I agree with Weiqi Gao. When I first started using Google a few years back I was in awe at how accurate the results were. That “I’m Feeling Lucky” actually worked! In recent months I’ve become increasingly annoyed with the results that google returns. They seem to heavily favor commercial sites and products over people and content. My gut feeling is that it isn’t something intentional on the part of Google, but rather the fact that companies have learned to “optimize” to get a higher spot in the results. What’s interesting, however, is that MSN is producing more relevant results. Examples abound.
- “jamin” google / msn.
The fact that my home page is near the bottom of the page in google’s results isn’t a big deal to me really. But I consider me more relevant than a leather company.
- “chicken” google / msn
Top link on google is one of Burger King’s promotions. Top link on MSN is a link to chicken recipes. - “adam” google / msn
Top links on google are companies. Top links on MSN are people. - “hl7 parser” google / msn
Top two links on google are a commercial product and a PDF document describing a parser. Top two links on MSN are two open source projects to create HL7 parsers. - “book reviews” google / msn
The top three links on google are the New York Times, Barnes and Noble, and The New York Review of Books. The top three links on msn appear to be more general, community-based sites. This is actually one of the best examples of how msn results are more relevant to me. I’m sure others will disagree.
I bet there are examples where msn’s results are less relevant than google’s, and this is largely anecdotal evidence, but I’m finding myself using msn and clusty more and google less. Is anyone else experiencing this or do you all still think google’s results are the best?
Tags: Web
March 9th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
FWIW, I don’t think The New York Review of Books has anything to do with the New York Times, except that they’re both from New York.
Whether a community site is more relevant than one of the the best known commercial book review magazines is pretty subjective, but you’re right… Google’s results do seem less community-oriented in these cases.
March 9th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Erik: my bad. I misread the link.
March 9th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
“My gut feeling is that it isn’t something intentional on the part of Google, but rather the fact that companies have learned to “optimize” to get a higher spot in the results.”
That’s my feeling aswell, and google is know to waste a _lot_ of resource trying to get those suckers in their right place
While msn/yahoo may look better, the fact is that people is not trying to reverse-engineer their algorithms so hard…it’s one of the reason I keep using google, if everybody starts using msn/yahoo they’ll target them and google has far more experience trying to avoid spam.
March 9th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I’ve been rather happy with the I feel Lucky button. Of couse it’s very left sided, like when I clicked to look for images of Pat Robertson or the like….go ahead and google failure (then hit I feel lucky) Okay well I thought it was funny.
March 9th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Hi,
MSN totally overrates my page. And previously, MSN reacted to “googlebombing” much more than google did.
Search for “xmldiff”, and you’ll find the page http://www.vitavonni.de/projekte/ssddiff
ranked #6 or so. Note that this page is 2 weeks old, and not at all relevant. Think of it as part of my resumé.
The actual ssddiff project page is ranked #95 or so on google, which is more accurate, actually… again #16 on MSN (and #11 is my blog again)
I think MSN’s pagerank is still quite immature compared to google, and likely much more vulnerable to spamming and such.
March 9th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
Diego - note that while many companies optimize their sites for a high ranking in Google, many of them are doing so quite legitimately. The problem is the ones who do so by means that breach Google’s terms, the kind of thing that gets sites blacklisted.
March 11th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Personally, MSN gives better results for searching my name as well (”danilo” puts my blog at first spot, which is probably a bit unfair, as does “danilo segan”). However, for Serbian, Google is by far technically superior.
Eg. try searching for “danilo segan” on Google. It will give me all search results for “danilo segan”, “danilo šegan” and “?????? ?????” (Cyrillic, as used in Serbian). Perhaps this is only available if your Accept-Language includes “sr” or if you go via google.co.yu, but this is the thing that keeps Google my primary search engine (well, anyone from Serbia would agree this is the best way to do searches in Serbian language, and my 6 years old web-based book library application also did it that way): one query instead of trying all the combinations myself.
Now, Google is not indexing my blog, but I don’t know why it got blacklisted (I never optimised it for anything, and it simply happened when I dropped alias domain “danilosegan.com”).