)
I think you're right, Google has basing its No.1 search engine tag on nothing other than a bunch of useless webmaster search statistics. It's a bit like me including spider hits in my client statistics. It looks impressive, but how many actual customers can my service provide their website? ... in Google's case no where near the amount that the statistics suggest.
All the Best
Col :-)
In fact two friends i know have changed to using yahoo as their primary search now, they are not in the business!. Whilst this is a low number if search users all over do the same Google will have a problem!
It will be interesting if Google notices any reduction in users over the next few months or not but i for one think its not as relevent now due to the high volume amount of pages missing from its index.
Whilst Google has the lions share of the current market and user levels are no doubt still high, it can still lose market share. Granted it will take something special to make a major impact but currently this BD roll out wont be helping their cause at all imo - They may well be sticking two fingers up to webmasters whilst they hold major ground, but its a two way street, webmasters will take so much and search users wont have any loyalty thats for certain - It will take a while, But it can lose significant ground from here if its not carefull.
Maybe Bill Gates has called this right after all?
All I'm seeing is a bunch of sore loser webmasters trying to use WebmasterWorld to get their hard luck story over to Google in a form that they might appreciate (i.e. If you don't put my site back to number 1 ... you'll be sorry).
He he he ... that should get them goin'
All the Best
Col :-)
Maybe we're just all being a little over-sensitive ;-)
Yes, I agree. But the start of any trend, good or bad, will begin with the people closest to the data; namely, webmasters and SEO people on forums like this. Over-sensitive or not, there's enough comments to at least warrant concern.
From europeforvisitors
So yes, you can criticize, but you're probably criticizing something that doesn't yet exist--and your frame of reference inevitably will be different from Google's.
That's a fair point actually, but also the source of my concern - the utter indifference Google have. Their only real attempts at communication being through an employees blog. It neither instills confidence or paints them in a good light. I'm sure Google couldn't care less, but it's not impressive. If things really are going to be rosy with their 'improved' infrastructure then why not say so in a formal manner. Google never miss an opportunity to tell everyone how technically superior they are, so why the cloak and dagger approach?
They practically fall over themselves to announce pretty ropey BETA products, so why the clandestine approach to something so fundamental?
Anyway the point wasn't about Google's frame of reference, it was the idea that we're wrong to criticize so soon. Google will inevitably have their own timescales etc., but the total lack of insight provided by them, as well as the lame approach to communication generally, fosters rumour and speculation.
"Over-sensitive or not, there's enough comments to at least warrant concern"
My main concern is that WebmasterWorld is being used as some kind of Google pressure group. Every time a group gets knocked of the top of the listings we are inundated with cries of "Google losing the plot" and "thousands are going to migrate to MSN & Yahoo". These users are using the fact that MC and his friends presumably track the forums and these comments might somehow cause Google to do a U-turn.
IMHO I like that Google takes a line and generally tries to stick to it. In these days of knee-jerk reactions, I think it's good to see a company put its money where its mouth is ... and if the webmaster fraternity don't like it, they have two options - "Google's way or the Highway".
I'm available for weddings etc.
Col ;-)
If things really are going to be rosy with their 'improved' infrastructure then why not say so in a formal manner
Why? They'd just be pouring fuel on the flames.
As for Google's market share (which was mentioned in another post), Webmasters have been complaining about Google's SERPs for as long as I've been a member of Webmaster World (about 4-1/2 years). Yet a recent comScore Media Metrix study shows that Google's market share of English-language search has been increasing (with Yahoo's and MSN's search share declining) over the past year. Danny Sullivan describes the study and shows graphs at:
My main concern is that WebmasterWorld is being used as some kind of Google pressure group
This is the Google bit of the forum. Where else do we vent our spleen about the big G?
Every time a group gets knocked of the top of the listings we are inundated with cries of "Google losing the plot" and "thousands are going to migrate to MSN & Yahoo".
I'm with you on this - Google's demise has been predicted more times than I've had hot dinners. Short of a convenient meteor strike in several parts of the world at once, I can't see it happening any time soon. I've never been a doom and gloom type.
IMHO I like that Google takes a line and generally tries to stick to it
You mean like China, and censorship? That line (Do no evil) didn't even last until the first AGM. Anyway, I simply don't see evidence for this. I think the reason it took 4 months for Big Daddy was because there was very little sticking going on. I'm not a SE engineer, but nobody else seems to take as long.
I'm available for weddings etc
Don't give up the day job. Lol.
Why? They'd just be pouring fuel on the flames.
I didn't really make this clear. I meant it from a marketing point of view. Namely, if the new infrastructure is as good as they have hinted I would have assumed they'd be shouting from the rooftops. Hence the comparisons with stuff they quite evidently haven't thought through, yet hail as the best thing since sliced bread.
It's a weak point, and easy to demolish since there could be any number of reasons things are kept low-key in the uber competative SE market. But my own suspicion they do so is the lack of a clear plan, not potential espionage.
I meant it from a marketing point of view. Namely, if the new infrastructure is as good as they have hinted I would have assumed they'd be shouting from the rooftops. Hence the comparisons with stuff they quite evidently haven't thought through, yet hail as the best thing since sliced bread.
