[Pound6F]

I think google is going about this the wrong way. They are claiming its a bad user experience for the search term to be down on the page or not have any content at the top but (1) that is far too generic a statement to make and (2) it is not Google's responsibility to make sure pages align to a certain design standard. They are essentially adding design requirements into their search algorithm. This restricts the design of any webpage that wants to optimize its Google ranking.

[mbell]

This change is awesome.

I can't count the number of times I've googled something, clicked on a promising result and immediately hit ctrl-f to re-search the resulting page for what I was looking for. Often it is either hard to find or not really there in general. Maybe its a link to somewhere else, or a partial text from another article, or simply 5 pages down due to a horrible layout.

Anything google can do to reduce this terrible UX is worthwhile.

[mey]

Ultimately Google is making a stand for user of it's search (Who they make money off of) by providing what the user wants. Which is easier and quicker access to information.

If your primary business model is free content, ad supported, and rely on google as your search engine, you don't have much of a choice.

Right or wrong, your business model is Google dependent, and you are held hostage. If you don't like that, it's time to find another business model.

(Google being a monopoly is another issue, but no search engine is required to carry your content for discovery (yet, who knows what congress will throw at the wall next year))

[TomGullen]

Agree completely! A lot of people who run sites seem to think Google should be serving them and they are victims of unfair algorithms. Google is actually serving the people who search.

[tikhonj]

Ah, but it is Google's job to make sure the pages are well designed. The top-level goal of a search engine is to deliver the best results possible. Once a result is sufficiently relevant, the quality of the site matters. Given two sites equally relevant to my query, I definitely want Google to prefer the well-designed one over an annoying, ad-ridden mess that's hard to read.

There is nothing wrong with restricting the design of a webpage aiming for a good Google ranking: as long as it results in better websites rising in the results, it's a good thing.

[TomGullen]

This reads a bit like hyperbole, this is just another ranking factor in an ocean of ranking factors. To react to this news by redesigning all your sites using this ranking factor as your primary focus would be a mistake.

Google's objective here is to reduce the ranking of bad quality ad ridden sites that attempt to serve as middle men between search results and a sale, low quality made for adsense sites. Anything google does to help rank these lower is good in my books.

[Pound6F]

Reducing ad ridden sites is great, but they are doing that in a roundabout way and taking down potentially useful sites in the process.

The point is not that sites with ads at the top should be as high in the results as sites without ads, but that using such a high-level heuristic (as they claim) is a poor way to lower (or raise) the rank of a page.

Google could also do a lot more work to show you WHERE on the page your search occurs. That would do a lot more to address the problem than just lowering the rank of pages where your search is lower on the page.

[resnamen]

Their instant preview feature tells you exactly that. The paragraph containing your search terms is marked by a red rectangle.