Google Fail due to the rise of SEO "best practices?"
About 13 years ago... you know back when we didn't have Google? I remember staring at my computer screen in stomach churning frustration because the search tool at my disposal, was it called Altavista? was crap.
I remember thinking
The person who can put these websites into some kind of order
is going to make a lot of money.
Google had a better idea, worked out how to scan across the internet and made gazillions out of being able to deliver exactly what you were looking for, on the first page.
However today, when I type in a simple question
"How can I make GoogleDocs recognize the date format YY-MM-DD?"
What I get back is 9,700 results from other folks asking the same question - no doubt, in all of that there is an answer - but who has time to look through all these forum posting and the miscellaneous extra crap?
Today when I want to find the support page of the company that built my printer in order to fix a bug, I get 15,000 resellers and the official website is lost in the mire.
Today Google is not my first stop when I want to find the best web 2.0 tool for the work I'm doing, it's Delicious - as I know that there's probably someone in my network who has bookmarked and saved a site already.
Google will churn out for me folks who've linked and listed a bunch of other related sites and within those convulated pages, I'll have to click three, four, five pages in deep to get me to where I'm going.
Search is failing. It's a big messy spider web.
photo courtesty of DFID on Flickr
Brin & Page - exactly just how many sites do we need out there made up of purely-crap-let-me-see-how-money-I-can-make-from-adsense?
Nonsense.
How many scam-sites do we really have to have before you guys will tighten things up?
Do we really need tweets, forum postings and all that jazz popping up in the results?
Is there no way to be a bit more discerning?
Seriously?
The scenario I just described is about the fiftieth time this year that I feel like I'm back to using Altavista again. No wonder EduPLNs are becoming an absolute necessity, Twitter and FB on the rise... with all this rubbish clogging up the 'net you gotta have your own folks around you who can tell you the answers because Google ain't doing the job anymore. And cutesy logos aren't the answer, gimme back effective search.
To be fair, it's probably not Google's fault - instead I blame the How-to-SEO best-ever-ever-ever-ever-con-the-system folks, I really do.
We're full circle: the person who can come up with a new algorithm and a new way to search is going to make heaps of money and they won't need ads because at this stage of the search game, I know that I one for would pay to use a search engine which actually filtered through the mud and got me the results I want.
