A lot of ‘parking pages’ these days are not a bad experience for most Internet searches.

Now this is a BAD Internet search experience for someone looking for ‘ever’ or ever.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ever&btnG=Google Search

When I look at almost any Google results page…all I see is a bad PPC landing page with ads and 1 or 2 ‘Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia’ results in the top 1-4 spots of the ‘actual’ part of Google thats suppose to be a Internet search engine.

If I want results from Wikipedia…I would just go there.

Google search has become nothing more than… one big AD aggregator…which to me… has nothing at all to do with Internet search.

Google has been so busy trying to become ‘MSapplegoo’… that internet search is not evolving at all.

Because everyone has the additude… ‘thats just the way it is’.

IMHO

As with anything…only time will tell.

Peace!
Dan

In the seatac.com example, I agree that domain should be for seatac airport. You chose a case of no ambiguity - there is nothing publishable for seatac.com more relevant than seatac’s airport. But there could be… Seatac is a city. Were Seatac.com a city directory, how would you decide what was most relevant? Presumably you would let the market decide between www.portseattle.org/seatac/ and seatac.com, based on actual use (in a perfect world)? From what I see seatac.com has very targeted links on it now for airport parking and travel etc. Aside from no link to the Port of Seattle, not too shabby a user experience?

As Google steps in an makes these judgements as to whether or not seatac.com is relevant for a search of “seatac.com”, Google takes on responsibility. Google also insulates the Port of Seattle (in this case) from the market forces they are supposed to manage — if seatac.com is so perfectly relevant for them, why didn’t or don’t they use it? Is Google inhibiting market liquidity in the domain space by editorializing like this? And if Google didn’t do this, how long before we would achieve steady state with perfect-match domains resolving to perfect content?

To be fair, I agree that if Google always ranked poorly-done parked pages, they would never go away nor improve. Surely you have click data I don’t have to support market-driven relevance?

I agree that if a user searches for example.com, they often want example.com to be returned. But I have also seen how much most users dislike most parked pages. I think the instance above is a good example of why Google’s policies are pretty reasonable, but each search engine will have different philosophies about how to handle url queries and parked domains.

If you want to send me 1-2 counter examples (I think you’ve got my email address), I’d be open to arguments that Google could pursue different/better policies on url queries and parked domains.

If you search for ever.com on MSN or Ask, they don’t return the site either. Yahoo does return ever.com, but it also returns lots of parked domains: yeah.com for the search [yeah.com], okra.com for [okra.com], and seatac.com for [seatac.com], so it’s most likely that Yahoo doesn’t detect some parked domains. Heck, okra.com goes straight to yeah.com as far as I can tell.

So why assume the worst about Google when 3 out of 4 engines don’t return ever.com, and the 4th engine returns quite a few parked domains?

John replies: Thanks for the comment, Matt.

If a user searches ever.com, why would Google not return ever.com as the most relevant answer? I suppose that is the hardest thing for me to understand. Even if Google doesn’t like ever.com for some reason, the user has specifically asked for it, no? I can stretch to accept that Google would not return slapmyasswithacomputervirus.com out of concern for user safety, perhaps. While you suggest that Yahoo! returns ever.com for the search ever.com because Yahoo! “doesn’t detect some parked domains”, could it be that Yahoo! returns ever.com for searches of ever.com simply because that is what the user wanted? That is the most relevant result?

It seems to me that Google has a quandary regarding direct traffic (queries where the user enters only a valid URL). If you accept it in the search query field, but don’t present the canonical domain as the most relevant result, aren’t you taking an editorial position? At that point, isn’t massaging of the SERPs potentially censorship? When Google inserts the Google Toolbar onto the browser page in a way that circumvents the location bar (by prominance, perhaps) it hijacks the direct traffic stream. Again, under that scenario, messing with the SERP is akin to censorship, no?

Most every domain out there has an “about” page or a “FAQ” which is relevant for searches “about” their site. I simply don’t understand why Google would block those and/or not serve them up for direct queries, where they (obviously?) represent a highly relevant result.

Please keep in mind I have to refer to these examples (e.g. Digimedia, ever.com in this case ) and not the specific sites I am most concerned with, because of Google’s track record on SEO and Google’s low level of transparency with respect to de-listing/demoting sites. I totally respect your desire to address specifics to help out, and I’ve tried to keep my questions here on-track so we can still make progress without naming specific sites.

And then look around you and wonder why so many people obviously understand what’s going on and yet are prepared to accept it and those who are the mouthpieces of Google.