The day Google became irrelevant

I keep reading posts and articles claiming that "Google is the best search engine".

The way I see it, it may still be the most popular search engine, but it's no longer "the best".
It has been beaten a while ago at usability by live.com for image search; it has been beaten in maps quality and features by local.live.com/VEarth, and recently it's not even longer "the best" for relevance of simple web searches...

You want the proof?

Here's a comparative search for a product mentioned in my previous blog post.



There's been more than 10 days since the post was created and google hasn't indexed it yet. To me this is even more unexplicable when I remember that blogger.com is also a Google-owned site. You'd think they'd index first the information on their own servers...

You may argue that Google's indexes have grown too big when compared with other search engines, that it has to make less frequent passes over the already indexed sites. Let's go with this theory and see what "less frequent" means.
Here's a comparative search for my wife's name.



There are now 2 month since my wife has changed jobs and Google still hasn't realized it. Flavia's contact info has been my site for at least 2 years now, yet it doesn't show up on Google in the top 50 results...

I'm sorry for those Microsoft haters out there who repeat ad nauseam "Google is the best", but at least to me, Google has lost its search relevance. I guess it's time for other search engines to step up and take the leadership.