Google has discontinued, combined and improved various services over the past few years and as Google evolves and grows it is expanding into cable, mobile and just about any other sector of information and communication tech.
Search may not be important to Google at all as it is choosing to lose minority search users in order to better focus on satisfying direct answers to majority of it’s search users.
But how important is search still to Google? As Bing.com is taking up slack and growing, almost on a month to month basis and as you start seeing Bing.Com search screens being used in popular movies and series episodes, one cannot help but wonder where Google is going with search. No question, a year ago anyone would fire up a Google search, heck even use Google a a verb, go Google this or go Google that, but sadly not anymore.
With Google becoming more that just search and Google search results declining in useability, these days one finds, frequently, having to turn to other search engines to find what you are actually searching for. The Google search results have become too local, too mobile and then in other categories just plain useless and wrong. It almost seems that Google is trying too hard and is exerting too much influence in results. Some categories it is already predictable that you cannot use Google at all, but I think it is time that we work through some examples:
A Search on Bing.com for ‘restaurant review’ reveals actual restaurant reviews or restaurant review websites, blogs and very useable search results.
A Search on Google.com for ‘restaurant review’ reveals fairly useless and wrong search results. The Google search results automatically assumes my geographic location and feeds me localised restaurant links, from 600 miles away… furthermore the Google search results are not for ‘restaurant review’ only the first one or two results are related to the search term, the rest is either an actual restaurant, advertising for restaurants or Google’s own ratings based on individual restaurant reviewed (probably by Google Plus?) users? Either way, Google search results are useless.
There are more examples, but it is probably already common knowledge that people are battling with answers from Google daily, so we will not beat a dead horse…
It is difficult for Google to please everyone and Google plays the odds these days by looking at what the average user is searching for. The average user searching for ‘restaurant review’ is probably looking for a place to eat, is probably using a mobile smart-phone to do the search and is probably Geo-located close to where the ip number is routed from. Thing is that for that 30 percent of more people that Google is not catering for, the results are useless. Not important, Google may think, but think about it: Exactly that which made Google what it is, is going to cause Google to fail. Because they are not just a search engine, bing.com answers the search results for the term ‘restaurant review’ completely, for 100 percent of searchers… The searcher looking for a local restaurant can easily find it on a quality restaurant review site (maybe like zagat.com, as in the bing.com search results or on one of the other answers) and the people searching for actual ‘restaurant review’ can similarly also find their answers.
It is difficult to try to be everything to everyone and Google will not be able to succeed in doing this as by choosing one thing over others, you cannot expect to dominate as a search engine when your search result filters are so granular, on broad searches as to become useless to a large percentage of people.
