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158 Comments
- fyngyrz, on 10/12/2007, -3/+71I agree. I have a concrete example I can bring to the discussion without fear of spamming; it's very obscure information, of interest to no one here, I am certain.
Among other things, I maintain a web page for the USS John Blish, a small patrol craft of WWII vintage:
http://www.blish.org/gens/AuxPages/PCS1457.html
That page, though certainly nothing fancy, is the only page on the Internet that contains more than a couple of paragraphs about the vessel -- and those paragraphs on other sites are inevitably cribbed from the DANFS naval page on the ship. My page has tons of info, numerous pictures, links to detailed bio info on the ship's namesake (on the same website, but a different page) and until I looked again yesterday, came up #1 on Google every time you searched for USS John Blish, just as you would think it should.
My page has been up for many years now, and changes (has info added as I learn it) every few months. Yesterday, I could not get it to come up at all with a Google search. The containing site is entirely legitimate (it's a genealogy site for the Blish family) and it would appear that Google has completely forgotten that this page exists, though other searches for data on the site do turn up results.
I've discovered similar problems for other sites I work with. Looks like Google is in serious trouble to me. Last week, they said something about being out of space. I believe it. - sinfree, on 10/12/2007, -16/+67@jl101
I don't care what lost piece of fruit you are, most people are going to mod you down if you decide to put adverts in your comments (i.e. the big wasted space at the bottom of your comment about lost fruit people). FYI. - fyngyrz, on 10/12/2007, -3/+46Also, I just checked Yahoo, AltaVista and MSN searching for "USS John Blish"... my page is right there at link 1 or 2 on all of 'em... and still gone missing entirely on Google.
(Cues spooky music) - mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -2/+34Google is sucking because of keyword spam, click-fraud, and people fudging search rankings. In other words, like anything else useful, easy, and popular on the internet, a relative few ***** douchebags ruin it for everyone else.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+33ogmo, suggesting an alternative to google isn't spam, but the lostcherry crap definitely was. Bloodjunkie can be an ass at times, but he's right.
- folster, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24The reason that the USS John Blish site doesn't rate highly isn't terribly sinister. The code is horrible, the only thing that the author did right is to have a title tag with keywords. The page has no offsite incoming links, and a page rank of zero. There's no doctype. The W3 validator found 63 errors. I could go on.
I don't mean to dump on you too much here, I just want to explain. Google hates terrible code, and that, combined with a complete lack of incoming links, is why the page is virtually invisible.
Then again, the Digg effect will likely shoot it up to #1. :-) - BloodJunkie, on 10/12/2007, -5/+22Google plays a large role in the productivity of a lot of people. I would be very interested to see how their recent sucking is affecting the bottom line of many companies.
- aguita, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18I just tried searching for USS John Blish and your page came up as the #8 result. #2 for yahoo and #1 for msn
- deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -6/+20Yep I agree... Google is becoming useless. 70-80% of results are pure SPAM. If you really want to find something it's easier to search digg/delicious or even blogs.
Why hasn't Google (or another engine) created a peer review/voting system yet? I would happily help Google by marking SPAM sites for what they are. It's almost like Google purposely allows SPAM sites to flourish because they're racking in serious AdSense views. - melek, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17Mod folster up, he is right. Your meta-data for that page is weak, to say the least.
META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="BenGen V0.R32"
META NAME="Author" CONTENT="The Usual Suspect"
META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Blish Geneology"
META NAME="Description" CONTENT="HTML Geneology for the Blish family"
'USS' or 'John' aren't even in the keywords. You're depending entirely on the page content (Which is weighed far less heavily than metadata). I'm frankly a bit surprised you rank as high as you do.
Oh yeah, "Geneology" is spelled "Genealogy". What do you expect?
Past that, super informative and interesting page, I hope you can get your search standing higher. - jaked409, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15I'm not saying whether they're right or wrong, but either way, it seems a little ridiculous to claim an entire system is broken due to an isolated incident, especially a system as large as Google. "Hey, my story isn't on the front page of Digg even though it's really cool, this means Digg must be broken, let's all go use Slashdot."
