water cooler :: Is google starting to suck?
Is it me on the fast track to senility or is it getting harder to get decent results from google?
During a recent project I searching was for specific apps and info but keep ending up at, huge shareware/freeware sites or, some sort of fake search/advertising sites that were just relisting my keywords as links to others sites 
My impression is that for some time ..... people/companies have found ways to get their (barely related) pages into the top search results.
End of rant, and this is one time where I hope I'm just going crazy 
...... I've been a big fan of google since it started.
Cheers
rob
Unless you're talking about locating apps for your win98 VM, I've always found that google.com/linux is very reliable in finding applications. Typically one of the first results is the Freshmeat page for that particular program, which has a link to its homepage.
Thanks for the http://google.com/linux tip! For Linux apps I've tended to search the debian reposititories or go directly to Freshmeat.
Re: Frustating search results. Probably just me failing to cope with the growing complexity of the interweb 
Cheers
rob
I agree that google results are getting worse, companies are probably actively improving their google result position with bots, very easy to do.
Yup, Google sucks big style at the moment. Almost the first page of any search for a product name or a simple set of (non numeric) keywords is "buy this here" or "compare prices for thing at our shop".
Especially annoying is the increasing lack of localisation. Why do I, searching from google.co.uk, want to know special offers from the US? Very few of the budget resellers will ship to the UK anyway.
I have switched back to webcrawler and altavista, two of the great originals.
BUT did these two not used to allow regex search terms? Can't seem to make it work nowadays.
Maybe we could put a regex filter onto google to remove adverts... 
TTFN
DrR
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