Google intrigued yet concerned

[xodigo]

Intrigued as I am that Google offers over 91 public services (many of those free), I am a bit concerned these days that the basic Search results of Google are less than overwhelming.

I recently did a search in Google using the following phrase; “Bird Flu Blues – helping your child cope with bad news”.

Having written the article myself I simply wanted to see who had picked it up and placed links to it.

Google Search gave 2 “relevant” results (one was not). So I checked Yahoo. They gave 20 “relevant” results – most were.

Then I checked MSN. They gave 50 results, practically all as far as I could see were absolutely relevant although I had just submitted the article 48 hours before.

My question is this – what is going on with Google? 2 results are a far cry from 50 – and remember, I typed in 10 words, way over the average 2-3 word search. Regardless of + 91 services from Google, I will have to migrate elsewhere soon if I don’t get the real results for Search which I know exist.

(My article is birthed from the web-site http://www.xodigo.com )

[janeth]

None will show me anything with the quotes but without the quotes Google is showing 60,300 and MSN is showing 5,800 while Yahoo is showing 2,410

Looks like Google won to me?

[google junky]

I used the first 4 words to find the article xodigo was talking about and realized children was supposed to be kids and without your

I think it was supposed to be (comes up with the number atleast) heh
“bird flu blues - helping kids cope with bad news”


although the text link at the site shows
Bird Flu Blues - helping children cope with fear

and the articles title on the page reads
Bird Flu Blues - helping kids cope with fear

How confusing.......
ok I admit I dont know what I was supposed to be looking for now

[damarzee]

I understand what you mean when referring to Googles results being less relevant. It appears that since the jagger update, a high degree of content is no longer available though Google, but this relevant content is available through Yahoo and MSN.

One of my websites has vast amounts of content which is very relevant to the home and garden industry. This content is easily found with Yahoo and MSN, but since Jagger, this content is almost impossible to access with Google, short of using extremely precise multi-word descriptions found only on the specific page. Now, if you look for a "room layout", instead of finding my premier site (which is all about room layouts), you find a site in the #2 spot that just happens to mention the term "room layout" when describing how to arrange speakers. The site is sony. They were the #1 spot for this search term, but are now #2 and their site has almost nothing to do with room layouts...except they just happen to mention it on one page. How is this relevant?

It gets even better. Search for "room layouts" plural and I'm #1. So how could i not even be listed in the top 600 for "room layout", yet I'm #1 for the plural version? Shouldn't the singular version get some weight as well? This new algorithm has no consistency and does not work in the way a human would search...thus it now provides results that are not as helpful as they used to be...at least not for humans.

This premier website has lost over 2000 visits a day from Google since the jagger update. We're not banned and we're not penalized. We're very relevant, yet we have almost no traffic at all any more from Google.

Bottom line, we agree that Google is not doing a very good job right now with providing relevant results and they should be concerned since i also agree that Yahoo, MSN and Clusty provide very good results.

i know i may be biased right now since the past 60 days have been a challenge, but it appears, from many posts and blogs i visit, that Google has dropped or lost many sites providing relevant content. Jagger was supposed to be an attempt to reduce spam sites, so perhaps Google needs to look more closely at their definition of "Spam site" so that is does not eliminate so much relevant content that has been posted for years, acceptable for years and is totally acceptable by all other major search engines.

[pemburung]

damarzee,

I'd have to agree. I think what has maybe been ignored when when site owners complain about being lost on Google is not that they just don't see their site, but that a good proportion of the sites high on the SERPS can be not very relevant, and of course as the site owners know their own specialty, they probably have the best idea of this. I just checked Clusty for a few terms in my own industry, and not only did our site come up, which it no longer does in G but does in Yahoo and MSN, but pretty much every site on the first few pages was right on the money. I saw a few old friends, who I suddenly realized also disappeared in the last shuffle, which I know to be highly relevant. It was a bit deja vu from a few years ago, when this would have been the G return, and the current G return altavista or one of the others of the period. It seems that the Clusty algo understands a searcher's intent, a feature that G no longer seems able to do.

MS focusing on itself, and not the client, led to LINUX and more; AOL to virtually every ISP only, especially back then Earthlink. As I recall, Earthlink was spread by word of mouth from industry people, who basically told internet-innocent AOL subscribers that there was a much better way to get what they wanted. We're now hearing some of the same talk from within the search industry. It would seem that unless G gets off targeted ad delivery as its number one focus (or admits it), and back to good search, it will also see better engines dominate in the near future. Build it better and they will come, and come they did, but build it worse, and they will go.

