I would use a paid search service with a quality search, no ads, no tracking, and no selling my data to third-parties.
How Google is Killing Organic Search
51–60 of 220 posts
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#52The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you…
I think your hypothesis is quite far off. Can you give an example of an auto insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean a mutual insurance company? Furthermore, when I bought car insurance last month, Geico gave me the most coverage for the least amount of money (after quite a bit of research), so I also don't agree with your assertation that Google is no help in that regard. While…
As someone who sells car insurance leads for a living, this is an interesting discussion.
First, Geicko isn't ranked number 1, affiliates who mask themselves as Geicko are. In high rewards markets like insurance (where 30% of the overall price of insurance goes to affiliates) it's actually about which affiliates convert the best and have the best payout. Those SERPs are dominated by black hat SEO. None of that is organic.
The larger issue (percentage of the page dedicated to SERPs vs ads aside) is that Google's formula worked best in a world where people weren't trying to game it. In the end it breaks down to relevance and links.
Relevance is based on tags and keywords, which everyone can get a perfect score on. So in the end it comes down to links.
Is a link there because someone just loves the site, or because some SEO schmuck built it? There are correlations, but there's really no way of knowing. The key to spam is mimicking a human process closely enough that a computer (or algorithm) can't tell the difference, then making that scale.
Google does manually review the SERPs for the highest grossing terms basically daily to try and find foul play, but those can be beat, too.
So why doesn't Google just manually find and serve up the best pages of content? Because you just described Yahoo.
So it's a very complex game that evolves every day as both parties advance and become more sophisticated, often in response to each other. If you think you can do better you either have to out-engineer Google or find a way to rank sites based on something other than links.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p I understand this, but most of us are looking for an alternative to Google and not a completely different search engine.
Take a look at StartPage ( http://startpage.com ) - similar Privacy Policy.
I did, but it still includes local results (it thinks I am in New York City). I signed up for a Google API account and tried the Google custom search engine and searched for "pizza restaurants" and received different results than with Startpage. Startpage tried to sell me NYC pizza.
Google Custom Search: http://i.imgur.com/PLZ79Vk.png?1
Startpage: http://i.imgur.com/5ui5LQc.png
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#54DuckDuckGo is far less cluttered, which makes sense considering they have less things to push aside from the results: http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png
In light of "designy" things like this, and other "ideological" things that have transpired in the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use DuckDuckGo. It's been about a month now, and I find the results terrible . I want to love it, but the first 10 results are pretty much never what I want. Sadly, Google still performs better on this front for me. If anyone has tips to make it better, I'd be very happy to he…
I've found DDG to be better at finding obscure content, and the Goog to be better at finding what I call "canonical" content.
For example, if I search for "binary tree" I probably want Wikipedia followed maybe by StackExchange. Google does that, while DDG sends me deep into the netherworld.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#55On desktop, set http://duckduckgo.com as your search provider. Problem Solved.
Even when I !g to see google results, I see 100% organic results because I have Adblock Plus plugin installed on firefox. Problem Solved.
Make sure you have 'Hide placeholders of blocked elements' option enabled, otherwise AdBlock will show a blank rectangle where the ads used to be.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#56From a network centrality metrics perspective, is there such a thing as "organic search"? Is the premise flawed or is the Page Rank metric considered organic?
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#57The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you…
You are 100% correct! I've thought this for years, but
gave up trying to convince friends. It seems like people
like paying more for cute advertising?
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#58DuckDuckGo is far less cluttered, which makes sense considering they have less things to push aside from the results: http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png
In light of "designy" things like this, and other "ideological" things that have transpired in the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use DuckDuckGo. It's been about a month now, and I find the results terrible . I want to love it, but the first 10 results are pretty much never what I want. Sadly, Google still performs better on this front for me. If anyone has tips to make it better, I'd be very happy to he…
I've been using DDG for about 1 year now, and I haven't missed google at all. The few times I don't find what I want, I !g to see google results, but they haven't seemed any better.
I find as more subject specific sites have grown, that generic search like ddg and google aren't as important to me.
I do more searches on sites like stackoverflow, yelp, maps.google.com, tripadivsor, etc. than ddg.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#59The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you…
It's not quite like that. What advertisers can afford to pay is margin X conversion rate. If people search for cheap socks and you have high margin socks, your conversion rate will be lower. In super competitive markets, the conversion rate is usually what makes one win. For something like insurance quotes, that probably means the one with a known brand, supporting advertising in tv & radio, etc. The quality of the s…
> The lawyers will drown everyone else out.
The worst lawyers will drown everyone else out, including the good lawyers. The lawyer that has a high conversion rate by promising it will cost $5000, but ends up costing $30k drowns out the lawyer who legitimately quotes $10k.
I agree, for certain searches, the ads are helpful, but I stand by the notion of avoiding SERPs with tons of high value ads. The person paying for those ads will likely be you.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#60I see lots of comments bashing Google, ads are evil, all that. But honestly how many people search for "italian food" on the web expecting global results to be relevant locally? Google is providing exactly what people are looking for when they google for Italian.