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Comment by markerdmann | Hacker News Reader

Has Google been making significant changes to the search ranking algorithms in the past couple months? I've noticed a significant decline in the quality of results, to the point that (for the first time in years), I've bounced over to DuckDuckGo or Bing to try my luck there. I love Google as a company, so (if this isn't just in my head) I'd love to see things get better again.

EDIT: Looks like the change to HN's ranking is related to a change that pg made, so my comment is now less relevant to the parent post. I still stand by it, though. :-)

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If you can look back in your search history to find the specific searches that didn't do well for you, we're always happy to get really concrete examples.

The best reports look like "I did a search for [Bavarian red widgets] and the results weren't good because e.g. you were missing a specific page X that you used to return or should return, or you returned Austrian red widgets" or whatever.

Lots of Googlers are clearly hanging out on HN over Thanksgiving while they're stuck at relatives' houses. :)

That's helpful, thanks. I haven't kept a record of those searches (they were mostly programming-related queries), but I'd be happy to submit reports in the future. Is there a URL or email address for this purpose?

At the bottom of every search results page is a link that says something like "give us feedback". That's your first point of call for reporting bad results, spam, etc.

If you have a whole bunch queries that are somehow related, like say we do a bad job at Python function names, then you can collect them and post them on our forums in one go.

And please give us details as Matt said. In particular, If your refer to a specific result, please say its URL not "5th result" because rankings fluctuate.

I've given feedback. A few days later the "broken" search was fixed. I have no idea if there's any link between the two, or if it was just a temporary glitch. But thanks for fixing it if it was fixed.

And I'd LOVE to see some of the reports (but I know that'll never happen) because it'd be amazing to see some of the worst reports.

What Pierre said. And if there's some specific programming-related search, feel free to tweet me a link to the bad search and why it was bad.

This is awesome. Matt friggin Cutts is over here personally responding to not just the big shots (as in PG, and I don't mean that in a bad way at all) but some of us little people too. I see this stuff and it just inspires me. I really hope one day I can be in a position where all types of people, rich, poor, powerful, powerless, can all benefit from my skill or knowledge and that I would be the guy who helps the average Joe the same as the hot shot CEO. I hope I carry that with me as I build my own business. Thanks for being so cool, Matt Cutts.

Happy to help! I was just hitting up HN for some stories to pre-load into tabs for a plane ride and happened to see the story. Bugs happen on our side too, so I was interested to dig into this case.

Here's a search that tripped me up -

I'm in Houston, TX. When I searched for 'windshield repair houston', the 1st result - wwwDOThoustonwindshieldrepairDOTnet - looked promising so I made an appointment with them to get my windshield repaired. When I went to their place of business, it was just a guy in a pickup truck in the parking lot of a strip mall, with a 'windshield repair' sign on the back of the truck.

Turns out he's running a scam where he gets ppl to file claims with their insurance, and when they pay him, he would kickback 50% to the customer. Having insurance pay for damages is common enough, plenty of businesses do it. But this guy was trying to get me to file claims for damages that I didn't even have. When I asked for a cash price just to repair the damage I did have, he refused saying that 'it wasn't enough money'.

I was pissed. Not only is this illegal, I couldn't believe he was ranked #1. When I did some digging, it turns out the guy is gaming google with a ton of paid backlinks. For example, http://www.searchpicks.com/business/automotive/patsco-windsh... (click 'suggest listing' for the price).

I'm sure plenty of other searchers ended up wasting their time with this SERP just like I did.

We'll check into this--thanks for the detailed report.

You're welcome. I did a little more digging and wwwDOTpatscowindshieldrepairDOTcom is a mirror site with the same info that's ranking for the same terms, and the backlink profile for this site also shows lots of paid backlinks.

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