« Google and Yahoo! accused of click fraud collusion | Main | A New Member »
April 08, 2005
What Is Wrong With Google?
I remember the time when Google used to be my favourite engine. I also remember the time when all the other search engines were producing mediocre results. The vision of 'This page cannot be found' messages appearing in the front page of Alta Vista were so common that the switch to Google seemed like a search engine panacea.
But unfortunately these were the days when Google didn't seem to care about money - or at least that was not obvious to us the hoi polloi. Things have changed in Google and it is obvious - and pretty understandable - that these days they are just a business trying to make as much money as possible by caching in from the incredible brand recognition they have gained 5 years ago.
I am somehow shocked though with the fact that there are so few 'anti-Google' statements in the internet world and that so few journalists and professionals mention anything bad against Google.
Over the past few weeks I have been checking in detail the Google Search engine results pages and to say the least there are some very weird things going on. Let me give you a couple of examples:
- The number of 'total documents' for searches of "the" and "a" oscillate wildly between 2.8M and 8M.
- The number of total documents for various searches oscillate between number Y and 2xY.
- There are hundreds of descriptions in the SERPs of Google that correspond to older pages which are totally different to the cached Google pages.
- There are many broken links in the Google results pages.
All these basically indicate that there is something heavily wrong with Google. Google is simply not that interested in the search engine results any more but is pushing all its efforts in their tangential endeavors. This feels as if they are mostly trying to impress the media and continue on their brand name building than actual work on the core project of their success (aka the search engine).
Maybe their tactics is the right one, i am not that smart to predict the future and see what the Google empire will be like in 10-15 years. However, what annoys me is the 'media conspiracy' - in a metaphorical way - in hiding the Google problems. Even in the free and anarchic (yeah right) internet world Google is part of the status quo and not very many people are keen to go against this status.
Posted by Basileios at April 8, 2005 05:14 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.rugles.com/mty/mt-tb.cgi/529