It never occurred to me that Google’s inability to find decent product reviews or how-to guides was actually a serious problem. I usually just resort to scouring enthusiast forums or sites I trust.
It’s sad to say, but Google is close to becoming just a spell-check tool for me.
Over the years, the impact of spam — mostly affiliate marketing and auto-generated splogs — has decimated the usefulness of the “product research” category. It’s impossible to do any meaningful product research with Google.
But recently, spam has taken over the “guide” query results, and even many “reference” queries. It wouldn’t surprise me if spam even started defeating the “address bar” queries — Google’s ranking algorithms recently have had a lot of trouble detecting the canonical source of duplicated content.
In other words, it’s now nearly impossible to find good results for many commonly asked types of queries.
Read: Marco.org – Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search.
