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Google's Search Results Degraded?
scrm writes "According to this Wired article, recent tweaks to Google's PageRank search algorithm have degraded rather than improved the accuracy of the results." I noticed this firsthand the other day, but only when I was searching for pictures of famous people, but all my technical queries came back fine.
Yes, the web should be indexed by people.
But how about not one that requires sites to pay to get in? (Yahoo)
At Google, go to the "Directory" tab, or go to DMOZ.org (Open Directory) itself. DMOZ is bigger, better organized, has fewer broken links, no ads, and is built by hand by people who know their categories and are interested in keeping them linking only to sites with meaningful content.
Semi-mindles search spiders are not all there is in finding stuff on the Internet.
There is a company called Search44 which seems to have made this kind of stuff their living.
They index lots of other sites pages and when google comes around spidering they return random content from them. If you follow one of these links from google you will be redirected to their portal.
No doubt it gives them quite a bit of traffic.
At Google, go to the "Directory" tab, or go to DMOZ.org (Open Directory) itself. DMOZ is bigger, better organized, has fewer broken links, no ads, and is built by hand by people who know their categories and are interested in keeping them linking only to sites with meaningful content.
First, I would suggest going directly to the categories at dmoz.org rather than the Google relistings. Google picks up revised RDF dumps from DMOZ whenever they please, but the lag in the cycle is pretty long. If you are looking for the "fresher" data, go directly to the source.
Second, DMOZ can become what you say it is only with proper editing. The project itself may list 50000+ editors, but they're volunteers and there is a lot of ground to cover. A large number of edits are made by those "high up" in the directory structure to "lower"/"deeper" categories less well understood. Certain branches of the project are neglected; others eat editors for breakfast with the amount of work that needs to be done. Volunteer and help out.
You may also want to investigate ChefMoz and MusicMoz, too.
I noticed that google is plural-sensative. For example, "SQL alternative" will give a bit different answer than "SQL alternatives".
It does not seem like a very good idea to me in most cases.
Table-ized A.I.
The pagerank algorithm is one of the most important reasons why it is so good in bringing up relevant and popular results. But, this is just one of the ways of searching for good results and will not always work to your satisfaction.
Google gives preference to the number and quality of links to a particular site rather than the content of the site itself. One can easily come up with cases when this is probably not the best approach.
For example, consider a portion of the web containing lyrics of songs. If you search by artist name or song name, google will return excellent results, because the pages are probably linked using the names. However, if you only know the soneg from radio, you might want to search for songs containing a few particular lines. The pagerank algorithm might not be the best fit here.
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