The geniuses at both Google and Yahoo have come up with an exciting new advertising ploy. When you click on a search result, you are redirected to an advertising page that often has nothing to do with your search.
For instance:
Google: I entered the term "Cocoanut Grove" looking for information on the 1942 fire. The first result Google returned was the Wikipedia page for the fire. Clicking on that link, however, took me to a fine food page, Gourmandia. Not only was I greeted with a truly obnoxious Flash animation for WallyWorld, it had nothing to do with the Cocoanut Grove fire, except possibly both involved exposing flesh to high heat. Clicking "back" (at least on Internet Exploder) took me to the redirect page, which sent me back to Gourmandia. To get back to the search results, I have to open "History" and click the link there. Once I finally get back to Google, clicking the Wikipedia link again finally takes me to the page I wanted initially.
Yahoo: On Yahoo, the first two results for "Cocoanut Grove" take me to the Cocoanut Grove (Florida) Business Improvement Committee website (with a side trip to Elle magazine). Returning to Yahoo -- again via the "History" button -- I click on the Wikipedia link, and, whammo, once again, I'm at Elle fashion. Hit the "history", find Yahoo search results, and finally -- finally! -- I get to the Wikipedia page.
Thus far, Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/, which used to be the leading search engine till Google came along), takes me to Wikipedia without a detour to irrelevant advertising.
Therefore, I am proud to announce that LYCOS is the Official Search Engine of 618Rants.
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Neither Google nor Yahoo were buit to please your selfish need, but rather to serve a broader audience.
ReplyDeleteYour limited thinking ability couple to your desire to promote Lycos while taking down Gourmandia.com prevented you from taking a step back to realize that search engines are built to serve a larger community not just you. Did it cross your limited mind that someone really looking for gourmet food would have been frustrated using lycos to search those exact terms?
Because 30 seconds of your time were lost, you chose to ignore the million plus gourmets out there that are please with google and yahoo returning gourmandia.com for those search terms.
By the way while search for the same terms I end up on your blog instead of a gourmet food site like (http://www.gourmandia.com/
ReplyDeleteOf course, Ray misses the point. Had I been searching for "gourmet recipes" or a variation thereof, I would have been happy to find Gourmandia. However, I had been searching for information on the Cocoanut Grove fire.
ReplyDeleteIf Ray had been searching for gourmet recipes, would he have been thrilled to get info on a 66-year-old fire? Especially if it was difficult to get back to the results he WAS looking for?
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