My Wife Asked: Is something wrong with Google?

[freelistfool]

My wife is a person who I would characterize as a good representative of the average search engine user. She has Google search as her homepage, types everything (including domain names and business brands) into Google to go anywhere on the internet, doesn't differentiate between advertisements and search engine results, and only bookmarks things that are really important to her or big sites like Amazon. In short, Google is her main portal to the internet.

Today she asked me, "Is something wrong with Google? It seems like the first 6 or 7 results don't have anything to do with what I'm looking for."

I am curious if others are hearing anecdotal stories of average search users not happy with the Google results. Let's not make this a Panda/Google bashing thread. Instead, I'd rather learn what you think Panda's impact will be on the general public.

[kidder]

I've posted a little more of this text in another thread but I think page one results with this sort of RUBBISH can't be intended.

On August 12 Google reported thcoming from it wvery stgrecoming froming out except for Chinese Japfantveryticese fantveryticd Korefantverytic. Google’s Amit Singing said Google wvery still testing improvements in those lfantveryticgucontinually become older.

“For most lfantveryticgucontinually become older this chfantveryticge impshows typictop rgotd friend 6-9% of queries to a college degree thin a person might notice” said Singhing. “This is distinctly lower thfantverytic the initiing launch of Pfantveryticda which impinged on effectively 12% of English queries to a lucid presence.”

Nevertheless the effects haudio-videoe lgotly felt.

Let’s get right to Sefoot posturemetrics’ lists.

Losers in Switzerlfantveryticd:

[MrFewkes]

Its not panda that I find messy about google - it hasnt touched any of my many hundreds of sites.

More to the point - and about the results - its the chinese sites which dominate my searches - the adwords advertisers based in china which take up 1 2 and 3 of the top adwords spots.

Who would want that? Chinese sites showing up when I search for "word1 word2" in England?

[g1smd]

If you're looking for counterfeit and fake products (and even if you're not) Chinese sites selling them are all over the place in the search results for some big brand names and have been for several years.

[mslina2002]

Last week I was looking for my favorite show to see when it would be playing. No matter how many searches I did, I couldn't find it on Google. I decided to try Bing which I never use. Found it on first try, in 1st spot. So I figured perhaps it was due to new Panda updates and movement in SERPs will probably settle back.

Tonight, I searched again. In the first spot was information about my show and tv schedule. Except it was a blog post from May 2011 describing several shows that will be coming in the Fall. Totally out of date. Went to Bing again, and again, first spot, Bingo!

So yes, I agree with your wife.

[Andem]

A couple of pretty smart people have mentioned the crappy results on Google as of late. My other half in fact mentioned it a few times over the past few months, completely unable to find content which was normally available.

Nobody that I know that who have mentioned deplorable Google search results are members of or active members of any social networks.. so they aren't necessarily the type of people who find 'social content' rather useful.

[wheel]

A super affiliate friend of mine once told me that crappy content makes for better click throughs on their ads on the same page.

In unrelated news, Googles adwords income continues to rise.

[shazam]

A super affiliate friend of mine once told me that crappy content makes for better click throughs on their ads on the same page.

In unrelated news, Googles adwords income continues to rise.

Bingo!


I had a search last week and the top result was packed full of viri/trojans and assorted nasties.

A few days ago, I was searching for what should have been common physics information. Never did find it, that is until I tried bing, then lo and behold the 3rd result was exactly what I was searching for.

I like it. Keep it up google, your doing good. People will never switch to bing no matter how bad you make the serps. Just keep feeding your own greed and arrogance. You are untouchable, go go go go!

[jinnguyen]

Google has been accused of cooking it's search result all over the news, from what I've read. Look like their "cookers" might have over-cooked? That's why the returned results so horrible lately.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

The problem is that we are the only ones discussing this. It won't have much (any?) impact until the mainstream media pick up on it.

[viggen]

Real life examples from "average" users are quite revealing, especially when you not looking with "professional" eye but with "real searcher eye",

I am currently looking for a new car and my lady is struggling to find a test report for specific models that is up to date, either wrong model or 5 to 6 year old tests dominate the results...

