Google is fine but much too dominant. There should be a wider variety of styles of search engine sites with a wide variety of ways of ranking.
Google’s search criteria are anything but transparent. That is fair enough if it’s meant to stop people easily manipulating their rankings. It’s also fair enough if MSN and similar sites are always easy to find.
However, the end result is that the big sites get bigger through being the biggest. Smaller sites that may have more relevant content don’t get a chance. Who is going to look at page 379 and choose a site from there?
And sometimes, it’s almost incomprehensible why there are pages of results that bear only a passing relationship to the query string.
A reliance on page descriptions can be even worse than the older user of metatags. The description has to make some sort of sense, so it needs standard English words that contribute nothing (and, the, a, as well as introduces, presents, shows and so on). The small word limit makes it very difficult to explain anything about your content, if you have any variety in it.
I agree almost 100%. I think it is a sign of the “developed” internet that now, the chances of a small site ever getting big is pretty remote and largely down to non-internet promotion methods. (eg. getting a mention on TV resulting from a publicity stunt)
The only thing I dont really agree with is the transparency of Google’s criteria. They (Google) have published lots of documents explaining (in general terms) how to improve your page ranking and how to get a good listing. Basically it boils down to relevant content and backlinks.
I am not sure you can say the same for MSN / Yahoo / Excite / Infoseek etc.