Google Is Planning To Penalize Overly Optimized Sites 299
tekgoblin writes "This is an interesting move by Google but not completely off the rocker for them. Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results. Google plans to penalize overly optimized sites because they want to level the playing field for other websites who do not concentrate on such efforts. From the article: 'Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains the following: “We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.” The search engine at Google is about to go through a major overhaul and de-prioritizing sites with heavy SEO is just a small part in the big picture to bring better search results. The changes to the search engine will be coming in the next few months.'"
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
How about somebody mentioning to Google that we also don't want Google+ crap spamming our results...
We shouldn't have to hit page 2 before we start getting useful results.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
See the globe next to the person icon, the one that says "Hide personal results"?
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
And on top of that, when you're signed in they have that whole useful "never see links from this site again". If you type in $BAND $SONG lyrics, you're bound to get sites that use shitty flash apps, annoying ads, etc. They are erased from my personal search results, and now I only see relevant ones.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW the block sites stuff doesn't appear to work well for me any more. I did this: go to google trends, pick two unrelated trending keywords/phrases, search for them. Click on spam site, click back, block the spam site. Repeat. Go to manage blocked sites, no sites show up- this is even when I'm signed in to Google.
FWIW Google could use a similar method to automatically block such spam sites (there would need to be some checks but some of these sites are so obviously spam that even a simple program should be able to figure it out.
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How about somebody mentioning to Google that we also don't want Google+ crap spamming our results...
I mentioned it to them in the "why are you doing this?" box when I deleted my Google+ account.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
I mentioned it to them in the "why are you doing this?" box when I deleted my Google+ account.
You mean "Disabled your account." You don't actually believe they deleted a damn thing, do you?
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Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
And how in the hell can you function without a Google account?
Is that a serious question, or do I get a "whoosh"? I'm missing the point, I think.
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Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
"I prfer yahoo for real mail"
Baffling, it really is. I have a yahoo account I don't use for anything, not spam crap, not anything. It gets several hundred spam a day that fly past the filter.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
I searched for "how to sing" not one Google + result and I went in 6 pages.
I'm also not a Google + member (none of the social sites) but that shouldn't matter.
I log in to my Youtube account anytime I need to do anything, then log out. I have one video that's seeing 50000 views a week
and the info on people (those who have logged in or never log out) is quite interesting; allowing one to specialize their spam
BTW: The video mentioned is on a different account, 5 seconds long, and nobody likes it, but it's doing rather well
Not one item of spam, not even a link to my other site have I placed (outside of the description).
-Citation: youtube search for "How to get a Mob Spawner" by badactorEP, I've left the basic statistics open.
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maybe my mojo is superior, maybe not, but i have g+ and am logged in when i search, and still i don't get g+ spam. i do get heavy amounts of SEO shit though, so i applaud their move to make their engine harder to game.
their strategy is probably that nobody gets a free lunch. if you want priority listing, you have to pay them. SEO will get you nowhere.
Using Google (Score:2)
You folks logged in when you use Google?
I use two browsers
One (let's say FF) I logged in my Google Account (gmail or something)
And on the other browser (let's say Chrome) which I've made sure that I've logged off from all my Google accounts - I use Google search on it
I do not know if my strategy works or not
I do not know if Google logs me in via my IP or not
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You folks logged in when you use Google?
I don't use Google.
I log in to my Youtube account ...
I've never logged into youtube. Why do you have to do that? To upload?
I have one video that's seeing 50000 views a week ...
Kudos.
I'll just go and play in the corner over there ... Don't mind me.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont' *have* a google account, yet, every once in a while, I get "personal results", and pictures of people I know who have google accounts. That's scary!
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You mean "Disabled your account." You don't actually believe they deleted a damn thing, do you?
In this instance, we're talking about Google+ results polluting one's Google search results. I really couldn't care less whether or not they deleted my Google+ circles or whatever - I'm not getting stupid Google+ stuff interjected into my search results, which was my intended goal.
My Google account is still active.
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Hmm.. if you have too many people in your circles recommending too much crap, you should consider a reorganization of your contacts.