She asked me if there are other search engines where she can try... never heard that one before...

[tcsoftware]

My Girl was looking for Jolly phonics this weekend for our boy, eventually asking me for some help because she couldn't find what she was looking for. We eventually found what she wanted via a wiki page.

I also have customers telling me to invest in some SEO because they found it difficult finding our software despite knowing exactly what they where looking for!

[arubicus]

I rebuilt my computer and reinstalled firefox. Google was my default home page. I was using bing for about a year before my rebuild because I was having trouble finding what I wanted in Google. I was just too lazy to change it back to bing.

I gave Google another try and found it has gotten much worse. I never knew about the panda update nor cared (my site was fine until recently - which brought me back to WW.) I just noticed it was really bad. But I kept trying, or rather I was being lazy and not changing it.

Anyway, I was searching Google for information about certain items for a game I was playing. I did find what I was looking for, *eventually*, but anything of high quality was few and far between. (Which got me to wonder why some really good sites got dumped on by panda.) I had to do multiple searches with different keyword variations. Usually page 2 was so bad I stopped going to it.

I read this thread and tried bing again, just for the heck of it, and found that the top 10 had exactly what I was looking for. #6 had some extra stuff I didn't know so explored the site a bit more and bookmarked it for later reference.

I am gonna switch back to bing. The switch isn't due to bing being a better search engine with new innovative search technology but because of the fact that Google is becoming a poorer search engine.

It's funny how Google preaches about quality content. Well Google, I am sorry to say this as I used to love ya, but your poor quality does not rank well in my book so back of the line you go.

[chrisv1963]

I like it. Keep it up google, your doing good. People will never switch to bing no matter how bad you make the serps. Just keep feeding your own greed and arrogance. You are untouchable, go go go go!

I'm not sure about the "untouchable" part. I know a couple of leaders in certain countries that were untouchable too untill a few weeks or months ago ... Things can change fast!

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My mother made Bing her home page last week after complaining that Google kept showing her results from "across the river" even if she typed her town name in. Across the river being a different state with a different city name. Google was returning results by IP instead of purely based on her search term and she just had enough, she's not going to cross the river to shop.

I had a good chuckle, and another in seeing this thread. I'm not Google bashing, I'm describing an example that says yes to the original question asked. The more we point this stuff out the more we're being told there is no issue, whatever.

[sanjuu]

Never mind 'across the river', searching in the UK on google.co.uk brings back lots of results from 'across the pond'.

This is for searches that are very much location based, such as looking for a particular used car. Searching for MPG figures brings back mostly US sites - which is utterly useless as the MPG figures in the US and UK are different (a UK gallon is larger than a US gallon).

On WW there are always lots of webmasters moaning about Google and the listings. You know something is seriously wrong when people outside SEO, the average web-user, start complaining about the rubbish google is serving up as 'relevant'.

[piatkow]

Never mind 'across the river', searching in the UK on google.co.uk brings back lots of results from 'across the pond'.

I'll second that, even after explicitly selecting a UK search. Going back to the OP once you have an Adsense result at the top and the map and local results being displayed in-line then the first organic result can easily be in the 7th or 8th position even if the SERPS are 100%.

[Web_speed]

Read this for a good laugh....
[www7.scu.edu.au...]

Sergey Brin & Lawrence Page in
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query....

Yes tell us about it folks...

[skweb]

I hate to declare this but in the past when reports said that G users were smarter/younger/wealthier, I proudly mentioned that G was my fav too and I also made a living with that. As the rest of the world catches up on this, I am holding off on declaring that but secretly I use Bing for my searches. The only time I use G is to do research on my own websites. As someone who also owns G stock, it is painful to see the decline of G and its arrogance not to deal with it.

[aristotle]

According to a recent interview reported by Search Engine Land, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Bing and Google give the same results 70% of the time. Here is a quote from the article:

“I would issue you all a kind of challenge to try any search you want on Bing and Google,” Ballmer said, explaining that 70% of the time, there won’t be any difference in the results, that 15% of the time, Bing will be better and 15% of the time, Google will be better.

