Google Local Suggest Nearly Broken and Mostly Useless

POSTED BY socialdude on Dec 29 under rankings

Chances are you’ve seen me complain about Google local suggest throwing local results in for queries that shouldn’t be local. IMHO unless I specify a local parameter you shouldn’t be suggesting one. I understand that might be personal preference. Recently, however, I’ve seen queries with local results that contradict the one included in the search term. IMHO this reaffirms how broken and nearly useless Google SERP’s are becoming today.

Recently, I was doing a search for [beaches of the caribbean] and Google decided it would be helpful to include local results from my nearest ISP location, Bellmore*.

If I am searching for locations that aren’t populated/well established, I could understand Google not quite getting the location name. But if Google is as intuitive as they want us to believe, then it should know full well the “Caribbean” is a location. And Bellmore is a location. But Bellmore is on Long Island, New York. The Caribbean is about 2000 miles south. The way Google is currently guessing makes the search suggestions as annoying and useless as Microsoft clippy. However, unlike Microsoft, Google treats us like children and doesn’t give us the ability to turn it off. Please Google stop coddling the developers and releasing half-baked functions into the algorithm. At this point it’s becoming embarrassing.

*For those of you with really good memories, I actually live in Wantagh not Bellmore. But that’s ok, since almost every ISP trace routine lists me as Bellmore.

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Google Local Suggest Nearly Broken and Mostly Useless