PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Well, I finally lost it with Google. What a shit search engine, seriously.

If you want to search for some information about a product, like a bit of music gear etc, all you get is shop links. It's really pathetic.

The targeted advertising on their email service is shocking too... I was mailing with Shroomz about his Octave Cat a while back and I was targeted with cat pet insurance ads! WTF.

Anyway I have started to use Yahoo and I can once again find some useful information in the sea of useless crap that is the internet.

Had to get that off my chest.. hope some of you find this useful.

darkrezin wrote:
Well, I finally lost it with Google. What a shit search engine, seriously.

If you want to search for some information about a product, like a bit of music gear etc, all you get is shop links. It's really pathetic.

I find I have to use the term "review" or somesuch to circumvent that happening.

e.g. my bike, if I type in "Z750S" I get "lowest prices..!" bollocks. If I try "Z750S Ride Review", I get some links that I'm interested in.

Google sure ain't non-commercial...

Hey Royston,

Of course I tried that Still no good really, since most shop pages have some pathetic review system which no-one ever uses.

Yeah, that's classic. You think you've found a review page and it says "Be the first to post a review." Bollocks.

I usually add the word "problem". Shops will never admit problems with anything they sell, and if you're researching an item it's good to see if users are commonly complaining about something.

Mr Arkadin wrote:
Yeah, that's classic. You think you've found a review page and it says "Be the first to post a review." Bollocks.

Drives me mad does that! Grrr!!

I once found a fake of my group's site the rigth one is http://www.haikufristajl.com while the fake one was something like http://www.haikufristajl.xxxx.xxx.com. Of course after searching for 'haiku fristajl' in google I found also the fake one saying 'haiku fristajl - full info, mp3, blalala'. Of course the site was only a search engine with garbage. I e-mailed google and they very briefly removed the site from their engine. It's fair.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: samplaire on 2006-06-08 05:51 ]</font>

Just a note darkrezin, the google ads are definately a source of revenue for google. Add to that the fact that Google is now allowing graphics in ads hosted on sites although their search engine will remain 'clean'--for the time being.

However, the reason that online retailers are propagating up in google's results has less to do with google than it does to do with the amount of time people invest in 'online marketing' these days. Almost all of my mainstream clientelle focuses on 'search engine marketing' for their online business, and these are almost all SMALL businesses. The larger the shop, the more time they're going to invest in insuring their products are at the top of Google and other major search engines.

Currently Google's "rank" is loosely based on things like the number of other pages that link to a given page. More ethical retailers just play tricks within their sites, like making every product have effectively 5 pages (comments, details, etc) instead of just one. Less ethical players hire the bots out there to farm vulnerable php driven sites, inserting ads and other data.

I have a few friends at Google, and afaik google is aware of this. Their unrevealed set of 'algorithms' to rank sites is periodically tweaked to try to compensate for things like this, but google's resources are finite compared to the number of online retailers and 'online marketing experts' out there that reverse engineer Google results and tweak away to the fantasy of easy money.

Another thing you'll notice about Google is that 'new' things on the net may not appear high up in results immediately versus other search engines.

This is not google’ fault, it is the user fault, because they do it to attract people like you, searching for real info, but they want to get their business to be known.