I came across an interesting blog post about a loyal Google searcher who was disappointed with the results he was shown from Google. This has been a situation which has been weighing on my mind a lot lately too.

I too am becoming very disappointed with some of the results Google serves up. On an increasing number of occasions the results from Google have been far from accurate. Recently while conducting research for a potential new client I did a search for the generic term “pizza”. I was logged into my GMail account so Google should have known I was from Toronto, but the first few organic (the only ones I really pay attention to) results I received were most decidedly not Toronto centric.

The Google Places results were from Toronto, but again I was looking for organic results and as the image below illustrates Google’s results were far from stellar.

Out of the 4 organic results on the page – (yeah never mind about making the top 10 on the front page anymore, but that’s another potential blog post) half took me to the US site of the corporation. One of the results doesn’t even have a presence in Toronto!

My only guess as to why I was not shown more Toronto results for my generic search term is that this is part of Eric Schmidt’s attempt to clean up the cesspool of brands on the Internet.

In Google’s opinion even though Papa John has no stores in Toronto, they are a major brand so they will get shown ahead of a lesser known (outside of Canada) brand such as PizzaPizza. The irony of course is that the keyword I was using to search was pizza and they have the keyword in their name – not once but twice!

UPDATE – Please excuse the broken page, the image is screwing up the CSS and since the whole blog post revolves around the image I can’t get rid of it and at the same time I’m having a challenge fixing it.