#1 result opens directly without showing search results

[Sobriquet]

For my main keyphrase, to which i was getting a traffic of about 600 uniques day, i was dropped to about less than 200 uniques a day, in last two days. ( its a niche market keyphrase.

I still hold the number 3 / 4 spot in natural search results in google, on almost all datacenters. On investigation, i found that when anyone searches for the keyphrase for the first time, he gets the topresults site opening automatically ( no - the key phrase is not in that domain name ). if you search again, normal results show.

I tried it on 7 computers at diffrent places today, diffrent isps, and still the same issue. Teh first time you search my fav keyphrase, the top result site opens up.

Is this a beta feature? or is a key phrase purchased? i am feeling down .

If this happens, google will lose its relevance in teh feild of SEARCH.

has anyone seen this or reported this?

[lammert]

This is possibly caused by the Firefox prefetch feature which is enabled by Google for some search queries. More information about this in the following thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Sobriquet]

This action appeared in IE 6 ( not firefox)

[tedster]

I may have seen this behavior once last week, but decided I probably clicked on "I'm Feeling Lucky". Thing is, I rarely use IE, so if it requires IE to happen I'm not likely to stumble over it again. Only your post brought the odd behavior back to my mind.

Were you signed into Personal Search at the time?

[Sobriquet]

no i was not signed in the personal search. it was a simple search from the toolbar.

only first time searchers for some terms are getting this thing i guess.

can anyone explain why google could possibly do this?

[lammert]

I now had this happening myself. I was searching using www.google.com (not the toolbar) with internet explorer and after about five seconds the page opened one of the sites listed in the SERPs. So I must agree that it is not the FireFox prefetch which I mentioned before.

The strange thing is, it wasn't a site from the regular SERPs that opened, but one of the AdWords listed sites. I am now digging in the HTML code of the Google SERPs to see if there is anything which might have cause triggering this. I am certain I didn't click that AdWords listing or anything else on the page. The mouse just hovered above some other listings because I hadn't decided yet what to click.

tedster: I wasn't signed in to personal search when it happened.

[a1call]

I think Google would be interested in the keyphrase. It sounds like a js redirect in the title tag or excerpt of one of the results on the page. Normally these would be striped. Perhaps someone has put it in the URL?
It might be related to this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[lammert]

It doesn't seem that js has been injected in the URL.

A strange thing is, that in the Google page HTML, most AdWords ads have the code
onmouseover="return ss('go to www...
where the website that I was directed to and one other have the code
onmouseover="ss('go to www...
without the return. I am not a javascript expert so I don't know if this has anything to do with it. As a programmer I find it strange that there are two different ways the onmouseover has been programmed in a SERP which is certainly generated by software. Why is there no return command in two cases?