I hope you all had a great holiday season with your friends and family. I know mine was exceptional once again this year.

Here it is the first full working day in 2006. As I sit at my desk looking over various Blogs and posts related to the world of search engines, I can see that 2006 is picking up exactly as 2005 left us… no surprise there. The same issues remain and probably will remain unresolved at good old Google.

Over the holidays with all of the football games being played I went to Google and did a search on the grand daddy of all football related search queries “Free Football Picks”, to see what the results would be. Not wanting to spend a long time going over the 1000 results that every search query should give, I used a string that gives 100 results per page as opposed to the 10 one would normally get.

At the time of this writing I see that Free Football Picks returns over 5 million highly contested results. The thing that is really interesting here is that out of the 5 million plus results, long before you reach the 1000 results limit you are gifted with this message…

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 283 already displayed.If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Hitting the link resets the search and you can now go all the way to the 1000 results. Closer inspection revels that of these 1000 results there are hundreds of pages from football.about.com/ and coversexperts.com/ and to a lesser extent, a few smaller sites.

Now I understand that these two sites have status and I personally use them but, how is it that their old archived football information can out position new, relevant content from other sites to the extent that they do? I have not noticed this problem on any other search engine, only Google. Relevance my ass!