Janeth, the result you quote is exactly what is wrong with G. No-one cares about the 63,250 pages where part of the search term occurs once somewhere on the page. They care about those pages where the search term appears in full, first. If the terms they used don't work, then they can change, but they shouldn't have to before all the relevant results using all the terms are displayed, just because more people link to a page that also includes one of the terms than link to a page that includes them all. Google no longer seems to understand that, but thinks more is better. OK, OK, maybe in some things size does matter, but not in this. The whole point of their model, academic citations (I used to subscribe to the main Abstract and Citation Search publications way back when, and then the electronic versions), was to see which publications were most cited in the specific field. It was divided up into lots of categories, and you could see which general peer review thought most relevant, as the number of citations of the paper was noted. Google adopted this, but in reverse by looking at the citation number as very important, and the actual written paper as less important. (Please people don't post again about the "100 factors; we know that, but we also understand weighting - all factors are not equal). Interstingly, in academia this also led to certain behemoths being frequently cited, and even more, Authorities developing as their papers virtually had to be cited, strengthening their importance still more. It didn't matter if they were no longer the most relevant, they were a Gray Eminence. Is there some coincidence that these Authorities also tended to be well established in the universities and research labs that would employ the whippersnappers publishing the newer papers that had to cite....But I digress.

Cheers all.

[ADAM Web Design]

Hi Ron, I'm Adam.

(For those who don't know who Ron is, he's the guy who wrote the way-cool Bird Flu article and the thread starter. No I'm not spying on you, I just found the article.)

You're in a lot better shape than you thought, friend. Google will pick up on your articles, and has picked up on them more often than you think.

Let me show you:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22Whe...XA:en&filter=0

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=ut...at+Bird+Flu%22

http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/resul...at+Bird+Flu%22

Yes, MSN still provides the most results, which isn't overly surprising given that they tend to crawl article sites a lot faster for some reason (at least this is something I've noticed for all the articles I've submitted.)

However, your Google and Yahoo! situation is different. The reason I took a phrase specifically from the article is because that phrase could only be found on the article itself.

When querying your article by title, you'll not only get the pages where your article is published, but the pages that link to where your article is published. So a lot of the results you were seeing on Yahoo! and MSN weren't all pages containing the article body.

You've written a high-quality article on a subject that, to my knowledge, no one else has even touched as far as writing an article goes. You've also submitted it to some of the major article syndication sites, so you're good there as well.

That's one that, if geeks are reading, tend to spread around like wildfire. I'm still finding sites that are publishing an article I wrote in July of 2004 (one of which is iDunce.net, which may or may not be a compliment.)

Have a shameless plug, on me:

Bird Flu Blues - Helping Your Child Cope With Fear

Anyway, I wouldn't sweat this issue too much right now. Google will probably have about 40 or 50 results within a week, if you keep plugging away.

As far as relevancy is concerned: those of you who are upset about it tend to have a vested interest in the results. You want your own site to rank first because you believe it to be the best.

There's nothing wrong with believing your site is the best: however, if it doesn't rank, that's no reason to summarily blame Google or any other engine. Consider these things;

1) Is there too much (or too little) information on the individual pages of my site? damarzee, your site in particular tends to have this as an issue. It's got a lot of great information, but too much of it appears on the home page. Spread it out. Divide the load.

2) Do the other sites bear relevance to the topic at hand? As long as the sites above are related to the topic (and most I've found that outrank mine in anything I'm targeting tend to be in some form or fashion), than the search engine has done its job.

3) Are there spammy results, and if so, have you reported them? No engine could possibly detect every blackhat technique or variant thereof. There are simply too many people out there with too many twisted ways to manipulate (sadly, some are here on this board) for SE minds to keep up. And if we don't say something, how can they reasonably be expected to check, automatically or manually, the 10 billion pages in their DBs to remove the spammers and the scammers?

It's also somewhat unfair to compare any SE to the Clusty engine, since it's a different kettle of fish entirely. If it had its own spider and internal database, then it's on the same level as other SEs. But it has the benefit of being able to indirectly take advantage of the spam filtration of multiple other engines, find out the top results on all of those engines, and group accordingly. It's really a different animal.

[damarzee]

Thanks for the input Adam. I agree that I may have too much information on the home page and i have recently begun to look at refining this page. The truth of the matter is that my website offers such a great variety of services and products and because of how many spiders work, I didn't want them to have to dig too deep, so i placed links and descriptions to many of our services on the home page.

Bottom line, i adapted the home page to please the spiders and make it easy for them to navigate the site, but now i am apparently confusing them...a virtual catch 22. Still, google increased my home page from a PR5 to a PR6 when jagger released, but then buried almost all references to the website. This makes no sense at all. On one end google is saying, check out this relevant page, but instead it is showing a page layout for speakers on a sony site that has no overall relevancy at all.

Actually, i did find out why Google ranks sony's page so highly for the term "room layout". They use that term in their file name...and although their site in general has absolutley nothing to do with room layouts, their listing is 600 pages above my website which is all about room layouts....which, by the way, my page that does come up at #1 has the term "room layouts", plural in its file name. This means that sony is in the #2 position for the term "Room layout" strictly because it used it in its file name and therefore, it is more relevant than an entire website dedicated to it. This isn't relevant search results, this is poor conclusions and bad concepts at work.


