Comments on: Reviewing Some Bad Google Search Results With Sergey Brin

By: sbyholm

sbyholm — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:42:47 +0000

I think Google puts too much emphasis on large sites and old sites without regard to the fact that a site can become old fashioned and some sites aren’t always maintained having mostly outdated information.

Simon Byholm
SEO and founder,
Secret Search Engine Labs

By: billmarshall

billmarshall — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:03:21 +0000

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

By: smanhays

smanhays — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:00:59 +0000

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.

By: aburt

aburt — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:08:26 +0000

“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.

By: danielrluke

danielrluke — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:56:51 +0000

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

By: Flubert

Flubert — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:25:20 +0000

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

By: les madras

les madras — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:55:40 +0000

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?

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:42:59 +0000

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.

By: propswest

propswest — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:40:16 +0000

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.

By: les madras

les madras — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:25:54 +0000

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.