Baseball fans in London have just ten online destinations to follow their favorite sport (http://www.google.com/search?q=watch+baseball+london&filter=0), if Google is to be believed. Last week Google offered fourteen. Of course Google finds far more matching results than it reports: 330,000, it tells us. It simply deems 329,993 of them as unfit for browsing, and we can't see them. Why?

Plagued by link farms and blog noise, Google's engineers have resorted to brute force suppression of the search results, in the process, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Recently rival search engines with much smaller resources - they index fewer pages - have trumped Google (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33366.html) by offering clearer, more useful results. In this example, the word 'watch' triggers the anti-spam filter. (You'd think that a better search term for baseball fans which avoids the noun - Watching baseball London (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Watching+baseball+London) would far better: but it doesn't. Google returns just ten out of 94,400 results.

So is Google's policy of indexing more pages more often better? Or do users simply value a few good results? And what are we missing? ®

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