google changes

By anders pearson 03 Oct 2002

the blogger crowd mostly seems to be concerned with how searches for their names don’t appear as prominently in the listings anymore. well, i personally couldn’t care where any of my stuff shows up in the search engines. but i have noticed and been concerned with a general decline in the quality of google’s results lately.

it’s hard to explain exactly what the changes are, but it seems that they’re not doing as good of a job of identifying the primary authoritative sites on a given subject anymore. random mailing list postings and stuff on big clearinghouse sites like rpmfind.net now seem to dominate the results.

eg, searching for “<a href=”http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=postgresql+python&btnG=Google+Search”>postgresql python</a>” <em>ought</em> to (and i’m pretty sure <em>did</em> about a month ago), point to the <a href=”http://www.druid.net/pygresql/“>pygresql</a> site since that’s pretty much the standard module for using postgres with python. but now, it’s at #6 in the ranking after some worthless mailing list posts and rpmfind.net stuff.

it used to be that if i ever got an error i couldn’t figure out how to fix with some piece of linux software, all i had to do was copy and paste the error message into google and it would immediately bring up either some FAQ or post explaining how to fix it. that hasn’t been working as well lately.

so i hope that whatever problems google seems to be having are just temporary and they’ll get things working better in the near future. i’ve become pretty dependent on google and i’m always impressed with the features they add so i’d be disappointed if they lose sight of what should be their main focus.

Tags: google