United States Edition
Google search results now view Dogpile as most relevant for 'search engine' -CC
Dogpile who?
For years, Google has dominated the search market and until recently, held the position of top dog in most of the world including their home market in the United States. But with the arrival of Microsoft's Bing we've seen a change in browsing habits on the Internet.
The rise of Bing seems to have hit a sore spot with the search giant and has recently caused them to make some changes to their algorithm which has been relatively stable for the past decade. In an apparent panic down at their headquarters in California, Google recently overhauled their search index in a series of tweaks known as 'Panda Update'.
Google USA search results performed in the United States, 03 June 2011
Now even Google is having trouble ranking for their main 'search engine' business and fails to rank in the top 10 results putting Dogpile as #1 in the United States and Wikipedia as the top spot in Canadian search results as a 'search engine'.
Google Canada search results performed in Canada, 03 June 2011
The recent update has had the webmaster community in an uproar for the past 3 months as Google constantly attempts to “improve” their index, yet for such a strong keyword that has been dominated by Google for the past decade, we're wondering who at Google actually came up with the idea that a giant like Google was no longer relevant as a search engine.
It seems that in an attempt to rid search results of low-quality content sites like eHow, owned by DemandMedia, Inc. or spam from large corporations like J.C. Penny had an over-reaching effect of penalizing large sites like Google themselves.
There has been little official word back from Google about the direction their search results have taken, but what is official is that this article would not be regarded as high quality because it “doesn't give both sides of the story”. Well, we are showing what we can of Google's official word, but the opinion presented here certainly isn't that of Google.
According to a blog post at Google, only articles publishing both sides of 'the story' are considered high quality.
But wait a moment, how can a computer program possibly know whether two human opinions are being presented in anything? Can a computer algorithm really know what an author is thinking or whether he/she is giving us both sides of the story? I digress.
This isn't the first instance where we've seen strange quirks in their results over the place 3 months. For instance, when Yahoo! shut down their Alltheweb property, the Alltheweb.com URL was redirected to a Yahoo! Search page and in Google Canada results, the algorithm is still having trouble ranking the real Yahoo! search and instead places AltaVista Canada in the top 5, a site with less much weight ( PageRank 6 ) than the original ( PageRank 8 ).
PageRank is a mathematical formula of how popular a web page is based on how many other pages on the web link back to it. This formula is the basis for the original rise of Google and was named after and created by Google co-founder Larry Page.
Though some argue that the word “search engine” is irrelevant today as everybody knows Google, the same can't be said for my parents' generation who still use the word search engine or the over 1/2 billion pages Google itself found mentioning Google search as a search engine.
Google it or Bing it? That's the question 30% of those in the U.S. have somewhat answered by choosing the latter and using Bing-powered search results as their “go to” for search results with market research firm comScore last month putting Bing at just over 30% market share. Definite numbers are hard to come by for Canada, but Hitwise put Canada around the same level for search engine usage as our neighbours to the South. It also helps Bing that Canada's largest Internet provider Sympatico (or now Bell) partners with Bing for search or that Facebook's web search is powered by Bing.
So what is exactly relevant to show for search results based on what you type in? Google believes it can show you results based on your past browsing experience. User experience data is collected each time you visit a web page from search results and Google tries to calculate and then determine your interests. So if you're logged in to any Google service (such as Gmail or YouTube), data is collected and then shared among Google properties meaning you might see a completely different set of search results based on your past browsing habits. The only way around this is to remain logged out of Google services and to delete all browser cookies and remain cookie-less.
Even then, Google has at least 16 'signals' to determine who you are and what your interests may be. Furthermore, with the roll-out of a new '+1' button, even more data may be collected based on who you know and who you're connected to socially.
So is Google right in finding the word 'search engine' as an irrelevant word to refer to itself as? Bing likes to call itself a 'decision engine', yet they still manage to outrank Google on their own turf for the most used term to describe an Internet site which spiders and indexes the web.
Are there any alternatives to Google Search? Well, yes and no. You would have to dig in to Google search results for “search engine” and the top result (Dogpile) today is not actually a search engine but more of a search engine results aggregator known as a meta search engine which collects results from other, real search engines. Yandex and Blekko are both potential up and comers but both lack the experience and depth of Google or even Bing. What's creepier in terms of privacy is that Facebook is reportedly thinking about taking the dive in to the search business. Decide for yourself.
