What do think will come of Google's big changes in indexing and search result pages? It just seems less reliable to me now. What do you think?

I haven't really noticed Google being less reliable. I know a lit of people have been seeing problems, but I've been finding the sites I want at the same rate I always have been. It's possible I'm just searching in the wrong places, but I am still finding what I need as quickly as I was before.

I suspect some of those claiming Google is unreliable are referring mostly to their own pages not doing well as before and often the case is simply that they've been practicing some kind od seo that Google no longer cares for.

I think in other cases there have been legitimate problems which seems kind of natural to me when things change. It can take a little time for the new stuff to sort itself out and I suspect over time Google will try to fix any of the real problems that may have happened with the update.

Originally Posted by kline11

What do think will come of Google's big changes in indexing and search result pages? It just seems less reliable to me now. What do you think?

I neither had finding anything in any sort of problems nor had any problems with the site as well so I am not in a good position to predict anything apart from what it could be more in improving quality.

But there have been a lot of complains from people that got their sites out of the index because she spam filter messed it up. Ie, some of these 850 comments:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

In my opinion that makes Google less reliable as is penalising some sites that are following the guidelines.

Yeah, but when you look at many of those complaints a lot of the site owners were enaging in practices designed to manipulate Google. I wouldn't call that Google messing up. I'm sure it's possible that Google has made a few mistakes and some sites have been de-indexed for nothing they did wrong, but in most cases the sites in questions were doing something they shouldn't have been.

Yep every change in Googles algo causes "colateral damage"

The changes in the past year/18 months have mainly been to combat link spamming. So any site\webmaster that has relied on massive link exchange campaigns or simply getting large volumes of dubious links are finding their "strategy" isn't working anymore