Has Google Jumped the Shark ?

Could the last person out please switch off the servers

Nothing stays the same

Has Google Jumped the Shark ?

Google has jumped the shark

These are not comments from the man in the street, these are comments from the people who use google everday and who help to maintain Googles revenue stream.

I keep saying that Google does have it's head on the right way when it comes to offering useful tools within the search sphere to help keep consumers using the service ... but I have had discussions with many of them relating to the quality of the search results and so many of them are disatisfied.

Its analogous with how we percieve the AM industry, we know the history and the challanges, reporters don't. Just the same with the search landscape, we know the history of the search engines, how some have failed and have to deal with them in more ways than just using that search box at the top of them.

People use a given search engine for various reasons:

relevance of results
ease of use
integration of other services

but the 4th is the killer:
Habit.

It's just like bank accounts, we're all so reluctant to change accounts. With search engines users have to re-learn how to use the new one. And you know how lazy people are ...

getvisible

Google grew through user recommendation and not a huge marketing campaign. I still remember thinking how 'funky' and straightforward the page appeared after having flirted between yahoo, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves for a few years...but nowadays it just seems to be targetting all angles to squeeze out every last cent and that is really beginning to diminish the quality of the results for everyone - publishers and Jo public alike. My sites do okay in Google and my Adwords campaigns haven't been nuked to the extent that some seem to have been, judging by today's posts here, but I do find myself using other engines more and more when I'm searching for something. Although I don't think I've got enough confidence to say I could go a whole week without using Google I'm beginning to find some of the others are back in my favour again. The Firefox drop down engine list certainly makes it easier now to resist big G's charms and using Yahoo it does just take you to their search homepage (which like ceetee said is a Google clone almost)

Maybe the rot for webmasters began with the 302 redirect hijack issue - I saw a few sites promoting Yahoo because of it - but now it seems each of us is being squeezed more and more so that all of us are becoming disenchanted in one way or another. It was long honeymoon but it is most definitely over for me now.

I've had some good organic search results in Yahoo recently so naturally I'd be keen to see a more equal split of usage developing across the search engines. Google isn't the internet (despite many users still using the search box instead of the URL line!) - maybe it's time we began to be a bit more vocal about this fact. Word of mouth (forum/email etc) made Google. Whilst I certainly wouldn't like to see them broken I'd love to see them realise that in this fickle industry they *could* be broken by a tide of user dissatisfaction, forcing them to look to their own long term strategy and return to some of the core qualities that made them popular in the first place.

mikey_freedom

After the experiances of Google in the last few days, any confidence in them that I had has evaporated completely. They may have been good in the past, but they are no longer acting in the interests of the users. If in fact they are, they are doing a very bad job at it. I completely understand why adwords needed to change and their stated reasons for the change are understandable. But in reality, the change does not reflect these reasons. How can that be when high quality sites/landling pages have been made inactive with stupidly high CPC and other, lower quality sites remain for the same keyword. If I were a user, I would want to find the high quality ones not the low quality ones. Google have jumped the shark, either because they are now completely incompetent or because of simple greed. Either way, I no longer trust them at all.

Stellar

I do think something needs to be done to take Google's dominance away from them and to open up a wider range of SE's that users use. The problems is is getting a fresh looking search engine that delivers decent results that we can suggest users to use. It's a shame there isn't a completely new search engine that is able to compete with the relevance on results, people have heard of Yahoo & MSN so it's nothing "new" and they are unlikely to tell friends about them. If however there was a new SE that was good and relevant then I would think they are more likely to "spread the word" if it offers soemthing decent. Perhaps a Yahoo re-brand with just the search engine part would be good, they could even give it a new name and keep the Yhaoo site as it is now.

Wardy