Panda-monium as Google updates key search algorithm Google has updated Panda, the algorithm it uses to weed out what it deems to be low-quality search results. Panda was introduced in early 2011 as part of The Chocolate Factory's never-ending quest to sell more ads ensure search results satisfy searchers' thirst for knowledge. It's been controversial because some web publishers …
> You are Jeremy Clarkson and I claim my five pounds...
Oops, I didn't notice that when I wrote it! I was mentally-blinded by the image of Russell Brand and his tinkie-winkie or whatever he calls it.
I'm very sorry ... *dramatic pause, look to camera* ... for what I did.
Your fiver is in the post.
as if millions of spammers were suddenly suffering ...
Now seriously, this is good for all except for the "business" that depend on appearing first on Google results to generate income. Maybe this will teach yet another generation of internet "entrepeneurs" that any business whose revenue depends on a single source is just waiting to die.
While I don't feel sorry for the quick buck spammers that are going to be deprived of their parasitic money, I also think that honest business impacted by this will suffer. Sad but true.
Somewhere in the not too distant past Google stopped being useful as my search engine for information.
What I now often get is a page full of commercial selling sites, or even aggregated link sites to same, with no relevance to my very specific collection of terms. Going to page 2 or 3 merely repeats the same links. Alternatively there are no hits at all - yet I know such pages of information do exist.
Hear, hear.
There is nothing more annoying than finding pages of junk by people wanting to sell you something when you just want technical information. It is almost as bad as those sites that want to display PDF documents in the browser (even when you don't have a reader plugin) and you want to just download them to read later.
I'm not trying to be cynically skeptical but I've heard this a lot in various comment sections around the web. Can I ask what you are searching for and where from?
I'm a developer and I probably for one reason or another do a hundred or so search engine visits a day, normally looking for documentation, example code, bug lists, problem reports, error messages and stuff like that.
Personally I find Google to be absolutely brilliant at what it does and every other search engine that I've tried has badly disappointed me within the first 10 minutes. I find Googles ads and sponsored links very easy to subconsciously filter out and they aren't in anyway intrusive. Most importantly the results just seem better and more comprehensive.
So can I ask what are your "very specific collection of terms"?
@IW,
Well, for one thing, drivers. Back in the day you could search for a driver with:
VEN_39FD&DEV_2933 xp driver
and it would net some fake results, but have some valid links and a few of those pointing to the .inf file from the driver package. This same link nowadays will net only garbage. And garbage of the worst caliber, such as download managers, and system scanners, and the like.
Sometimes all I get back from a Google search is garbage, and it has gotten worse in the last year or two.
This could be easily solved if Google would allow me to combine multiple search results. So If I put "Policy Server" in one search windows and "Policy Server dolphin rape-cave" in the other, and said that anything found in both is not to be returned. Hell, they could let me store spam search results as a favorite, and always search against it. Problem solved.
I use DDG when I can but it simply hasn't got the quality of google results. Plus - AFAIK - it can't do a lot of stuff that google excels at such as phrase searches (put quotes around it for an exact phrase "rather like this") or word wildstars in phrases (e.g. "A duplicate attribute key has been found when processing: Table: *, Column: *, Value: *. The attribute is *" - mega helpful when MS inevitably lets you down). Google can do this and #a lot# more besides, but most people aren't aware of this.
Google FTW technically. DDG FTW because they're nicer.
Slightly more useful demo of wildcards, google for
"be there or be *"
with quotes, and see what I mean.
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