Has Google sold out?

[Taz]

I find Google more and more disappointing when trying to get useful sites returned from a search.

Quite often i'll want to see reviews of a product before I decide to purchase it and i'll type in something like '<product> review'. The first few pages will be around 90% full of shopping portals that are nothing to do with a review of the product, being mostly price comparison sites.

Whilst these are sometimes useful when a decision to purchase a product has been made, I do feel that Google is allowing these sorts of sites to 'spam' the search results.

[5lab]

how can they block them? whatever they filter, the more those sites will change. its the same for any search engine

[Ben_]

theres an extension for firefox called stumbleupon that has a decent search feature as all the sites are suggested by people. ive found some really good stuff that way. what are u looking for exacttly?

[Steve B]

i find that alot too, i just keep a list inside my head of all the review websites that i can find, so i can just go back to them from memory to see if theres any new reviews. one of thems bound to have reviewed it if its a new product, and you dont have to sit faffing about with google searches.

[5lab]

the other trick is to put unusual, but relevant words into your search. so - if you're looking to buy a cd player, as well as typing 'cd player buy uk' you might put 'cd player buy uk aux phono', as most decks will ahve that in the description..

[Lee H]

The thing is it's not google. It's more a case of the website designers putting metacodes and tags in there to get the search results higher.

have you tried using the advanced search features like +nvidia +7950 +review or even "7950 review" as using these symbols would assist you in filtering out all the shops

[Taz]

theres an extension for firefox called stumbleupon that has a decent search feature as all the sites are suggested by people. ive found some really good stuff that way. what are u looking for exacttly?

In this specific case I was looking for a review of a microphone, so I entered 'Sony ECM-719 review' as my search criteria and up popped a load os shopping portals! As I mentioned before, these are useful in their own right but I specifically wanted to find technical reviews.

I guess these sites are falsely adding the word 'review' to their meta-tags so that Google's spiders index them as review sites. That's the real issue i'm highlighting.

[pak000]

it is a result of the success of google. They are trying to combat it, but it will always be a problem. There use to be a problem months ago with blogs and how they link, but they have fixed that well. Unfortunately websites will always compete to come at the top of the list through what ever means necessary.

I do remember that a couple of well known brands, i think bmw was one, were completely removed from google for a while because they were found to be cheating the rankings. Google need to do more like this

[Funkstar]

something else that hinders you, is that more and more shopping sites let you add customer reviews of thier products (amazon for example) so even if they don't hide 'review' in the meta data, it is on their page and there are reviews of the product too (ok, they aren't very good reviews, but still)

[Steve B]

i left a crap review on a tin-foil case on ebuyer, gave it one star only to look at it a week later and my review was deleted. Methinks they're deleting the crap reviews to make the product sell more!

deceptive, but it gives the impression that its a 5-star component, which it clearly is not.
i'd say always go with online-review sites like hexus and custompc etc cos they could just be making up any old pap.

[Funkstar]

completely agree

[Taz]

I agree with the last few comments. Why would a shop keep a negative review of a product that it's trying to sell? Having said that, Amazon are pretty good at balanced reviews.

[Clunk]

yep, agreed, sifting through pages of portals that just link to other portals is a bit annoying, especially when the end portal doesnt even have what you are looking for in the first place.

last night and this morning, i was trying to find some info about a psu and there was shedloads of crap obscuring the real info.

ill try that stumbleupon, someone else mentioned that it was good, cheers!

[muddyfox470]

or just put

-buy

in the search and then any website that has 'buy 7950' will be excluded as it will exclude pages taht has the word buy in it, i do that sometimes. google has loads of neat features to help with your search

ian

[chicken]

One of the things I do in my job is to try and get our google ranking higher for relevant searches. It takes a bit of getting to grips with but once you get to learn it you get a feel of how to lay out your site to appear higher, and what to avoid that might hurt your rank.

Trouble is a lot of people use this to push spammy pages up the rankings, so those who don't bother to optimise real content get pushed down the list.

Google are trying to combat this all the time, so it's an on-going job between them and web designers to get the right content to the top, but there will always be spammers and people who will sell their services to them. It's not a case of Google getting worse, but the spammers getting smarter. The only way to improve the situation really is like 5Lab and Lee say, make your search-strings more accurate by using unusual terms and advanced features.

[Lead_Head]

or just put

-buy

in the search and then any website that has 'buy 7950' will be excluded as it will exclude pages taht has the word buy in it, i do that sometimes. google has loads of neat features to help with your search

ian

Top tip that is, I was going to put it but if you want to omit certain words put a minus sign '-' infront of that particular word it won't bring it back in the search criteria.

This also works on eBay too