Why modern search engines are ugly?

What search engine do you use? Let me guess! In the majority of cases ‘search engine’ term is associated with Google. But… are you always satisfied with search results? Probably, not. Let’s find out why this happens and why the search index is getting worse.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a person who is not familiar with the Internet and search engines in particular. We all search for information and want to get results not only fast but also relevant. This is the main focus of companies and corporations that work on their search engines. Do they succeed?

As the scope of information coverage is getting bigger and wider, new sites appear, old become abandoned, there are also some associated problems with it.

Tons of trash

This problem is closely related to high “update rates” of information across the Internet. Sometimes search engines cannot fetch all the changes in time and provide users with the most recent search index that may cause some outdated sources to appear. Another source of this problem is so-called “one-day” sites that lack quality and have only a few good articles. Obviously, search engine algorithms have internal smart logic to forbid such kind of sites from being added to the search index, however, there are many opposite examples.

Useless/Bad index

The useless index is a flip side of trash – you type your search request and receive some results. But then, while going through these results you realize that they are also irrelevant despite the fact that all found sites seem to be alive and regularly updated. However, these updates worth nothing and it’s awful. Furthermore, there is no correlation between quality of search results and index size in terms of “the bigger – the better”. Sometimes, a finely-classified small index base provides more relevant results than the bigger one.

SEO

It’s a common practice when a good site uses SEO for promotion (e.g. to increase its market share). This will make the index more relevant and competitive. When a bad site uses SEO for example, for viral marketing and other bad promotion techniques, index gets clogged by annoying search results, data sets or pop-up windows. At the moment it’s not already something difficult to imagine.

Tracking everything and everywhere

By tracking some of the user data, search engines receive vital information about the user: location, preferences, search requests history, etc, thus making search results more relevant and helping users find required data faster. Tracking personal information has always been a matter of debate, especially now, in the era of smartphones. However, some big companies don’t make their search engines privacy-friendly because tracking personal data is a forming part of their internal features. So, the phrase “Your search engine knows you better than your friends” does make sense. If you want to be aware of all the personal data search engine collects, you can try one of those mentioned in the article 3 search sites that don’t track you as Google does.

Some related articles about tracking information:
http://searchengineland.com/yandex-launches-personalized-search-results-for-eastern-europe-142186
http://donttrack.us/

Conclusions on the problems of search engines

As you can see, modern search engines are fully-featured solutions aimed at making your Internet life easier. At the same time, there are lots of troubles that make user experience really bad. Obviously, some people don’t care about it, however, as far as more other search engines follow this “bad practice” because it’s a big business and, as the result, the user experience is getting even worse. From the other hand, as long as search results quality are still acceptable, who cares about those bad practices and privacy in particular?

We are concerned about it as being a part of IT world. Obviously, the only reasonable workaround for those users who are not satisfied with modern search engines is to use alternative solutions. Luckily, there are plenty of them now. But you should not forget that sometimes even the most popular alternative switches to commercial “mode” and goes through some “bad practices” mentioned above in order to stay alive.

Here at IT Svit, we want both existing and new products to have not only a commercial purpose but also a real value to end-users. For this moment IT Svit team is involved in one ambitious project that is going to solve all the above problems and bring Internet search to the brand new quality level.

Stay tuned!