I was sure I wasn't the only one complaining - just that this really pissed me off today, also from the user point of view:
I needed some purely statistical data (absolutely not porn related!) and simply couldn't find it on Google (which used to be my 1st choice in the last 2-3 years). I finally went to Lycos (where I know how to do a specific search like that - unlike Altavista for some weird reason) and on all 5 different topics I got what I needed from the top 6 or 7 listings...
And my stats are now showing that I get more se traffic from Altavista (once I subtract the searches for mydomain.com -
why are people doing that?) than from Google! Yesterday the order was Altavista, MSN Search (which was never big with my sites) and finally 3. came Google - and I wrote them this fact too - after all
Google are in a competative market!
As far as I know they want to float stock next year, and we all know what happened to Excite and Go once they got things wrong...