Scott Schuey, chief reporter at Gulf News and all-round good guy, thinks Google isn't doing a good enough job in this part of the world:
I know this is silly. I can give you a list of about ten computer shops in Dubai from memory, so why can't Google? or Yahoo? or Live? Most, if not all, of the computer stores in Dubai have webpages, but not a single search engine was able to actually point me to one. I dug down ten pages into the Google results and wasn't able to find a single link.
Scott thinks that local companies need to do a better job with search engine optimisation (SEO), but I disagree - and I'll tell you why, after the jump.
SEO is the bad guy here. It is the reason that you can rarely find what you want on "commercial" google searches.
Google rocks when it comes to factual information (finding a company website or wikipedia entry or whatever), but type in "boutique hotel in Hong Kong" or "cheapest flights from Dubai to London" and you will get page after page of spam - spam that has been well optimised to make it to the front page of google search results.
What you really want when you type "computer stores in Dubai" is to find a great blog post or newspaper article, written by somebody who knows and cares, listing the city's best computer stores. Sure, someone like CompuMe or Jumbo Electronics could spend more money on getting to the front page, but then, so can anyone, including some random page of googlebait whose entire business model is to get clicks from google searches and surround useless information with ads.
This is where Google is getting slowly ruined. There is real, serious, money in getting among the top ten links, and wherever there is money, rent-seeking spambots and general uselessness will follow.
