Wife has given up on Google

My wife is taking the kids out this weekend (I have to work) Going to Surrey to see her relatives. For those of you outside the UK this is the last Bank Holiday of Summer here and a reasonably big deal.
Anyway - wanted to see what there was in Surrey.
Opened her Ipad, went to google, tried a few search terms "entertainment in Surrey" and "kids activities in Surrey" etc.

The results were F&cking AWFUL

She isn't logged into webmaster or anything of the sort (her Ipad, she wouldn't know webmaster tools from a hole in the ground)
Top 31 results were from the same site "dayoutwiththekids dot co dot uk" Only ONE of these results had anything to do with Surrey. It included contact pages, maps of other parts of the country, events hundreds of miles away, "meet the staff" pages and all sorts of complete shit that no-one in their right mind would even remotely consider as being a decent set of results for the search term entered
Next 14 were from a single other site by the way "daysoutguide dot co dot uk" next 40+ were tripadvisor - again 95% of them had no relavency WHAT SO EVER to the search term entered

She said "Is there any way I can see more options here"
I said "Yes - try Yahoo or Bing"

We chatted for a while. I changed her default search engine and home page to Yahoo. Went into the kitchen - 5 minutes later while making a coffee I got the call from the living room

"Oh - these are much better - thanks"

Like the vast majority of people she has ZERO emotional attachment to Google (who the hell would?), and changing the default search engine in Safari browser took 20 seconds.

Wonder how often this is being repeated with googles clusterfuck results?

Scritty

Wife has given up on Google

Sounds like your wife is a very intelligent girl

steelballs said:

Wife has given up on Google

Sounds like your wife is a very intelligent girl

Click to expand...

Yeah - thing is it's from a purely "user" point of view.
She has little or no idea about SEO etc, it's just giving her a very poor user experience - it costs nothing to leave and like most people she really couldn't care-a-less where her search results come from as long as they are consistent, on topic and offer choice. Googles don't any more - so she's quit. Simple as that really.

Not like facebook where she has friends and converstations. Google is just a tool - one of several that do the same job and that she has invested zero emotionally or financially in. It's as easy to quit Google as brush a bug from her sleeve.

I think your wife isnt only one who want to switch from google to yahoo or bing.

More and more people will do that.

Just look at google insights , there is huge increase for search terms like : change default search engine
switch from google.com , change search engine, search engines other than google
You will see some increase in last months . strange, isnt it ?

She changed her heart just like that with no feelings??? mmmmmmmmmmmm - i be very careful matey and try not to piss her off



sorry mate - just a joke enjoy the Bank Holiday weekend...

ferma231 said:

I think your wife isnt only one who want to switch from google to yahoo or bing.

More and more people will do that.

Just look at google insights , there is huge increase for search terms like : change default search engine
switch from google.com , change search engine, search engines other than google
You will see some increase in last months . strange, isnt it ?

Click to expand...

Great catch - didn't think of that - but you are right, some of those search terms have trippled in the last 7 weeks.

I'm staggered that Google are letting this happen. WTF are they doing. I can't abide them personally, but knowingly sabotaging your own search results - your entire reason for existing in the first place. I just don't get it. The results are total jizz at the moment. I try and be objective about it. I ask others, try and look at them from a "user" viewpoint - but they are just total crap.
I can't get my head around why they are doing this - I really can't.

Scritty

Most of us only use Google for rankings....I have used yahoo for local and international searches and has given me great results. Try youtube to search for simple keywords and you will be amazed at the volumes of unrelated debree you will find not forgetting the fact that its owned by Google!

Scritty said:

Great catch - didn't think of that - but you are right, some of those search terms have trippled in the last 7 weeks.

I'm staggered that Google are letting this happen. WTF are they doing. I can't abide them personally, but knowingly sabotaging your own search results - your entire reason for existing in the first place. I just don't get it. The results are total jizz at the moment. I try and be objective about it. I ask others, try and look at them from a "user" viewpoint - but they are just total crap.
I can't get my head around why they are doing this - I really can't.

Scritty

Click to expand...

I think this would be right time to switch search engines

If im right , then around 30% use other search engines (yahoo, bing and ask.com )
That is 30% , so if you have 100k exact search KW , then 70k for google and 30k for other engines, Is that really that bad number ? I dont think so

The thing that gets me is that Google seems to hate affiliate sites. But if Google ranked high quality aff sites for that term then your wife would have been presented with a multitude of events around Surrey.

Google is all about the money these days.

Hi,

Nice post. but I'm only seeing 1 result from "dayoutwiththekids dot co dot uk" for your keywords. But still you should post this on webmaster forum. Matt Cutts should read this.

Bing and DuckDuckGo are much better than google these days

Scritty said:

She said "Is there any way I can see more options here"
I said "Yes - try Yahoo or Bing"

We chatted for a while. I changed her default search engine and home page to Yahoo. Went into the kitchen - 5 minutes later while making a coffee I got the call from the living room

"Oh - these are much better - thanks"

Click to expand...

Yep, I agree that many people will get turned off by the same cr@ppy search results that your wife experienced. But, this has to be balanced with the fact there will be millions of new users who will choose G..ggle by default - through their browsers.

They're paying billions to the browser developers to use them as the default search engines:

And with that kinda' spending power and a 40 billion dollar income from paid ads, G..ggle couldn't give a flying f@ck about user experience.

But yeah, one day they will get their come uppance.

I love seeing threads like this, my own friends are slowly turning like this also with no input from me.

I made a thread about removing google totally from my life -
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blackhat-lounge/474978-help-me-become-googleless-ideas-please.html

Which reminds me, I need to try out this new microsoft outlook.

i think Matt Cutts has some secret agreement with other search engines to destroy google's monopoly in search engine. due to that these kind of stupid results showing and google implementing panda and penguin update. It will destroy its own search engine.

Google sucks, but bing/yahoo is way worse.

Recently, I've heard a lot more people are happier with results from yahoo. Approx the last 3 months.

Marissa Mayer must be having a seriously positive effect on Yahoo since she left Google!

Most of my personal ecommerce transactions are now originating from Bing as they offer more diversified results. Other webmasters should consider doing the same.

Scritty, if you can grab a few screenshots in post in Google's webmaster forum as gagandeep4687 noted, that would be awesome. A little public humiliation is always a good way to give Matt Cutts and other Google engineers a reality check.

Yahoo or Bing sucks, too, (which is why few ppl use these) so it's just a matter of which one sucks the least.

I have noticed this too. The results sometimes suck so bad i go over to ask, which is actually surprisingly good.

my theory is that they are showing crap results to people who aren't using personalized search or google plus. they are basically saying "if we can't datamine your personal life then fuck you get out"

they are going down a very bad road

gorang said:

Google is all about the money these days.

Click to expand...

True that. They finally realized the economy going downhill.