One Searcher’s Frustration With Search Engines
A SiteProNews reader wrote an interesting letter to Jim Hedger, one of SPNs more prominent writers. He reiterated something many searchers have been saying over and over again for years. Of course, I think he’s right.
The thing I hate most about search engines? That advanced searches, no matter how constructed, do not filter out the garbage. More is NOT better when it comes to online searches. What the Internet needs is something along the lines of the system libraries use.
The reader was frustrated because he had typed in “pet food recall” and got an article on Google search titled “Google Goes Ctrl - Alt - Delete”. The final paragraph of the article used “pet food recall” to illustrate a larger point about search. Hedger’s reader was frustrated because the article ranked No. 1 for the unrelated search term. I don’t blame him.
It’s happened to all of us. It seems to happen more and more frequently as the search engines try to be all things to all people. Now Google is introducing its Google Universal product and Hedger believes that will solve the problem. I’m not so sure.
The system Hedger’s reader recommends is a filtering system to filter out older items in search results. I’ll have to say that I’ve had that same thought myself many times. I don’t like going online and finding information on a topic that is 10 years old - especially related to Internet marketing, an industry that is constantly changing. Any industry that changes as often and as fast as Internet marketing will have an onslaught of irrelevant information in no time at all. That’s why filtering out old information is a necessity for many search terms. You don’t want to be doing research on a topic and find something that is no longer true. It could kill your research.
I hope Hedger is right. I hope Google Universal fixes this problem. I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, I’m learning to filter my own searches by asking for very specific information rather than broad terms like “pet food recall.”
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