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I've seen this complaint here before, but still haven't seen any "Google+ crap" in my search results.
What are we doing differently that is causing you to get all this "Google+ crap spamming" your search results and I don't get any? Maybe there is some setting you've missed or something else you've changed?
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Bleah, I'm lucky if I can find what I'm looking for before page 5 on Google these days. I remember when it was almost always in the first 3 results.
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
It used to be that good content was what search engines were looking for. And by producing good (and well organized) content you automatically ended up at the top of the search rankings.
Unfortunately search bots don't actually know what "good content" is, so all they can do is try to work with the bits that they can figure out, and that led to SEO which really ONLY exists to game those algorithms.
This is a good move on google's part. I think one of the big failings of all search engines recently is that they have mostly been accepting SEO rather than fighting it. This leads to lots of garbage sites with good SEO grabbing all the top spots, and makes it very difficult to find really good sites. The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better, I long for a day when the only way to do SEO has the side effect of having to make useful information for human visitors too...
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The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better, I long for a day when the only way to do SEO has the side effect of having to make useful information for human visitors too...
If they can pull it off... http://xkcd.com/810/ [xkcd.com]
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Or have more than one popular search engine, each with a ranking algorithm that is different from the other, different enough that optimizing a site for one search engine would cause that site to get demoted in other search engines. Well I can dream can't I?
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How about one search engine with multiple algorithms, giving you the first N hits based on different ranking algorithms.
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It's like judging teachers by their students' results on standardized tests.
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Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)
So you're the one stealing yesterday's leftovers from the fridge. Time to make a chocolate-exlax cream pie.
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Luckily for me, my current slate of sites is all highly specialized and catering to people who are specifically sent to the site from other places (usually not online) and not to people who need to search for them.
The last site I ran that had any reliance on search engines showed up in the top 5 results for the appropriate search terms, and that was strictly through content and proper tagging (nothing shady at all) Mind you that was also about 5 years ago, so who knows if the same would be true today. I was
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The thing about google's "walled garden" is that it doesn't have any walls, sure they curate what they deem to be actual content instead of spam ridden ad farms. But there's nothing to stop you from going to the span ridden link farm if you so choose.
Compare that to other well known "walled garden" approaches that prevent you from accessing/installing specific content, even if you specifically choose to do so, and the difference should be obvious.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.
Surely the reaction to this will be producing good content, and not employing more SEO gurus to circumvent the new weights by dodgy techniques.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had mod points this would be +1 Funny...
SEO is the business of circumventing the proper weighting of search results by "dodgy techniques", it always has been, and always will be.
SEO didn't exist until people realized that bots had specific things they were looking for, and people started putting only those things in instead of writing good content that happened to include those things (what the bot writers originally assumed would be found)
I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.
The core of the problem is really that people don't want to hear that their site/content is not relevant on a search term, because for them it is relevant. So they will search for ways of "correcting" this picture, and demand creates supply.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.
I can propose a tactic that might work pretty well: Whenever Google figures out the latest spamming method the SEO people are using, make a list of all the sites that currently do that (ideally in the way that only or primarily the SEO people are doing it), and then give all those sites a long-term decrease in ranking, even if they stop doing that thing. Make it two years before you can get your site back into the higher rankings.
Soon enough everybody will realize that "get SEO" is a synonym for "get your site removed from the first page of results for the next two years" and then finding methods of fooling the Googlebot in the short-term won't matter anymore because no one will be willing to attempt it if they can get slapped with a long-term penalty.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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So forget about SEO, and forget about Online Reputation Management (pushing others down in the rankings). Those days are coming to an end.
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I'm not sure how effective that would be against what I'm describing.
The idea is that you give the SEO bastards some time to come up with their latest successful strategy for increasing the rank of a site, then you make a list of the sites that have done that, then you blacklist all of them in one shot for a long period of time. The second it comes out that people who use that tactic get blacklisted, the sites are all already blacklisted. It's a one shot deal, so you can't figure out which tactic they're go
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You seem to think the small business owners that this would hurt would know about it.
