Do you think Google is destroying search?

[loopyal]

I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse.

I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications.

What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query.

What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed.

In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all.

I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying)

What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed.

One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them.

I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page.

That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document.

Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results.

I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing?

What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too?

I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using  site:mysite.com in the search box.

[kellymandingo]

I do tend to agree the quality In Google has gone downhill, I blogged about this In March after the latest Panda, there have been so many updates it looks like Google has lost its core reason for being the best search engine out there

I predicted that profits from Google would rise from those last updates as you have genuine businesses that were doing ok on Google demoted to the nether regions to be replaced by garbage sites, non relevant sites or massive brands like Amazon

These business now have to buy their traffic or go under, the same will happen to these garbage sites that have been promoted to the first page their revenue will rise whilst they are there, they will employ more staff to help cope, Google will fix whats currently broken and then cycle continues

Just search for SEO UK , have a look at the backlinks , total manipulation yet been promoted to top spot, the company's earnings have been 10 fold since it's promotion