Google search piles on pounds of facts to score fat dollar

Google has tweaked how its results are displayed in its recently overhauled search engine in a move to keep users on its web pages for longer. Exactly a year since the company launched Google Squared, which is the Mountain View Chocolate Factory’s attempt at structured data search, Google has rolled out new features to take …

[Giles Jones]

Caution

Google have to be careful not to be too greedy. Once the quality of the service starts to swing towards making them money and not providing a good user experience then people will look elsewhere.

It happened with Vista, Microsoft lost the home user to add DRM and features for business.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Google the New Wikipedia?

A search for "prime minister of united kingdom" will have Google tell you that it is not David Cameron, nor even the slightly out of date Gordon Brown, but TONY BLAIR. Eeek! What does Google know that we don't - worrying...

[retroneo]

Not new

I'm sure I've had this in my Google for at least a year.

[Neil Barnes]

what major did bill clinton’s daughter study at stanford

Interesting. When I googled that as written, the first hit was Wiki; the second was this article.

[James O'Brien]

Heh

Just for kicks I ended up doing the same and now its Wiki first, your posting on the forum second and the article third :)

[Jelliphiish]

i asked it

which way was up. it got confused. told me about films and other things i'm not wanting to know..

[Forget It]

Get rid of Goggle Everthing - addOn for Firefox

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/161661

this reverses the recent chocolate coating

[Anonymous Coward]

I might appreciate this feature more....

... if they hadn't hit their layout with the ugly stick.

Majority of people I've spoken to hate the side bar layout and squashed results area (what's up with all the whitespace on the right hand side?)

[Gene Cash]

The result quality is going way downhill

I just wish they could ban shit aggregator sites like codeweblog and experts-exchange. They're showing up more and more often.

[Al 4]

Google doesn't provide information

The problem is their search engine has lost its mind. That is the only reason I can come up with when I type in a search request for particular information that I know is on a page, and it doesn't show up till the third page. Quoting phrases didn't improve things either. At Yahoo it showed up in the middle of the page without quotes, second down with quotes. The first was an article about the data I was searching for on the net. I thought it might have been because I used a Google search box at a site but their own search page gave me the same results. I only did the test because of the results I got on the first search for a known page. I made sure the same arguments were used for both sites in the test.