What a load of trash

No, it isn't trash. It is called "Panda" or "Quality".

I'm seeing similar things. Not social media, but maybe even worse.
Doing a search with a two word search phrase, lets say "short widget" (141,000,000 results) returns awful results with on the 4th position a website with no useful content (that is if you are not looking for adult type images) but with the very useful domain name "f*ckyeahgirlswithshortwidget". It dus have "short widget" in the domain name, thus it must be a spot on result according to Panda!

I think I'll tell my kids to use a different search engine ...

Its not looking good TBH

In my sector the number 2 position site has no content and the company has gone into receivership with just a holding page of "This webpage is offline and currently unavailable." and has been that way for 5 months

I sent i hope you get better card to Google as its clearly broken and in need of lots of love and tender care

Our brand name site with "brandname.com" dropped to the 4th position for "brand name" search term.
The first 3 are:
1. Our long forgotten Myspace/brandname/photo page with one photo.
2. Our Facebook page
3. Our Twitter page
Now, do we need to set up pages on all social sites? Just think about spammers doing it instead of us!

We still have a problem with a particular search term where wthe other site of ours ranks below a fake Indian facebook page where some guy published content taken from our site.

Go figure!

I am not sure what serps you are looking at so I can't comment on it. I can share my recent experiences social profiles outranking the main site. My research has found Google is typically not at fault but rather the poor work of the company webmaster. I have seen brand websites with almost no backlinks, or blocking googlebot with robots.txt, or using 100% flash so there is no content for googlebot to index. It is no surprise that in those situations the social profile pages will outperform the brand website in the serps.

Instead of complaining about Google serp quality, let's keep the focus on what webmasters can do to fix this problem.

#1 - Make sure the social profile pages link to the brand website. I see many newbie webmasters forget to do this.

#2 - If you add a twitter or facebook button to your page, consider blocking the link juice flowing out of your brand website that is boosting the social profile pages.

#3 - Make sure you add new content to your website first to avoid Google accidentally thinking your website is scraping the social sites and having duplicate content issues.

#4 - Use the social profile pages to drive traffic to your brand site. Tweet about a contest that can be entered by going to the brand site and filling out the form. On Facebook mention that you have discount codes available if they click through to your website.

The tenth result was the company's website.

Wow, first page! My example.com is 500+, I gave up at that point.

There is a twitter.com/example page in the top 15 yet my 1994 example.com is not recognised unless I add at least another keyword yet BingHoo! get it right...I reckon they've got some AdSense people working there now since the results are that bad!

Instead of complaining about Google serp quality, let's keep the focus on what webmasters can do to fix this problem.

A noble sentiment, but my original post was more about the lack of quality in the results rather than any effect they're having on my site (or any other) and how to fix it.

My research has found Google is typically not at fault but rather the poor work of the company webmaster.

So it's the world's webmasters who are to blame, and not the single, solitary web search engine? Hmmm, I like your thinking there...

Taking my webmaster hat off and simply being Joe Oddsox for a moment, doesn't it seem remotely likely that if I want Twitter results, I'll search Twitter and if I want Facebook results, I'll search Facebook?

I know, I know, call me crazy. Or odd.

Believe me, the loss of a good search tool is more depressing than losing 30% of my traffic. Just.

This is the fact that social media has been most important part of internet marketing. This case in not only with you but most of the internet marketers marketing on social media platforms.

I've seen this kind of result, too - but only recently. It surprised me because of all the Twitter results when we know that Google did not renew their deal with Twitter. Even when they had the Twitter Firehose, the Twitter results were not done to this extreme.

I think it's a test of some new idea - and no, for the search where I saw it, I did not find all those tweets useful.

I think it's a test of some new idea

yes, the idea is to propel google+ in the SERPS...

Until now social media was important by its own strengths but since google now has its own new social media site, they will have to find ideas to push them up in SERPS with more vigor, by lifting all checks that were in place for the other social media sites until now.

Now it is the time of Google + but I remember Google Groups, Google wave and some other services.

I think it's a test of some new idea - and no, for the search where I saw it, I did not find all those tweets useful.

My guess: G cannot legally do what has been doing lately, filling the top with G+ for legal and PR issues. So they will use the excuse of 'social' and include some non G+ too. Of course the deck will be stacked but it will seem a bit better, considering how everything Google now does will be scrutinized by the frogs in pot of boiling water.

_{If they cared about non G+ social they would have renewed the Twitter deal, especially since they are frozen out of FB. Twitter wanted to charge them tens of millions a year, IIRC. That's peanuts for Google so it isn't the money but the desire to promote G+ and hurt Twitter at the same time. Follow their long term goals of dominating and short term %$$ goals and you have the answer to almost everything Google related}