[Productivity]

I remember the day when I gave up all hope for Internet search engines. That was when the search results I got on page one were filled with nothing but useless instances of the keywords in my search query. Then Google came into the picture and revolutionized how search was done, and suddenly the Internet was useful again.

But today, Google seems to be plagued by new kinds of search problems. It seems that most Google searches I do these days seem to come up with Facebook profiles and Tweets right on page one – not really the kind of information I find. It's usually easy enough to find the relevant hits at first glance, but when Twitter “pollution” gets so bad that it knocks Wikipedia off the top spot, it's a pretty serious hurdle.

This isn't the first time Google faced this kind of problem. In the early parts of this decade, the rapidly-growing number of blogs also began swamping search results. They fixed this problem fairly quickly by adding a blog search feature, but even this remains hard to work with to this day.

Granted, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has made the Internet more useful and enjoyable for millions of people. But there are still some strange creatures out there who use the Internet for only its informational capabilities and not its recreational side. These creatures are the ones who move the world, and when they no longer have Google on their side, they may need to start looking elsewhere.

It's going to be a strange world where people start using other search engines over Google...

Still, it's not the first time Google got hounded by such problems in search. Even with their constantly changing parameters and indexing procedures, they still sometimes struggle to bring relevant results to page one. This is probably the reason why Google is keeping new search engines like Cuil on the horizon – if Cuil gets its act together and starts bringing better search results, “cuiling” might soon make it to the dictionary too.

Suddenly, searching on Twitter doesn't seem like a bad idea. For one, social media platforms seem to pick up on breaking news much more quickly. Google is great at giving you news stories that happened eight hours ago. But for news as-it-happens, it's probably better to look through relevant Tweets.

Of course, Google can just buy Twitter...