Napoleon - 5:00 am on Aug 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

Yes indeed, there's been a thread in the Google News forum about this (I've no idea why it doesn't show here).

If you want a book from Amazon (for example) you'll go to Amazon and search for it. Or you may well hit it on the site you visit because there are so many darned affiliates.

What the vast majority of people DON'T want is Amazon books (etc) flooding the returns everytime they do a search for widgets. In some areas that is exactly what is happening. Ditto eBay, ditto PDFs, ditto MS-Word docs, etc.

I did a search and there was ONE normal web site on the front page. Yes, ONE! That really is crappy.

Try getting that reality into Google's corporate head though. They seem obsessed, as SteveB infers, in simply sticking in technology for the sake of it without too much regard for search impact. Either that, or their QA department is on strike.

What on earth are they thinking to let this one out?