google showing scams
WASHINGTON: Earlier this month, Rebecca Skloot replaced her hulking big-box TV with a flat-screen no thicker than an iPad. She turned it on and, horror of horrors, the picture was lousy.
Displeased, she turned to Google for help. What the search engine delivered was a mess, a collection of spammy sites riddled with ads.
So she turned to Twitter, posting: ''Old TV died, got newfangled LED TV. Shocked how bad/fake movies look … Others have this prob?''
Solutions to Ms Skloot's technological melodrama rolled in. A few hours later, she posted: ''Thx 4 fixing my TV today. It's an example of how Google = in trouble. Googled 4 fix, got spam sites. On Twitter answer = asap.''
Ms Skloot's story seems ever more common these days. Google is facing criticism from tech bloggers and search engine experts who say the world's premier gateway to digital information is increasingly being gamed by spammers - and losing.
One tech blogger, the well-known iPhone app developer Marco Arment, wrote a post about ''Google's decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search''. Another blog headline spoke of ''Trouble in the House of Google''.
Data seems to back them up. Google's success rate, as measured by the percentage of users visiting a website after executing a search, fell 13 per cent last year, according to Experian Hitwise, which monitors web traffic.