Back to the subject on hand...i recently added a site map which is linked from the home page and others and this puts most pages within two clicks of the home page, but this only answers the problem with how Google may be treating the home page. i have over 1000 internal pages, most are very specific and focused and google no longer lists them. i am concluding at this point that I must rename every page to more acurately mirror the page title...so what do you do with pages called "index"?...like my home page.

Personally, i stopped using Google searches, except to occasionally see where i am at. i now use msn overall. i also stopped paying for AdWords and now use overture more since i refuse to pay Google for purposely making it difficult for people to find the relevant information i provide.

Sour grapes? I have some and am working on that, but i am moving on. There is life after google.

[DrTandem1]

On other threads and topics I stated this basic observation before the "Jagger" upchuck was even recognized as occurring. I got no response when I mentioned something drastic was starting at Google. Then, when I mentioned the quality (poor) of the results compared to MSN and Yahoo I was rebuffed by several posts.

It's refreshing to now see many others expressing the same observations. The bottom line on all this is that Google is not providing obvious relevant content, even when digging deep into their SERPs. At the same time, MSN and Yahoo show them among the top of their SERPs.

Maybe I'm beating the proverbial dead horse, but Google's financial life (now the share holder) depends on its PPC offerings while MSN and Yahoo do not. In other words, MSN and Yahoo have very little to lose by providing relevant organic results while Google needs to drive clicks to their PPC and away from their organic SERPs.

As I mentioned on another topic, I myself am using Yahoo far more for my own searches. Google has become a waste of time.

[ADAM Web Design]

I don't know if I fully agree with that, DrTandem1. I find that it really depends on what you're looking for.

When it comes to a technical query (i.e. one where a webmaster wouldn't bother to SEO, since almost no one in their sane mind would look for it), Google is hands-down the best tool for finding relevant results.

Use the query "ASP Regular Expressions remove HTML". The first result for Google returned exactly what I wanted: a function that could remove the HTML from a string of text, and spit the resulting plain text back out to me.

MSN doesn't come up with what I was after until #7, and Yahoo! was #1 (indirect result) and #5 (direct result).

It's even more true among error codes. Try the ASP error code "80040e14", for example. The first result in Google (and the 2nd in Yahoo!) is an article that explains exactly what the different possibilities are and how to solve them. MSN? Well...they come up with a different result, which is also relevant, but a lot harder to read.

In other words, for tech purposes it's great.

Commercially? I gave up on Google years ago when every other search I did turned up a gay or gay-positive website. Nothing against gay people: I just don't want to know about your nudist clubs when I'm looking up a downtown Toronto bowling alley.

As stupid as it sounds, my commercial needs are so minimal that I tend not to bother much with any engine anymore. I know what I want, and I've also gotten to the point where I regionalize and use phrases that are so long that no manipulation can occur (e.g. Toronto 5-pin bowling alley, Markham computer store video cards). You drill down that fine, no one's gonna optimize for things like that.

[DrTandem1]

I don't know if I fully agree with that, DrTandem1. I find that it really depends on what you're looking for.

When it comes to a technical query (i.e. one where a webmaster wouldn't bother to SEO, since almost no one in their sane mind would look for it), Google is hands-down the best tool for finding relevant results.

Use the query "ASP Regular Expressions remove HTML". The first result for Google returned exactly what I wanted: a function that could remove the HTML from a string of text, and spit the resulting plain text back out to me.

MSN doesn't come up with what I was after until #7, and Yahoo! was #1 (indirect result) and #5 (direct result).

It's even more true among error codes. Try the ASP error code "80040e14", for example. The first result in Google (and the 2nd in Yahoo!) is an article that explains exactly what the different possibilities are and how to solve them. MSN? Well...they come up with a different result, which is also relevant, but a lot harder to read.

In other words, for tech purposes it's great.

Commercially? I gave up on Google years ago when every other search I did turned up a gay or gay-positive website. Nothing against gay people: I just don't want to know about your nudist clubs when I'm looking up a downtown Toronto bowling alley.

As stupid as it sounds, my commercial needs are so minimal that I tend not to bother much with any engine anymore. I know what I want, and I've also gotten to the point where I regionalize and use phrases that are so long that no manipulation can occur (e.g. Toronto 5-pin bowling alley, Markham computer store video cards). You drill down that fine, no one's gonna optimize for things like that.

Fair enough, but most here are concerned with making money via the internet and thus being found is extremely important. I guess I should have qualified my post by adding that I'm talking about relevant SERPs for e-commerce sites or at least sites that are trying to make money whether or not they have a shopping cart.

I assumed we were comparing commercial sites as those are the only ones likely to spend money on a PPC campaign. Google's organic results for relevant commercial sites in their "organic" SERPs pale in comparison to Yahoo and MSN.

That is a good point. If Google starts attracting info-only seekers, those searchers are unlikely to use the PPC links. On the flip-side, those looking for commercial offerings will be disappointed in the organic SERPs and as studies have shown, few click on the sponsored links. Google cuts their own throat no matter which avenue they take. They need to improve their organic SERPs to attract visitors and that cuts their financial throat. The poison pill scenario.