Dare Obasanjo on his Carnage4Life blog has a great entry on what some companies are doing to screw up the web experience. I'll let you read the details on his site but number 4 in his list really hit home for me. Many times I've been searching for a solutions to some obscure IT issue and after seemingly discovering a link to a possible solution I discover that I must "register" to see the page that was in the search engine result list. I think this is a creepy thing to do (letting the search engines "see" the information without registration but forcing real humans to register to view the info), but Dare expresses it much better than I do:

Forums that Require Registration Showing Up in Search Results : Every once in a while I do a Web search for a programming problem and a couple of links to Experts Exchange end up in the results. What is truly annoying about this site is that the excerpt on the search result page makes  it seem as though the answer to your question is one click away but when you click through you are greeted with “All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only”. I thought search engines had rules about banning sites with that sort of obnoxious behavior?

A List of Companies Working Hard to Screw Up My Web Experience

 

Dare works for Microsoft....I wish he would use some of his influence to help improve Microsoft's websites...