Paul Kedrosky on Google’s Crummy Search Results for Appliances

Paul Kedrosky:

Over the weekend I tried to buy a new dishwasher. Being the fine net-friendly fellow that I am, I began Google-ing for information. And Google-ing. and Google-ing. As I tweeted frustratedly at the end of the failed exercise, “To a first approximation, the entire web is spam when it comes to appliance reviews”.

I’ve noticed this too, for numerous competitive areas of consumer products. And Google’s conflict of interest is clear: all of the spammy pages clogging the results for such searches display AdWords or other keyword-based advertising. What would solve the problem — but Google is unlikely ever to offer — is an option to show results only from pages that don’t have keyword-based ads.

★ Thursday, 17 December 2009