Google Search is changing...

There is still one area of Google search results that irks me - when you do a search and it throws up results for major websites and when you click, what you searched on is not actually there, or page has no relevance to your specific search. But the big names are given prime spots, such as gumtree, zoopla and ebay. They give pages that are no longer available, have only partial or no relevance but they show something else instead anyway. This is not good and is extremely common-place so how does Google justify these results? I thought all results were supposed to be relevant and accurate to our search keywords? Well still, in these instances, they are not.

For 404 pages, it's annoying but I guess its down to crawler refreshes to update Googles cache. Bigger sites will have a lot more churn and will be removing more pages. We've been moaned at that a listing is still being displayed in the serps, 2 weeks after we've taken it down. The fact it goes to a 404 is irrelevant if the former listing owner doesn't want it in googles results, or showing up for a keyword search.

Lack of relevance though has been an age old issue I think they still haven't cracked, and serps (I think) are more crowded/polluted with Adwords and G+ local results rather than organic. Having the knowledge graph in its current incarnation seems to reduce the organic results even further.

But until people vote with their mice and we have genuine competition, it's a case of playing the game

Sometimes 404 yes, but the majority are just nonsense pages that contain your keyword at the top of the page, usually in some sort of database result being shown, but don't actually have any info regarding that keyword.