It annoys me more and more the bad results Google is giving these days. Take Caffeine : the www2.sandbox.google.com is dupe content of www.google.com and does not even mention the word caffeine so what you saying Google throw enough links at a website and you can make it rank for anything you want maybe I will start a miserable failure
Do a search for caffeine outside of our tiny industry and caffeine means coffee, in fact I walked around Ripon at lunchtime today and asked people did they know what caffeine was … 100% said coffee. When I asked if they had heard that the new Google search engine update was called “caffeine” they just laughed until I told them to Google it.. I mean Caffiene it .. anyway you get the point, that surely the search results should meet the needs of the masses, not just us web people.
DaveN
20 Comments
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Just picturing you walking around random strangers asking if they know what caffeine is….
I’m actually disappointed that its not slang for some sort of drug mix, the closest UD could get was http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hippie%20speedball&defid=1890543
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Nothing changes. I remember trying to rank for ‘turf’ a few years ago… there was some kind of awful, redundant text-based game called Turf that hung around like a bad smell in the top 3 on the basis of a few .edu backlinks from 1845 when some students were into it or something.
Mind you, I don’t know if that’s worse than the BBC ranking for ‘cruise’ recently on the basis that Usain Bolt ‘cruised to victory.’ Seriously.
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Absolutely agree.
Interestingly thought it only ranks 7th on www2.sandbox.google.com as opposed to 2nd on Google.co.uk. although the webmaster article does beat the US national libray of Medicine into 4th spot.
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Isn’t this just a case of “fresh” links with the anchor text Caffeine? It has always been known that new fresh content with new fresh links will outrank even many older established sites. This is most likely a temporary boost, and 90% of the time will be helpful for the user.
If their are lots of links and buzz around a certain term showing up then they think the intent of the searcher may also be in line with the trend in the links.
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Andre, what you are saying is correct, as far as I know but its a bit rubbish really isn’t it. Perhaps G should run two “Web” tabs, one for real time search but even faster and another that doesn’t have the recency algo in it. I for one would like to see that.
Dave I clicked your link to “caffine” and I got results all about cofee and caffine the stimulant. Do you think they implant Google employees with an RSS reader chip in their brain so they can action comments from top 10 bloggers.
Must do, I’ve thought Matt Cutts might be a robot for a while now actually. LOL KIDDING MATT… you are just too good at your job.
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I agree – Google decaff and caffeinated are both returning rubbish results. Google is starting to remind me of the old MSN Live – messy
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It’s definitely an imperfect system, but I think it still mostly works — select examples to the contrary aside. Things like this mostly make for a good laugh (and a sigh), but Google has worked on fixing such things in past years.
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One month ago I had a search engine optimization project for a company in concrete floors.
Since 2003 they did nothing with their website.Her google position was on page 13 and I told her that afther optimization the site, page 3
should be the maximum. After one weeks they were on page 3.Last week she was visited by a company that sells backlinks for 20 euro a month.
Her website is now on page 1. I think this not the way it should be, if I did not had optimized her site, was her website than also on page 1 ? - 10
Isn’t this just due to anchors with “google caffeine”?
Remember when whitehouse.gov accidentally published the word ‘failure’ and started ranking again for [miserable failure]. Not quite the same, but similar principle.
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Um, I searched for [caffeine] yeterday, looking for the search engine version. The fact I clicked on it will also be making the results more relevant.
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You also have to think that those are topical results too. It’s more fresh content compared to those other pages about caffeine so it’s acceptable for a search engine to think they are what you are looking for. This is exactly why news posts and blog posts with very little links can rank for a keyword because of their fresh nature.
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It’s like http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/ ranking for “click here”.
The truth is until a better way of deciding rankings comes out then backlinks will always have to carry weight.
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Have you tried BING? They give much better results (http://www.bing.com/search?q=Caffeine&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all&qs=n)
Not one result comes back with sandbox Caffeine links. Well done BING.
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Google engineers seem to have code named it caffeine, the final product might remain the original G.
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This begs the question, just how much [link] “buzz” should be enough to even temporarily dethrone an established website.
The suggestion to have two options, “slow” and “real-time” was interesting. Perhaps Google will build that in to their date filters, if they haven’t already.
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[...] 27/08: I just noticed that DaveN covered this as well. Great minds… ] Push my Buttons! submit_url = [...]
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Google seems to change there criteria on a whim,on some of my sites they for no obvious reason take a sudden drop in rank and then without me doing anything return to there previous position !
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Google sometimes behave really funny. I think it is because the ecosystem it has created is Huge and Moreover everyone is trying to play with it. If Google cant handle it, nobody will be able to do it.
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whoever is punting that bing is better is a retard (sorry) but i have made a cool tool to compare the results of google and google caffine http://cartercole.com/googlevsgoogle.html
‘anyway you get the point’ – Yeah, you’re trying to rank for Caffiene