While I understand that Google is trying to accommodate customer desires with their new algorithm change, their method already seems pretty darn flawed. I can’t find anything! And I used to be the Queen of Google; just ask my old debate partners. We always had every evidence card we needed because of dear old Google. Now, I think they’re trying to dig themselves an early grave and push consumers away toward Bing, since their change has resulted in big issues.
No matter what I’m searching for—from restaurant menus to t-shirt stores—my results are completely irrelevant. I looked up the Taco Bell webpage for my aunt yesterday and it was almost all the way down the page, past a bunch of stupid news stories rather than the company’s own page itself! I’m a researcher, and now one of my best sources is now my worst.
The biggest laughable search, though, happened just today, when I was searching analytic pages to find the number of page views for some of my blogs. Do you know where Google took me when I searched for this information? The Sonic Drive-In website! What the hell?
Google, you’ve got to go back to the way it was. You know, I think that with the way you’ve messed around with people in the past, this may just be your way of screwing with our heads. “Here, we gave you what you want,” you’re probably sniggering as we all search through the chaos, “So why are you complaining?”
The thing is, you can’t give people “unique, meaningful content” with an algorithm. Do you know why? Because it’s subjective. What I need is different from what my mother needs and that’s different from what the girl at the gas station down the street needs. We might all be looking up, say, watermelon drinks, but I can guarantee you I’m thinking kiddie punch while my mom’s thinking of something intended for adults only.
The point is that no matter how people complain, we should be left to our own devices when searching for content that’s relevant and meaningful for us. That’s why you have all of those nifty tools, like photo, news, or shopping search results (which all also suck now too, by the way; I had a hell of a time finding my husband a Rocky t-shirt today that I know I easily found a month ago). That’s why we can put things in quotation marks. Instead of changing your algorithm so it royally sucks this bad, Google, you should change the thing back and install a how-to-search guide for people who complain about finding too much of the same content, since they obviously don’t know what they’re doing.
Bing is looking better every day.
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