Google No Longer Objective - links to its own "books" at the top

[vtella]

Google is now showing the results for it's own products in the top search listings?

I thought Google was up front and did not favor one site over another. I thought that their search results where determined by a mysterious formula that objectively ranked web pages.

Now I see that Google is using the searches to advertise their books in a very nonobjective manner.

I spend thousands of dollars per year on Adwords advertising I and others have worked very hard to be listed in the top searches for relevant keywords in the regular search. Now I see it is all for naught. If this trend continues I will cancel my Adwords account.

I hope that this will become very public very fast and I am certain that I will not be the only one with this opinion. I also hope I will not be the only one that tells them what I think of this.

Victor Tella

[edited by: tedster at 3:30 pm (utc) on Sep. 8, 2007]

[europeforvisitors]

When the blue bar seems only to have the link for BOOKS the results are junk.

If that's true, wouldn't you expect it to be fixed? To me, it sounds like either a test or a work in progress.

[zjacob]

Instead of a bad thing (Google losing objectivity), to me, these new links on the blue bar seem like a great alternative way to implement "universal search", instead of splashing images, news, patents, books, etc amongst the first page results.

That would also play nicely into the "taxonomy", or classifying sites theme.

[dhatz]

With regard to "Google Books", I indeed get it listed on top, even though for my country (Greece) the link and associated pic DO NOT RESOLVE (via DNS):

host books.google.gr ns1.google.com.
Using domain server:
Name: ns1.google.com.
Address: 216.239.32.10#53
Aliases:

Host books.google.gr not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

I've e-mailed Google several times, out of courtesy, as a bug they'd probably want to know about. After waiting a few days, I even submitted it via Webmaster-Tools spam report screen (in case a human actually looks at those). I checked again today, still no fix.

[outland88]

Google Books is just another one of Google’s flops. If it garnered enough traffic to begin with it could suffice as a stand-a-lone web product. Instead they shove it down people’s throats and likely do damage to the earning power of many sites. Same goes for Universal Search. Doesn’t Yahoo Answers have enough of a footprint at Yahoo without filling the results with it. I haven’t seen a Universal Search result from a site that didn’t already have a very strong presence on the Internet to begin with.

[Marcia]

vtella, hold it just a minute:

Yes I have seen a reduction in my visitors. which cioncerns me greatly as I make my living making whips and 80% of my sales are done on the web.

-Just when did you experience the drop in visitors?

-Before the drop, what percentage of your visitors arrived from Google organic search? Not from Adwords, what percentage was from Google regular search results?

-Prior to the drop, how much of your traffic was direct or type-in traffic for your domain name?

Let's try a couple more:

-Have you made sure that your domain doesn't resolve for both www and non-www as Google (and everyone here) recommends?

-Have you tried your search with no filtering, with the default, and with strict adult filtering on?

-Did you take both the singular and plural versions of your domain name (and 301 redirect one to the other) so that you would catch all the type-in traffic, and so that no one else (like a domainer) could take the other version (plural or singular) of your domain name, and therefore start getting the type-in traffic from people trying to type your domain name in their browser but typing it the "other" way, resulting in you losing type-in traffic to another party (like a domainer) who might take the other version to catch the type-in traffic intended for you?

Before blaming Google, did you do any or all of those basic webmastering things?

[edited by: Marcia at 8:36 am (utc) on Sep. 11, 2007]