This Google-eBay relationship getting ridiculous?

[internetheaven]

Been plenty of threads on how Google seems to rank eBay everywhere. The obvious difference between their wikipedia facination and their ebay one is that wikipedia pages that rank all tend to have superhigh pagerank and normally plenty of inbounds. The ebay ranking pages have none of this, their only attribute seems to be that they are ebay pages.

Today, a brand new listing on the first page of results for a term I am tracking. Number 4 out of 3million results for the search term "widgets" is the profile page for the ebay user "widgets".

Oh yes Google, that really is what I was looking for! When I'm searching for information on widgets what I want to see is the ebay user profile for someone using that username to buy Britney CDs ...

Is this the worst example of Google-ebay ranking or if anyone had any others?

[budlight]

I would agree with you on ebay definitely. But there are honestly alot of terms where ebay is the only place that has the term. I do think it's rediculous when they rank for an expired auction but what do you do? On the wikipedia bit, I guess you haven't searched for "pearl necklace" lately. What google returns is obviously not what searchers want for that search.

I can't fault Google I mean if I ran the company I what I would do is figure out which users to show more ads to and less relevant results (the key being to minimize showing bad results to people who will be vocal about it). This way they could psychologically give less intelligent users a bias towards the ads as they will be more relevant. I'm sure this isn't a novel idea at all at Google.

[Essex_boy]

I agree, I was looking up an artist of interest me recently and Ebay had the top 4 places, very frustrating

[BradStevens]

That's par for the course for a publically held company. Board members are made up of other business leaders ... and, those leaders influence the company to assist friends and colleagues at other corporations.

Yes, the good-ole-boy network is alive and well at Google!

[trinorthlighting]

I think a big reason why wiki, ebay and amazon ranks well are:

1. Unique Content
2. Popular Site
3. Links

[Marcia]

Ebay is flooding the index with subdomains, multiple ones for the same searhes. It appears at least one searcher has caught on how to get around it and get decent results. I just saw a stats referral for search term -ebay.

This is a flaw that seriously mars the quality and value of the user experience, and imho it's possible the authority knobs are turned up too high, with Ebay exploiting the algo weakness to the max.

[fraudcop]

ebay and wikipedia success is due to the fact that they get worldwide tv, newspaper, magazines and internet coverage and advertisment for free.

the only difference is that wikipedia is free while ebay charges the highest fees on the market.

[hvacdirect]

Nothing is more frustrating than hitting some expired auction. The stores or semi-static pages I can see, but auctions that last 7 days shouldn't be indexed at all.

[Reno]

I think a big reason why wiki, ebay and amazon ranks well are:
1. Unique Content
2. Popular Site
3. Links

In regards to eBay and Amazon, does anyone know whether or not there is some sort of financial agreement between Google/eBay and Google/Amazon? If for example eBay is paying Google $50m per year, then that could mean there are 50,000,003 reasons why they come up so prominently. But again I emphasize, I don't follow Google financial news with the dedication of others on this forum, so admittedly do not know one way or the other if there has been any kind of publicly announced formal agreement between these cyber-giants.

..................

[trinorthlighting]

Reno,

Yes, look at all the adwords advertisements that ebay does.

[blite]

the good ole boy network lets you get away with anything. for instance shopwiki.com I don't want to link to them, but the whole site is a scraped site and yet they have people like Chris Pirilo promoting them and are an advanced adsense publisher. I mean come on if I started a site doing that, no matter what the technical knowhow I had, I couldn't get away with it.

[Decius]

Is it just me or has anyone else also noticed that Ebay results are showing up #1 where the froogle results are supposed to be?

[adessa]

Ebay is probably the number 1 advertiser of Google in Adwords and that G give Ebay as that high results in search. There might be a special treatment! Of course money is the big factor.