Google’s declining relevancy

Google couldn’t even rank its own main domain first for a search of its own unique brand name yesterday.

It made for a short discussion at Search Engine Watch, and Barry Schwartz has a screenshot - though he misses out the fact that Desktop search held positions 1 and 3, simply according to having both a https and http form of the URL.

To some people this who incident is just a humourous anomaly - the internet information giant couldn’t even rank it’s own website properly for its own unique brand name.

And Google can just go into its own system and fix things, so that it can rank fine again. Great.

But, really, what this shows is just how f*cked up Google is.

Let’s face it, if it can’t even rank it’s own main website for its own brandname, then what about all of those other websites that have been losing business because Google has an equally f*cked up attitude to them?

Google’s relevancy has suffered a significant decline this year, which has been widely commented upon in the blogosphere.

And webmaster forums are filled with webmasters complaining that they have problems being recognised for their own website for their own names and brand-related keywords. Talk of Google Sandboxing killing websites is everywhere.

Maybe Google doesn’t see it as a problem - maybe the internet to Google is nothing more than a mathematical problem to be solved. Perhaps the Google engineers have constructed a very real mental ivory tower to work from, where severely impacting internet industries is nothing more than a series of mathematical constructs.

But to people like myself who use the internet from both a commercial and non-commercial aspect, it makes Google look a shambles. The greatest minds in information retrieval have discovered how to make something that ain’t broke, broke.

Google to 2002 was f*cking brilliant. Everyone knew that. Google became a verb in it’s own right.

Yet since then, Google seems to have done little more than try and find new and interesting way to cripple it’s own success by developing a less and less relevant algorithm.

What is really sad is how Google are probably able to justify doing so to themselves - no doubt they will claim that they are “removing spam” from their index. But they’re not - they’re just trying to wipe away one level of sites, to reveal a new level, which also contains spam.

For example, a lot of websites that are sandboxed, rank lower than search scraped results on throwaway domains.

Maybe Google can claim this is a problem that requires yet another automated solution. Well, Maybe it actually doesn’t - maybe what it requires is for Google to make a remarkable change in how it views the internet - the internet isn’t just some collection of network theory and information retrieval problems, but a medium composed of the hopes, fears, dreams, and aspirations of a globally connecting species of humanity.

It might help Google to remember that.