New Changes to GOOGLE bring unwanted results

[Fsiphskilm]

Well this is just plain unfair.

[madphilb]

The problem is (and I've primarily used Google for years, even though I do most everything else through Yahoo) that far too often sites show up that are rigged to go higher on the list.

This is much like the Spam filters that have started catching real mail from people and marking it as Spam (I get this all the time from friends of mine who definately aren't Spammers). In trying to fix this problem it sounds very much like Google "broke" their engine.

We had a thread about what not to put into a search engine... but along those lines, I was going to send my brother-inlaw a on-line birthday greeting from somewhere. I wanted to find some sort of Anime greeting, and putting "anime birthday greeting" in a search gave me hundreds of Henti sites! Talk about being P.O.ed. (in the end I just tuned up his older video card so it could run a newer game )

There are plenty of other search engines around (Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Lycos just to name a few)... they all suffer from the same problem, and Yahoo hasn't gotten any better in it's old age.

It used to be that I'd start with Yahoo because of the submited pages, but often they are so out of date or have long since been shut down (dead links) because things move around so much.... it becomes a waste. And most searches over there now give you hardly any Directory hits, mostly just Web hits.

The other thing that I've had problems with is all the sites that "sell" stuff. I've done quite a few searches looking for fan or infomational sites on things, and get all the sites that are selling that item (or selling it through somewhere else).

Oh, and on top of it all, there are several sites that will generate hits on places like Google that are just search engines themselves, or generated pages with seared terms.

It all get's quiet fustrating to try to find the real pages when you're looking for something. It's every tom, **** , or harry who's looking to make a quick buck that's hurting things... and people like that woman in the article who's store has dropped off the list with the changes, and those of us who try to find what we're looking for on the net who are to suffer.

PHIL

[Fsiphskilm]

Ahh yes, I agree.

[Mithrandir]

Hmm. Whatever they've done, it hasn't messed up my results. I still show up as number two when searching for "ff8 walkthrough" in google, and number 1 when searching for "complete ff8 walkthrough." Hmm. In fact, all my results are pretty much the same as they always were. Huh.

edit:
Well now, this is interesting... I searched in each of the engines above for "complete walkthrough FF8 PC" and here's the results:

Google: 1st entry.
Lycos: 1st entry.
altavista: none.
excite: 1st entry.
netscape: 1st entry (not a surprise. NS uses google's engine)
msn: 1st & 2nd (but the 1st entry is for white-stone.com which I have never published. That's bizarre!)
digpile: 1st entry
askjeeves: none
webcrawler (yup, they're still around!): 2nd, unless I spell it 'walk-through' then it's 1st. o.O

[Shao Feng-Li]

hmm, i only use goole once in ahile, so i havent noticed. I usaully use Excite anyway