- itsallgeektome, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12I guess I should add to that... because they're trying to filter out all the junk it's filtering out lots of legit sites as well.
- nogami, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Your site came up as result #7 for me in Google. Perhaps the variability relates to which of Google's machines the request gets routed to? It wouldn't surprise me if different parts of their network were at different levels of "search completeness" depending on what's happening at the time.
- Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11"Your meta-data for that page is weak, to say the least."
Ha ha ha, Welcom Rip van Winkle! It's now 2006 and Google et al don't do meta keywords anymore, for about a year of 7.
If you don't believe me, check out: http://www.google.com/search?q=perl%20programmer and explain me how I got there with even weaker meta data :-D. - Xopl, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15Something is broken at Digg.
I submitted half a dozen comments yesterday that never got posted, I keep getting logged out today, and dumb asses keep submitting CRAP. - neverender, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12i tried what the author suggested.
i ran the search (privacy service - no quotes) in both google and at yahoo.
his website did not show up on google. but the results returned by google were all legitimate for the query.
his website DID show up on yahoo, number 3rd result, right above results for the privacy policies for the NOAA weather service and the National Parks Services....the authors statement of " When you use Google you are getting less relevant returns than you do with other search engines" seems to be highly biased, as my own test returned equal if not more relevant results in google.
dude is just pissed his google search ranking is dropping. - skytimelapse, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10It's hurting my two legit sites badly.
Google has already admitted they have a machine crisis (see webmasterworld) and I think these results are the result of that. Supposedly they spend 1.6 billion on infrastructure annually. I don't see with that kind of money they'll keep these ***** results for long. The wierd thing is, for nearly half a week many of their datacenters had the best results ever, now this... so I am holding out hope. - madkow420, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11First I find out the tooth fairy is not real, then santa clause, then the Easter bunny and now.... Google is not the best!!!
I need to go back to bed. - yoda715, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11I agree. Lately google results have not been what they used to be. I since have started using Yahoo as my preferred search engine.
- dayquil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7totally agree. if yahoo were #1 they'd be getting their asses kicked just as bad (probably worse, given the difference between their and google's priorities).
not to defend sucking, of course. But to say it's *google* sucking is kind of misleading; this is the internet experiencing growing pains, and google taking the fall. - csimpkins, on 10/12/2007, -8/+14So... the gist of this article is that something is broken at Google because this site (the article's site) doesn't rank in the top listings returned when you search for privacy service?
What a waste of time. - viruz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7No, Yahoo just reveals people's identity to china.
- EdLesMann, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8While I cant speak for everyone, for me it is a noticeable difference.
I used to work for a company that always bought the cheapest hardware they could. You had to really pester the lady (who knew little about computers but was the only one that OK'd purchases) to get a more expensive item. Doing tech support on bad hardware used to be really easy. Simply google the name and numbers on the device and you would find something relevant.
There was one computer inparicular that was really bad. There was only a single set of numbers on the sound card and network card. No names or anything else. When I had to do a windows rebuild after I started there, I found the drivers easily on google and had it running. A few years later, had to rebuild again. This time I was installing XP. The guy had lost the cd I burned with his drivers, so I tried googling them. Nada. So much junk was returned with the numbers it wasn't even funny. Apparently the numbers for the sound card matched some HP printer device and all the ads on google returned results for that. There were tons of forums about that device, and MANY of those ripoff websites that attempt to tell you they have the HP part for less. Useless. Utterly Useless.
In the end after many hours of searching and finding nothing of use, I yanked the name brand sound card and network card from one of the Linux servers and replaced them with his. Linux saw exactly what the sound card was and used the basic tulip driver for the network card and I went on my way.
This is probably the more extreme story, but by the time I left I guarantee that I was spending more time sifting through the crap that google turned up then I was physically working on the part in question.
And its not just obscure hardware either. About a week ago I saw an article on digg that I didn't care for, but had a great comment. I wanted to tell a friend about this comment and knew I didn't digg the story. So I google site:digg.com and a few keywords and after the 5th page I went to digg.coms search. Same Keywords and it was in the top 5 results.
Anyway, in my opinion, yes google has problems.
