Google is turning into a corporate cheerleader where large US companies dominate the rankings (revenue grab? knocking out the small business?). Type "e" and I got: ebay, espn, expedia. "s" - skype, sears, staples. Randomly type 2 letters: "be" - best buy, bed bath and beyond, etc. I'm in Argentina atm and have no interest in US companies... What happened to independent results? Someone really needs to come out with an independent search engine that doesn't sell out to corporations.
It's basing it not on company size, but most common search keywords used. For example, "eBay" is the #1 keyword searched for that starts with "e". Has nothing to do with company size (or even necessarily) BEING a company. Do it for "di" and #1 is "dictionary", #2 is "disneyland". More people search for dictionary than disneyland.
Ok. This makes sense. Although I'm sure there's a little paying for ranking under the table that we don't know about, I do agree, that it's base of the popularity of the keywords being search with each letter in those keywords.
For example I don't have on 'safe search' and the most common searched word starting with 's' is 'sex' but that is nowhere on the list. Did another quick look in adwords for global search volumes starting with 'e' - ebay 83m - espn 11m - expedia 5m ....but other keywords with higher searches: exchange 16m - eye 13m... and there's tons of other keyword starting with 'e' that have higher searches! Google is not showing the highest searched keywords in the new recommendations feature. They are showing the highest searched corporations in lots of these places. If you want proof go look in adwords and do some research yourself.
Are you doing exact match searches in AdWords? I have a hard time believing people search 16m times for just "exchange"... maybe "microsoft exchange", but not just "exchange".
yes those were global and things change when looking into exact. For fun lets get into exact searches and dig deeper in the suggestions G offers after ebay, espn, expedia: easyjet, eminem, ebuddy, etsy, eclipse expedia 2.7m easyjet 3.3m eminem 1m ebuddy doesn't show up etsy 368k eclipse 1m ok here's some higher searched keywords that are searched more but not in the list: email 1m exchange rates 450k I'm sure there's more but again they are pimping out the corporate suggestions over generic keywords in some categories.
Sure, I believe it. Its sad to say but the rich get richer. There are tons of random keywords you type in but always comes on top is some big-shot moneybags corporation. I you type in any item then your sure to get some stupid corporation on the top or wikipedia. Wikipedia is a major problem. They are taking over in the serps everywhere. Here's some more as a test here's what I typed and here's what I got: bb - blackberry.com ha - wikipedia at - wikipedia we - wikipedia fa - thefa.com (football assiociation) yeah, pretty much 90% of 2letters are wikipedia. The fact that bb is considered blackberry is stupid considering that nowhere in the site it even shows BB.
Corporations aren't buying positioning... they just have brand names that are commonly searched for. Google is just trying to deliver relevant results based on what it knows. For example it knows click history for search results and also knows if someone clicks on a link in results, and then hits their back button pretty quickly and picks something else instead. Wikipedia isn't a huge corporation, but they do have a worldwide recognized name that many people actually find useful information on. It's even trying to give results that might be more relevant for you based on your physical location. For example I get things geared more towards San Diego sometimes since that's where I am. Putting "s" in it gives me "SDGE" (San Diego Gas & Electric... the big utility company here), "San Diego Zoo", "Skype" and "San Diego County Fair". I've not seen anything within the auto-fill results that I think shouldn't belong there yet.
I think Shawn is right but it does suck for us. I don't like it at all. I don't use Google to search though.
re: povshop. ebay is not the 'big' auction site down here... most use mercadolibre. Also I doubt most people get their sports news from espn since soccer is not covered that good on their site... it's all US corporations which I find weird. re: digitalpoint - If google is not selling out to US corps how do you explain how etsy is #7 in suggestions - 368k exact searches.... while generic keywords such as 'email' 1m, and 'exchange rates' 450k are not in my suggestions? I have personalized search turned off, and even if it was on I would expect 'exchange rates' to be suggested higher for me since I'm often searching for this term.. never 'eclipse' or 'etsy' type sites. Is anybody else seeing similar suggestions from Google? I checked with a few friends and everyone seems to be seeing the same... Is it because google gets more profit by suggesting 'etsy' over 'email'? I have no idea why Google does this but there search results are biased in my view and do not reflect true search volumes.
