
On the increasing uselessness of Google - kgarten
http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google......html
======
old-gregg
So true. It only opens the doors to vertical search opportunities. I have
stopped searching Google a few years now, instead I search on Wikipedia for
information, on Amazon/Newegg for products to buy and on Yelp for location-
based reviews. Wikipedia in particular (not Facebook) has eaten Google's
lunch, in my opinion, because when someone says _"..to organize the world‘s
information and make it universally accessible and useful.."_ I think of
Wikipedia, not Google, despite what <http://www.google.com/corporate> says.

Google is gmail+maps to me, not search.

~~~
bad_user
I also search IMDB for movies suggestions and ratings, in addition to
Wikipedia and Amazon.

I would still use Google because I don't like thinking about the kind of
search I want to do and I don't think having Wikipedia/Amazon/IMDB as the only
sources of information is healthy.

But goddammit, Google needs to do something about that spam.

------
swombat
For what it's worth, I still use Google _all the time_ , for a wide variety of
uses, from extremely specific programming questions, to vague "should you take
painkillers when you have a fever?" type questions, ranging across pretty much
everything, and I have not noticed any decrease in results quality or had any
trouble finding what I wanted.

You do need to know how to ask, but if you know how to ask, Google knows how
to answer very well indeed.

I wonder if this new "Google sucks" meme is manufactured by some competing
interest. I know it sounds a bit conspiracy-theory-like, but there have been
many articles over the last few months repeating this theme.

~~~
Athtar
Maybe so. But I think the more likely explanation is that people are starting
to find better results by using Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, IMDB, Blekko,
DuckDuckGo, etc. that Google, comparatively, looks worse than it did before.

~~~
jarin
After reading this article, I switched my default search engine to Blekko. But
then I had to switch it back, because honestly the results were nowhere near
what I was looking for.

------
benologist
I mostly use Google to search specific sites these days. It's fantastic for
that. Individual site searches suck and I'm certainly as guilty as anyone else
doing a quick job on that ... LIKE '%foo%' ... heh.

But when you stray outside of known sites you get all kinds of garbage in the
results and unsurprisingly it's _always_ monetized by AdSense. If Google was
serious about fighting spam they only have to audit AdSense publishers. Of
course that's asking them not only to invest a ton of resources but to do it
with the intent of making less.

~~~
Vivtek
_do it with the intent of making less_

... Initially.

------
danilocampos
Google's strength has long been tackling the difficult, hairy, algorithmic
tasks of data processing, ranking and retrieval. They rose to absurd
prominence by coupling a smart approach to search with a virtuous mechanism
for targeting ads.

Users won – they found what they were looking for. Advertisers won – they
found customers they needed without wasting money. Google won – they became
essential for everyone.

Google's strength is emphatically, absolutely _not_ anywhere related to user
experience or design. Their early product succeeded because the under-the-hood
functionality was superb and they didn't have any taste to design anything
beyond the absolute simplest interface that would work. Simplicity and
efficacy beat mediocre, complex competition.

When you look at the Google of today, there's zero focus and a pile of
products where UX is essential to success. They compete with people who can
deliver outstanding user experience _and_ reliable results. Can Google evolve
to the point where UX is a strength instead of a liability? Can they succeed
with such a scattered approach against focused competition?

Maybe. I give them even chances – they have more money than god. But if their
boredom with their original, solely-profitable core product continues to
manifest itself in the sloppiness and neglect we see today, I fear they aren't
long for this world.

~~~
bad_user
Google's weakness is in no way related to UX ... their algorithms have been
gamed for a while now, and it shows in the crappy results they return.

The problem Google has is that eliminating the spam is both technically
challenging and detrimental to their bottom line: after all, most spam in
Google's index is serving Google's Ads.

~~~
zackattack
I agree.. I think Danilo doesn't understand what good UX is. UX and visual
design are two different concepts, and they are also separate from product
value.

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mbesto
This makes me really wonder about the saturation of knowledge in SEO, the
number of companies in the SEO, and the maturity of the Google "algorithm".

As I understand it, the history of SEO/Google is as such (simplistic view):

1\. Google creates a search algorithm (that is not 100% known to externals)
that tries to match your search term with valid, true content.

2\. SEO strategists -- whether by legitimate or deceptive means -- tailor
content, HTML, etc to match this algorithm.

