What happened to the damn search engines?

I am growing more an more frustrated each day when I try to search but today I hit a wall and wanted to write about how useless the search engines are becoming. I have addressed the issue before but it seem they grow worse by the day.

I have all but given up on google because they have lost it someplace between becoming an ISP, Mobile provider, Online Entertainment and Building cars they forgot that we know google as a search engine.

It has grown to mega proportions operating like its own government.

They have progressed from 2 guys in the computer lab at Stanford that created great technology to a complete mess like the US Government who spent $600 million to build the healthcare.gov website that does not even work.

The reason the website did not work is because they had too many cooks in the kitchen. Over 50 independent vendors trying to interface with 35 States and hundreds of insurance companies. With no real leadership, uncontrolled spending ad vendors that were taking advantage of a bad system we ended up footing the bill for a pile of junk.

But now google, yahoo and Bing have evolved into the same monsters.

Google was great when Larry Page and Sergey Brin created it, but now who knows how many hundreds of people are involved trying to make it better, faster and stronger each and every day.

Personally, I don't give a crap how many people are involved, the only thing I care about is what it can do for me when I need information, and lately, that is not much at all.

Today I was searching for information to show me the difference between the volume of traffic in searches for porn and ecommerce. My thought was that the Internet has more porn traffic than all the people that are shopping or looking for services of any kind.

And you would think someone has address the issue, some place at some time with some relevant numbers so I could get enough information to create my own article.

The thing that made me snap was the quality of results.

Not that there were not millions of pages that contained the words ecommerce and or porn, but that even in changing my search, the word i was searching for I was getting the same pages.

I phrased the search as a question, change it to a statement, changed the words, added quotes and tried many variation of the same topic. It seemed that no matter what I did, I got the same pages.

So I went to Bing expecting better results, and the same thing happened.

So how can the same pages come up for different searches?

How is it possible with countless billions of pages I get the same results, the same pages in the same order no matter how I rearrange the words in my search?

It seems the search engines are ignoring the intent of the search. The content in my words, the meaning of what I need.

If I search for "plane crashes" and "how not to crash a plane" I am looking for completely different answers but I get almost the same results. ehow.com how to survive a plane crash, images for plane crashes and many of the same pages.

At this point in google's evolution shouldn't they understand the different between a plane crash and avoiding a plane crash?

This make searching so much more difficult.

And this is part of the search engine logic.

Rather than google searching for what I am asking, they search for what they think I might be looking for.

How do they know what I am looking for? They are not me, they don't know what is in my mind.

Millions of people have spent more than a decade learning to use google as a tool. Leaning how the search engines work, just like learning how to drive a car.

Then they change everything.

So now what worked last year does not work anymore all because google wants to anticipate what I am thinking instead of letting me learn how to use it as a tool.

This is the most counter productive process I have ever seen except for heathcare.gov.

Imagine if you had a screwdriver that would move from the screw you want to tighten to another screw completely and a message appears that says, you actually want to tight this screw?

What if a refrigerator beeped when you take out a carton of milk and told you that based on your eating habits you actually want a glass of water?

What if you car didn't let you steer it and drove you to where it thought you might like to go?

It does not seem like this would be a productive use of technology.

I guess it was inevitable that google would eventually succumb to the same fate as all technology. They forgot to keep it simple. They forgot, we use it for research, they forgot we have our own minds and make our own choices.

Trying to anticipate how I think and expect that the other billion people using the searches are thinking the same was seems like a serious oversight.

Is google any better than healthcare.gov?

Will they get back to the game of search or will they follow the same path as AOL?

AOL was the largest company in the world because of their internet services and then they began expanding into entertainment, media and ecommerce. Who does that remind you of?

The problem was they ignored that there were the biggest ISP in the world and broadband came in and cut them out. In just a few short years they went from being a $600 Billion dollar company to multi million dollar company.

And all because they ignored their core product.

Lets hope that google does not fall to the same fate. Everyone thinks that is not possible but that was what they said about AOL who was the biggest search, the biggest ISP and the biggest company of all time.

Then this little unknown name, google showed up and AOL abandoned search and piggybacked on google results paying google for their services.

You know the rest of the story, it did not end well for AOL and in fact google bought 5% of aol back in 2005 for $1 billion valuing the company at just $20Billion that is a big drop from $600 Billion. But it has gone way down from there.

Will google be the next AOL or will they get back to giving users what they need? What they have come to lean and what they are clearly looking for someone else to do better.