Google Search

June 20, 2004 9:04 AM

Did anyone else notice Google search behaving oddly yesterday? (more inside)

Yesterday I was searching for some technical information on a car I was working on. Certain combinations of words would return a relevant result then about 1-2 seconds later a mainly irrelevant result would pop into the top spot. This link was not tagged as sponsored, but when the cached page was viewed it contained none of the searched for terms. In once case I was searching on technical terms, and the first link that came up (after the 1-2 second delay) was something ridiculous like "buy head gasket torque on e-bay" with a link to e-bay's main page. I can assure you e-bay's main page had no relevant information on the torque specifications I was seeking.

I tried a few more searches to make sure I was seeing this odd behavior and it was consistent. Whenever you entered a particular word combination that triggered a sponsored result sure enough after a 1-2 second delay, the top result would shift down and the sponsored result would go in.

The behavior is gone today. However, from what I observed it looks like Google is gearing up to "jump the shark" and start putting sponsoired links into their search results. I only hope if they really do roll it out they label the sponsored links as such.

Did anyone else notice this going on yesterday?

posted by jester69 to computers & internet (16 comments total)

It could be Google Advertising, but it could also be spyware. Double check that you havn't picked up something that inserts adverts into google search results.
posted by seanyboy at 9:39 AM on June 20, 2004

I didn't see it, but I've seen Google testing things on their live servers before. They'll often only show something to a randomly selected 0.1% of users (probably less) when they're testing it, and then it'll change for everyone in a week to a month. I do hope they're not going the way of sponsored results in the main results, though (they already have them at the top and the side, after all).
posted by reklaw at 9:48 AM on June 20, 2004

there's this, from Wired (6/19): Google Expands Paid Search: In an effort to generate more money from advertising on content sites, Google has begun letting any Internet publisher host a search on its website and collect revenue from advertiser-sponsored search listings.

Were you going right to google to search or doing it thru another site?
posted by amberglow at 9:49 AM on June 20, 2004

kind of related - when did advertising on iht start? that used to be a beautiful site. whoever added the advertising bits should be shot. or maybe the original design should have included them?
posted by andrew cooke at 9:50 AM on June 20, 2004

I'm still seeing some issues from the Akami DNS problem of this week. I wonder if the odd behavior could be related to that.
posted by yerfatma at 10:04 AM on June 20, 2004

Last night (around midnight) I could load google's main page without a problem, but my queries would timeout. The same thing was happening at yahoo, which led me to belive it was the Akami issue -- don't know if that's related to what you experienced.
posted by TurkishGolds at 12:21 PM on June 20, 2004

I have only been able to reach Google intermittently for two days now - the search, gmail, and toolbar have only been functioning about 25% of the time - pages just load forever and then timeout.

I've been working this weekend, so I have really noticed it. This has been going on since early Saturday morning. I assumed it was more of the Akamai stuff going on - in fact, I came here to see if anyone else was reporting Google snafus. I'm not having trouble with any other sites.
posted by madamjujujive at 12:59 PM on June 20, 2004

Related question:

On a friend's comp, google searches from google's main search page loads a full page of ad-links after each search, requiring one to go to the bottom and click "next" to go to the real 1 to X results page.

This advertising results page looks nearly - but not completely - identical to the real results page. It looks and smells like google, not a browser hijack.

Has anyone else seen this? At first I thought that maybe it was a gmail cookie thing, but it's not.

She's pretty good about keeping spyware off her machine and hunting it down, but she uses the Avant browser in XP, which I'm not familiar with.
posted by loquacious at 2:16 PM on June 20, 2004

Turk, Mad,

"Me too."

I tried to start up OS X lookup services (incase it was an external DNS issue), but that didn't seem to help

Oh, ISP - comcast
posted by filmgeek at 2:47 PM on June 20, 2004

google's been fine for me. here are some numeric ips that might help:
[andrew@ctioyn ~]$ host www.google.com
www.google.com is an alias for www.google.akadns.net.
www.google.akadns.net has address 216.239.39.147
www.google.akadns.net has address 216.239.39.104
www.google.akadns.net has address 216.239.39.99
posted by andrew cooke at 3:36 PM on June 20, 2004

This thread had some responses about sponsored ads on Google search result pages. It doesn't solve the downtime questions, but might be worth a gander if you're still having ad problems like loquacious.
posted by fionab at 3:37 PM on June 20, 2004

Sounds like spyware to me.
posted by fvw at 6:24 PM on June 20, 2004

fionab: Thanks! The first screenshot listed is exactly the page I saw on her machine. Will fix when I get my hands on her box again.

Err... Read that however you want. :)
posted by loquacious at 6:30 PM on June 20, 2004

I was getting it too. I'm convinced it's spyware because the ads were nowhere in the HTML code itself and they appeared only in Internet Explorer. It was just the thing I needed to get me to finally ditch IE and switch to Firefox.
posted by 4easypayments at 7:22 PM on June 20, 2004

andrew, thanks - those numeric isps do help, I can use Google through them just fine. Whew, I was getting facial tics.
I am still having trouble with Google via my toolbar, and also accessing gmail. Yahoo is timing out for me too now - I think it must be the akamai issue or something similar - I'm not having a whit of trouble accessing any other sites.
posted by madamjujujive at 8:02 PM on June 20, 2004

All, I am pretty sure what I saw was not spyware. Only the first result was superseded, all other results stayed the same. Secondly, reputable companies were put into that first slot. Companies, such as e-bay, that would not have paid a spyware firm to do such a thing. Finally, the same browser the next day did not do the same thing, leading me to believe something changed on the server side.

That being said, I have ad-aware installed on that PC and will re-run it just in case. Thanks for all the comments.
posted by jester69 at 8:28 AM on June 21, 2004