German web searches suck

From our We-are-sure-about-this Department.

We have touched on odd internet rules in Germany issue in a couple of earlier posts, for example Internet Connection More Dangerous Than Gun.

And just this week, the German parliament passed a law aimed at forcing search engines to pay for search preview content unless they show "very short snippets of no more than a few words". Many experts call this sad, or crazy, we call it "job enrichment for lawyers".

But this post is about something altogether different, it is about "the use and usability" of the German language portion of the Internet.

The whole thing is quite strange because the basic premises and facts all point to the German internet being as pervasive and as good as you'd expect from one of the world's four or five largest economies.

We looked at figures, at expert articles, at international rankings, and found that all was pretty much alright, and yet, something felt very wrong about our daily user experience.

Previous posts of the K-Landnews contain ample examples for our attitude towards premature conclusions: usually, when we see one, we jump.

But our definitive answer to the strangeness of the German web was slow to emerge, and we gave ourselves time to reduce, if not eliminate, the language barrier aspect. If you don't speak French, good luck searching the web in French. Same for German.

We gave it a few years and now we can claim: German web searches tend to suck.

The point is: a huge number of searches conducted in German will give you so much irrelevant crap, so many ad farms, so many aggregators, so many cookie cutter shell sites that the good stuff if much harder to find than for searches in English.

Yes, the German web portion has everything, from news sites to gardening, from shareware to shopping galore, from dating to porn, from pet care to pediatrics but good results are hard to get.

We did account for some language specifics, for example, the mind boggling use of compound nouns as well as for the wider gap between government speak and general language usage, or technical terms versus generic language.

Still, even simple one word searches bring up as much trash as the Pacific garbage patch. You, the little internet bird, run the danger of choking on useless bits of degraded data.

The one browser feature that has saved us: bookmarks. We use them much more for German web sites than for English ones.

Along the lines of the undervalued famous disclaimer "past performance is no guarantee of future success", we can now claim that the country that brought you the printing press has yet to deal with its digital mess.

[Update 11/2015] Search engine companies continue to tweak their handling of German (and hundreds of other languages), and we have seen small improvements. But the headline is still very much true.

The law "ancillary copyright", as use of this unspecified amount of text is called, has worked out great: the big search engine companies asked publishers to agree to a waiver or face delisting and lose the substantial traffic generated by the news listings.
The big publishers gave in and focused their extortion efforts on small aggregators as well as renewed political efforts at the EU level.

Money for nothing is just too tempting.