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The ones paying any attention would know about it. And the result of that would be that most of the SEO companies would go out of business and the remainder would be selling pure, unadulterated, more-harm-than-good snake oil.
It's also worth pointing out that as long as the targets are only the ones who actually used SEO in the first place, they're only getting what they deserve. Screw anybody who thinks polluting everyone else's search results is a good idea.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Surely the reaction to this will be producing good content, and not employing more SEO gurus to circumvent the new weights by dodgy techniques.
Or, in other words, when the best SEO practice ceases to be the best SEO practice, another one will logically spring to the top. "Punishing best-SEO sites" seems to be a logical contradiction.
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Oblig Stephen Jay Gould reference (Score:2)
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Add to that a negative-only modifier for keyword stuffing, bad descriptions, and too many links to crap.
So, with pagerank out the door, no more link farming, and no more meta-tag foolishness, content becomes king again, all those doorway pages disappear, and everyone but the seo scumbags is happier.
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Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
The best way to do this is a catch 22. In order to gain better search results you have to give up search privacy. Using Google 'manage blocked sites' you can start killing off those SEO sites that crud up you search results one by one, catch is you must be logged in.
Google can of course compile those blocked sites, sites that users have decided to permanently toss in the search waste bin and start putting those sites further and further down the results list (associated with broad users types).
Google can even publicly shame offending sites by publishing lists of the most blocked web sites, really sticking it to the SEOs who get carried away with crapping up search results.
To get really good search results, search companies just need to provide the core, the starting point and then allow logged in registered users (no privacy, suggestion here use 2 search engines, one for private and one for public searches) as a distributed effort to rate good and bad results, for general rankings and specific user type rankings
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I know, it's a real catch 22. The block let's you block up 500 crap SEO web sites and the more that participate the more SEO web sites that die. I already use http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ [nyu.edu], obscure usage (it makes many more searches than I do) and I use more than one search engine (search engine specific to data type) but when you are in a hurry and want the best results to come up on the first page. Not wanting to fuck around for 10 minutes (sometimes far longer) wading through crap you're not interested
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For the too many keywords issue, male the not only use the first N (maybe 20?) keywords. It would be a trivial change.
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This is great.. I have been running a web application company for the past 14 years. Now days we are drowned out of the search results for certain terms by jackass SEO optimized competitors. The competitors at the top of search results are simply there because that have done things like exchange links with a completely unrelated site. They have a list of 12 or so links in their footer and each of the 12 other sites do the same. None of the sites have anything to with each other. It is surprising that w
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It may be cheaper to buy Google's keyword ads than pay for link fudging efforts to compete. The keyword ads appear on the right side of their usual search results and marked as ads. You "buy" a keyword and a frequency amount (higher frequency = more costs). I used to use this service, and it was relatively effective. (Lately they've moved them to the middle in tan sometimes if a low number of matches.)
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Yes; to people doing searches, SEO is more often an euphemism for Search Result Pollution.
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I know of a small family plant nursery business/garden centre who wanted to redo their website. They mostly sold flowers, trees, landscaping plants, etc and also ran vegetable classes.
Anyway, the developer they hired insisted that Google gave higher priority to the words "fruits" and "hedging", and proceeded to throw up a website containing essentially nothing but content about fruits and hedges. Trouble was, they didn't do a lot of hedging and I don't think they did fruits at all. When questioned on this,
Not a very good wingman... (Score:5, Funny)
Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results
So now Google is officially a co.cc blocker.
content not ads (Score:5, Insightful)
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Good SEO often comes at the expense of good content. I don't think this latest development is absolutest. In the end, they want to improve their search results. This is just one piece in that.. among countless other factors.
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If you have good content, SEO shouldn't be necessary. People have found that you can enhance your ranking by inserting fake or misleading content in the form of keywords, links, and activity which does not increase the actual value of the page. This causes the accuracy of the Google search bot to go down - though it increases the hits on optimized pages. The net result is poorer searching, and good searching keeps eyeballs in front of advertising, which pays the bills to provide better searching.
