I don’t care where in the search results a specific Santorum page pops up, but I hate that their algorithms increasingly seem to favor recently updated sites. That’s great for news, because it’s, you know, news, but it’s made Google increasingly useless as a research tool. Once upon a time if, say, Little Ricky said something stupid, I could do a Google search and easily [see] if he said a similar stupid thing a few years ago. Now the first several pages of search results will inevitably be just repeated quotes of the current gaffe.
Agreed. There’s already Google News if you want the latest and greatest news. And there’s an option (on the Advanced Search page) to limit your results to the past day or week or whatever. So people who want to search for recent stuff already have options. It would be nice if those of us who don’t necessarily want just the recent stuff had the option to get that. Increasingly, we don’t.
I don’t suppose this will ever happen, but it would actually be kind of interesting if the Advanced Search page gave you the choice of various ranking algorithms. That could be really handy. Other than the fact that it might be a pain in the ass for the development team, is there any special reason for Google not to do this?
