PC Mag‘s pundit John C. Dvorak calls it today…
“You can see the beginnings of Google’s ruin already … the recent and more aggressive changes have been terrible … It doesn’t take a genius to see that Google is beginning to make huge judgement errors.”
Much as I love Google, I’ll admit to a similar uneasiness in recent months. Wild and often silly experimentation with the core search results appears to be a product of chasing “the dumb market”. It’s also possibly a reaction to the apparent lack of innovation in search itself — exemplified by what seems to be the obvious failure (*)of Google Caffeine to suppress spammy search results and SEO spivvery. I’d wonder if yesterday’s global 10% pay rises at Google, aimed at stemming the outflow of people from the company, might be linked to this sense of failure?
Perhaps better to split the basic search almost in two, via the configuration options. Give people who don’t want to switch to a Firefox/GreaseMonkey/scripts solution a single tick box in the Google Options dashboard that says, in as many words…
“I not a drooling idiot, please take all the silly training wheels off.”
Google also needs to invest far more heavily in free high-quality online training in how to search effectively. And to push it into schools at the junior level under the rubric of ‘search literacy’.
More commentary on the Dvorak article at Beyond Search. He thinks the article harsh, but concludes…
“What’s unfolding now is little more than visible signs that a systemic problem is disrupting functions. … The digital Black Death has taken root.”
* “Some 22.4% of Google searches done since June [2010] produced malicious URLs, typically leading to fake antivirus sites or malware-laden downloads as part of the top 100 search results, according to the Websense 2010 Threat Report published Tuesday”