I'm surpri
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The problem is that there is no way for googlebot to know what "good content" is. SEO isn't some magic thing that makes bad content appear as good to a search engine, instead it's a way of gaming the mechanism that the bots use to try to determine genuinely good content (which is what the bot really is trying to find, it's just not smart enough to know the difference). The only solution is a smarter google-bot, and this is something that I think google really needs to work on, (and this seems to be the firs
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You're part of the problem. Go DIAF - slowly. And shove your hosts file up your rectum.
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Oh this is too good. (Score:5, Funny)
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That may be illegal under prohibitions against shilling.
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I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies that provide SEO tend to work for a monthly retainer, not as one-off payments. I doubt many of them will like this because it eliminates one of the things that differentiates their service from simply "build a good site and add good content". The people who don't "over-optimise" make more money by simply doing a good job of building websites, and they have no need to define themselves as SEO companies.
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That's one way to look at it. However, if Google changes its algorithm rapidly enough, then they can price most of the bottom feeders out of that market. For instance, how much am I willing to pay to be able to game the system for a week when all I'm optimizing is a parked domain, aggregator, or other crap site? If I have to spend full price every week, the value isn't there.
To me that's the major benefit, that it will increase cost the most for those who truly are gaming the system (eg, domain parkers)
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Indeed. Got a friend who was into the SEO business (did everything in my power to convince him to drop it), and if I am remembering correctly, they reverse engineer Google's ranking algorithm from their patents. If this is true, and were I Google, I'd keep my new implementation off the books, or at least have the USPTO seal it.
About time.... (Score:2)
The SEO scumbags have been polluting search sites everywhere.
When I can search for 4 different unrelated terms and have the same site show up in each, you know that SEO is only a scumbags game.
Re:About time.... (Score:4, Funny)
I know. There's this one scumbag SEO company that comes up for an absolute load of unrelated terms, it's that obvious, I don't know why Google haven't blacklisted them yet. The SEO company even has a silly name, Wiki something I think.
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semantic web (Score:4, Interesting)
as the web becomes less semantic-based, html/css is slowly eroding in value as a searchable medium. for websites worth visiting, the default html structure that the googlebot loads is little more than a placeholder for dynamic content, with css styles used to declare javascript event listeners for a given element. clicking on said element loads the dynamic content.
people are finding things in different ways now: one example is via word-of-mouth (viral, etc) via social networks. who honestly thinks that fine tuning their website's keywords will help them obtain more visitors? does anyone actually believe this will help their website gain popularity? especially given the billions of webpages already in various search engines' databases? in this day and age?
as a web marketer, you are better off promoting a website through as many social networks as possible. dont waste time fine-tuning keywords; nobody cares anymore.
its about people helping people find information, not some algorithm helping you.
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Politicians first, then Lawyers, then Marketers.
Anyone else with me?
Keywords up the wazoo (Score:4, Funny)
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From An Insider: Good! (Score:2)
As someone who provides SEO, among other things - shameless plug alert: www.uvmanagement.com [uvmanagement.com] - I see this as being a welcome change.
It is frustrating trying to provide what I deem "honest" SEO - focusing on marketing the content, rather than creating content which is marketable, for example - when so many other providers out there use all the tricks in the book to increase page rankings without actually having content worthy of where they end up. I very well could engage in such tactics, but I'm a nerd befo
Penalize? I don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't sound to me like they're trying to penalize anyone; it sounds to me like they're trying to improve their search results. The people who spend so much time and effort trying to artificially boost their rankings may feel like they're being penalized, but that doesn't mean they are. You might as well say that a thief forced to return the goods he stole is being penalized for the value of those goods. While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.
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While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.
Excellent. We should call SEO what it is, stealing rankings.
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A big problem in my humble opinion is how google categorize things by the mba's in google's ad sales - motorbikes in x, is that only one customer for x location for google? The rare baseball/sports cards example seems also to assume that people are trying to search for specific cards for shopping sites. We are not retail, and our thing is not specific to one location.
Another is that term 'something' has a quality end and an junk end. We get envelopes with codes from google that go straight to the recycle
In google's interest (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of the SEO sites have very low actual value in them. They are avoided by any humans with 10% of a brain.
