Google SearchWiki:OK now I slept on it, and woke up thinking about it (as any good SEO would). This is something that Google is rolling up into Universal Search…
What is Google thinking? Over the last several years Google has taken the award winning formula of a plain simple webpage with clear understandable quality results, and proceeded to make these the exact opposite. A query on Google now is rapidly becoming a labyrinth of conflicting information. This began when they started to put pay per click ads in their results (this of course we understand as they needed to make money) and with this they clearly displayed what results were naturally earned and which results were PAID.
Lately Google has been changing everything. In the past few months, they have started displaying news results, Video Results, Book Results and Blog post results. This has really started to clutter things up, a person who searches “medical insurance” is now offered medical insurance news, which although potentially helpful, is not what I searched for. If this is what I wanted to see then I would click on the news search or I would search for medical insurance news. Then I am now blessed with a video on medical insurance, hmmm, well not sure but if I wanted to watch the health channel, I would turn my TV on. Then as we proceed to the bottom of the page we are now offered the opportunity to read a blog post or buy a book? I guess Google assumes now that when I selected my search query, I did not really know what I wanted? Well Google I knew what I wanted, and you do not!
Now most search queries on Google offer us the opportunity to see 50% of what we are actually looking for, and 50% of what Google has decided that we need to see.
Google SearchWiki is now added an entire new level to the clutter and confusion offered to the average internet user. I am not sure if Google does market surveys and user studies, but I am willing to bet that 80% of users, have no interest in this new tool, and I bet that 75% of user have no clue what to do with this tool and will never even use it.
This is no longer the simple clear quality search results that made Google dominate search, and this leads me to my theory that this will be the downfall of Google in the long run.
Tags: google search results, google seo, google universal search, seo