Reviewing Some Bad Google Search Results With Sergey Brin

chiropractic, October 7th, 2009 at 2:13 pm ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

A bit surprised that “car rental california” does not include ten box in results and I have looked to see how popular the search term is. Appears that “car rental san diego” and “car rental newport beach” returns results I’d expect to see (map, brands, luxury cars, etc).

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mregan, October 7th, 2009 at 6:32 pm ET:

I wrote an article on a local pizza parlor having a better SERP than the local Pizza Hut. And, while it is easy to ‘blame’ G oogle for the poor SERP of major players in geo-targeted searches – the sites themselves are much to blame.

Many of the ‘big boys’ (Hertz, Pizza Hut, et al) direct traffic through a corporate home page. In the case of Pizza Hut – there was no easy route to a page on the local outlet. There is little or no attempt at SEO other than getting links for the home page.

On the plus side – it sure makes my job easier.

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christof, October 7th, 2009 at 11:27 pm ET:

Gosh – All this time and I thought Google was using DMOZ volunteers to check the quality of websites – which in turn leads to more trust and better SERPs for those included! I suppose DMOZ is just too slow reviewing sites and getting them into the directory.

“Talking with Sergey today, I said that after reading how Google pays people $16 per hour to rate the relevancy of its results, how about paying some of those to review and improve the third party local information that Google depends on?”

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Shadab Malik, October 8th, 2009 at 2:24 am ET:

“..that much of Google’s algorithm seems to reward sites that have gained trust over time…”. Lately I have noticed that its the only thing that works for Google. Take a look at any keywords related to ‘ecards’ for instance – birthday cards, anniversary cards etc and you will see for yourself. Sometimes I dont find any quality content or enough back links on a site which is still ranking. This becomes frustrating at times that while I have been wearing white hats, dear Google ranks only black hats. Do a search on ‘goa hotels’ or ‘delhi hotels’ and you could easily explain a layman what ‘keyword stuffing’ is and how it helps.

Which makes me think if there are more factors that help a website rank except Keyword based URL and Domain Age!

I hope this post serves as wake-up call for Google.

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Michael Martinez, October 8th, 2009 at 2:40 am ET:

The California Car Rentals query could certainly benefit from a mix of big brand and local rental agency sites. The results do look rather odd today.

However, when it comes to local restaurants versus national brands, or local merchants versus national chains, Google too often favors the national chains/brands over the local businesses.

Eric Schmidt doesn’t really get search. People will search for brands specifically but when they want truly local results they often have to dig dip past all the brand spam to find what they are looking for.

Brands are just as much a part of the Google spam problem as the made-for-adsense spam sites. The local businesses don’t have the know-how or resources to compete with all the search-savvy sites.

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les madras, October 8th, 2009 at 2:25 pm ET:

Excellent writeup. I think page rank as a way of measuring importance is all but broken.
The original insight behind pagerank came from academia, where the importance of a paper can be measure by the citation index, i.e. how many other papers refer to it.

The problem now is that there is a lot of automated and semiautomated sites that are cranking out questionable content designed to maximise rank for carefully selected keywords, and then monetized with Google Adsense. Googe makes money all the way but the user is poorly served.

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propswest, October 8th, 2009 at 5:40 pm ET:

Don’t most people search for “SFO car rental” or “john wayne airport car rental”? If I’m in San Diego, I’m not going to search for “california car rental” knowing I could get stuff in Sacramento.

Searching for those kinds of city or airport terms, the results are actually quite good.

Not saying they’re always good, they’re often not. But local results are many times better than they were 2-3 years ago.

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Danny Sullivan, October 8th, 2009 at 7:42 pm ET:
Premium member since 12/2008

Dunno, searched for “john wayne airport car rental,” and I don’t see many trusted brands in there. The description for one of the gives me a quote in pounds, rather than dollars. John Wayne’s in fairly conservative Orange County, where I live — but the area isn’t so conservative that it has reverted back to British rule. Many of the sites seem to be places that simply send your query to a back end clearing house. My experience with these types of sites has been pretty poor, to say the least.

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les madras, October 8th, 2009 at 11:55 pm ET:

google backs a return to british rule! man thats funny.

but actually not. a lot of these sites are just adsense farms. heck, search for arthritis on google, and the top ranked listing is from, why, Google!. since when did they become an expert on health?

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Flubert, October 11th, 2009 at 7:25 am ET:

With all due respect to Sergey Brin, as head of an IT department myself, I have it on good authority if you type ‘Google’, into Google you can break the internet, so please no one try it, even for a joke

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danielrluke, October 11th, 2009 at 8:56 am ET:

I’ve noticed these kinds of anomalies quite frequently as well. Glad to see that someone else is finally noticing and writing about it.

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aburt, October 11th, 2009 at 2:08 pm ET:

“countered reasonably that people who search for “search engine” on Google itself probably don’t expect to find Google. They’re already there, so putting it tops isn’t relevant.”

I’m not sure he knows his customers then. I know many people, just ordinary folks, not techies, who don’t really use or know the terminology “search engine”. They just use Google as a browser location bar. (I recall there was an article recently illustrating how people at large don’t really use or know the term “browser” either.)

It’s thus NOT a “reasonable” counter argument… and truly does illustrate how Google often doesn’t present good search results.

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smanhays, October 14th, 2009 at 2:00 pm ET:

I think your point about national brands struggling for local result penetration are echoed by the weakness of GOOG-411. There have been so many times I needed a national phone number, but alas, there is no way to secure a national phone number (yes, I am the guy without an iphone or blackberry).

The GOOG-411 system is based on providing a city/state and business, similar to the Google Maps system. Well, what is the city for “AAA” main line? Or “PNC Mortgage”? Or “TiVo Activation.” National businesses have no local results.

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billmarshall, October 16th, 2009 at 6:03 am ET:

Should have shown him the results that Barry Schwarz just found for Google New Zealand when searching for Google Ireland ;-)

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