I did a search on Google yesterday off my cell phone and got back a handful of weeks, and in some cases months old results. Nothing surprising there. So I fired up my web browser – did the same search and got back a dozen fairly good results. Then I did the same thing with Live Search on both my cell and my browser.
Believe it or not – I find myself using live search more and more. Google, the old standby for so many things, has to me become a very commercialized and highly productized set of listings that don’t show me what I want when I want them. Ironically, Live (which I fully think is going to do the same thing eventually for reasons I’ll explain later) seems to be better for not giving me “canned” results.
Anyone remember the “old” internet? Back in the days when Google was that scrappy up and coming search engine that could find you anything you wanted? Back when you’d type in “Madonna and Child” and not get listings for the last 3 bad albums or porn sites and instead you’d get a link to a useful story? Back when instead of getting some Wikipedia entry that may or may not be accurate you’d get links to papers submitted and reviewed at Universities and works out there that actually had some merit? Yeah, me too.
What we get now is something that’s been shoved through Google’s “special sauce” which gave us the decent search results. This is good but the problem is that what the Goog’s been cooking up is only as good as it’s ingredients. The ingredients are being tainted like bad chili by SEO specialists. These are people that know how to get a page ranked higher – specifically on Google. Part two of this is also that once the chili is “cooked” it is also vetted by Google’s multi-billion dollar a year advertising program. So that whatever we search for is sorted in preference based on whatever advertiser has had the SEO juice to flood Googles special sauce with whatever spices are needed to make their results come higher in the list, and again by the usual “paid results get higher rankings” thing.
Don’t get me wrong – I have no issue with Google trying to make money. I have no issue with anyone trying to make money. Making money is a good thing. But you can’t make money if you’re not providing a service which people will use. Currently many people are moving away from Goog to Live and other search competitors. This is due in large part because they aren’t getting what they need from Google.
What’s the Goog doing to try to fix this problem? A lot. They’ve got people working on the Special Sauce every day to remove these SEO artificially injected ingredients. But the fact is once you go commercial you can’t go home again. Just as Microsoft’s #1 real security problem is they own 95% of the desktop market – who wants to code exploits for only 5% of the market or less? Googles search woes are owed to the fact that they’re the big dog of search. Google will be faced with these cooking marauders as long as their the top dog in search. Each time they “fix” the problem – someone will change the ingredients on it again and again.
Live being down on the list isn’t faced with this problem quite so much. They also have a different approach to the way to they deal with the problem. They have the advantage of seeing where Google’s method isn’t working so they don’t have to rework an existing model. They have created completely different models of search technology that take into account SEO modifiers that outsiders use to adjust things. It’s by no means perfect, but of late I’ve found it’s as good or better than the Goog.
Time will tell if this pays off for them, but for now, I and many others are taking advantage of their approaches to get us the information we need without the bad after taste of excessively adjusted SEO results.
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