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Inaccurate Search Results

         

gstewart

8:17 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Is it my imagination, or is there an increasing number of results in Google which are inaccurate?
For instance, a search for <snip> gives as a No1 result a site with no mention whatsoever of <snip>.
Why should this be - any ideas anyone?

[edited by: Marcia at 2:49 pm (utc) on Oct. 9, 2002]
[edit reason] no specifics, please [/edit]

PFOnline

8:25 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Very interesting you mention this! I thought I might have been the only 1 noticing this:

(Hope its OK to use a specific search term here)
When you search google for "pink floyd" (band from the 60's, 70's) and look on the 2nd page at the top, there is a link to Search411.com... Then when you go to Search411.com there is no mention of Pink Floyd anywhere, and its really just a crappy advertisement search engine that somehow managed to sneak its way to the top of the 2nd page of a fairly popular musical search word.

It's obvious Search411.com shouldn't be there. I even looked at the source code, trying to figure out how they did it, not even a mention of "Pink Floyd" in the meta tags or anything... strange? yes, very strange indeed.

Another interesting note, looking at search411.com's page rank... says "Current page not ranked by Google"!

What's up Google?

martin

8:54 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



And Yahoo!, Disney, Google, ODP, AltaVista, and Excite have something to do with exit?

[google.com...]

cornwall

9:40 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



When you search google for "pink floyd" (band from the 60's, 70's) and look on the 2nd page at the top, there is a link to Search411.com... Then when you go to Search411.com there is no mention of Pink Floyd anywhere,

The answer to your conumdrum (if this is not edited out by the moderator) is to go into the source code of the page that you access via that google link using GOOGLE CACHE for the page

And you will see near the top of the source code

<font face=arial,sans-serif color=black size=-1>These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: <B>pink floyd </B></font>

Tells you a bit about Google that one!

cornwall

9:47 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



And Yahoo!, Disney, Google, ODP, AltaVista, and Excite have something to do with exit?

ditto for those searches, go to the source code in the cache and you get

<font face=arial,sans-serif color=black size=-1>These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: <B>exit </B></font>
</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>

for Yahoo and the others.

Begs the question as to why Google has not been able to stop such results with its algorithm. But also tells a lot about the importance of inward links!

Sinner_G

9:50 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



You don't really have to go into the source code for that. The text 'These terms only appear...' comes in the Google 'header' of the cached page for all the examples stated here.

So yes, the link text is very important in ranking.

Strangely, I can reproduce gstewart's example on google.com but not on google.ch.

vitaplease

9:58 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



cornwall,

nice one, I had never noticed that before in the cache heading..have I been sleeping or is this new?

martin,

do a search with: allinanchor: exit

and compare with normal search results
and you will see that Google bombing still has some effect ;)
(the search results differ near to nothing between the two)

gstewart,

in general, you should check the back links of the sites with these results and look for some surrounding text around the links. I did not dig deeply, but did find one where your search term was in the surrounding text.

Sinner,

I checked google.ch and got:

Diese Begriffe erscheinen nur in Links, die auf diese Seite verweisen: pink floyd

gstewart

10:50 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Vitaplease...thanks

in general, you should check the back links of the sites with these results and look for some surrounding text around the links. I did not dig deeply, but did find one where your search term was in the surrounding text.

That's a fair point, but to be positioned above other sites with proper content, titles etc relating to the search query is pretty eccentric. Or am I missing something?

vitaplease

11:22 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



gstewart,

I would agree it is a bit strange, I guess you have to dig further..

check the Pagerank of the pages linking with good surrounding text are they better than those of the competition?

Just to feed the adword algo conspiracy:

check the descriptive text below the "link" in the First adword on the right with the sponsored Links. ;)

and to feed the toolbar paranoia:

Maybe visitors/relevancy now count for ranking (it has the top adword placing) :)

Sinner_G

11:24 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I checked google.ch and got:

Diese Begriffe erscheinen nur in Links, die auf diese Seite verweisen: pink floyd

What I meant is that I don't get the same results for a search for "villas crete" on google.ch compared to google.com. Can't tell if it's an index or a ranking thing.

vitaplease

11:31 am on Oct 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Sinner,

you are right for Google.ch different results and different number of results!
also for Google.nl and Goolge.fr

for all three the ad of number one does not appear
check Google.co.uk and the ad and the number one position reapears - the new trojan horse? ;)