A family member's been using a teeth-whitening "system" called Idol White. It's a pen with a brush; you wipe stuff from the brush onto your teeth, something magical happens, and your teeth (supposedly) get whiter. And it's endorsed by the Kardashians!
I'm skeptical of magic bullets that offer no explanation for how they work (I'm also dubious when the endorsement is from the Kardashians), so when I was sent home from the holidays with one of these whitening pens, I decided to do some research. The results were incredibly frustrating.
This post is about how sometimes Google fails us. For tips on how to get better results when a simple Google search isn't working, check out our guide to tweaking your search when Google didn't deliver.
Here's a screenshot from the first page of Google results for Idol White:
First of all, this product's apparent home page (IdolWhite.com) lands nowhere on the first page of results—instead, the first result is a .ORG site set up in some crappy blog template. Next, you've got page after page of other splogs (spam + blogs) with domain names like IdolWhiteReview.org, IdolWhiteReviewed.net, IdolWhiteTeeth.org, and so on. If you're wondering about that last result in the screenshot: "Idol White - Is Idol White A Scam? Discover Our Shocking Review!", which is hosted at IdolWhiteExposed.com, don't. It'll set your fears to rest without once discussing anything shocking. You'll find plenty of similar "scam"-related results, like IdolWhiteScam.net, which explains—without qualification of any sort—that Idol White is not a scam!
Idol White is an effective method and it has satisfied a number of consumers around the world, so nobody can talk about a Idol White Scam.
Makes sense.
After a lot of searching and filtering, you'll find it nearly impossible to find anything of substance written about Idol White by any reputable third party. Instead, you've got page after page of blogs with bad advertising copy written by robots.
It may seem disingenuous to blame Google, since Google isn't the only search engine on the block. And what if no one's written anything about Idol White except for the splogs? What's Google to serve up then? The problem is that these splogs are so low quality—full of such nonsense—that they really don't belong in any search results, ever.
No one's really blaming Google (the same search on Bing, for example, wasn't any more helpful). But Google is, well, Google. They're a verb. If they're fighting a losing battle in certain realms of search, that's a problem for users.
Part of the issue is that my Idol White search is a product search, and these splogs make product search incredibly difficult. As former Tumblr developer and Instapaper creator Marco Arment put it:
Over the years, the impact of spam — mostly affiliate marketing and auto-generated splogs — has decimated the usefulness of the "product research" category. It's impossible to do any meaningful product research with Google.
To be fair, a lot of us head to destinations like Amazon for user-generated product reviews, but even Amazon doesn't have anything to offer related to Idol White.
Unfortunately there's no simple, catch-all solution from the user's perspective. If Google's working correctly, you shouldn't need to employ any unusual search skills or esoteric tricks to get better results—and most of the time, you don't. Still, many of you, and many others, feel that Google—which earned its success specifically for its ability to get you the results you want—has been losing the battle to spam or SEO-focused content sites serving up quantity over quality.
Hopefully that will improve. Just last week Google's Matt Cutts announced that said they're working to increase the quality of results in search. In the meantime, most of us do occasionally run into search problems that a regular Google search just won't answer. For those instances, check out our guide to the best tweaks for your search when Google didn't deliver.
Want to vent with your similar experience? We'd like to hear about it in the comments.
This post is ultimately more about Google than Idol White, but for what it's worth: Idol White does appear to be of a scam-y nature involving some sort of fraudulent free trial—or at least that's the best I came up with. I still have no idea whether it has any credibility as a product, but it's clear I'd never want it touching my teeth.