Is Google being tricked?

[infomira]

I recently searched for 'convert <snip> on Google. I was rather suprised that most of the results on the first page pointed to getfound.com, a shopping/search engine which needless to say had no information on what I was looking for. Is this just a one-off, or has another search engine found a way of hijacking Google searches?

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 10:22 am (utc) on May 1, 2003]
[edit reason] per charter, we don't do spam reports [/edit]

[chiyo]

not what i got on this search. Were you having visions? - or maybe delusions? Looking at the site iid be very surprised it has any good listings in any searches at all. Another useless affiliate/PPC-opportunistic commercial directory gaming innocents ( and not very well at that) and gumming up the web and im not surprised it has almost no listings in Google. Forget it.

[edited by: chiyo at 10:35 am (utc) on May 1, 2003]

[pixel_juice]

I think it's a bit unfair to name the site in question in the thread title and posts itself, especially as everyone will criticise it ;)

[mack]

You will often see results for other se's in google serps. This happens a lot due to links placed on se's to "popular searches" or perhaps even log files. (if they are spiderable) I dont think there is a lot you can do to optimise a serp for google but it does happen. A good example that you will see quite a lot when searching on google is "open directory results for..."

I think it just goes to prove that google is getting better for dynamic pages.

[infomira]

Point taken about not mentioning the offending website - I did think about this and put it there because it was what I searched for to see if this had been mentioned before. That being said I would have expected the moderator to snip the website name, not the search term.
The point of the question was that I have often seen similar results, but never dominating the first page. In some cases this is because an expired website has been taken over by a shopping/search engine, and Google is responding to what used to be on the page. In others it seems that when Google scans the page it gets a long list of words rather than what actually appears on the website.

Actually, I was assuming that it was the second case, but going back and checking the cached results, I see that they all point to the same information, which does have the words I was looking for.

[infomira]

OK, so now I've read the charter & posting guidelines. You mean some people read these BEFORE they post :) I suppose my question now is whether this is

1) A one off, unlikely to occur for other search terms or at another time
2) A well known phenomenon, to be reported to Google, rather than mentioned on this forum (remember this was not just a single result, it was most of the first page)
3) A worrying new trend in the battle of the search engines

[Ramius]

I would suggest reporting it here:
[google.com...]

I recently came across a google keyword combination that resulted in 9 of the first 10 results being sites which redirect to getfound.com.

getfound.com of course has little-to-no information on their site about their business model, but it is my impression that they are paying referers, and some referer is abusing cloaking to get high rankings in google and get lots of referrals to getfound.com. I guess that getfound will be able to claim innocence in the matter because they don't have control over their referers actions. It is really annoying, though, when you are attempting a legitimate search and get nothing but junk from the usually trustworthy google.

p.s. based on their WHOIS registry, it appears getfound.com is actually owned by findwhat.com