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Poor Quality of Search Results

The results returned by search engines have improved significantly over prior engines BUT are still abysmal in so many cases. Disagree? Here are a few simple queries you can make to see the poor quality of current search results:

Query: History of Search Engines​

Query: History of Search Engines

Results: Notice the number of results that are outdated, poorly presented, have duplicate content, or are covering SEO rather than search engines properly.

Query: "Best {Product/Service}"​

Query: Best {Product/Service}

  • Choose whatever product or service you like, e.g. a refrigerator, laptop, bed, headphones, etc.

Results:

  • Most reviews come from "big entity" sites - the indie/personal web is missing.
  • It is easy to end up reading the same/similar review on multiple sites before finding unique/helpful content.
  • Some sites are no-name brands that may have questionable practices (e.g., not actually testing products that are reviewed, reviews that drive the viewer to the highest commission generating product).
  • Oftentimes the length of the articles and the details shared are of interest to search engines (e.g. rank well) but unnecessarily verbose for humans.

Query: "CNN" or "Fox News" or "{Organization Name}"​

Query: CNN or Fox News or {Organization Name}

Results:

  • Often dominated by the organization itself (not entirely unreasonably).
  • Many organizations (e.g. news) have duplicate content from sites syndicating their content. Do we really want to see the same story from CNN, APNews, and MSNBC?
  • One can use query operators to refine the results (but how many people do you know who use them or are even aware that they exist?).
  • Even if one uses query operators the number of sites that need to be excluded can become quite lengthy and must be recreated for each query.

Query: {Medical Topic}​

Query: {Any Medical Topic}

  • For example, try diabetes, depression, cancer, or cold sore

Results: Medical topics, oftentimes of critical importance to the searcher, return notoriously poor results. These results suffer from information that is:

  • Incorrect - Oftentimes sincere, this information is untested and can be dangerous.
  • Incomplete - Does not provide enough information for an individual to take informed action.
  • Redundant - A number of larger medical sites provide primarily redundant information regarding the cause, diagnosis, treatment, prospects, etc.
  • Commercial Information - Treatments of questionable value are marketed to individuals at high costs.

Conclusion​

We could go on ad nauseum with examples of poor quality search results but we don't want to bore you.

For Further Consideration​