Harder to find things on Google these days?

Community
1

As the title say is it just me or is it harder to find things on Google these days?

For instance I have joined a Google+ group and I posted a discussion and want to see all the comments in the discussion which I thought would be straight forward but I end up with a load of irrelevant links where Google seems to have reversed my search and is returning results for something else.

The other day I was looking for a simple php answer that I have seen before and this time every reply on the first couple of pages was about Ajax and I never even mentioned that in my question. I suppose in this case the answer was correct but I did not want to use Ajax I just wanted to use php.

Getting very frustrated and think I will have to start looking for an alternate search engine.

2

Nope, it’s way easier to find things on Google than it ever has been and it’s constantly getting better.

Your first problem sounds like it’s because you’re using Google+. My advice is to stop using Google+ :smiley:

The second one could be fixed by adding -ajax to your search query.

3

I usually do OK with searches, but there have been plenty of times when the results have been much less useful than what I had hoped for.

I don’t know much about G+, so I won’t joke about it :smiley:

I usually don’t need to use Search operators, but I guess at times they are nice to know about.

4

Try to search on Google.com instead of Google + and you can filter your search results by using Google search setting and commands.

5

I stopped using Google 10 years ago and use Yahoo as my primary search engine because I find it produces superior results. Google sucks. I am a heavy search engine user. Google’s results used to be dominated by spam sites really bad. The have gotten better at it and, in fact, became more like Yahoo with less spam in the SERPs.

Another problem I had with Google was you would search for something, find a website, then never be able to find it again. I would later learn that Google routinely drops sites in the search results for no reason. Why? It just so happens that Google is the biggest advertising seller on the internet and if you cannot get traffic from the search engine, you better pay for it or do without. A website either deserves to be ranked or it does not. You cannot have it both ways. Something is wrong, and I think it is intentional to drive advertising sales. When I start a site, it usually ranks good for a while then drops far below irrelevant crap. Then I get an email from Google (as I signed up for Webmaster Tools) trying to get me to buy advertising. :mad:

Try Yahoo (now the same results as [URL=“http://www.bing.com/”]Bing/Microsoft as they no longer create their own results, or run their own advertising, or do much of anything of their own anymore). Also check out [URL=“http://blekko.com/”]Blekko. Blekko has its annoyances (like JS navigation), but its results are not bad, sometimes good.

6

I may have not phrased the post very well Promatics: I was searching on Google for a problem I have with Google+

Thanks for the info cheesedude. I will give Yahoo a go and take a look at Blekko; I have never been impressed with Bing. I did try duckduckgo a couple of years ago and will try that again as well.
It is a shame I can not remember what the php subject I was searching for as I would like to try the phrase on the other search engines.

7

I have noticed that Google is, perhaps unreasonably influenced by back links. Therefore you can get sites floating to the top that have poor content but lots of back links. Sometimes I think the back links are all owned by the same clever webmaster who is skilled at ranking link directories or fluff sites.

One example of bad search results is anything with “povray” in it. As soons as you exhaust results from the official povray website the results are completely irrelevant.
Sent from my XT316 using Tapatalk 2

8

That makes sense. Google’s meta searching is surprisingly pathetic, unless it’s about Android.

I remember when G+ was first launching and it was getting popular, searching for Google+ or G+ actually wouldn’t even bring up G+ in the first 5 results. Trying to type it in the chrome address bar for searching would actually throw errors.

9

Google is, perhaps unreasonably influenced by back links

I know my reply is getting a little off topic here, but I’ve been hearing the recent panda update was an architectural change to downgrade the importance of backlinks over the next year. So, quality of content and how much that content is shared by others will be the dominant factors for better serps as the months go on.

10

Never.Google is my favorite search engine.And it has never disappointed me.

<snip>

11

I think that Google doesn’t know every bit of search queries that different people type,I guess that they also don’t have the whole internet indexed in their databases.But I am sure that they still are the best search engine I ever tried.