Sunday, January 2. 2011On the increasing uselessness of Google.....Comments
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Yes, I would pay 10 Euro a month for a neutral... Google!!
Whenever I try other search engines I am always back home to Google, spam or not spam, it just works. The others are pretty much behind.
Maybe is worse than it was a few years ago because the sheer quantity of spam has increased?
None of my recent product searches on Google UK has turned up a lot of spam. I think the problem lies with keywords like "reviews" and "ratings" which attract a lot of search engine spam, and spamming of user generated content sites.
While I agree with Gabriele (the competition does it even worse), another factor making Google results bad (read: highly gameable) is the efficiency of automated blog farm software, which easily rank by interlinking blogs consisting of spinned articles. Google is completely powerless when it comes to fighting this articial content and popularity.
All those problems put together might be Google's demise in the long run, or the advent of another type of search engine (with social input, for instance). All the recent bells and whistles (instant et all) might just be a smokescreen to cover the limits of the current algorithm.
Yes, I saw it in Tim's tweet in the morning but could'nt open the link- but here I am, fourteen hours later, because I wanted to read this! Bringing down a server does'nt make information dissappear!
I guess I adapted to this before Google really existed, and therefore never used Google for product reviews. Back in high school I worked for the public library, and was tasked with providing recommendations for programming and other technical books. Amazon was around, and was the biggest bookseller. In fact, I think at the time, they didn't really sell anything else.
The user reviews were incredibly helpful. Now that Amazon sells practically everything, they're my first stop when I'm looking for product reviews. It never even occurred to me to use Google or Bing to find a product review because I just assumed that the results would be spammy, and the meta-curation method Amazon uses ("Was this review helpful to you?" Brilliant!) works very well. (Substitute NewEgg for hardware, and other sites for more domain-specific product information.)
Re: Amazon. If you want Books, select 'Books'. If you want e-Books, select 'Kindle Store'.
Just FYI, Paul's article is from December *2009*, in case you hadn't noticed. Which means it's been this bad for over a year now. Oy.
Interesting point about competition. I think the reason that Google is so dominant and so hard to compete with is the size of its index. It can afford to build and maintain this because it has so much revenue and this has become a virtuous (or vicious) circle. Perhaps the EU should force Google to open its index to competitors who can use their own algorithms? This is a bit like BSkyB being forced to wholesale content via other platforms.
@Ryan - I didn't clock Paul's article was from 2009, I read the Techcrunch article talking about it a few days ago and realised I had the same experience.
@Nick I was on "books" - interestingly, today the same search has the first Kindle entry at position 4. @David I am intrigued by the idea of parasites in a Google monoculture, I think that is a realistic model.
This article is just a scrap of Paul's article with some anodyne commentary around it.
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Hey Alan,
We're hoping that a more semantic-driven search will be the answer to the problem that Google is having. We built Pikimal (http://www.pikimal.com) to create Pikis for products or choices that are solely driven by facts and the percentage of preference a searcher chooses to place on facets of any product. It allows us to suggest something like dishwashers by an equal combination of price, features, etc. Check it out sometime and let us know what you think. As we improve our algorithm and increase the information in our Pikis, we hope to provide an outlet for search results and recommendations that is marketing free, bias-free, not advertisement driven and beneficial to everyone seeking information on the web.
If you tried to use social networks or user-driven contributions to improve search results, the spammers would figure out how to make "contributions" to game that system, as well. It's hard to dream up a free and effective alternative to the big search engines.
Google makes 96% of their revenue by selling ads. They have direct benefit in showing high quality laser targetted ads over low quality search results.
Google doesnt care about quality, they are constantly balancing between lowering search results and increasing them slightly to prevent users going away.. I think we all agree they are taking things to far. Google is so over the top, nothing more then a habit. Cool new searchengines like duckduckgo will take over the market once people realise that google is deliberately fooling them. Several researches showed that old bing delivers more relevant and better results then google. Google is getting worse and worse |
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