I’ve been a big fan of Google for a long time. In fact, I sometimes pride myself on being an “early adopter” of Google, back in the late 90′s. I used to think Alta Vista was the bee’s knees, and it took some pretty compelling stuff to convince me that Google was better…but I was sold – and the rest of the world followed suit over the next few years.
But over the course of the last few months, there have been several instances where I’ve been unable to find what I was looking for on Google. Or, in many cases, that I wasn’t able to find it in the first three or four pages.
On obscure topics, that’s not such a big deal. For instance, searching for something like “open source CRM software review” will return a ton of stuff, but you’re going to have to dig; the most useful results will probably be found on smaller websites that focus on open source software. But if you’re searching for something that you KNOW exists on the web, but whose URL you can’t verify, Google doesn’t seem to do a very good job of returning relevant results in a hurry – and I’m not quite sure why.
Let’s take my company as an example. Searching for the name of my company on Yahoo! will provide you with a direct link to our base website as the number two result; you won’t find it after scrolling through ten pages of Google results. Yet, I know Google’s crawled the site, because I’ve found links to other pages within the site by manipulating the search string. I’d consider this a failure of PageRank – if that’s what’s responsible.
While it’d be easy to just chock this up to bias, I’ve been using Yahoo! steadily for the last several days – and have not noticed a degradation in my results.
I’m considering piecing together a spreadsheet of my searches, and results, by engine. I perform quite a few searches in a given week, so this might be a good experiment. But for the time being, I’m going to continue using Yahoo!.