Google losing the place..?

Is it just me or is Google being manipulated so much as to make it less than top choice of search engine?

Looking for information on anything that might be vaugley construed as a consumer product, brings back first 5 pages of hits from shopping robots, kelkoo etc ad nauseum, with faked pages mentioning product or brand.

To be honest I have the google toolbar installed and if it wasn`t for its adequate pop-up blocker I would have uninstalled it.

Alta Vista and Dogpile are getting more and more of my search queries nowadys.

What does the panel think?

Adam

I also have been less than satisfied with the results the last few months. WAY too many shopping sites showing up, but what I really hate are those faked pages that seem to contain your search phrase typed into THEIR search engine and then try to hijack your browser. Epinions.com is another one that shows up way too often in the top ranks on google.

I used Alta Vista maybe 8 years ago, is there anything out there as good as Google was?

Just a year ago I could search for a fix and find it. Now someone wants to sell me something or show me some pictures I don't want to see. Now I have to reference good sites in the search i.e. "VB object output (!) operator experts-exchange" I had thought it was just that sites became smarter about getting "picked" by google. I'll go back and see how dogpile compares.

Good point, LED-FX. Irritates the fire out of me.

*edited*

I just searched Copernic for the above phrase minus "experts-exchange" and got good information. Your point may be more valid than I suspected. Thanks, LED-FX.

Panel?

AAAH, Man.... I wish I had downloaded and saved the whole article instead of bookmarking it:
NY TIMES ARTICLE on "Hacking Google to engineer results". While the article was primarily of a political bent, it showed the basics of how anyone willing to invest the time could make Google come up with results to enhance anyone's agenda.

Unfortunately the article has been archived and they want to charge $2.95 or morre for reading it.

Darn, I guess I better start saving this stuff even if it does fill up my hard drive.

I had recently switched from Yahoo to Google for my primary search engine. Guess I'll have to switch back or to Alta Vista or Dogpile as primary. (Webcrawler is pretty good for finding more obscure stuff.)

Is this the article here?

-Bill

You ainta kiddin LED-FX! I have been noticing it for quite a few months now. I was starting to think that I was in one of those twilight episodes. Every article/review and everyone I talk to sings its praises. While its still probably the best, the amount of shopping sites that show up at the top of the list is getting ridiculous. Its gotten to where most of the time I go right to the 3rd or fourth page just to skip all the false hits. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif

same observation here.....been using dogpile for several years and although i try some new engine for a while i end up going back to using the dog again.

another similar (dogpile type) search engine i've had good results with is copernic ( the basic free version )

rob

I tried this:

GOOGLE SEARCH: LED FLASHLIGHTS

I wasn't disappointed by the results, but if I had wanted general information on LED lights, or if I wanted to learn about the subect I might have had a problem. Is that what folks here are talking about?

This is supposed to be a pretty good search engine:

ALLTHEWEB


BTW, what are "faked pages" ?

Brightnorm

It does kind of bug me but I'm not that annoyed by it. The faked pages all look the same in the results, and they're usually at the top, so I just have learned how to skip past them. The people at Google are smart, I bet they find a way to fix this problem.