The following graphic, designed by the guys at SEOBook.com and ByJess.net, is a good overview of how Google has evolved over the years and the various actions that they’ve taken to combat spam, make their search results better, and to help publishers get their content out.
Does Google search have acceptable collateral damage?
Looking at the graphic below, people can see just how unsure, untested, and unreliable Google has been since they were initially launched back in 1998. Back in that year, they were named at one of the top 100 sites on the web and many people noted how impressive their results were compared to other search engines. Google then started to gain ground, and eventually became the standard in search. Even today, when most people want to research a topic, they often will say to ‘google it’.
However, Google has recently been under fire for less relevant results, tons of junk content showing up in their search, and generally a lower quality experience. To combat these claims and impressions, Google released a new search algorithm on February 24th, 2011, called Panda. The latest updated was intended to fix what was broken with the old Google (never admitting that there was actually something wrong with it), and hoped that it would improve the results and bring Google back into the forefront of relevant results. It remains to be seen just how good this latest update is, and from the many website owners that were devastated by this update and loss rankings to shallow big sites like Ehow.com, makes me wonder if they’ve actually lost even more ground and moved further away from relevant results.
What do you think? Do you like the current results you see at Google or do you feel that Google has lost more edge?
