Is Google Getting Aggressive?

While reading up on my tech news tonight, I ran across a story at the Financial Times about the iPhone 4's reception problems and how they might lead to a class action lawsuit. Another day, another class action lawsuit. No big deal. As I scrolled down through the story I caught sight of a rather large ad for Storage Containers:



I wasn't sure why the Financial Times was advertising Storage Containers, but nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary.

And then it hit me. About two weeks ago I had been doing some research via Google for a domain name that was dropping: ShippingContainers.us

I had done a few searches for products and such in that space to see if it was worth a backorder (I ended up just hand registering it) and as any good researcher does, I looked at related keywords and one of those was... you guessed it - Storage Containers.

So apparently, Google, in its infinite wisdom decided to start using it's cookies to pull out my search history and to start showing me ads based on my previous searches rather than content on the page. No problem, right? Except it took a good two weeks before it pulled that particular trick out of the bag from when I had searched on that term and while I have the typical banner blindness that most internet users have developed, I can't recall ever having such blatant use of cookies to feed ads regardless of the page's content.

In yet another coincidence, the Federal Government released new guidance that essentially removes the Federal Ban on Persistent Cookies as well as providing additional guidance for use of sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can see the full details at Federal Computer Weekly. Why are the two related? Because just as the federal government was getting comfortable with putting their foot back in the water of using helpful technologies like persistent cookies, Google may very well be screwing it up in order to make a few more pennies per page (times billions of pages!)

So has anyone else noticed an increase in Google's use of search history/cookie data lately or was this just a fluke? Until tonight, I had always just considered this as technology that was an internet marketer's wet dream, but it seems that it may turn into reality sooner than I thought.

Google is Broken

The reason I switched to Google years ago was it's ability to find exactly what I was looking for no matter what I typed in... with the first result being the exact right site 90+ percent of the time. It was really magical. But progressively, Google's search engine has gotten less and less accurate. I've noticed this over the course of at least a year now. That I'm having to refine my queries more often, having to change my key word searches more and then I'm still left with having to scroll through many pages worth of results to get the one result I'm looking for. This isn't a good sign. The web isn't getting easier to analyze, though people are trying. It's certainly not getting less complex. This problem will only get worse. Here are some of my issues with Google search:

• I've been doing some analysis using Google compared to it's competitor search engines, and Google appears to have taken a dislike to .TV's and largely anything nondotcom. Oh sure, justin.tv, ustream.tv and tnt.tv still show up at the top of the list, but there's a huge barrier to entry for non.com's to get to the top of the list, at least in the US. Google needs to wake up to the realities of life that the extension is less important then the content. It also needs to do a better job of realizing that the extension is a valuable part of people's search keywords. If I search for Virtual Volunteer TV, I want VirtualVolunteer.TV like all the other search engines give me, not volunteertv.com. I can provide numerous examples like this and it's very frustrating as other search engines "get it".


• Google needs to be start differentiating between "authoritative" sites like wikipedia.com, hotels.com, etc. and niche sites that cater to a specific market. Yes, page rank and links should matter, but far too often the first page of results in Google is the who's who of megasites and there's really very little relevance to what I'm searching for. Niche sites though, by their definition, will have fewer links to them, but they are highly relevant.


• Social Media - Google does a horrible job of finding relevant social media. Where are the social network results when I search for Tampa. Don't tell me to go to blogsearch.google.com ... it's fine, but I shouldn't have to go to a walled off search page just for blogs. Honestly, how many facebook and twitter pages have you seen as the top result for your search queries and yet those places are alive with informative discussions and people who are talking about the things you care about.

• Google is dumb - There are very few "smart" results (50 cm to inches) and don't get me started on the crap that is the Google local searches. There are very large advancements needed in the area of smart results. If I do a search for Andrew Douglas, I should see a contact management like interface because obviously I'm looking for a specific person. Google is now showing a "Profiles" feature... but I think that's a stretch. Google shouln't care where the information is stored. It's a search engine for crying out loud. Go find it. Preferably, Google would be smart enough to know that there is an Andrew Douglas in my social network and use that to make better search results too.


• Google's ads are smarter than their results. It's an inevitability that when a company gets paid for one product and not paid for another, they'll spend more time on the thing they are getting paid for. My Google search results have, seemingly very little if any knowledge about where I am on Earth, for example... but the ads know. If I search for "news" while in Tampa, the ads give me links to news in Tampa, but the search listings don't list a Tampa specific site for quite a ways and even then it's mingled with Detroit news... so it's hard to say if that's just coincidence or if Google really does give some weight to your current location.


• Google needs new competition in order to stay healthy. It's a basic law of the free market. Bing likely isn't it either. Nothing I've seen there really changes anything. It's also a basic law of the free market that someone will come along and replace it if it's being inefficient.


• Google needs to get into real time, real fast. Crawling is dying. Polling is going the way of the dinosaur. There are bits moving way too fast for Google to keep up with and that means they will become less and less relevant. Services that can keep up will eventually take over if Google doesn't catch on to real time content. I'm hopeful that with Google Wave, they will finally step up their game, but I'm not sure any longer.

I'm not sure where that leaves us. I don't agree with the arguments lately that we've seen some sort of Peak Domaining. But I am getting more and more frustrated with the results I'm seeing from search engines in general. It's not just Google. The next time you have to refine your search, take a minute and wonder why. The next time the link you really wanted is found on page 5 of the search results, think about how the search engine could have done a better job finding that result for you. You'll quickly see that Google is broken, it's just a matter of time until everyone else realizes it, as well.