I also agree that Google and Bing just want to do one thing: provide the highest quality search results for whatever you are searching for and to prevent people who game the system from appearing ahead of quality of content (gaming the system really boils down to doing the minimum amount of effort to get the maximum exposure – i.e. jump to the first result without quality content and onsite SEO best practices). The benefit to the search engines is that you come back and search more (and see all the AdWords ads).

One example of this, is that I like how they give extra keyword weighting in headings because people often skim headings to see what portion of a page they want to read. Therefore, headings are highly relevant and key to the success of a page and are weighted as such by the search engines.

But personally I use Duckduckgo, Startpage and Ecosia. These three combined give me the best worlds of Google and Bing with enhanced and customizable features for videos, images, instant and related searches, appearance, security/privacy (no tracking, no ads) and much more under the hood.

A recent example was in a very specific search for a song my band plays. Despite that fact that the particular song (a top chart song from the 70s) is published all over the web, Google kept showing me YouTube videos of people covering the song — not instruction on how to play the song. They showed me membership sites that only offered to sell me subscriptions to access all their songs.

Google also could not seem to understand that I wanted sheet music, tab, a guitar tutorial — it just kept shoving other stuff my way and never did produce what I was looking for.

This is also the case in many of my local searches now. I Google something in Los Angeles and get results from Florida, Missouri — all over.

I understand (and loved) all your thoughts and agree that search engines strive to please consumers first — they should. But Google has made so many changes that it now seems to have made search results so variable and with all the wrong data. For example, I don’t want Google to factor in my previous searches, what I bough in Amazon or liked on Facebook. I want my searches to be clean and fresh from assumptions because multiple family members use my PC for their own stuff.

That said, playing by the rules used to be enough. Serving your consumers used to be enough but now, I feel like we are reverting a bit — it is harder to show in searches even when playing by the rules and making your site all about your people (and not search engines.) But what does show in search is often mind boggling in how wrong they got it.

I think you should also write an article on how users can get a better experience from Google. It’s only fair!