Google Prioritizes Sales Over Content
Google has removed the Video link on its search results pages with one to Google Product Search, relegating the very useful Video link to the “More” menu. The Video link is fourteen items down the More menu, making it a lot of work to reach. Previously, on any Google search, you could hit Video to get results from dozens of popular and unpopular video sites, making it the easiest way to find video on the internet. Now? Not so much.
Google seems to be prioritizing Product Search, with its huge links to Google Checkout, over Video, which is actually a very popular and fast growing segment of the internet. It’s a decision that, unless backed up by traffic number saying no one used the Video link, makes no sense and implies Google ignored the needs of its users over its need to sell stuff. That’s dissapointing.
I’ve been trying to find a video card for my wife’s computer all week, and Google has been no help. Every search on a product name reveals site after site that is selling that product. Why Google can’t do powerful integration with Product Search, and then remove the product results from the web results, I have no idea. I could not find forums discussing my various technical issues, because Google listed site after site with the same useless sales information.
Google needs to do a non-commercial search engine. They’d be able to sell more ads, since the results would contain no stores, and users would finally have a way to get answers to their questions. I posted my questions to my two blogs because Google was a waste of my time. Three years ago, when I started doing this, Google was the place that indexed blogs and forums and ranked them high, now it’s the place that ranks every outdated deal and online store above actual information.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. When it comes to searching for anything anyone is selling, there isn’t any information to be found.
Perhaps Google is returning all the deal sites because they used black-hat SEO practices to get top rankings…
Comment by voyagerfan5761 | November 23, 2007
I don’t think I used the Video link. Whenever I look for a video, I guess I’ll go to video.google.com myself. If I’m not looking for a video, Google may add such results to the regular result page, or can add a video link to the “highlight bar”, or whatever it’s called, right below the Google logo.
http://www.google.com/search?q=video
I do think stores can get really in the way of actual information (let’s be honest, most of those stores don’t add valuable technical details or hard-to-find specifications of a product). In order to get past those stores, which are no less annoying than regular web spam, I usually exclude certain keywords to try and filter them; think [ati linux drivers -buy -purchase -order -shop].
I do fear advertisements on such result pages are worth less than on the unfiltered results; after all, it shows that the person doing the search is not immediately interested in buying something. It’s probably a savvy user who has no problems comparing prices later on.
Comment by Tim | November 23, 2007
“Google needs to do a non-commercial search engine. They’d be able to sell more ads, since the results would contain no stores, and users would finally have a way to get answers to their questions. I posted my questions to my two blogs because Google was a waste of my time. Three years ago, when I started doing this, Google was the place that indexed blogs and forums and ranked them high, now it’s the place that ranks every outdated deal and online store above actual information.”
Amen to that!
Comment by Libran Lover | November 23, 2007
great blog.. keep up the good work
Comment by Ken Liang | November 24, 2007
First, I think Google has the data to justify their decision to put Products in place of the Video link. At this point we should have learned how data and metric aware Google is. The traffic that they have (with their lead in Search engine market share) is not a joke, and if these page views does not translate to productive Video link clicks,then I think it’s fair to put something else there, one that needs more exposure. This is also an indirect effect of Google’s universal search. Now that video results are included in the main search, the separate video link is not as important anymore. I also tend to agree with Tim: video.google.com is perhaps one of the more “memorable” google sub-domains.
Comment by Google Tutor Jr | November 26, 2007