Hi Carson: Google's been twitchy all weekend as far as I know but I haven't seen anyone complaining that their traffic has suddenly tanked. I thought maybe because I hadn't seen any other complaints that Google just decided to not give me what I want anymore without me noticing it. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

A lot of the time when Google changes it's ranking algorithms they mix everything up. This is something we refer to as the "Google Dance". They mix everything up and let the new ranking algorithms re-sort things. The frustrating part is that when they do this a lot of the time the sites that are at the TOP of the rankings are completely irrelevant.

I bet if you do your search in a few days or even a week, that you will find what you are after. It's funny that you mention BING because I tried switching over to bing when Google did this about a year ago. I quickly changed back after Google's results settled down.

For all of us here at WA who are writing quality content on our sites, rankings and traffic usually goes up when Google changes the algorithms. Google is ALWAYS in the process of making the results better and weeding out sites who try to "Game" their system.

Give Google a few days and see how the results look.

Carson

Yeah, it's just weird. In fact if you bring some of these new practices to their logical conclusion -- what, you're not displayed in Google unless you're *already in some kind of user group*?

That puts a huge damper on natural internet business growth in my opinion. Who's going to be motivated to create anything new for the internet eventually then?

I've already switched over to Bing for general research. I just can't find what I want on Google as a consumer.

Interesting. I came to a similar conclusion recently as I perform a lot of searches for generic business types. Increasingly it seems the first page of Google is just filled with directories (Yell etc, etc) and forums. I have always had a lot of respect for Google (sometimes grudging) but it seems to me they have lost the plot a little recently on search. If you strip everything back to basics their business is built on delivering relevant results against a search and increasingly (in my humble opinion) they are failing to do that.

Your question: "or have they lost their minds at Google?" sure seems to fit, but I have to remind myself that they did not get to dominate the web as they do by being dumb. And all those PhDs are not sitting idly. We may not like what they come up with, but it will certainly benefit Google.

Actually there are a couple sites I always admired that I'm noting are not turning up for major search terms I use pretty frequently. They used to, and their content is perfectly relevant and the sites have high traffic and lots of interaction. I have *yet* to get a first position google term but I saw that and thought...huh. I wonder what would happen if I grabbed those keywords I'm typing with crappy results. Then I realized probably nothing. I just don't get Google anymore.

Yes I agree.Google quest for relevancy perfection and "quality user experience" seems to be veering off its intended mark. I think I'll refresh my experience and try using Bing for a awhile. Yahoo is way to busy of an interface for me.

Thanks for your responses...

The thing is I don't think I go to forums that much. I spend some time here and some time at Squidoo but for the most part when I'm doing searches I'm looking for informative reading material, etc.

The thing that bothers me about all this personalization is that eventually none of us will ever see anything new. We won't ever just run across a thing we've never seen before; we'll be sort of cocooned by our past choices. If we have personalized video, personalized news, and ads that serve up stuff we've clicked on before we'll just keep running on the same information loop forevermore. Weird to think about.

Google is delivering results based more and more on "personalisation" and "localisation". For example if I consistently click on .coms rather than .co.uk's then it begins to favour ranking .coms in my search results. In other words, it personalises the rankings to me based on it's previous experience of what it thinks I'm most likely to be interested in. Likewise, I get markedly different results if I reroute my IP address and search as though I'm in Edinburgh or Cardiff as opposed to London, where I'm actually located. It will eventually become more and more difficult if not impossible to gauge a site's true rank as these techniques evolve. Rich.

Forums are horrible for information most of the time, and yes, they are clouding the front page of Google! It's frustrating to see part of a piece of text that looks like it answers your question, then have to flip back and forth between 12 pages of numpties talking trash, only to find that the phrase supposedly answering my question was taken out of context!

Lol. Bing is the hipster of search engines. :)