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I went to bed last night trying to recall what is it that I was looking for a few days back when I thought "Umm... Google is pretty useless..." Looking back at my @kulesh I believe it must have been something to do with i18n and I recall finding what I was looking for from Stack Overflow instead.

Yesterday I found three discussions on the same topic:

• Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail
• Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
• The End Of Hand Crafted Content
• Why Social Beats Search
• Search and the social graph

We constantly try hard to get better ranking for our content and products at Digital Assembly. Therefore, I have some vested interest in search engines and their ranking of content. More on that later.

When the keywords you're looking for return lots of advertisements on Google, rest assured the search results are pretty useless. In such cases I move on to localize my search to expert sites like Consumer Reports, Stack Overflow, and the like. Sometimes I use Google itself with site:www.example.com [my keywords] to carry on but most of the time I am on the site itself. Given that Google knows which keywords are popular among advertisers, I am sure Google can help make this process a bit easier on their users. The question is how and what can Google do that is hard to game.

Edit: Lot more conversations happening since I posted this. I have added a couple of more links above.