This dilutes Google's actual value as a search engine.
If they change how sites are rated to raise usable content-rich sites, then people are more likely to view the site and maybe actually click on an ad and maybe buy something.
SEO is bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
I have always hated SEO with a deep passion.
I despise the SEO marketing idiots who glamorise themselves with "arcane knowledge". They end up using basic tools that any illiterate monkey could. Knowledge that could be written out on a 2 pages, in a big font.
They act like Chiropractors, alternative medicine quacks and ponzi fraudsters. Wizard of Oz stuff, "Ignore the man behind the curtain". They all get caught out, simply because what they espouse is rubbish.
The sooner Google allows the entire internet population to have a "This Is SEO Bullshit" button, the better.
I use Google's very own... (Score:2)
...SEO optimization guide [google.com] on my websites. Will I now be penalized for doing so?
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Assess the content quality I say (Score:2)
Doing that is rather tricky at best as natural language is difficult to interpret by non-humans. Finding out if an article is well written is even tougher. Finding indirect hints -e.g. style, vocabulary,
Old SEO joke (Score:5, Funny)
Moving the ads to Google properties (Score:3)
This may be about moving ads to Google properties. With AdSense ads, Google has to share revenue. With ads on Google's own pages, they don't. Google is putting more ads on their own search result pages now, and adding their "social" (i.e. brand related) results at the right. Look up "cars" and you now get "People and Pages on Google+ related to cars", which are Ford, Nissan (with logos) and "cars.com".
Google has been trying to drive traffic to their own properties for a while, and the pressure is increasing. Top results for popular searches are increasingly Google's own content, or something they scraped from somewhere else. (You can stop Google from scraping your site. The price is total disappearance from Google searches. News Corp. did that for some of their newspapers. Few others dare.) "Videos" as a search option has been replaced by "YouTube". And, of course, there's "Google+"
Anything Matt Cutts says about "cracking down on SEO" has to be viewed with skepticism. He's Google's promoter to the SEO community. He speaks at the big SEO conferences. His position is "SEO is not spam. [zdnet.com]
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It is important to understand though that what Google means by SEO is things like having an XML Sitemap, ensuring each page has a unique title that reflects the content of the page, providing alt text, using descriptive anchor text (i.e. not "click here"), and providing friendly urls. Those things are easy, and most of them also inherently improve the quality of the site for humans too.
What all too many people understand by SEO is things like getting more pages to link to your site, making sure every imagin
Stop trying to tell us what you think we want (Score:3)
About two months ago I was searching for something, and I remember being annoyed enough with the results that google was posting to go try searching on Bing *shudder*
The problem was, despite using quotes, google was not searching the exact term I had entered. It was two months ago so I don't remember the exact term, but the problem was of the nature where it was modifying the end of the word. In that case it was making a significant enough change that I wasn't remotely finding what I wanted, despite the quotes.
I think in the near future google is going to start to find out they're not immortal. They've really been going downhill..
Another big annoyance is a removal of the timeline from the news archive searches. I used to find that extremely useful. You could easily search for a term, then narrow down the date visually by clicking the year, then the month.
Now you've just got raw results that you can only sort ascending or descending, but you've got no idea where clumps of stories may occur or anything like that.
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I very much appreciate the whole idea of non-personalised results, the lack of bubbling, etc but in the case of DDG it's only really convenient if y
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About two months ago I was searching for something, and I remember being annoyed enough with the results that google was posting to go try searching on Bing *shudder*
The problem was, despite using quotes, google was not searching the exact term I had entered. It was two months ago so I don't remember the exact term, but the problem was of the nature where it was modifying the end of the word. In that case it was making a significant enough change that I wasn't remotely finding what I wanted, despite the quotes.
A few months ago, Google decided to ignore quotation marks. Ick. The tool you want is Verbatim Search, but to reach it you have to do a search, click on "More search tools", then click on "Verbatim".
Let's start with TekGoblin (Score:5, Informative)
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Don't worry. eHow will find away around this to boost it's page rank.
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I read your first two links and they had exactly zero to do with paying google for search relevance.
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