On July 8, 1998, Larry Page, Google's (GOOGL) co-founder, wrote on a mailing list "have fun and keep googling!"
It was the first recorded use of "google" as a gerund and the name went on to become a part of the language as the search engine became a part of people's lives.
'Google is Dead. Long Live Google + 'site:reddit.com'
Now, however, critics have laying into the company, challenging the quality and accuracy of its searches.
A recent blog post by search-engine blogger DKB entitled "Google Search is Dying" asserts that Reddit, a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website, is currently the most popular search engine.
In addition to Reddit, some of Google's other competitors include Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing, Yahoo and the Chinese search engine Baidu (BIDU).
"The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface," the post said. "So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word 'reddit' to the end of our queries."
The post declares "Google is dead. Long live Google + 'site:reddit.com'."
"Google still gives decent results for many other categories, especially when it comes to factual information," the post said. "You might think that Google results are pretty good for you, and you have no idea what I’m talking about."
However, the post said that users don't realize that "you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search."
"You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result," the post added.
Reddit did not immediately responded to a request for comment.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, which posted stronger-than-expected fourth quarter earnings earlier this month, cited a tweet from Danny Sullivan, Google's public search liaison, who tweeted that "some people clearly want to get great content from Reddit but for whatever reason don't find searching there to be as useful."
"So using Google to successfully locate what you want at Reddit, that's also a sign we're helpful," he said.
In a statement Google said "we do hundreds of thousands of experiments and quality tests every year to ensure that Google Search is improving and helpful for people. "
"We make thousands of improvements every year, and we rigorously measure them to ensure they make search better for people around the world," Google said.
'Try Using Anything Else'
The DKB post said serving ads create misaligned incentives for search engines and complains about SEOs, noting that there "are tons of people whose sole job is to game their way to the top of Google, so it shouldn’t be surprising when search results deteriorate in quality."
"To be fair, this would probably be an issue with any search engine, but you’d expect Google to be able to come up with a less gameable algorithm," the post said.
The post cites several critics of the search engine, including Michael Seibel, managing director and group partner at Y Combinator, who tweeted earlier this year that "a recent small medical issue has highlighted how much someone needs to disrupt Google Search."
"Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories," Seibel said. "Health, product reviews, recipes are three categories I searched today where top results featured clickbait sites riddled with crappy ads. I’m sure there are many more."
In response, Sullivan, tweeted "sorry to hear this."
"We’re always looking to keep improving our results," Sullivan said. "If you’re comfortable sharing any of the queries you found disappointing, happy to pass those on so we can look into them…"
Seibel told Sullivan "I purposely asked people to share their experience so I hope that provides many examples."
"To be honest though - I’m sure all the people on your team have examples as well," he said.
There was at least one satisfied customer on the thread, who stated "as a consumer we are pretty happy."
"Try using anything else," the person tweeted. "Also the paid version would not be good. Limited data means BAD results that’s why Google search is awesome, coz it’s free & has 22 years of search data. You want to criticize something look at the battery life of iPhone."
Rising interest rates, inflation, and market volatility are on the horizon. You don’t want to miss out on this exclusive opportunity to unlock Action Alerts PLUS at our lowest price of the year.
