Anyone else notices really strange results on Google ( and therefore also on Yahoo and AOL ) in the last few weeks, I keep getting some totally irrelevant results on searches regarless of which Google I use. Anyone know why this is? I have noticed a mass of local sites disappearing.

Hi James, I have been using Google UK, extensively over the last couple of days and I haven?t noticed any odd results. However, I have been mainly looking for New Zealand links, not Thailand links.

nothing on google, but i can't seem to put a reply on this forum for several days....i type out some long answer and post it and it disappears never to be seen...most frustrating...any suggestions??

bob

now for some reason this worked....go figure....it must be thai software??

Tangata, as wife and kids are staying on extra time in HH after NY to see some friends around Prachuap I need to rent a car locally, decent but not the big guys, I searched on Google for Hua Hin Car Rental and came up with just US and Euro links, it took me pages and pages before giving up, went to some local Thai sites and found a decent local company. None of the sites that really had anything relevant were in the top 100.

If you are looking for NZ stuff go to google.co.nz and click where it says 'nz sites only'.

I had an email from a business collegue in USA who says that Google has overhauled how they rank searches.

James,

You are right. I just tried looking for car rentals in both Chiangmai and Hua Hin and I got some stupid results, like 280 Pounds for a Honda Accord! I would be looking at 20 Pounds tops!

I guess the smaller Thai firms don?t register with Google, or maybe Google doesn?t want them.

I almost have our New Zealand trip sorted out. I am just a bit worried about a rental car, the quote I have been given seems very low, scarily so! We normally use Pegasus, but this lot is $24/day cheaper and on a 40 day hire that is a lot.

Email me at [email protected] when you want that beer.

According to my friend in the States the reason is that you have to do all kinds of tricks and have to know how to place words etc etc and also if 100 Brazilian tyre companies link to your site that gives you a better ranks than just having a great site for a guesthouse in Chiang Mai!! I found the HH car rental from Hua Hin's Observer local newpaper site which was at 271 on a simple search for 'Hua Hin', madness! Under 'Pranburi' which is near Prachuap top 10 sites includes Houston and Virginia discount hotels! Seems a mess

Hope to be in CNX early Feb, will let you know!

About NZ, I can only tell you about AU car rental, you get a price which says AUD 29, then the insurance is collosal, I had to pay total AUD79 ( about B 2,000 ) for a small Corolla. If I hadn't taken the 'extra' insurance I could be liable for about AUD4k( B 260,000 ) for any damage, so naturally you have to take the extra, do check it out! Check the insurance add ons, they are often more than the base rental!!

It will have to be early James, we leave for NZ on Feb. 3rd.

I have been talking to A2B their excess is NZ$750 which I shall ignore. I am a Kiwi, so I have hired from most of the companies over the last 35 years that I have been walkabout.

It seems that to get any decent result you really have to put in 'exactly' what you are after, our business is software so luckily I have some good techy lads, but they tell me that unless you put in real full details on the search nowadays you won't get what you want, they also tell me that in the US and Europe there are people who companies 'employ' simply as experts on how to 'tweek' the systems to get a decent position, as all this technical information is in English most local companies with a website don't stand a chance.
Anyway they say that if for example you want a cheap hotel rate for a budget hotel in Hanoi you are wasting your time unless you put in the search box 'cheap hotel rate budget hotel hanoi vietnam', then it seems you get decent sites. So the trick is to, without going over the top, put in about 5 or 6 words that you really want, then it seems ok.
From a 'personal business' side we rank 50 down past multiple foreign irrelevant sites when searching for our type of compter software business for Bangkok and Thailand, a company in Chile with a site in Spanish got in the top 20 when searching for our business type for Bangkok Thailand, because they added every town and city of the world at the end of their sites, sheeeeeez!

I guess that is where Forums come in!!

It seems that every search result is a commercial site in the top 20-50 now, keep on getting hotel booking services and the like for searches that have nothing to do with wanting a hotel! If you want 'information' about a place my suggestions is you put that in your search, if you want information and local content I think the only way is like searchjing for say 'Angkor Wat local information reviews' or similar otherwise you almost surely will miss some good sites.

Searched using Wisenut.com and got much better and more rlevant search results.

Just topping this, interested if anyone has noticed the difference these days? A lot of local sites have disappeared and certainly Thailand and Malaysia searches bring up some strange results.

In addition to (but not necessarily instead of) Google you might want to try Copernic. The basic version is available as a free download from www.copernic.com, with more sophisticated versions available at a price. It's a "metasearch" engine that searches up to individual 17 search engines (in the basic version) including Altavista, AOL and MSN (but not Google) and sorts the results by relevance.