IceArdor's Blog

Ever since My Opera's release of hitslink integration, it's been interesting looking at how people arrive to my blog. Google gets massive amounts of data from its users about what they search for and where their queries lead. Even with just a few queries, I'm starting to see how Google just might not have the best search results. With mounds of data and hundreds of employees, I'd think Google would be aware of this problem. Not only is Google not telling its users where they left their car keys, Google isn't answering people's questions. (I'm a big fan of Google. I believe their descriptions for queries are some of the best and generally return high-quality results, but this is me just facing reality that for some users, Google isn't as great as I'm used to seeing it.)

Google's searching algorithm is pretty good. But sometimes, I wonder if My Opera really deserves as high of a placement as it gets. For example, today someone from Atlanta Georgia searched for [how are sites recognizing me when i have cookies turned off]. The first result in Google for that query is my post, Opera Wishlist: Delete Unused Cookies, which completely fails to answer the query. The second result is Cookie Preferences from the Opera Lover series. Again, this doesn't answer the person's question. I'm amazed at how many queries on Google point to my pages, just one small personal blog with feature requests, rants, and the occasional recipe. Do you think the people at My Opera do too good of a job at helping search engines find your page and ranking it well?

Another example. Today, someone searched for [star bucks applecider caramel]. That recipe has been around on the internet for a long time. I'm sure newspapers have even posted recipes—newspapers which are linked to by many blogs, have a lot more credible information, etc. But Google insists on prioritizing us wee little users to fill its top results. I guess I shouldn't be complaining, because, hey, traffic is traffic. But when I copy-pasted that recipe from some other blog, should I really be getting the credit for that by being placed as the first result in Google?

Here are some other strange queries that don't really answer people's questions, but point to my blog anyways.

• [vector image of starbucks] (I made a post about starbucks recipes, and a seperate post about a vector image of an Opera timeline I made, but there is zero connection between these two posts besides both being displayed on my blog homepage.)
• [javascript timeline] (Again, I made an Opera release timeline written using javascript, but not a timeline of javascript.)
• [water dam names] (This links to a horrible picture I took in Washington state of just one dam. Shouldn't Wikipedia be ranked higher on Google's index for that query? It certainly better answers the question.)
• [timeline releases] (Should Opera, which has 1% marketshare of the browser world, be ranked higher than say a Unix timeline, or Firefox timeline? I'd like to say yes because I like Opera, but realistically, most people aren't searching for Opera.)
• [opera speed dial homepage] (My post was just a congratulatory post about Opera getting that feature, adding one more news entry to Opera's new speed dial release in hopes that news sites would rank speed dial more seriously. If I was serious about improving speed dial awareness for that post, I would have at least included a link to Opera Features or Operawatch. And yet Google, which favors sites with backlinks (using the PageRank algorithm), ranked my link-less post. That just shows how many links My Opera crams into every user's page, and how much meta-information there is in order for Google to rank my insignificant post as 5th for this query.)