But Google isn't in the infrastructure business (as, say, a telco would be). For Google, using search infrastructure as a merketing platform would be like Kellogg's taking out ads to publicize its latest generation of breakfast-cereal machinery. Users, investors, and the media want to hear about products and/or profits. They're interested in the "what," not the "how."
Namely, if the new infrastructure is as good as they have hinted I would have assumed they'd be shouting from the rooftops.
I think one problem might be overestimating of what Google can do. While hard disk space might get cheaper, the billions of pages on the web are a massive amount of data that in end effect also has to be processed in some way. How much can you actually really do if you have billions and billions of pages, and a data amount, that is growing constantly? I haven't went into SEO much in my life, but from 16 years of programming and my PhD, I am not entirely sure if even masses of PhD's can work around certain data mass problems and restrictions of AI. Google has cleverly steared around AI problems with just sucking in all there is imo. As the old backlink algorithm is essentially defeated as one would expect from Game Theory as soon as cheaters [aka spammers are around] the inherent problem that Google will more and more face is, how to combat human intelligence with computer programs.
Google engineers have after all to deal, given the global nature of the web, also with the combined criminal energy of the web + an amount of data that is unprecedented in human history.
Hence I wish them all the best but remain sceptical, how this is gonna end if not more actual human based filtering is deployed, unless BD entails some digital lie detector with a < 0.01 error margin.
And even then according to the stats [cant post the url] there are 1,022,863,307 internet users. If on average everyone does one page, you still have 10,228,633 wrong detections aka pages on the web. Now most scientists dealing with organic data [aka produced by humans, animals, overcomplex systems] are quite happy with a 0.05 error margin. That's ~ 51.143.165 "errors". But this also means 1 times in 20 you are wrong. And your data mass is increasing every day every hour and is dynamically changing. Hence we have sandbox, sites being crawled by their PR, imo.
Maybe in the future the UK and India won't be the one huge call centre, but Google's data review outpost. ;)
So if each person in the UK looks at one page and rates it... but then again .. in all those people are cheaters again ..
In short, I think we are getting closer to what Google can achieve in precision.
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And the above is just some of the "A's" in a very long alphabetic list of all the towns and counties in the UK. The only other content on the home page is a link into their online catalogue. Google sees this as OK so if they cannot suss that as spamming there must be something wrong.
Yeah, if G could do half of what people speculate it can do, there would be no need for speculation.
Yeah, if G could do half of what people speculate it can do, there would be no need for speculation.
Thats pure speculation!
Yeah, if G could do half of what people speculate it can do, there would be no need for speculation.
IMO, it's unfortunate that there isn't more critical analysis of what G can and cannot do. Far too many people assume that because G has solved some difficult problems that it can solve all difficult problems.
Think about it this way; you have over a billion pages of text and in two seconds someone wants you to find a spaghetti recipe, how to rebuild a carburator on a '57 Chevy, and an article on mitosis. And almost every single time, they find it.
You can do this easily with altavista with their fantastic and really geeky and/or/near syntax and probably with every standard text search engine.
The real challenge imo is to fight human intelligence in trying to game/spam/cheat the system.
What Google was really good at is taking you away from being geeky and just loosing the logic control syntax, aka playing to human laziness. I use Google too and used AV in the "good/bad" old days. Just type, don't think, was the winner imo, and speed as you say. :)
These are not really tech savvy people and probably have no idea of the workings of Google but they have noticed a distinct change in quality.
Believe me Joe Public is starting to notice.
Believe me Joe Public is starting to notice.
That hasn't kept Google from increasing its share of the English-language search market--not just over the past year, but also over the past few months. (Source: comScore Media Metrix, as reported by SEW.)
they keep throwing up 404's that won't last and with the current lack of being able to crawl sites properly (SOME) the serps will soon become stale.
Pages that I have put up weeks ago are now ranking on both Y & MSN and G is still waiting to crawl them - what happen to the good old Gbot that would crawl a page within a few days
Do you know what month the data was accurate up for EFV?
The comScore Media Metrix market-share percentages were for English-language searches conducted in March, 2006.
Danny Sullivan's SEW article was published 10 days ago, so with luck we'll be able to see the April numbers in about three weeks.
But Adwords won't become stale... ;-)
The comScore Media Metrix market-share percentages were for English-language searches conducted in March, 2006.Danny Sullivan's SEW article was published 10 days ago, so with luck we'll be able to see the April numbers in about three weeks.
Cheers EFV :) Could be interesting.
I think, if you remove obvious spam, the web content as a total, even if unique, even if not a link list, might have simply deteriorated in quality. Maybe people themselves have changed, just taking the first link from G when they quote, which might have been of less quality and the SERPS loss in quality might be a social event and not only a software engineering event.
Web access is higher and many people do link to other websites, just because they found it, not because they are necessarily experts in the field, which will be slowly diluting process.
Anyway tried to find info about a Sony camera today, well in the end I went directly to Sony. I was still able to retrieve information about an extinct fish, but the text search didn't really give me what I was looking for. Fast scanning of the images search results , nevertheless led me on page six of the ISERPS to the right site.
