I’ve noticed over the past 3 months, google has pretty much been killed by SEO.
can’t find anything useful with it anymore.
for instance type in some random computer related issue, it brings up a bunch of forum posts mostly unanswered or actual answers completely irrelevant to the search topic.
Is it just me? or has SEO killed google?
If you mean that the top hits aren’t even remotely related to what you were searching for, i seem to have that idea as well.
A good example is “hack xp admin password”. In the past Petter Nordahl’s tool or referenes to it always popped up on top of the lists. Now you really have to add Nordahl into the phrase or else it seems nowhere to be found.
I actually noticed this so much I thought I’d been browser-jacked in some way…Until I was told this “wasn’t possible” with firefox + mac…
Yeah i’ve been noticing this. Takes too many pages before you find the thing you want.
I guess they’ve figured out some big flaw in how google works.
I noticed this many years ago, annoyed me for a few months, switched mainly to Yahoo but have since come back to using Google most of the time…
Hopefully it’s a fad/phase which will pass.
Probably not. Not as long as people/companies are willing to pay to have a good spot in the search-results. Just doing a search about “SEO” gives you about 700,000,000 results. 
Maybe the good ol’ encyclopedia will have a revival soon? 
is there zuckerberg in the water?
SEO isn’t killing Google any more or less than its killing Yahoo, bing, altavista or ixquick.
But just as a litmus test…
a search for “hack xp admin password” gave me perfectly relevant results for me on google, in fact I get only one sponsored result compared to yahoo’s six and ixquick’s three. I actually got the results I needed (with NO sponsored results) by the time I typed "hack xp " on google… go figure.
furthermore, the ONE sponsored result that came up for a search on the above on google (after actually finishing typing out the query) was actually totally relevant, I can’t say the same about the results that came back from ixquick or yahoo.
As well as SEO it seems like a lot of sites are generating pages on-the-fly to match exactly what you search for, or to look like a link to a
“search engine” that will find what you’re looking for. I’m getting offers of “playlists” of hack xp admin passwords(!) which suggests to me google is getting far to personal for my liking…
tried this search engine for the first time now. sorry, not impressed at all 
what’s the deal…?
from what I can read on the ‘about’ page it looks very promising, but in reality… it doesn’t work really well.
tons of stuff i can’t find at all using this.
I was also starting to wonder if my browser was hijacked or even if my dns was poisoned, but even after flushing my dns so many times and using different browsers it’s still all the same. I’m even using a completely different set of dns servers now and it’s still just not right. for some reason forums now have much more priority than before, and the forum threads are almost always littered with detraction to an answer that is not correct to the thread title, 1 posts, and silly arguing. So I am now led to believe it’s actually google’s fault in their fight against bad SEO and is turnicating useful real blogs and real pages from their indices that may not have had proper SEO or any at all which is in turn killing google’s usefullness.
one thing is for sure, when someone asks a specific question in a forum, we cannot say “google it” ever again, since eventually those thread titles will be brought up into google’s relevancy, and we will probably see this feedback loop happen in full effect during the coming years.
probably a pretty good little comic in there worthy of XKCD.
Also, I do remember this happening before a long time ago, some guy on the netstumbler forum was trying to figure out some networking problem. it went on for several months if not years. it required a very specific answer that I was also trying to find years later that only related to a wifi card and linux. The problem was related to dd-wrt and kismet drone config, but there was one guy that just kept telling the other guy to google it, and being very adamantly dickish about it throughout the entire time. I even realized I had went through the entire thread years before for something only related to kismet and a card I had. one of those instances you want to make an account just to troll the entire forums userbase.
google’s been kinda ehhhhh for a long time iirc. cant remember the last time it’s worked like it was supposed to since like 1999. been a long time though and i was like 10 years old. just have to get a lot more specific
Search results are definitely getting polluted with a lot of useless shit these days, but I think in this case it’s really more about context than anything else.
When I looked at Petter’s website, the word “hack” is not actually mentioned anywhere, and “XP” is only mentioned on the FAQ page whereas the main pages actually refer to Windows NT.
His pages are also really old HTML with the absolute bare minimum of markup, and nothing useful in terms of correct headers or meta tags and keywords, etc. That stuff is not strictly required to perform well in Google search results, but it definitely helps a lot, and it’s easy to see why some other similar sites with more modern content and SEO are appearing sooner in the search results.
Nevertheless, I did manage to find his site quite easily when keeping in mind its actual content. If I Google “reset windows password” or even “reset admin password” then his website shows up immediately in the top search results. If I Google “reset NT password” then he is the #1 result.
@jenoki: relevant? very. google is indeed personalizing stuff a lot, resulting in different search-results on a per-user basis.
personally i have not really paid attention to, and therefore have not really noticed, Google getting crappier or anything. what i do hate is how some of the same websites keep popping up with a certain type of questions. sometimes this is good, sometimes bad. for example, asking programming-related question i often get Stackoverflow (which is good), but also ExpertExchange (which sucks ass). for linux-related stuff, i often get linuxquestions (good), but even more often linuxforums (which sucks special ass with their goddamn ‘you are unregistered so you get 2 popups!’ bullshit and their damn attitude)
/end of personal rant.
Google works fine for me, the only thing that pisses me off, is the way I get constantly automatically logged out of youtube/gmail even when I set “stay signed in”. Didn’t have to mash in my pass all the time so often before.
Totally hopeless is googling for some product reviews or info. All you get is literally tens of thousands of net shops who want to sell you the item. There is no way to filter them out either.
wow. I can’t say I’ve shared this experience at all. for those of you complaining that search engines are worse than they were 10 years ago you were probably on some reeeally good hallucinogenic drugs, imho. what is it you all are searching for that you can’t find on google?
Google has evolved to prioritize local results. If you live in Montreal Canada and search for something from a Montreal IP address, those results show up. Is your country full of spammers? /joke
Google has Personalized Search which can help improve results. The drawback is Google knows your search history. This may be a privacy concern for some.
Learn to use the syntax and write good queries. Specifically the tilde (~) and quotes ("") Tilde means synonym. Quotes means exact. If I were to search for “hack xp admin password” I would do:
Admin password together, xp as a synonym. First result?
Short version, I’m with mSepsis.
Thanks, I didn’t know that one 
I like the ability to do filetype: searches with Google. Nobody else offers that as far as I am aware…
Yeah because the very thread the user started his topic with turns up above in the search hits when following that advise 
It would be humor though. (Remember a remark from Kazakore about googling for sample hit-points at which he did got the particular Renoise topic on top of the results list)