Increasingly people are finding their searches on Google leads to spam sites gamed to appear at the top of the results. Google needs to change this, and fast, says entrepreneur turned academic Vivek Wadhwa in a TechCrunch post that is attacting major attention.
Is Google the Next Yahoo? asks Silicon Valley Insider, noting it is a major warning signal when techies start grumbling. Indeed, I saw this happen with Microsoft, and now it’s happening with Google.
I use Google less now. Twitter and Facebook have useful search, as does Google News, which has no spam. Ditto for my Google RSS reader. But these are primarily searches for news. Searches on other topics are much more problematic. Wadha said his students were not easily able to find info on the founders of tech startups on Google because of huge amounts of spammy search results. Paul Kedrosky had the same experience. He repeatedly tried then gave up trying to find info on appliances on Google and used Consumer Reports instead.
In their different ways Blekko, Quora, and Hunch are next-gen search that avoid spam. Check them out!