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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.
Old algorithm was better . See http://fantomaster.com/graphics/googhell.gif
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
The article suggests that many people are saying pagerank is working badly because they have lost their previous power to affect search results. Overall, the pagerank seems to have improved in this latest incarnation (IMHO)
...available in Mark Pilgrim's blog
Those pideons must be slacking off...:)
google still seems the best. Sometimes I use teoma or lycos because they give different top results. Being tied to one search engine seems bad as you miss alot.
I had an instructor point us to a page on networking that was amazing good but not found on any of those 3 search engines, at least in the top 30. Most of those top 30 hits wern't very good either.
Maybe yahoo has it right, The web should be indexed by people.
More importantly, was the mature content filter off? :-)
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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.
We who are editors at dmoz hold a lot of power right now. Its time for you to share in some of that power. Head over to dmoz and apply to edit your favorite category.
Can't decide where to apply?
Whether the rest of the article and of Google's changes are simply causing a rash of sour-grape whining or not, one thing I did notice when I used it yesterday: for a current topic of major interest at least to its part of the world, I got a helluva lot of dead links and blank pages ("Document contains no data" and when I checked, sure enough, it was just the HTML and /HTML tags, with no content). This did strike me as unusual not to mention annoying. More to the strange, none of these "dead pages" were in Google's own cache.
:( and no, it's not pr0n :)
(I still haven't found what I was looking for
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
To test if we really are in front of a Dmoz dominated Update, we have set up a Aspseek based small search engine, a GNU search engine with a crude PageRank-like ranking system. We have indexed around 1.500.000 pages, using as the starting point 700 Dmoz very competitive dmoz cats, including up to 250 pages per site, following up to 10 outside link, with up to 100 pages per outside link. What we found was that 59% of our top 20 results on the 100 cat-related competitive Keywords where also top 20 in Googles new index, and 26% of our Top 10 where also Googles Top 10.
But we must also said that we have not been able to find a so-compelling relationship using no-competitive categories. A 2.000.000 pages index with non-competitive regional cats, using non-competitive Keywords, showed a very small correlation between top 10, top 20, and even top 50 results.
So, our working theory right now is, yes, small changes, probably committed in order to fight both googlebombing and Pagerank commoditization, have affected the index accuracy in many different ways.
We think the index is unbalance, or unless much more unbalanced than the last one, and, as a result, the weight of some previously no-so important characteristics are souped-up, opening the door for abuse.
The main effect of all of this is small well managed sites at competitive categories can not relay anymore in good content + good linking to get a good listing. They will have to pay Google using Addwords program. That is the main change here. Forcing small business to pay to get at the top, using advertising space.
But we do think this update and the changes committed are, to say the least, unbalanced, and the new algo is rampantly open to easy abuse. Lets hope Google good old Phd common sense returns soon, and a new, improved update takes place as soon as possible. Lets hope they are not tring to make a easy killing by forcin small popular sites, all of the sudden deprived from traffic, to pay google using Adwords.
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.
Google's results are now less accurate because people are cheating. The way pagerank works is widely documented, and people abuse from it to get better scores.
I work for a company that hosts pr0n sites. Maybe 95% of our partneers are cheating that way. Fake sites, fake auto-generated HTML pages (with pseudo real sentences), cloaking (what Google sees is not what visitors see), javascript tricks, etc. are a must. They spend most of their time on trapping google, it brings more money than working on the site itself.
The company I'm working for has even a team working full-time on this (spamming search engines, and creating thousands of fake sites just to promote one real site) .
{{.sig}}
Here's why.
Your job, as a webmaster, is to produce a user friendly, useful, maybe informative website.
Google's job, as a search engine, is to find the sites most likely to be of interest to a user, based on their search terms.
Therefore,
To get good rankings, all you have to do as a webmaster is produce a user friendly, useful, maybe informative website.
It is Google's job to optimise to the web, not the web's job to optimise to Google.
So,
Search Engine Optimisation is big massive NET LOSS to you, because all it results in is getting visitors who aren't the slightest bit interested in your website or product.
It also results in a soon to be pretty useless Google, so please don't do it.
* you can't beat the best google-spammers in the end ... they're always smarter, quicker, difficult to identify
... let's hope this isn't a reason
* worse rankings with a particular keyword mean that a company will seriously consider using AdWords to maximize the traffic gain from google - so hey, it's good for google
* the big mistake is to use a "static" relationship between websites as a measure for a site's traffic or importance - better offer a "google counter" (google has the resources, I suppose)
All things considered, Google is still doing pretty well.
-lj
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
...because I've noticed some odd correlations.
