Is Google accepting money to weight search results?

January 22, 2004 7:20 AM

Is Google accepting money to weight search results? [more inside]

In today's first article on Something Awful, the author says that they are, citing this search for "bbs board". I had noticed similar oddities when doing two recent searches of my own, "how to string a mandolin" and "how to tune a mandolin". Porn and cell phone ringtones were definitely not what I was expecting to see in my first pages of results. What's the deal, yo?

posted by UKnowForKids to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

oh good, it's not only me. i thought i'd lost my search mojo, heh. lately most of my google searches bring me nothing but pages and pages of... i don't know what to call them. marketing sites that have nothing to do with what i'm looking for. i figured they were all using misleading meta-tags to come up higher in various searches, but when i check their source pages i find this isn't so.
posted by t r a c y at 7:32 AM on January 22, 2004

what makes you think that google is complicit in this? it looks like old-fashioned search engine spamming to me.

Even the somethingawful link attributes the problem to "neglected software", not to payola.
posted by jpoulos at 7:36 AM on January 22, 2004

errr...retract that last line above. (note to self: read entire article before pretending to know what it says.)
posted by jpoulos at 7:38 AM on January 22, 2004

Response by poster: The weird thing is that this looks like those tricks that were screwing with Yahoo years ago - loading up a page with dozens of unrelated search phrases to get hits for your porn site. But Google has done such a good job of filtering out this trash in the past that it must be a new kind of scam (if it's not payola, which I am also inclined to doubt is the case, jpoulos).
posted by UKnowForKids at 7:45 AM on January 22, 2004

Might explain a bit?

Things have settled down somewhat (well, at least for the sites I work with) but not across the board from what I'm reading on other forums.
posted by romakimmy at 7:57 AM on January 22, 2004

When you find those crappy marketing sites infiltrating your search terms, do let Google know. They'll work on clearing them out.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:20 AM on January 22, 2004

I don't get it. Where's the evidence? One user's searches don't really mean much. It seems more likely Google has some fixing to do, either due to the Florida update or MT comment spam or something else. It's not like they perfected searching the web back in aught two and are now selling out 'cause they're overcome by ennui.
posted by yerfatma at 8:22 AM on January 22, 2004

Mmm. the burst of commercial shit on google made me look for other search engines for the first time recently. I'm sick of searching for, say, "trees" and getting a page-load of links to sites that then say "your search for trees turned up nowt, but buy this, why don't you."

there's definitely something clever going on, because google is somehow indexing search engine *results* pages (or static pages dressed up to look like results pages, I guess)

Perhaps the question needs rephrased: are there alternatives to google to use while it sorts its shit out?
posted by bonaldi at 8:52 AM on January 22, 2004

Google changed some of their algorthyms recently and there are kinks to work out.
posted by mathowie at 9:40 AM on January 22, 2004

are there alternatives to google to use while it sorts its shit out?

Sure. AllTheWeb has been getting positive reviews for a while now.
posted by yerfatma at 9:47 AM on January 22, 2004

I don't get where this paranoia about Google taking bribes comes from. If it were possible to pay for placement, wouldn't there be a mechanism in place for them to accept these payments? If they were taking cash, wouldn't they want everyone's cash? Usually these accusations come from people who lost standing in an index shuffle or algorithm tweak, so they are understandably upset, but it's still not rational.

Google's being exploited by the quasi-spammy SEO types.

Take a look at google.public.support.general, it's overrun by creepy "webmasters" obsessed with their search result standing and SEO people, but the underlying commonality to most of the messages is that (a) an index and algorithm change has made search results a little less useful, and (b) the index is being spammed by shady operators.
posted by majick at 9:56 AM on January 22, 2004

Response by poster: Can someone tell me what SEO stands for? The article posted by romakimmy seems to explain the problems I'm seeing, but this acronym has me stumped. "Search Engine..." what?
posted by UKnowForKids at 4:30 PM on January 22, 2004

Search Engine Optimization, I assume.
posted by litlnemo at 4:47 PM on January 22, 2004

Response by poster: Ah, many thanks.
posted by UKnowForKids at 5:47 PM on January 22, 2004

I know it's terribly uncool to assert this, but I like Yahoo's searches. Their hierarchical system, coupled with Google's results stream that they re-jigger somehow, seems to work pretty well.

Alas, their contract with Google is ending soon, and I believe they'll either be developing their own or going with Inktomi.
posted by Vidiot at 7:44 PM on January 22, 2004

I've noticed a lot of gaming-related searches wind up with the same (or almost the same) site on multiple domains. So I suspect search engine spammers are buying tons of domains with popular search terms in the domain name, then cross-linking these domains to each other to create googlejuice and traffic, and selling pop-ups or similar advertising on their sites.
posted by arto at 10:15 PM on January 22, 2004