Monday, August 8, 2011

Is Google going bad or are we spoiling it?

For me, Google is the god. He knows everything. But lately, I have a feeling that Google is not the same God that used to exist 5 or 6 years back. The pure God that existed in those days is spoiled by money minded human beings I assume.

By the term "those days" , I meant those days where SEO was considered bad grammar. Times have changed and today, even the village grocery man is thinking of SEO. well, it is basically about getting your site displayed in search results. In another word, it is like attracting customers to your shop.

If you are a shop owner, you can do many things to get customers to your shop. If you are a clothes shop, new designs, cheap prices and lot of crowd in the shop can attract more people into the shop(cz if the shop is crowded, people think that it got good stuff). It is the same for web sites. If there are more hits to the site, site will appear on top of search results. If many have recommended that site publicly on web, Google has no second thoughts to recommend it to us.

This is totally ok if the traffic was driven to a site naturally. But I feel it is not. These days, there are many internet job sites where you are paid to do a Google search, visit a particular site and press plus one or like it on Facebook. As this kind of hits come from all around the planet, I assume that Google takes them for natural hits. The result: site shows up in the search, people visit it, but there is nothing useful in the site. We are victimized, we search and they earn from their ads.

The other reason for Google to go bad is using the social search or recommending stuff that were previously shared by our friends. Thinking negatively, there is a privacy issue and some really do not like to see what their friends have liked or plus oned in search results. If you are such a person, you better go here and disconnect all the other accounts attached to Google. And also, sign out before doing a search. It is lame, but works :P Personalizing our search results is another issue. recently, I was looking for a way to change my blog template, I searched for that and Google gave me an article from Mashable to where I visit often. The article was related a little to what I was searching for. But I think Google gave me that as the first result because I spend lot of time there each day. In another point of view, it is nice to get search results from the sites that you visit often. Reason :if you are visiting the site often, it means that you trust the site and the information presented there.

How ever, there are solutions if you do not like this kind of troubles in search engines. Go use duck duck go :)

That said, the next in the list is content duplication. I get a problem, I post it somewhere in a forum. Another person gets the same problem, he posts the problem in his forum. The hundredth person search to find out an answer for the same question and he end up looking at 99 forum posts but no clear answer. Personally, I think, if this habit stops, internet would be a better place for all. Internet is made of links and they are share-able, so why copy and paste the same content over and over again. 

For this argument, some one might say that we only tend to post our problems in the help groups or forums where we actively take part in the discussions. Well, it is true, we can post our problems in the community that we like. But before, doing that, it is better to do a search to see whether you are the only person having this particular problem. If so, it is ok to post the problem in a place where you like. if not, we will be using the valuable time of people who help us in the forums. The bottom line is, it is no point for two people to spend time solving the same problem.


Web geeks play their part in this by web page optimization. If the optimization happens in a good way, it is good. But if the bloggers write about "dogs" and tag the post in the "cat" category, it is bad and it makes Google go crazy.


Do not blame me for using Google as the base for the post. I took it because I'm in love with that cute search engine with lot of white and empty space. I have seen how it grows and how people use the very growth of the Search Engine to make their ends meet. It is alright to do that. But I think we all would love to see ourselves abiding by cyber ethics.


PS: Uni apparently is functioning from today. Until the exams finish, you might not have the trouble of reading my crazy thoughts :)  Till we meet, have a fun time buddies!

5 comments:

  1. Definitely google is a god with some bad habits :) but I love it 

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  2. hehe I love it too, it runs in my blood now :D

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  3. I like to add something to this , in some online job sites (as I can remember the famous one for these kind of things is a one called  Microworkers or sth like that, I don't remember the exact name ) offer money for forum posting also. In some Windows forums and some other technical forums they pay for writing to the forum. After that those forums will come in a Google search and the content of the forums which are about technical stuff is useless because of this. Most the time the sites which are paid for online working is behind this scene, some how they manage to include their link to be seen in Google search and the useless stuff pop ups in a search. Most the time some forum helps are useless because of this, paid writers write clueless things and they will make it appear in Google search.Yep the other things are personalized search and repeating same thing, Yahoo has come up with a solution for that with choosing best answer, but this also doesn't work all the time.For me yahoo answers are working than the forum stuff on a Google search.  In near future  Google will have to consider about those things as they can't keep providing the user with useless stuff as they maintain the QOS. I love Google, even it becomes sth dull stuff I won't give up with  it as it is the most simple thing with accurate results ..

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  4. I think it's nature for google to change their aspects. But it'll soon gonna be an issue since they are in a process of gathering all their products in to a single base. So going everywhere while logged in will be a problem.

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  5. in my point of view, google is good for me. usually i am saying googling instead of searching in the net !!!!! :)

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