Back in September Google released it’s new Hummingbird algorithm, apparently affecting 90% of search queries, as it strives for greater accuracy and more relevant results. Aimed at ‘conversational searches’, like what is the best cake? rather than simple terms such as best cake. (when is the last time you made a search request like that?)
Then on the 4th October they released Penguin 2.1, aimed at reducing the quality of spammy backlinks, I assume the theory is that better sites have better backlinks, (as they have been around longer?) and newer sites, (trying to use spammy backlinks to gain traction?) can’t be as good or as relevant. Fairly naive thinking, though I guess it might help in ‘cleaning up the web’?
Quality Of Results
If Google’s main aim is to provide better quality results. Then lets look in an honest search query that I’ve just made! nginx sip proxy! At work we need to find out if we can proxy SIP through Nginx using web sockets, so this kind of query is the kind of thing I’d use to start my information search!
Google Results
The first result from Google, is from the Nginx documentation, but that page doesn’t have the word SIP on it anywhere, so how can it be useful to me? Sure, it’s very authoritative (although actually out of date) about Nginx and HTTP proxies, but it’s the least helpful result ever.
Bing Results
The first result from Bing is more relevant, a topic on the Nginx forums asking about exactly what I’m after.. using Nginx as a SIP proxy. The results after that are also a lot more relevant, other people discussing using Nginx as a SIP proxy!
Google Are Making The Internet Worse
In all likely hood, Google will probably start ranking this page for nginx sip proxy by the end of the day, if they do I will tag everything I learn on to it to make it actually helpful! Google seem to be on a quest to create a really high barrier to entry for new web developers, preferring to return old, out of date information, whilst at the same time dumbing down their search results and losing sight of what made them great in the first place:
- Clean no frills website
- Relevant, meaningful content
- Being a search engine, not a web portal
nginx “sip” proxy
Thanks for pointing that out, although I believe that presents an even better case about how Google is getting worse and assuming their users are stupid.
In their defence, a lot of their users are stupid!
I’m a google user 🙁