It seems that Google have become victims of their own success of late, in that they feel they need to do things because they can!
When Google started, it had a simple interface, you typed what you wanted, and you got a nice simple set of results. We then had the google directory, and then came Froogle, image search and many other ‘alternative’ methods of searching (which is fine).
Of late though the Search Results Page of Google looks like something a party goer threw up after a drinking session of the ‘most colourful cocktails’ section of the menu at the office party!
IT IS A MESSS, and this mess just got messier. With (what I would refer to as) their new Consolidated Realtime Additional Presentation Fomat (C.R.A.P. for short)
At the top we have PGA tour, below that we have news result, then below that we have a bunch of what can only be described as CRAP!
LMAO that Gatorade dropped tiger woods
“RT XXXXX Gatorade first sponsor to drop tiger woods”
“You know what? I also had an affair with tiger woods, THERE”
There is a scroll down box that is filled with ‘real time’ search results. You know what? If I wanted to read pathetic childish crap, then i would subscribe to pathetic childish Twitter accounts, I really don’t need to get it shoved at me from Google.
What Google HAVE managed to achieve in a single stroke is to attract MORE spammers to the twitter service that is already full to the brim of spammers!
Imagine what would happen if the ‘hot topic’ was a product, we would get mountains of results, tweets, news, more news, shopping feeds etc and what we REALLY want is below the fold.
Sorry Google but this for me is a step too far. I know it is panto season, and I know that you were going to perform Mother Goose, but I understand that it had to be cancelled as someone in product development killed the Goose that was laying the golden eggs!
Very interesting article and I think you’re absolutely on the money about this one. I love Google’s funtional simplicity but this is just plain C.R.A.P.
Hi Andy,
For me, someone who has been around Google from the start, it is such a shame to see them go down this route. Time will tell which way they take this, but personally I feel it is a bridge too far.
I agree and hope it’s an experiment that will be pretty short-lived. Though, with Google giving Twitter an estimated $15m recently, for the right and ability to index its content, I’m sure they have long term plans for Twitter results.
They are showing the crap twitter stuff for searches like ‘new year eve’ now http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GPTB_en-GBGB290GB290&q=new+years+eve&meta=&aq=f&oq=
They seem to be expanding this, and unless they improve the filters, we are going to see meaningless drivel on the first page of most searches.
I noticed the Twitter results but are gone now? Was just an experiment or it depends on the words you search for?
Thats an interesting write up. It shows a different approach of looking at Google. Probably,with the involvement of Google being able to index Facebook and Twitter content,it would be more messier. We can only hope to have a better search capability.
Just visited you from UKBF, have to say couldn’t agree more. Hadn’t actually noticed this until this post (however I don’t often search for events or people) but my goodness is it is annoying as hell! I think they could seriously cost themselves market share here, Google became popular for it’s ability to deliver relevant quality results (well, did it better than others, even if it was prone to abuse) to users quickly. I just did a quick count on the Tiger Woods search today, the first real result is tigerwoods . com – it appears after News Results and Latest Updates now. There are 10-11 links you could click on (5 in the news results, many in the visible updates bit, more if you scroll) before you actually get to the first decent result. Terrible, really hope this doesn’t expand to more generic searches.