Search engines are great shopping resources – for video games, cameras, or even summer camps. But for practical information, the search engines have run into serious trouble. Commercial sites elbow out more substantial, community-minded resources, which have become nearly impossible to find. Fortunately, these problems can be fixed if search engine companies work to balance community and commercial needs more effectively.

Our Askquestions.org reporters are currently researching an article about residential treatment programs for troubled teenagers. As a result, I know that there are many excellent information sources available. Plenty of academics, nonprofits, advocacy groups, magazine writers, and public agencies provide noncommercial information about treatment options that work, how to find them, and what to avoid. But when I plugged the phrase "troubled teen" into Google, the results were astonishingly commercial.

None of the magazine articles, parent-to-parent advice groups, expert opinions, or public policy information I know about turned up on Google. Instead, I was confronted with a staggering number of listings all pointing to one commercial option: coercive residential treatment centers (RTCs) including boot camps, wilderness programs and expensive private schools. Costing between $1000 and $2500 per week and lasting for many weeks or months, RTCs are a growing and profitable industry. But the consensus opinion among experts we consulted is that families should first seek local, community-based programs that treat the whole family, not just the teen. And although plenty of community-based programs are available, they didn't show up in my Google search.

The following table shows my analysis of top 100 non-sponsored results for the "troubled teen" search I conducted in June 2004 at Google. I looked at each of these 100 sites, noting interconnections between the various sites, the links among them, and the people behind them. Only 15 percent of the listings were the kind of nonprofit, noncommercial resources that would be most useful to parents.

Searching on the phrase ‘troubled teen’	Google
Total number of results	448,000
Total Listings per Page (sponsored and non-sponsored)	20
Percent of first page, non-sponsored results that are commercial	80%
Percent of the top 100 results that are non-commercial	15%
Number of valuable news articles in the first 100 results	13
Number of commercial sites with multiple listings in top 100	16

Clearly, the RTCs have a web-marketing program that works very well to recruit potential new customers, and Google is a key element for them. Their sites interlink to one another, which boosts their Google rankings. A parent who wanders into one site tends to get stuck inside a kind of RTC echo chamber where no other treatment options are considered, and no dissenting views are expressed. None of the commercial sites quote independent information sources, for example, even though there are plenty available. And none of them refer to media reports or news articles about themselves or their industry.

Good journalism was surprisingly hard to find, too. My Google search turned up 13 news articles in the top 100 results for "troubled teen," but none of the excellent, cautionary reporting on RTCs from the New York Times, Fox News, and Salon.com (among others) that I know is available.

From a user's viewpoint, this search experience is frustratingly commercial. All of the most effective and affordable treatment options are missing. Journalists, academics and other impartial information sources are scarce and hard to find in the overwhelming numbers of sites served up. Welcome advice from other parents cannot be heard. And important government research information does not appear. The results are wildly out of balance in favor of commercial rather than consumer needs. It's time for Google to upgrade their product for consumers.

I'd like to see a Community Channel on Google similar to their Google.com/UncleSam channel, which restricts search results to government sites. Consumers would appreciate having the same option to bypass commercial sites. Google also needs to boost the visibility of credible media sites and to set more rigorous standards for the commercial sites. Clearly, the RTCs are using link exchanges, redirected links, and other technical gimmicks to elbow out the sites consumers might prefer to find.

As a gatekeeper to the Internet, Google has the opportunity to develop a workable middle ground between consumer goals and commercial ones. And if Google isn't the search engine company that meets this challenge, then consumers should keep searching for a better alternative.

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Cheryl Woodard is a cofounder of PC Magazine, PC World, Macworld and the Macworld Expos, and author of the book, Starting and Running a Successful Newsletter or Magazine (Nolo Press, 4th edition, 2004). A full-time business consultant to publishers, Woodard also serves on the board of the Independent Press Association. Interested readers can find a more detailed analysis of this search experience at the public interest news site where she serves as executive director, AskQuestions.org, along with a list of the good resources not found in Google.