Has google gone too far in its push for better higher quality search results?

That may well be the case, of course I do believe some changes were called for however some of the changes seem to be a bit over the top.

For example I wanted to look up a product on using Google, I could have used bing, or some other search engine, there are a lot of them.

But you know how it is you just reach for the tool that is best and easiest to use, usually that is google.

However, things have changed, used to be if you just put in a few keywords you could easily find what you were looking for, sure there were a lot of unrelated search results, but hey as long as I could find what I was looking for without really getting frustrated or without using up too much of my own time in the process I am happy to take the easiest pathway to where I want to get to.

The thing is that I could not remember the name of this product, there was some block going on in my head and I just could not remember it I remembered the first name of the CEO, but not the website address, I remembered what the product was but not the name of the product.

So I ran over to my trusted friend Mr. or Ms. Google, depending on your preferred viewpoint and I ran a search using what I could remember of the product, and the name of the CEO,

(Nothing related to the product I was searching for)

Ok, back up and try again…

I tried to search for the general product category, then the name of the CEO, nothing. . .

Ok, now I am getting a little irritated and ready to look somewhere else.

I try for a third time and come up empty, now I am starting to wonder what is going on because I know this is a popular product and should not be that hard to discover using google.

But Now that I am getting frustrated with the user experience now I am starting to feel like the changes google made may not be putting me first, and I am the only reason that Google should be concerned with, (right) well ok probably not, but without people searching google for products they want to buy how long before the stock price of Goog starts to go down.

What I finally had to do was to go on my hard drive and find an email where I had communicated with the CEO and then I was able to get the product name, yes, I know but when you deal with hundreds of CEOs and thousands of products eventually you are bound to forget some details.

Still the issue remains, if consumers cannot find what they are looking for on Google, how long before the high stock prices that they have enjoyed for the past five years start to falter?

I understand the need to combat grey and black hat techniques but not at the expense of the consumer, that is just not a smart way to do business.   So here is hoping that google does the right thing here and develops a better way to present the best search results without interrupting the consumer experience.