For a long time, a search on "Samuel Johnson" returned Frank Lynch's "Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page" as the first hit. And, flatteringly, but mysteriously, a search on "Eyeglass Prescription" returned a web page of mine as the first hit. (I say "mysteriously" because the only page that Google reports as linking to my page is... my own home page! So it is not PageRank that accounted for its ranking).
About a month ago, Frank's page dropped to #3 and mine dropped to about #20. In Frank's case, the #1 spot went to a fine Samuel Johnson web site at Rutgers; in mine, I was edged out by a bunch of commercial sites selling eyeglasses.
The interesting thing is that two or weeks ago both sites popped back to number 1.
And then a few weeks later, Frank's is again at #3 and mine is down around #10 or so.
I don't think there's any reason why eyeglass prescriptions and Samuel Johnson would be connected. (And, no, Frank's page and mine do NOT link to each other!) So the changes must reflect tinkering by Google.
Neither Frank nor I use any kind of "cheating" to boost our ratings. And I don't think the sites that climbed above our did, either. Nor do I think many of the sites involved changed ANYTHING significant that would have altered their rankings.
(BTW I'm NOT giving URL's because the contents of these pages are irrelevant to my observations, I don't want them slashdotted, and this is NOT an attempt to boost the rankings of either page).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I agree with you 100%, but I don't think it'll ever happen. If everyone did as you suggested, and no one cheated, we'd live in a perfect index world - search results would accurately reflect what's on the web. Searches would be easier, and more relevant sites would come up with more specific searches. The number of hits you got coming from Google (or anyone else) would likely depend on the "real" content of your site.
Then, one day, someone would rediscover that by putting "Anna Kournikova Blowjob" on their site, they'd get some hits they wouldn't have otherwise. No harm, they think, it's a few bytes and it's not hurting anyone. Webmaster tells his friends, they tell their coworkers, and this continues until the search engines have to begin working around the issue.
Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, people aren't always honest, especially when it's something they perceive as benefiting them without hurting anyone else, especially if the benefit is financial. They don't care about the integrity of some other website's engine, they care about profits. Realize also that even personal sites do this; people like other people to see what they've made. While your idea is a great fantasy, near-perfect search results will only come from human-edited sites, or a better algorithm than we have now.
If a site is "convicted" of google-spamming (use the ranking engine to prescreen, and human checking to verify), or of helping to spam, it should be permanently blocked from the results by name and IP.
Result: pr0n sites will be too terrified of deletion to munge their ratings.
Background: Among other things, I am always trying to discover music from independent (especially blues) artists that post mp3's of their stuff on the web. I have been boycotting the major record labels 100% for about 15 years (hooray for independents!) for several reasons: 1: CD prices have always been a rip-off, 2: most major label artists suck, 3: I have worked in music business (artist/bands/production) and detest the industry for the way that it exploits artists, 4: I have always loved discovering talented "unknowns" and turning other people on to them. I went through a new music dry spell until the web started to become a vehicle for independent artists to promote themselves.
It's amazing what's out there now - I've found great artists from all over the Americas, Europe, Australia, Russia and even a few from Asia. I have found a lot of crap, too. The mp3 search engines are essentially useless for this purpose (I don't want major label music) and I have never used Napster or any of the off-spring. Links pages are more often out of date than not and webrings have similar problems. I have contrived several search techniques that try to exploit the strengths of search engines and the likely information on an artist's site. One very simple one is to look for "mp3 +(insert name of a well-known blues standard) -(a lot of keywords to exclude the many sites that put "mp3" on every page that simply lists a song title just to pull in traffic) -(specific sites that pollute the searches)", to find artists that cover the song and also have their own tunes.
I have been a proponent of Google for many years. It came along just as I really started to dislike Altavista and I was an almost instant convert. But I am always on the lookout for a backup or something better. I have tried Teoma several times in the last year (as recently as last night), but I'm not terribly impressed. I find its interface and the way it presents results simplistic and dumbed down and it appears to have indexed far less of the web than Google. I got turned off Lycos years ago, when it seemed to want to become another portal/Yahoo (as if we need another one).
The one search engine that I do use as a regular alternative to Google is Alltheweb. For one thing, IMO, its advanced search is currently better than Google's (I swear that I have brought Google to its knees by entering too many keywords - it stops responding and is inaccessible for several minutes thereafter - this has happened several times). When I've done back to back comparisons with Google, Alltheweb seems to fare pretty well and seems to find more international pages than Google. The difference in top rankings can also be useful. Google has some nice features that Alltheweb does not, such as the elimination of duplicate pages.
For one-stop searching, I find Google best for me, but Alltheweb is a good alternative.
Sigs are bad for your health.
Unfortunately for your theory Google is very good at finding song lyrics given only a small quote. I've done this several times. Try it.