Google is so far ahead in the UK that a lot of people have never even heard of Yahoo and MSN Live Search. Sometimes Google doesn’t give the right results and people have to start all over again, the funny thing is that nobody minds starting all over again because it only took 0.08 seconds in the first place.
Even if it takes me 10 searches to bring up the right information I’m not going to get upset because I will still find what I’m looking for within a minute or two. A few years ago before broadband Google was installed on millions of peoples PC’s as the homepage purely because it was faster than it’s competitors. Now Google has the luxury of being able to take 5 tries to find a good result because it is still quicker to Google than to Yahoo.
Om Malik sums it up best
While their results aren’t optimal, they are good enough. Just like Microsoft Windows was good enough to dominate the market. Google, according to Hitwise, now has 64 percent of the total search market. And although a typical Google query can often be an act of futility, we put up with it because the results are fast. If they’re wrong, we can just start all over again.
Google is falling further and further behind in giving internet surfers what they want to see in their search results. First and foremost is the surfer. If they search using Google for “large green sacks” then Google should return results for “large green sacks”… It can, and does, return what it wants to return based on what it thinks about paid and unpaid links and the page rank etc. But is this the service the customer wants? People looking for large green sacks on Google will never find “www.largegreensacks.com – the worlds main manufacturer of large green sacks” – because Google doesn´t list it because it thinks it has paid for links… should Google penalise the site for this? NO it shouldn´t(everyone has to pay for advertising, buying links is another form of advertising and increasing popularity/brand awareness etc.).. Google even do it themselves. Mr General Public wants to see this site. Of course Google has to rank the results and there can only be one top spot, everyone understands this and everyone wants top spot. There has to be a method for obtaining the SERPS and each search engine is entitled to do it their own way, eventually the surfers will realise that they don’t always get shown what they want to see, they are only shown what the search engine wants them to see.. it is then up to them to make their choice about which search engine they use. More and more people are now using alternatives to Google and getting better results. With Google’s shortcomings in other areas such as cost per click advertising, Google ads and the very annoying “Unable to display results as this seems like an automated request” page that is shown regularly nit is only a matter of time until they bury themselves.