I want to be able to give a small group of keywords and have some sort of lead. I dont want to have to pass in 15 keywords with a minus sign in front to cut through the crap. Maybe thats just me.... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8@ fyngyrz:
Your page is actually a pretty good read-I love History :) - rhrrs2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Yeah but would you really go anywhere else? Really? I started w/ alltheweb, then altavista, then yahoo (good stuff) but Google took me away from all the others. I would be willing to wait for them to fix the problem.
- seenthefuture, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Maybe try some search engine optimization...the meta data is pretty sad.
- macko, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10I'm sure I'll get bashed for this in some form or another, but whatever...
I've been enjoying http://search.live.com as of late. - approxinfinity, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Did he check all 4,400,000,000 search results? He implies he did. If I do a search for privacy service cotse and it comes right up.
I checked the google page rank of the top 10 sites the search for privacy service yielded. All had a greater google pagerank bar than cotse.net, with the exception of mcafee (which suprisingly, even on their frontpage, had a 0/10 pagerank).
I don't question the potential for Google's search logic to be messed up, but this claim has a lot of variables involved that point toward the fact that Cotse does not belong on top, and is somewhere lost in the 4,400,000,000 (thats BILLION) search results it yielded. - Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8each search engine has a different method of ranking sites.
What may appear high on a list for a particular search phrase does not have to appear high on the list for another.
People do not have an automatic right to high rankings, however nice it is.
Its too early to be crying that somethings broken imo, and as itsallgeektome says, as soon as any site gets traffic there is someone out there who wants more and does whatever it takes to get it, at the cost of other sites. - fyngyrz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6aguita:
For the 7th result, I get this:
www.blish.org - notable Blishes
... John Blish - Inventor and namesake for the USS John Blish · John Hedding Blish - Founder of the Blish MIlling Company of Seymour, Indiana ...
www.blish.org/notables.html - 8k - Cached - Similar pages
...but that's not the page. That's a page on the site that *links* to the page. Google's still not showing the actual page for me.
It could indeed be different google machines with different views and priorities of the net, but... that seems to me to be poor design, so I'm kind of doubting it. - itsallgeektome, on 10/12/2007, -12/+16As soon as any site starts getting hits, people start trying to find ways to game the system. You see it on Google, Digg, anywhere where someone thinks they can generate significant traffic.
Site/Forum spam is the new telemarketing. - mydickhertz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"Google purposely allows SPAM sites to flourish because they're racking in serious AdSense views." - Exactly. Hard to tell the shareholders that you are going to eliminate your entire (effective) revenue stream in order to produce more relevant search results. Is it evil to show the world spam?
- iChris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4(Not spam. This topic requires specific links to prove the point.)
Search for TransNote. This computer from IBM has been out of production for over 5 years. There are only two sites dedicated to helping users with these computers: TransNote.us and TransNote.com. Yahoo has these at number 4 and number 6. Ask.com, 6 and 4. What sites does Google show for at least two pages? Reviews from 2001 and places to buy TransNotes that have been out of stock for years. How helpful is that? Google has jumped the shark. - Swift2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5This is utter nonsense. First of all, the firm that's complaining here did show up: on the second page of results. I presume that means that Google is "broken," in their eyes, if they don't show up on page one. The pages that do show up as "privacy service" are MacAfee, etc. I presume that means there are more links to these firms. The other whining that's going on is that nutcases like Michelle Malkin want to show up in Google News. Well, I hate to break it to you, people, but that's very definitely opinion, not news. Hey, I googled my real name, and some guy in Iowa showed up first! Google is broken!
If you can do a statistical analysis that shows some problem, then fine, you have a case. Otherwise, this is just one company whining that they're not number one on the list. You want to be number one in a search for "privacy service"? Buy an ad. - clairmont, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7That guy is just tryin' to knock Google.
