Is Google sliding downhill?

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the tech blogs about Google:

Their forays into social have been criticized, The quality of Android over iOS is questioned, the future of the Chrome OS is uncertain, their Google TV platform seems crippled by old-world media.. Perhaps most disturbing, they’re being called the new Microsoft <gasp>.

I am a stockholder, a fan of many of their services like Google Voice, Gmail, and an owner of an Android phone so in many ways I think Google is a great company.

But where I am concerned personally, and the criticism that I’ve seen that I think is most alarming is in their search results.

Search is still the core of Google’s business (well, to be fair, advertising is the core of their business.. search is the most used interface that exposes customers to their ads) and I’ve seen some alarming changes to the quality of the search results that Google provides.

Some of the criticism is around Google surfacing their own content and services higher on search results pages.  This does not bother me as often that content is valuable.  Other criticism, that does resonate with me, is about the useless content-farm sites that fill the Google results.

I experienced this heavily just recently while working on my car stereo install.  Throughout the process: of selecting a stereo, determining the compatibility with my phone and researching installation issues I was plagued with horrible, useless search results.  What appeared at first to be a highly relevant result would end up being (upon clicking through to the site) a useless page with scraped content that was buried somewhere on the page with no relevance.

This has happened to me on several occasions lately and seems relatively new to Google.

After a while, bad results become easy to spot: many of them come from overly generic domains and many times the same preview content is displayed for multiple results.

These highest-ranked search results render the entire search useless.  Navigating through page after page of these useless content sites make it impossible to find the quality, relevant results.

Whether Google will be able to break into social, whether they are able to compete with Apple, whether they are able to fend off Microsoft are all good questions.  If they can’t maintain their search product it’s hard to imagine them succeeding.

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