While Google does a great many things well, I have been cynical about their search results for a while now. They do a good job generally serving up what I need on the 1st page of results.

This is not all that impressive, since these results are nearly universal. You just link to a result on Wikipedia or Amazon for broad subjects. Or find a decent blog or newspaper for long tail search.

What concerns me, and makes me question Google results, is when I get to page 2. There I start seeing things like this when searching for the 1971 board game Stay Alive by Milton Bradley.

Yes, that is a link to the board game from the venerable retailer, Sears. This piqued my interest, so I clicked on it. The results were not particularly useful or high-quality.

It is a generic page with dummy text and broken images. Which does not exactly fit in well with Google’s commitment to surface high-quality content. It also makes me question the dependability of their algorithm when such an obvious low value result makes it the 2nd page. Well above much more useful and informational blog posts on page 3 and beyond.

I know most of us do not click deep on Google. It does such a good linking to a couple of high-quality sites. But if they control over 75% of the search market, they need to commit to doing a better job of surfacing content.

They can start by eliminating results from e-commerce sites that no longer carry an item or in the case of this sears result, probably never did.