Giving Google the Goodbyes

What has Google recently done to its search algorithm? It is a disaster.

There is an old wisdom which holds that "power corrupts" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely". And Google appears to be corrupted - absolutely.

Whereas most of the world has increasingly been singing the praises of Google, we have become increasingly wary of this search engine whose overly smart but increasingly complicated algorithms are perhaps beginning to run asunder.

Until about a week ago, the entry of "lawpundit" into Google expectedly returned the blog "LawPundit" as the first search listing, as it should be, since there are no competing websites or blogs with that name.

What we now find is that the entry of "lawpundit" into the Google search box no longer turns up that blog but an absolutely confused mess of websites that LINK to the blog. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the listing whatsoever and many of the sites who do link to our blog are not very important, since some of them are our own LESSER, seldom used, blogs.

Or to put it another way, when looking for the blog LawPundit on Google, Google is useless. Even keying the words "LawPundit" and "Blog" does not provide the desired result. Something has gone very badly bonkers in the algorithm of the Google search system in the last week or two.

Our tolerance level for nonsense is low. We do not wait long. We have installed both the Yahoo and MSN toolbars and are going to give Google the boot. Yahoo's first four results for LawPundit are perfect:

1. http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/lawpundit.htm - the LawPundit blog page
2. http://www.lawpundit.com - the LawPundit website index page
3. http://lawpundit.blogspot.com - the previous LawPundit blogspot location
4. http://feeds.feedburner.com/lawpundit - the FeedBurner RSS feed

That's the way it should be. For any entered artificial keyword such as lawpundit, we - at the least - expect the search engine to find the comparably named URLs and RSSs and rank them ahead of sites that merely LINK to them. God forbid.

Goodbye Google. Yahoo is now our toolbar of choice. It has some new features we were not even aware of, such as an anti-spyware button which permits immediate scans of the hard disk. Terrific. And the search results are just as good, if not better now.

Giving Google the Goodbyes....

Crossposted to LawPundit.