- CMangrum, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Google results can be different for different users as well. They can factor relevance to an individual into where a result falls. If you are logged into Google for Gmail, personalized hompage, have search history turned on, etc. those results will be different than if you were on a pristine box as an anonymous user. See http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/10777.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I use greasemonkey to filter most gateway pages but..
there is a blind search engine test...I will admit that for me yahoo was surprisingly more revelent for what i searched for.. but if you check their stats page.. google still leads msn and yahoo.
http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/seo-experiments/the-search-engine-experiment/test-results/
or if you want to try the blind test yourself
http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/seo-experiments/the-search-engine-experiment/
this guy is just made because he doesnt know how to design for google ranking. - hagrin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Haplo -
Kudos. The people before you talking about compliancy and standards are just spreading FUD. Many of the page rank 9 and 10 sites that rank highly for the most competitive terms have code that doesn't validate according to W3C. Meta tags are "sooooo" 2000.
Instead, age of domain, PR of back links to the site/page, leakage, anchor text, sitemap data, possibly traffic (many SEOs specualte Analytic data may be coming into play since the Big Daddy update), etc. play much, MUCH larger roles than META tags and compliant code. Now, I'm not saying to script your sites poorly because it still matters for the user experience (rendering on multiple browsers, etc.), but for SEO purposes, it means very little. - Crimsoneer, on 10/12/2007, -9/+12This article is the biggest pile of crap ever designed by manking, because it fails to see one crucial point: google results are unfiltered. You get WHAT YOU SEARCH FOR. If your getting the wrong results, its because you don't know how to search. Yahoo, by automating that part of the search project, do make things easier. But its also not a proper search engine. It gives you only what it wants you to see. Its a bit like China really.
- GreenLantern33, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I was going to call ***** on this, but I decided to check it out first.
I went to yahoo and google and did identical three identical searches for three different domains I own. I was rather shocked at the number of gateway's that turned up. I was also kind of shocked at the number of varying results that yahoo turned up over google.
I think something may be broke. - portwojc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Easy fix: A search on Louis l Booth brings it up number 1. That's your name...
You own LouisBooth.com and it forwards right to LouislBooth.com - Google would probably only treat that as one somehow. I would recommend dropping the forward and making a site for it that links right in. That or the same site without the forward so the name gets indexed. Can't hurt to try it. - Macattack15, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4hey this disappeared off the front page, what gives?
and yes, lately i have noticed googles search results getting less and less accurate - exilio, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5This is viral marketing chatter.
- boomerxl, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Surely I can't be alone in thinking that Google isn't that bad. I've always been able to find what I need, in a relatively painless manner. Perhaps try more boolean terms, you know -"innane crap nobody cares about" will kill most blogs from the search results.
- Xalorous, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3a search for "privacy service" turns up 3.46 billion hits (with a B). "privacy service cotse" gets 76 thousand. 76,000/3,460,000,000 = 2.19653179 × 10-5. Assuming that all of the 76k hits which include costse are on their site, those are still overwhelming odds AGAINST that being number one. That is without factoring traffic in. PLUS the first page is almost all Mcafee. I sure think Mcafee before Cotse when I think privacy. Who the hell is cotse?
Also, there is the fact that privacy and service are two completely generic everyday words. On top of that, they're even buzzwords right now. Any commercial website that collects information will likely have the word privacy at least once. And all the service company websites out there. Come on, get real. - rebrane, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The ACLU? You have a Constitutional right to have your blog indexed by Google News? Boy, I didn't know that. It must be because I've been brainwashed by activist judges.
- drewcare, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5while the article may be right, I always seem to get better results from google. I've been using a9 to get my amazon discount, and after they switched to msn search (windows live), I noticed a result set that didn't have what I was looking for.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I made a site selling widgets
i think i have the greatest widget site in the world
why doesn't google link me at the top
they are trying to ruin my business
>>> i say before you complain too loudly.. read a few online books on google ranking and the various ways you can improve your site and search relevance is in the eye of the beholder - RyeBrye, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I had a VERY similar thing happen to a wiki I maintain devoted to canyoneering information. The wiki is at http://www.canyonwiki.com/wiki/ - for a long time we were on the first page for relevant terms...
Now - you can't even find us by searching for "Canyon Wiki"
The page is still listed as being pagerank 5 (yeah, right) - but unless you search for the EXACT domain name - you get nothing. I've contacted google several times about it - but they don't respond. The site is just a public service - I have no ads or anything on the site - not even text-link ads. - bonaldi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Seems to work fine for me. For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=something%20is%20broken%20at%20google
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