Hotels online are a bit of a mess.
Personally I'll go straight to Tripadvisor to find a hotel in an unfamiliar area. I may book there but I will also call the hotel in question, particularly when my company has a corporate rate. Not because the corporate rate is betteer but because when the website tells you the hotel is full for the requested dates a person at the hotel will tell you what dates are the problem and possibly bump you up to a higher room class to make your stay possible.
As an aside to people who develop hotel aggregates:
1. Never make me register;
2. When I search a date range show me, for each day, the rate, availability and include all room classes. This way I can easily see if a single day is the problem and adjust accordingly.
In fact I'd like to combine the hotel and flight so one one page I can see flight costs on my requested dates (+/- 2 days) and the matrix of per day rates and availabilities.
All sites I've seen have these as too many separate steps. What's worse, refining the search can be problematic.
As for Google search results, this is one area where there is simply too much noise. Hotel affiliate programs combined with cheap hosting mean thee are 234245556345 aggregators, almost all of them useless and hotel sites, except for the largest chains generally, tend to be useless.