We asked readers last week whether what influential bloggers said was true—that Google was losing the war against search result spam. Your response? More than three quarters found Google prone to spam, with one-third tagging the decline as significant.
Here are the results from our just-closed reader poll, which garnered just 30 votes shy of 10,000 responses:
It's notable that 11 percent haven't noticed a change in their results lately, and 3.5 percent believe their results have become even more relevant. But the majority of users have noticed some downward trend, even if they've simultaneously learned to compensate for it. And our readers do have some nifty ways of compensating for it.
Lelielle likes searching in the StumbleUpon toolbar, as it leads her to results that actual humans have given the thumbs up to.
Commenter samssf tells us how he pushes through the click-minded result-grabbers when looking for real reviews and product information—an area fraught with SEO tricks:
Just for those of you who don't expand the comments... Try filtering Google results by selecting "Discussions" from the "More" sidebar. I find much, much better information this way. For example, if I wanted to know about great headphones, I could 1) search google for "great headphones" and get no helpful results (obviously). Or I could search multiple forums (head-fi, hardforum, etc). Or, you can search google and filter to discussions, which yields helpful results. I do this with pretty much everything and the only downsite is results from Yahoo Answers, which can be removed by adding -site:yahoo.com to your query.
Benny Gesserit explains why he checked the "middle of the road" reply to our poll: he uses Greasemonkey to customize his search results:
- turf anything from ExpertsExchange
- zap the ads (pink in your example)
- and one I customize to zap specific ranges of domains (ie [anything].about.com)
As spammers manage to get useless links boiling to the top, I zap 'em.
And there's always Duck Duck Go, one of our top 10 answer-finding tools that aren't Google, as recommended by alex.gaddie.
Tell us what other tools provide better Google results, and what part of the discussion you feel isn't being addressed, in the comments.