The Google Backlash Continues
from the get-over-it dept
Isn't it about time we had some Google backlash backlash? I haven't read a single article talking about the "Google backlash" that has made any sense whatsoever. The latest, from Salon, repeats the same old misleading statements from angry search-engine optimization agents who base their entire business on Google's shifts. First off, if you're depending on Google for the majority of traffic to your website, then you probably need to do a better job promoting your website. Google has no responsibility to help you out. Their whole business is based on getting people to the most relevant result for their search. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. However, for every area in which they're not perfect, then let's see a competitor step up and offer something better. That's the nice thing about the internet. No one has to use Google - but people will as long as it provides relevant results. I use four or five search engines on a regular basis, and I still find that Google is most likely to find me what I'm looking for quickly. That is all that matters to most people. Everyone complaining about Google's "power" should probably spend more time making their site relevant than doing special "Google optimization" tricks. If it's really true that Google is "selling out" to advertisers or whatever else the backlashers would have you believe, then it will be quickly noticed online, and people will start to shift to other, better, search engines. Google seems to realize this, and (so far) has done everything to keep their searches as relevant as possible. It seems that the root cause for most of the complaints against Google are either (a) Google is a big company now, and I hate big companies or (b) Google ranks someone else higher than me. The first complaint is a waste of time and the second is more a function of an individual site's "visitor capture strategy" rather than an issue with Google. Any company that bases a large part of their business on a single company with whom they have no specific relationship is simply asking for trouble.
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Google Dance
However, my main beef with Google is not either a) or b) but that their results are not as good as they were.
My searches are returning fewer results (and sometimes even no results much more frequently than before). I find that in order to find what I'm looking for, I need to be more and more creative in my search criteria. This is annoying, particularly during the so-called Google Dance, where a strategy that worked before to find certain results becomes inconsistent.
I'm finding that rather than trust I'll be able to find a given site again using Google (even if I remember what I searched for before), I'm copying the URL. And I'm also copying the content if I think I'll really need to look it up again, because I can't rely on Google's cache being there either (also my previous approach).
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Re: Google Dance
[Nelson Muntz Voice]Ha!-Ha![/Nelson Muntz Voice]
:)
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Google
More recently, I am also finding that alltheweb.com is doing a better job of finding what I need than google.
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Re: Google
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correction
"Their (Google's) whole business is based on getting people to the most relevant result for their search."
This is, of course, stupid. Google's "whole business" is selling paid search results to the highest bidder, so that the user doing a search is directed to the website of the highest bidder.
I'm not criticizing Google, just recognizing that Google isn't in the business of directing you to the "most relavant result" but rather to the "highest paying result."
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Re: correction
I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure I agree. If Google's main searches don't retrieve the most relevant results, then people are going to stop using Google, and that, more than anything else, will harm their ad sales business.
So, for those ad sales to work, they need to continue to return the most relevant results. Thus, I still believe their business is based on returning the most relevant results.
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