I think shawn is wrong for sure. Maybe take a step into the past when google bought utube then you saw a huge spike of their stupid inner pages of videos in every search possible. The search is surely controlled. It sucks but what can you do? hope that bestbuy goes out of business if the place is ranking just above you....
No clue... I only see 4 suggestions, so I don't see it. But I would suspect they put weighting factors on things. It's not as simple as a straight "most searched" terms (for example my example how my suggestions are geared more towards San Diego since that's where I am). If I do "em", "email" is #4, and I bet more people search for email than some of the things higher ("eminem recovery" is #2). BUT... you also have to factor in probability that someone will get a page they want on their first try. If you search for something as generic as "email" you probably are going to have to go through a lot of different Internet pages before you actually find what you want. But if you search for "eminum recovery", you are probably looking for Eminem's Recovery album. With just "email", maybe you are looking for YOUR email (that could be gmail.com, hotmail.com, mail.yahoo.com)... maybe you are looking for mail.com, maybe you are looking for an RFC about how the email protocol works, maybe you are looking for an email client software, etc. It's like walking into a clothing store and asking a sales assistant for help finding "clothes" (without giving any further info). The assistant can try to help you, but chances are they aren't going to get what you are looking for on the first try. Now if you ask them about "blue t-shirts", chances are they will be able to help you quicker even though more people might have been interested in generic "clothes" before. Based on user activity for the search "email", Google probably sees it's searches for a lot, but they can also see the user has to try a lot of different sites before they stop looking at new sites for their search.
Agree that they have weighting factors... but their weighting seems to plug US corporations every place I turn instead of more exploratory generic keywords. Even within corporations there are favorites. Lets take your example about email, maybe it's that they don't want customers to get their email from anyone else but gmail? Lets dig deeper and search 'email' - gmail is the top result, yahoo second.... but where is their main competition hotmail? (very popular). It's in 7 place (no surprise buried deep in the results). Also the main title says 'Sign In' instead of hotmail. Very confusing to people searching for a new email provider. Is google gaming their results? I think so.
...or it could be that Microsoft is terrible at SEO. Hotmail people tend to go to hotmail.com and link to hotmail.com. hotmail.com is a 302 (TEMPORARY) redirect to http://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=...e.com/default.aspx&lc=1033&id=64855&mkt=en-US If Microsoft didn't use such an idiotic URL for the base of their mail service, or at least do a 301 (permanent) redirect instead of 302, it might rank better. Google's redirect for gmail.com is the right type of redirect (301 - permanent), and also redirects to a better URL: http://mail.google.com/mail/
email was a bad example because it's a little complex and yes msn is not good at seo because they are large enough to not care... they shouldn't have to do the google dance (game the system) if they have the traffic. According to compete.com they have 3 times the number of unique visitors per month. So why is hotmail ranked so low if they are so popular? Because Google might have gamed the algorithm in their favor? Same for other big corps? Probably so. On the other hand I know of the importance of SEO for small business, not dissing it at all. But SEO for small firms will do no good if Google is playing favorites to large corporations and it's own interests over accurate, unbiased results.
So which is it? You think Google is gaming results for large corporations, but at the same time you think Google is wrong for not gaming search results for Hotmail even though their site is terrible? Hotmail's site is so bad that even Bing doesn't rank it well... and it's known that Microsoft DOES manually manipulate their search results. http://advice.cio.com/shane_oneill/bing_search_tainted_by_pro_microsoft_results Also, another factor to consider is who are the users of Hotmail vs. Gmail. Gmail users tend to be more techie (so they are going to be more inclined to have a website that they might link to Gmail). Hotmail on the other hand... well... the only people I personally know that use Hotmail for their email is my grandma, my grandpa, my aunt and a few very non-technical friends who aren't that computer savvy. None of them have a website or even a blog. You can't give a link to Hotmail when you have nothing to link FROM.
Shawn has the right idea. Everyone else that says Google is selling out to Large corporations is clueless. The fact is things like Ebay, ESPN and Expedia are searched more. More people who begin typing the letter E go with Ebay or ESPN than every-credit-card-reviews.biz or whatever adsense site you run.
Hell... if Google is manipulating their results, I would think starting a search with "y" would get you to YouTube (which is owned by Google) first... In fact, "Yahoo" #1 and YouTube is #2... and I would even argue YouTube should be higher than Yahoo for "y", but that's just my personal opinion.