To which I say "Who Cares!?" That's not a useful measure of which websites are the best.
Instead try searching for something like a toaster. Do a search like "good toaster" or "crappy toaster" or "toaster reviews" and see how much "etailer" or retailer noise you get, or even better all these lame 3rd rate search "aggregator" sites that claim to have what you are looking for but are mostly there to push you to whatever retail sites that they are in cahoots with.
Someone please come out with a search site that allows me to exclude retail sites, other search engine sites or even blogs or include any of the above. Ability to be set to only show corporate sites (like if you search for toaster and only get sites of companies that manufacture them like Cuisinart, Sunbeam, GE, etc.) would also be great.
Companies realized that spam was quickly becoming a dead-end solution to getting customers and have instead turned to the search engines for bringing customers to their sites. Just as spam has made email a lot harder to use, so these search spammers are making sites like Google that much harder to use.
Alex, one interesting move in this regard is what Mark Cuban is doing with Ice Rocket. Ice Rocket allows you to search only blogs. Now this is not perfect. There is still an ad as the first result and tricky marketers also have been inventing fake blogs that really just link to commercial sites. But it's a start. Of course, if you are looking to avoid blogs, well then that may be a little more difficult.
Posted by: Thomas Hawk | Monday, May 16, 2005 at 09:06 AM