Has Yahoo got it right?
More and more I find myself going to Yahoo to find any useful/unique information about a subject.
Lately it seems a search in Google turns up results from the same handful of large sites with little uniqueness or user content. The first few results seem to always include wikipedia and similar dull info sites, granted they provide good info, but it is generally much more general than my search requires. It is getting harder to find unique user content on the countless smaller sites which often include great pictures and much more detail on a particular subject. I go to page 2 of the results thinking there must be some good content buried and it just quickly gets to be off-subject content. Google seems to be showing more and more general results for specific search phrases and then quickly tailing off to other general sites with content that is more and more off-topic.
I personally have a few sites with good unique content that Google likes to keep supplemental. Why, I don’t know, but my info simply cannot be found in Google and is usually on the first page of Yahoo. These are not pages that I’ve promoted or tried to rank well on for any particular term or at all for that matter, they merely contain the detailed information that a person searching for information about would like to find. They are useful pages with useful info and pictures and the results that Google gives in most respects does not compare to the unique content that my pages contain. Again, I go to page 2 thinking I will see my results there…. around page 10 I change it to show 100 results per page and give up after a few pages of 100 results per page in a myriad of totally off topic pages that aren’t even close to what the search qeury is about.
It is also harder now to find results from forums on Google, which is where much of the useful content of the internet is stored. Now I know a few years ago it was easy to find quality specific term results in Google for informational queries. Since that time, the internet has only grown and the body of available quality data on the internet has only grown, but one would not know this by searching Google, it seems as if the bulk of quality, detailed data has vanished.
This is off the topic but I have another problem with Google listing results from subscription-only sites. If Googlebot is able to see the info and a click on the search result puts me at a subscribe-now page to view the content, then the site is delivering a cloaked page to Google (confirmed by viewing the page source), which to my knowledge is against their webmaster guidelines. While the cloaked page may have contained data pertinent to my search, arriving at a subscribe-now page is just plain spam. Consider if Google did not allow sites to block the page from being cached. No-cache should mean that the site will not get indexed either. If a site is authoritative enough to be subscription-only, why does Google need to waste my time by sending me to their subscribe-now page? Accordingly, why does Google want to increase the 3rd party sites’ revenues by sending me to their subscribe page? There are some well known, high traffic, authoritative sites that do this and have gotton away with it for years.
Back in about 1999 when I first started using Google, the big advantage it had over the “other guys” was exactly that one could search for a very specific term and get results from the small sites with the best info. Google delivered the information one was looking for when the other guys failed. Chances are, without Google, one could search the “other guys” for hours and not find anything close to the information needed. The “other guys” did more what Google is doing now…. giving general results for a specific search term and the same or similar general results regardless of query modifications to make the search string more specific.
Another thing is that Google seems to be somewhat stripped of sites that sell stuff. The problem is, sometimes I’m looking for more than just to find info on a subject, sometimes my search is directed at finding a website that sells a particular type of product. Granted, Google has done an incredible job with Froogle, but the general web search for a type of product fails pretty bad on Google… there’s nothing to buy…. but the Adwords column is usually full of things to buy, often unrelated to the search string. Adwords is sort of the “buy stuff here” column on Google, thus directing the user to click there. However, again there is a problem because these results are usually clogged with affiliate links, ebay links, large companies, large price comparison outfits, and tons of sites that look like spam and just have sponsored links to other sites. By clicking anything in the Adwords column, I feel like I’m just going to get the run-around of multiple clicks on multiple sponsored ads to make multiple people a few cents and cost multiple others a few cents and still never arrive at anything that really helps me on my search to buy something.
So at Yahoo then, there seems to be a better mix and a less-overzealous use of PPC advertising hogging any potential click to buy something.
Bottom line: I’m not happy with the results I’m seeing at Google lately and it seems to be getting worse every month. I turn to Yahoo and I’m finding the info I need quicker and easier. All in all though, I feel let down by the search engines. Can’t these guys do a better job? Multi-billion dollar companies? At one time in the distant past, Google had it very right. Yes, there was spam back then too, tons of it. Google seemed to be nearly spam-free compared to the “other guys” and still delivered the results. Granted, Google’s popularity back then was not that of the “other guys” so it may not have been the target of the spam as it may be today. Still, Google had it worked out, now it seems as if they are just floundering at trying to be a quality search engine. There is tons of good content out there that a searcher will never be able to find on Google, regardless of how closely it matches the search query or how many different variations of the search query one tries. It’s time for something new.
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