82 replies to this topic

[ListGuy]

, , , and !

I am a VERY frustrated consumer right now.

I use Google searches to find a lot of information - both personal and business related. These last two days, ALMOST EVERY TIME I search I get a list of "Find _______ Using This Search Tool" pages.

I search Google to FIND INFORMATION, NOT to FIND PLACES TO FIND THE INFORMATION I'm looking for!!!!

wouldn't you think that a company that is threatening to go public soon, would want to avoid all this bad publicity of how irrelevant their searches have become... go figure..

oh to go back to the good old days!!! before Florida...

[darciusrex]

all sounds contradictory to what newsweek was saying about the accuracy and wonderfulness of google search vs msn, yahoo and askjeeves . . . .

at any rate, like everyone else is saying, it'll all eventually change and probably for the better.

[OldWelshGuy]

I do get outbursts, but I also have great faith in the ability of the Google team. They did say that things will be weird for a good few months yet. I will just be glad when it all settles down, not so much because of the crap results, but because it makes it almost impossible to to be able to rely on your research.

[Jill]

Google still works fine for the average searcher...and there's nothing better.

Hopefully, G won't get complacent and let spam and irrelevant results rule the day.

J

[powerofeyes]

Hopefully, G won't get complacent and let spam and irrelevant results rule the day.

Yahoo has the worst spam I have ever seen, They seem to love the olden day keyword stuffing and areas I see sites are loaded with keywords, Also single page sites ranking No.1 for competitive phrases,
The worst thing is for some phrases same site has 7 listings in the top 20 results, all different pages of the same site, They have to sort things out, They look like pure begineers in Search Engine Industry,
Algorithm is pure olden day algorithm, Just now i talked to one of my client he has a network of 3 sites all focussed on a single area, he dominates the top 8 spots with his 3 sites, All these sites are interlinked, Yahoo cannot even sort out and all keyword stuffed sites no Real Content keywords repeated on all over the pages, He says google is crap, since google cannot rank his crap sites,
Google gives the best results possible, I am not saying in SEO point of view, As an average search user who queries google atleast 150 times a day, I cannot find any thing broken in google, what ever I search for I get what I need. I cannot find anything broken in google like people here suggest they drive a lot of traffic to lots of my clients,
I cannot understand why some people here keep suggesting google is broken, OWG do you have anything personal with google , i see you suggest most of the time Google is broken, is it really broken , if so in what way,

VIJAY,

[arman]

google is like lost gambler who is gambling with double strength. I think google took a wrong approach by tweaking it's algorithm to get rid of spam and now IMO what we are seeing is few engineers still hoping that they can tweak new algorithm to it's finest instead accepting the fact "it's a fiasco"

[MakeMeTop]

>if so in what way...

People can't find what they are looking for.

They can find directories than contain links to what they are looking for, but why do you need a search engine that sends you to another search engine?

Sort of defeats the object, I'd have thought!

And average searchers are noticing. Not all - but day by day, if this continues, more and more will get frustrated. If they continue to not find stuff, they will try Yahoo and find it straight away. They are then unlikely to switch back.

The fact that my Yahoo referrals have risen to over 25% is not just due to having better rankings for Yahoo on newer sites - I am seeing similar increases on sites which have not suffered from the Google "wooble".

As an example? I was looking for the vendor of a particular router in Ireland on Google. I couldn't find one so after 10 minutes I went to Yahoo and found 5 vendors on the first page. QED!

I couldn't care less if the vendors had spammy pages or not - at least they were there!

[blackpool]

What frustrates the hell out of me is I do a search for a particular search to check my position in Google........

One day I'm at #3........... the next day nowhere....... the next day #3......... the next day nowhere........... the next day #3

So this week I have been

So this is what I think at the moment

Or is it

Either way, I'm gonna get

and then

This way I might be ready for next week

[ferret77]

just curious but how many of you started using another search engine , since google has become so bad

[Scottie]

I still use Google first... I switch to Yahoo only if I can't find what I'm looking for. I don't use Yahoo much...

[qwerty]

Pretty much the same story with me. I throw Teoma into the mix if I'm looking for resource sites -- particularly when I'm doing link building.

[seafoam]

What frustrates the hell out of me is I do a search for a particular search to check my position in Google........

One day I'm at #3........... the next day nowhere....... the next day #3......... the next day nowhere........... the next day #3

I can't say I have ever seen that happen.

But you know, if I ran a search engine and I didn't want webmasters to be able to manipulate their rankings, I think I would semi-randomise the serps. Not a lot, but enough to make it difficult for anyone, or any program, to be able to make any sense of the relative weightings of items or of keyword densities.

Blackpool, have you ever thought that maybe Google knows what you are up to and is just playing with your mind?

[Grumpus]

You'd be surprised how true that may be. On the few SEO related forums where I've ever seen traffic logs, I've often seen Google IP blocks coming in - but not as spiders, as lurkers. Someone at Google is almost certainly going to be reading this very post before the week is out.

G.

[Wyoming]

Some of our sites have disappeared, as has happened to the rest of you. It is very frustrating, of course. These are sites that sat at the top of the listings for years because we followed the rules. Now my clients are screaming because their sales dropped off, and telling them to wait months without making any money is not the answer they are looking for.

I have gone in and typed in the url for some of the sites that dropped off. When I read the description that Google is presenting, it is very, very strange. Google will pick just certain sections of the text, and not the main body. In one case, it was the address of the client at the very bottom of his web page - the rest of his text was completely ignored. His address had no relevant keywords, of course - so if Google was relying on the bottom section of the page to determine content, it was bound to get it wrong.

I have found Google reading stuff on the side, or the description is apparently coming from the Open Directory Project because the phrasing is not on the website.

We don't use any funny tricks in our design - we do use tables, and are using Dreamweaver MX 2004. We don't match font colors to the background or anything like that. About the only thing we are doing is using the latest version of Dreamweaver, and that uses CSS - is that why Google can't see the text on the page?

Has anyone else found that Google can't read the text?

[blackpool]

Blackpool, have you ever thought that maybe Google knows what you are up to........

Could you define what you mean seafoam?

All I am doing is checking results in search engines regularly like any other normal individual would do.

If you've never seen that happen before (one day there, one day not) you obviously have not been watching Google as closely as I have lately.

These crazy results are happening all the time. Not just with me but with many others as well.