Why Google is often a poor search option
Search engines like Google try to help us find the most relevant and highest quality material on the internet. Since there is so much information on the internet, search engines need to make complex algorithms, essentially software, that sifts through, organizes, and ranks this information.
How does this software “know” how to rank the highest quality material first? The short answer is that the software doesn’t know how to do it. The algorithm designers at Google, and other search engine companies, come up with criteria that is supposed to rank the best and most relevant material first.
No one knows exactly how the search engine works, but we do know several things.
We know that if a website has many other websites linking to it, then it will be ranked higher. The idea here is that if more people link to a website, then more people probably like it, and therefor it has a higher chance of being of high quality.
We know that if an article has a lot of keywords about a certain topic, then it will be found more easily on search engines if someone happens to type those same words into the search box.
These brilliant algorithms, which are based upon much more then the above two examples, are not fool proof.
Google tends to overweight old websites. One reason is that a website that has been around for a long time will probably have many more links than a relatively new website, even if the new website has much better information.
Also, many people on the internet are very knowledgeable about how to make websites popular on search engines. They may write uninteresting articles but their search engine knowledge allows these articles to appear at the top of search results, far ahead of much better articles. This happens all the time. For many searches, the website you would be most interested in could very well be buried in the 30th page of a search result. It’s rare that someone would sift through all of those results. Most people click on websites listed in the first or second page of a search result, and then stop.
When you are searching for new websites, make sure you use different ways to find them. Google is useful but don’t rely on that only or you could really be missing out.
Take a look at forums,
social news networking sites like www.digg.com
social bookmarking sites like www.delicious.com.
Sometimes good websites travel faster up the ranks on those sites than they do on Google.
