I’m so frustrated with google today! It’s so upsetting trying to locate a website that I will grant me instant gratification on what it is I need right now. Where does google or any search engine get off thinking they should let me know what site they think is the authority on what I need? Am I not intelligent enough to find the websites that I want to visit, rather than have them force one on me? Sure one can argue, “But you don’t have to click the link”, and I can argue back “But the link is right there, in your face and promises instant gratification!”

Authority links are killing my search experience, I do not mind if it were something of value such as a search for a specific Company/Business like “Forbes” and sending me authority links to “Forbes.com” or even a search to “Tahiti” and you respond with Authority Links to the Tahiti Visitors Bureau, but the authority links that are difficult to navigate and difficult to use are a no thanks.

That’s where my frustration lies, today I ran a search for “some software” specific tutorial sites - [ enter Authority Link subliminal message here ] So I click the link, I get to this website and it looks like some message board which immediately threw me off, I could not figure out where to go or what to do so I went back to google, because the “back” button was exactly where I knew it would be! Kudo’s for FireFox. I clicked the second link, still not what I wanted, I’ve been here before [ insert Yahoo and MSN memories ] This went on for 10 minutes. I gave up!!! Read the software help page and ended my frustration and before you ask, yes, this software is quite popular and heavily used it returned over 2 million search pages.
I am sure, that as an avid searcher, I could have gone back to Google and rewrote my search query and I would’ve found something eventually. But why would I need to redo a search that was already specific? I’m not just some kid looking for a google fix, I know how to search for what I want. But obviously, based on my current frustration, I might have to take up google 101!

It seems the only thing google thinks about now, is how to keep Search Engine Marketers from exploiting their algorithm. Everywhere I go it’s “what to do to get ranked on google”, “what not to do if you want to rank on google”, “how you need to rely 110% on google for your website to survive” UGH UGH UGH.. Okay! I can honestly say that this is a good “excuse”, but let me point out that it is not a good excuse to take away from my user experience of a search engine that has always provided me what I want, when I want it, until today…

Will I use google again? Of course I will, despite my frustrations on finding what I need these days, it’s still the best search engine out there, at least until something else comes along. I don’t use Yahoo unless it’s “work” related, I’m sure Yahoo serves it’s purpose for many people out there, but I’m sick of seeing banners and ads and bad search results. If I get frustrated over 10 minutes of bad search results from google, imagine what I was like back when I used Yahoo! uh huh… hated it. MSN was never a factor, the search engine never existed in my regular life and still doesn’t. MSN what? If I was Gates, I’d have chunked out the MSN Search Engine, provided Google Search Results and market the hell out of the MSN.com offerings - now I would choose that over Yahoo any day.

So enough of my rantings.. Google needs to get back to User Experience and spend less time worrying about the Search Engine Marketing industry and I’ll go back to praying that Google stops sending me subliminal click messages that deter me from finding some cool website somewhere out there.