Let me tell you a little story.I was going to pick up a friend at the Airport in Montreal and he called me to say his flight was going to be delayed. “No problem I said, I’ll check your updated arrival in real time and come and get you when you land!”
So off I went to Google, to look for the official Montreal airport website which has real-time updates on flight departures and arrivals. I tried 10-15 different searches, here are some examples:
Montreal Airport
Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport Montreal
Montreal Airport Flight Arrivals
Etc.
The first 100 results for all my searches did not bring the official site www.admtl.com ! However, I was able to find hundreds of Hotels, Limousine services, Google Map results of businesses around the area, Youtube videos about the airport, airline ticket purchase services, and hey… who would have thought: Wikipedia’s entry about the Airport.
Now you can sit there and tell me that it is the airport’s fault for not having “Montreal Airport” on the title tag, and not optimizing, blah, blah, blah. But the reality is that Google’s job is to crawl, index and present relevant results. They have the responsibility of ordering all of the chaotic content that appears on the internet each day to help users sift through it in an organized manner. That is their service. If they fail to do this, they becomes useless, people will no longer waste their time using Google.
Yahoo! gave me the same horrible results. What to do!!??? Surprisingly Live.com showed the site in the 1st page. Not the 1st result as that is always reserved for Wikipedia, but at least it was listed on the first page.
Why did Live.com get an appropriate result if the word Airport does not appear as text anywhere on the page? I looked at the results snippet for Live.com:
Sounds a lot like a Dmoz entry huh? Well that’s because it is. When there is no Meta Description tag Live.com does what Google used to do: Grab a DMOZ description.
You can hate DMOZ all you want, but it sure helped Live.com rank the appropriate relevant site. Strange how such an old school, primitive and manual method helped Live.com get an appropriate result even though the site contains no mention of “airport” whatsoever.
The reality is this: White hat/Government and Official sites are not always optimized. In fact many companies and organizations don’t even know SEO exists. However, BlackHat Spammers do, and this puts them in a considerable advantage against “white hat, relevant content” websites:
1. Black Hats know what to do to rank. They have tested so many sites, gotten so many sites de-indexed and penalized that they are able to tell just how far they can push Google.
2. Black Hats develop automated methods of creating thousands of websites in a short period of time. These websites are created by hundreds or thousands of different Blackhats, and will all have millions of varying footprints if any at all.
So how do you algorithmically remove these millions of results appearing everyday? How do you do it manually? Even combining the two as Google does, has limitations.
Imagine a librarian trying to organize millions of books by category, author, title, etc. And each day hundreds of trucks come in and dump more books on top of the few which were already organized. I don’t envy Google nor Yahoo! For what they have to accomplish to stay relevant as an industry, but no matter how many Phd’s you hire, massive volume always prevails.
Black Hat Spammers will not be stopped from producing new content anytime soon, and Google does not seem to have figured out a permanent way to remove these sites from their index. It seems that the Google index no longer belongs to Google.
The ‘progress’ Google is making in its algo’s don’t seem to be reflected in the actual SERPs – a shift in paradigms seems to be an inevitable necessity, but my question to you is, does it have to be a shift to a new paradigm, or would a shift to an old one be more effective?
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Posted by Gab Goldenberg said on 08.05.08 @ 7:29 pm :
Great find. Not every day you find an MSN result more relevant than a Google one.
Out of curiosity, what do you think of niche/industry specific algos? Like a “no .edu” algo for the pharma industry? Think that might be effective?
As to your conclusion, I have to disagree that blackhats own Google’s index. Sure they own the pharma drugs n all, but what percentage of searches/the search economy is composed of aff marketing type stuff?
Posted by agustin said on 13.05.08 @ 10:17 am :
Thanks Gab, Yes I think that an industry specific algo would possibly improve the results, however pills and drugs are usually legitimately talked about in university papers. It would be a shame to filter all of that information out. A close eye would have to be kept in it.
As for the blackhats taking over, I agree its not as obvious yet, but I can guarantee you that with adsense, and other “advertising networks” you can monetize any site in any industry through “related” keywords in your text… The famous MFA (made For Adsense) sites is what I’m talking about I have been seeing these “spammy” database made sites showing up more and more, and it is getting easier and easier to keep them in the index with the appropriate techniques. Its just by the sheer number of new Blackhatters everyday, that more and more spam sites are created.
These spammy sites make 2$-25$ a day in clickthough advertising, and are a great way for spammers to inject links in them towards more “grey-hat” style sites once they are indexed by Google. So not only are they easy to create and lucrative, but they can also be used to leverage other sites.
This is not something that is happening overnight, but I am noticing that Google is getting worse and worse.
Posted by Francis Vallieres said on 14.05.08 @ 5:11 pm :
Just noticed this article, Agustin you have to send me the link when you write something here. Always like to read SEO articles. And if you want my opinion on Google vs Live results, sadly (I’m not a Microsoft fanboy) Live is slowly getting better results than Google…
Posted by Ben Margolin said on 16.05.08 @ 5:02 pm :
Did you report this as a bad search result? I just did a search for “montreal airport” and the official link is the first entry. But maybe they’ve already fixed it? There is a link at the bottom of the Google search result pages that allows you to make suggestions.
Posted by Malte Landwehr said on 20.05.08 @ 6:10 am :
You cannot blame this irrelevant SERP from Google on blackhats, because live is even easier to manipulate than Google.
Posted by agustin said on 20.05.08 @ 9:16 am :
@Ben: No I didn’t report it to google. They probably fixed it manually. Who knows maybe they even read my article
@malte: While Live is easier to manipulate than Google, it is still gamed big time. Being the supposed #1 search engine, SERPs are still getting worse due to intelligent Blackhatters. I’m not saying Live is better than Google, all I’m saying is that in this instance Live had better results. And this was due to an old School DMOZ entry scrape.
Posted by Seattle said on 23.05.08 @ 11:49 am :
Great article. I’m having more second thoughts about Google. Plus with this whole Live Search cashback that just came out…. ;]
When I’m going to shop online, I know where I’m going to go!
Posted by Adrian said on 22.07.08 @ 6:20 am :
Personal, I’m stick with Google. I tried Yahoo and I was disappointed. Live.com or MSN I don’t even try it. I heard they are all under blackhats control. So far, this business (SEO) is a full time job and you have to keep up 24 hours a day. If you are going in vacation for 3 months forget about it! The PR it’s easy to get it. The bad news for you: try to improve it, let’s say from 4 to 7! Almost impossible under 6 months. Anyway, nice article. Thanks.
Posted by cekay said on 16.08.08 @ 3:51 pm :
Why don`t you just enter the flight number in goolge search field
http://www.googleguide.com/search_by_number.html
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