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WTF is up with Google?

I havent been online in a few days, but today I was trying to do a search for "Dawn of the dead." The search results seemed to be all merchant websites like amazon, etc. It used to be I would live by google because of their great search results. Anyone know anything about this? Is it gonna go back to the way it was?
 
I read a thread about the same thing the other day... had never noticed anything wrong. But later that day, and since then, a lot of my searches are resulting in a ton of ad type results, plus links to other searches for the same topic. Annoying! (to say the least).

Apparently google changed the way they're collecting sites.
 
Originally posted by: DrPizza
I read a thread about the same thing the other day... had never noticed anything wrong. But later that day, and since then, a lot of my searches are resulting in a ton of ad type results, plus links to other searches for the same topic. Annoying! (to say the least).

Apparently google changed the way they're collecting sites.
Gee, imagine that, a soon go be a publically traded company selling out.
😉

 
Originally posted by: krunchykrome
I havent been online in a few days, but today I was trying to do a search for "Dawn of the dead." The search results seemed to be all merchant websites like amazon, etc. It used to be I would live by google because of their great search results. Anyone know anything about this? Is it gonna go back to the way it was?

wtf are you talking about? only 1 page in the top ten is a merchant page.
 
I've seen spyware and browser hijacking that somehow takes over the search results in Google. Basically, any search string will produce all commercial links. Only by going to page 2 of the search results are Google's actual results displayed. Freaked me out when I first saw this type of spyware.
 
The huge amount of Amazon affiliate pages are the result of so many people using scripts such as the Amazon Products Feed (APF) which allow anyone with a web site to basically sell every item at Amazon. Google seems to like these pages, and many times will index tens of thousands of "pages" which were generated dynamically from these scripts, and therefore a lot of them show up for search results - especially when you do a search for a particular product that Amazon carries. Luckily this trend is starting to slow down, as Google is starting to penalize all these sites with basically the exact same content, and therefore their position in the results should drop, hopefully bringing more relevant pages to the top of the results.
 
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