You can find the article at [searchengineland.com...]

[freelistfool]

People will never switch to bing no matter how bad you make the serps.

It won't have much (any?) impact until the mainstream media pick up on it.

After my wife asked me if something was wrong I asked her what she did about it. She said that if she found something close on the first page she'd go to page two. If not, she refined her search and tried again.

Then I asked if she tried another search engine like Bing or Yahoo. She said, "What's Bing? Is that Microsoft or something?"

I'm sure Google has enough statistics to tell if people are going to page two, refining their search, or switching search engines. I suspect that this will drive their decision to move forward with Panda in an attempt to make it better or to roll it back. My guess is that they still have plenty of time.

I started this thread trying to get a feel for what "real world" users were doing so we can plan for the future. Will it be a world where Google continues to dominate in search or not?

According to a recent interview reported by Search Engine Land, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that Bing and Google give the same results 70% of the time.

Microsoft is correct now. I don't believe this was the case a year ago.

[rlange]

Years ago I used to find myself impressed with how Google could find exactly what I was looking for when I typed in a six-word, seemingly nonsensical query about an issue I was having.

Now... not so much. The results in similar situations are nearly worthless.

The results for two- and three-word searches don't seem to be faring very well, either. More often than not I'll notice that a significant number of the first-page results don't even include one of my query terms (at least not in any kind of relation to the other terms, other than being on the same page).

These issues seem less of "bad sites clogging the index" and more of "we can no longer figure out what you're looking for".

I don't know if any of the recent updates have made things worse, but they don't seem to have helped.

--
Ryan

[aristotle]

freelisttool said:
Microsoft is correct now. I don't believe this was the case a year ago.

Sorry but I don't know what you mean. You quoted from my post, but I said nothing about the situation a year ago. And the Search Engine Land article I cited is dated Oct. 18, 2011, which was six days ago

[tedster]

These issues seem less of "bad sites clogging the index" and more of "we can no longer figure out what you're looking for".

That sums up my recent experience, too - at least the times where I have trouble. I can appreciate that winnowing out the bad sites is a bigger challenge than it ever was, but something about the "user intention" area seems to be getting a bit flaky.

[kidder]

If Google wanted to impress me and go way ahead of the other guys they would wind the results back to where they were good and give us something cool like voice activated search and navigation. Sooo much better than this constant tweaking and breaking and fixing. While they are pissing about with the bottom line somebody else is going to do it and take the search market by the short ones with some luck. Imagine how much intent you can pickup in a tone of voice..

[Conard]

I had the same experience last week with my wife. She is on her first computer and I'm trying to stay hands off as much as possible.

When she couldn't find what she was looking for on Google I suggested Bing, which is now her homepage.

Another one bites the dust......

[johnhh]

I actually think Bing is on a winner here - less "Places", more diverse entries, less brands...

<rant>all the brands seem to owned by American holding companies if you actually investigate</end of rant>

[coachm]

Remember, my sons and daughters, for history:

One cannot fix a complex system by adding more complexity.

Of course that's what google is doing, or trying to, and why the serps' are all but useless for me, too.

BTW, noticed that I had two articles on the first page for a major search term, and while I have a whole site dedicated to that term, the articles shown on the first page had nothing to do with it. They were mine, from another site, but not relevant. As a famous man said: Ar you havin a laugh?"

[Reno]

but something about the "user intention" area seems to be getting a bit flaky.

In a few years web historians will begin an evaluation of where Google started to get on the wrong track, or as others have said here, where Google "jumped the shark". I would suggest it was at the point where they announced that they wanted to "know what we wanted before we knew what we wanted" (that is a paraphrase from memory, not the exact quote). Telling me what I want before I "know what I want" borders on insulting, and if in fact Google management began to implement that sort of thinking within the 'plex, then it was the wrong way to go, and the current mediocre query results only drives home that point.

..................

[tedster]

I agree, Reno - that whole "intention engine" thing is when experienced searcher began to scratch their heads. And don't get me started on query revisions. That's gone into Crazyville.