The decline of Google's search engine?

From Nick Jenkins

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I've come to have a falling opinion of Google. It wasn't always this way. I used to think there were God's gift to the Internet, but now I think they're just better than the rest. There is a difference.

Reasons are as follows:

  • Updates are appallingly slow. Speed of their indexing is appalling. If you have a page that you maintain, then look at google's cache, and check the last update time it was updated. For one site I have that last time was January 25, and it's now 27 June, so that's a time taken to update of over 5 months! Anything added in those 5 months is simply invisible to Google.
  • Google AdWords does not allow advertising for "anti/hate sites". On the face of it, that sounds fine. Then you come across a shonky business, and find that Google's team blocks ads explaining what they have done because it is "anti" content, but will still run ads from the business itself. By all means block hate sites, but don't block "anti" sites. Freedom includes (among other things) the right to publicly criticise businesses, and blocking this is definitely "doing evil", in my opinion.
  • Declining search results. More often now results include pages and pages of link farm results.
  • Declining quality of adwords. See this video for an explanation (viewing video requires Macromedia Flash Player).

All of these problems relate to their search engine proper, not to the new services (like gmail, or their Google maps service which was recently expanded to include outside of the United States).

Lately, Google's "link:" search seems totally useless.

To illustrate, see this example, which (at the time of writing) returns exactly one hit, but I know that there's more than one link to that site. For example this has a link that site, and it is clearly in the Google cache, but it doesn't return a hit on the "link:" query. Why not? There are more links (e.g. the DMOZ), which serve to further illustrate the problem. Why don't they work either? So Google's "link:" search currently seems broken to me.

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