Should we ignore page one of the Google SERPs?

[superclown2]

Just lately, for the first time, I've been using Duck for searches, because of sheer frustration with Google. For instance, if I type a query such as 'what do green unicorns smell like' or 'do green unicorns go south for winter' page one is full of the same few big companies offering (as affiliates) green unicorns for sale but no real answers to my query.

And that's after I've waded through the usual 'people also ask', 'top stories' and all the other junk (most of it scraped from American sites so irrelevant to me in the UK) on page one before I can actually find these search results.


From page two onwards, though, Google is back to it's old best, showing clean and relevant answers for my search query.

So; seriously; is page one of Google a waste of time for serious searches, and should we all skip it completely? It's a habit I for one am slipping into.

My wife tells me she's been doing just that for months. I am getting healthy numbers of hits again for search terms my main site is on page two for (which used to be somewhere you could hide a dead body) so I don't think she's the only one.

[Wilburforce]

I haven't used Google as my primary SE - I switched to DDG - for a couple of years now. However, I still monitor Google for results in my own sector, and now take solace from your post. as my own site has been at the top of page 2 for its key search term for a long time.

I will try out Google P2 for my own searches and see how that goes.

[JesterMagic]

I find it depends on what I am searching for in terms of if page 1 or 2 is better.

What I can't stand is Discover on my phone. For a lot of articles a title will be attention grabbing for example "Widget will be Released" but the article is long and buries the meat of the topic. It tells me absolutely everything about the widget (which I already know) requiring me to scroll through the article and ads until I find what I am looking for. Then in a lot of cases they don't actually know the answer and say something like "it will be soon": Aggravating direction that content creators are going (and I realize they are chasing just what they think Google wants to see). A lot of well know media tech companies are going this direction.

[browndog]

I'm finding their results more and more frustrating. I was just searching for something (hopefully the post I made about it will be permitted), and as I was looking for my own article (which isn't on page one), I scrolled to the bottom and hit 'see more', which then takes me to a different search result. I fall for it over and over again but find it so confusing that you have to scroll past that to get to the 'next' button which will take you to page 2 of the search you asked for. I get sick of being lead down a rabbit hole.

[Pjman]

Google has transitioned to the new GOTO.com as it continues to try to increase profits above all. Which let's be real, any public company has a duty to do.

DDG is a better tool for certain, but the market hasn't realized that, and with the pile of cash G is sitting on, never will. With the right board of directors in place, G will just gobble up all these would be DDG along the way. They learned from Yahoo that was dumb enough to transition them to their sole search provider, without even considering buying them, dummies.