3\. Google has constantly improved and tailored this algorithm to prevent
spammy type sites.

4\. There is a growing consensus that spam is taking over Google search.

This all leads me to believe that either Google is losing it's touch on it's
search algorithm or it's simply matured to a point that it can no longer out-
game the gamers (SEOs).

~~~
bdonlan
If this is the case, the only solution is for competition in search to return
- it's much easier to exploit one ranking algorithm than it is to
simultaneously exploit multiple algorithms. It's not really a problem in
Google so much as a result of Google's popularity.

~~~
stcredzero
Perhaps Google can facilitate the competition in search by becoming
infrastructure for search companies.

------
jimfl
You are not the customer. You are the product. Google works just fine.

~~~
code_duck
Yes, but I'll only remain in their inventory insofar as their secondary
product, the one I use, remains the best.

------
tgflynn
How are these sites spaming PageRank ? I understand that it's fairly easy to
create sites with dynamically generated content for common search words but
how are they getting enough incoming links to rank highly on Google's search
pages ?

~~~
cagenut
Actually the trick isn't going for common search words, its going for specific
long-tail search phrases. "How do I make tacos with ground beef" instead of
"tacos beef howto". Currently google will rank a near-exact long-phrase-string
match above a less exact more bunch-of-keywords one with more inbound links.

Tech people, sysadmins in particular, have been living with this in the form
of Experts Exchange for a long time. However since they're usually the second
or third link among a pile of mailinglists and forums you just learned to skip
them. The popular fad in "Q&A" sites (stackoverflow, answers.com, yahoo
answers, quora) exists specifically to exploit this revenue/traffic
opportunity.

But thats for tech stuff/people. When it comes to general consumer searches
the real 800lbs gorilla is Demand Media. If you want to really wrap your brain
around how silly this has gotten, read this:
<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/>

In a way this is all backhandedly from the success of google. We all got so
used to it being so good at finding what we wanted, we learned to just "talk"
to it, but writing into the search box pretty much exactly what we'd say out
loud.

~~~
tgflynn
I'm not quite seeing how that's causing the problems that people are
complaining about. If I was looking for dishwasher reviews I would just type
"dishwasher reviews" and you'd think that legitimate review sites would have
those keywords as well as lots of incoming links. So they should beat out
dynamically generated sites.

~~~
jshen
There are a lot of ways for SEOs to get links. The simplest is to buy them.

------
peterlada
Do your part, it'll improve:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhjafeidhfbojhnfiepj)

------
stcredzero
There's a lot of these sorts of "Google not useful" articles going by all of a
sudden. Is this a 5th column PR attack by Microsoft et al?

~~~
rimantas
There are always clusters of related articles. In this case it is a cross
between "me too!" and "king has no clothes". Search in google with a product
name or, god forbid, "review" is indeed worthless.

~~~
jackvalentine
The worst is when the link for review is actually "be the first to review this
product!". This isn't the review I'm looking for google.

------
TomOfTTB
___@broadstuff.com: I'll check back and delete this comment once the site is
restored_ __

For those trying to get to the page here it is from Bing's cache (Google
ironically hasn't cached it yet)...

The lead up to the Christmas and New Year holidays required researching a
number of consumer goods to buy, which of course meant using Google to search
for them and ratings reviews thereof. But this year it really hit home just
how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1
of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that
doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing
the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant"). The
other main scamsite type is one that copies part of the relevant Wikipedia
entry and throws lots of Ads at you. It wasn't just me who found this - Paul
Kedrosky found the
same([http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.ht...](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/12/dishwashers_dem.html)):

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail.
Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to
mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and
regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.

The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are
just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles,
original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before
Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results
completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.

And I can't believe Google doesn't know this - nor does Paul:

Google has to know this. The problem is too big and too obvious to miss. But
it's hard to know what you can do algorithmically to solve the problem.
Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry
crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of
search results and utility. For my part it has had a number of side-effects.
One, I avoid searching for things that are likely to score high in Google
keyword searches. Appliances are an example, but there are many more, most of
which I use mechanisms other than broad search. Second, it has made me more
willing to pay for things. In this case I ended up paying for a Consumer
Reports review of dishwashers -- the opportunity cost of continuing to try to
sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high.

