One of the things I need to find is technical info on various laptops.
Try find a manual or upgrade information for a Dell or Toshiba laptop (or any other laptop manufacturer).
I chose those two because they both publish information about their computers beyond the usual user manual (including service manuals).
The results of any search you make in Google ALWAYS come up with the same websites trying to sell freely available stolen information - and often they don't actually have the information you need on the page you are looking at - it is just spam filler to get a result from the search engine.
Conspicuous by their absence are the manufacturer's websites.
Why is that google NEVER EVER points you at a manufacturer's web site in the top ten results even when you put that manufacturer's name as the first search item - and doesn't even do a particuarly good job when you use site:.... to sepcify the site to search manually.
I think advertising and incompetence are rapidly making google's results unusable.
One simple innovation would be to have a thumbs up and a thumbs down link in the search results page for each link so that rubbish can easily be reported*. Bad sites could quickly be identified - and maybe they could then ban those people from the Google Ads system too - oh but that would affect the bottom line so there is no chance of that happening!
* Yes I know this could be abused but there could be safeguards introduced.
-Carol Haynes
I'm curious if you have any better luck with Bing, or even Yippy, DuckDuckGo or other alternative search engines. I guess my question would be, is this a problem unique to Google, or is it a problem of modern search systems on the Internet as a whole?
As for Paypal-like authentication schemes, it becomes a question of privacy and anonymity online. This is a subject I am somewhat no the fence about because spam, malware, etc. do a lot of harm and a fully authenticated and known-identity Internet system would solve a lot of that, but at the same time the Internet is a tremendous tool for the oppressed to gain a voice, and that can only happen when anonymity is possible. Granted Google don't have to be the ones providing it, but it should be available I think. It's a hard question, but I don't think stronger authentication for Google account signup is necessarily the answer. Maybe one could sign up for a Gmail account free, but then using more services like search engine result tuning (that would be incorporated into their rankings, as you say) would require further authentication. That way people can sign up for Gmail accounts easily, but not as easily game the results.
- Oshyan
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