Open Web Directory makes Google Site Search less relevant

Google site: operator for performing Site Restricted Search is one of the most useful Google search operators. Very often, I find myself using the Google search in conjunction with the site operator to search across some particular website rather than using that website’s own search box.

The same is true for Google website as well. Say, if I am looking for examples of Google adsense formats, I prefer to add site:google.com to my query and search directly from the main Google search page rather than visiting www.google.com/adsense and then clicking Help.

But at times, the results are far more different than what one would expect them to be. And the main cause for these “not so relevant” results is the Google Open Directory project.

While every Google service has a separate subdomain (Google Answers - answers.google.com, Google Groups - groups.google.com) - Google, for some unknown reason, choose to place Google Directory service at two places - one under the main www.google.com domain (www.google.com/alpha/.. or www.google.com/top/…) and the other under a separate directory.google.com domain. And the former kind of arrangement is leading to less relevant results when using site search restricted to www.google.com.

If I want to see google.com webpages that contain the term “Microsoft Office”, I would frame a query something like “site:www.google.com Microsoft Office" - but this query will also show me webpages from the Google Directory since they are located under the www.google.com domain but are not written by any of the Google staff and are not related to any of the Google products or services.

Can I request Google Webmasters for a small change in the Google sitemap. Please use only directory.google.com for Google Directory listing and remove that same information from google.com/top or google.com/alpha subdirectories.

I know this could be a massive exercise since the Google directory contains over 1.5 million URLs. But the current site structure is showing duplicate information at different three URLs. The removal of google.com/top and google.com/alpha subdirectories would also make site search restricted to google.com more relevant and useful.