Reading the comment's on Paul's blog post was interesting - you can parse the
responses into 3 broad groups:

\- Yes, we agree with you, and here are some tips on how to deal with it \-
Yes, but its not poor Google's fault, its those evil spammers (ie Google has
no way of changing their systems and is at the mercy of SEO) \- No, there is
no problem, this is the best of all possible solutions (complete bollocks
IMHO, it was definitely better a few years ago)

(Ignoring the ones trying to pimp their own products or agendas of course, and
the end posts comparing the economics of online vs library copies of Consumer
Reports.....)

Ignoring these comments, I have found my behaviour is exactly the same as
Paul's , i.e. increasingly reaching for paid-for, edited research (Which? in
the UK) as Google and some of the "comparison" sights (clearly flooded with
Spam, Sock Puppets and Sleazeoids) become less and less credible. (Another
aside - I had a gift voucher from Amazon, and searching for a book I wanted I
found Page 1 was totally full of results for the book on Kindle, which was
very irritating - they need to allow one to select e-book and/or book).

The interesting question to me is what happens if this gets worse, as Google
risks attacks on 2 fronts:

(i) Other search engines decide to eschew Ads for accuracy and cut down the
spamming, to gain market share. There is an article on Techcrunch today about
Blekko, which appears to promise this.

(ii) The market for paid-for search and research grows - how much would you
pay per month for a neutral search engine? Which? costs about £7 a month,
would you pay that for a neutral engine?

Frankly, I don't believe that it is not possible to reduce this sort of spam,
I think Google's problem is more that it is trying to navigate a line between
income (systemically the more spam there is, the more Ad money it makes) and
usefulness (how much spam can you run before the user walks away) and has
veered too far to the spamside.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
Google cache (more readable than your text dump):

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&q=cache:http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-
the-increasing-uselessness-of-
Google......html&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1)

~~~
IVirOrfeo
Irony.

------
rryan
Ironically, I read this article via Google's cache. How useful!

------
bhousel
It would be nice to be able to create a blacklist of sites that I want to
_never_ show up in my search results. If any search engine implements this,
I'd switch.

~~~
dwc
Did you see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060994>

~~~
bhousel
No I hadn't seen it, thanks for the link!

------
solipsist
The url isn't loading for me, and I can't seem to find a cache of it. Is the
url supposed to look like this?

 _[http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-
useles...](http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-
of-Google......html*)

------
ronnier
Here's my cache of the page using my side project:

[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://broadstuff.com/archiv...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-
the-increasing-uselessness-of-Google......html)

------
dageshi
I know google does try and combat this. For example any adsense account making
more than x dollars per day does get investigated and if they're deemed to be
too spammy their sites often get penalised in the indexes e.t.c.

But adsense is only one advertiser, there are many more. And the problem is
the measures taken to combat this are likely penalise new sites and new
(legitimate) content.

It's a difficult line to tread really.

------
joshus
Google has technical ability to stay on top of spammers, but may not have
enough incentives in the short term for ads revenue or lack of competition.
Also, their foray into mobile platforms, social networks, and TVs etc comes
with huge opportunity cost - at the end of day, the top guys can only have
limited attention.

------
QuantumGood
It's interesting—this is a war, with Google on the losing side, and yet
there's very little discussion of the winners—the spammers.

Considering how amazing Google's accomplishment has been until recently, the
spammers have obviously really, really stepped up their game. But all anyone
talks about is Google's "failure."

------
cubicle67
I find productreview.com.au to be the best Australian review site I've found.
It's not perfect, but it's fairly comprehensive and has (mostly) well written
reviews. Amazon as always is also worth a read

------
lelele
Call me stupid and old-fashioned, but to me Google still is the one true
search engine which always finds what I'm looking for. I've tried Bing and
others, and I've been disappointed.

~~~
norswap
The point is not that google is worse than something else, it's that it's
worse than it used to be, and that it shows no sign of improvement.

------
awt
any comment from google on this issue recently?

~~~
jeffreyrusso
The last official comment on anything related to this was a vague mention that
resources had been taken away from the search quality team to work on other
projects, but that they would be refocusing on search quality in the near
future. Not sure if there has been much else in the way of official comment
since then, but I can't imagine that they would let the cries (warranted or
not) go unanswered for much longer.

------
lelele
Windows Mobile sucks: that's what my Samsung Omnia taught me as a customer.
Never again.

~~~
lelele
Sharing my view: <http://sdsync.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-sucks/>

