And I find it very easy to believe that "the giant" is doing such things... Although I do not see much of a logic for them selling emails, it is quite obvious for me that they are manipulating the results. It would be worth enough only for one obvious reason - ADWORDS!
Indeed, there's no doubt you'll start seeing ads all over the place related to the Google searches you make. However you can't accuse of such thing unless there's hard and solid evidence they're selling emails.
Re: dinosaurs query... You can't really say Google results aren't relevant if the keywords you are trying relate to you/your site. You end up being emotional about something that ultimately is subjective (I mean of course you will think your site is the best out of billions out there). If *I* look at results for dinosaurs, the results seem pretty relevant to my query.
I'll have to keep that in mind if I get into something like sharks. Instead of a site with information about sharks, I'll produce a tv show that no one likes and get it canceled. Its more relevant than the information site and will rank better.
Yep... A Google search with a single keyword is going to be generic in nature. If someone *was* searching for dinosaur shows, but only searched, "dinosaurs", they also would be disappointed that the results aren't exclusively about dinosaur shows. If you want *info* about dinosaurs, you should be searching for "dinosaur info". Google isn't a mind reader, but it does try to give the most relevant results based on the info you give it (your query). I mean should I be mad that a search for "server" might not include info about "SPDY support in ngnix web server" on the first page of results? After all, that would be most relevant to *me*... But it's certainly not a conspiracy that Google doesn't know exactly what I want based on my limited query. And even then, Google will get smarter over time with it's personalized results to weight rankings based on what I was previously interested in.
You are accusing multi-billion dollar Google of selling your information to tiny companies in the "office space" industry so they can spam you? Google doesn't have a service like that...nor do they need to do business with tiny little companies for pointless revenue.
I think I know which site is yours. Anyway, if I am correct having the "Spot Available " in your footer instantly makes your site seem, well, you know. I think that hurts your site a lot. Long before you bought the dinosaur site, at least the one I am thinking of, I actually had a link exchange with the previous owner. That is just an FYI. I still have mine, but have pretty much left it alone so G rightfully doesn't give it much respect.
I do product and other searches all the time on google logged in and not and never do I get emails like that.
I make about 100 searches everyday and never got an email, I don't believe that google would make that.
There is a difference between saying "google returns crap" and "google is dirty". What you are noticing is big brands being pushed more in the SERPs. You also fail to consider that what you expect to see in the search results is going to be different to other users.
Without looking at it myself, my common sense would assume that I would expect to see some sites that have the exact domain name, probably wikipedia because they seem to be everywhere anyway. You should be mad if applebee's and boston pizza are there though. That is my site, but I've owned it from the first day online. Noted. I've pretty much given up trying to get back in the game for now, but it won't hurt to fix stuff like that from time to time.
Highly doubt this google arent that greedy and it would ruin there rep very fast. Maybe you got hacked
Google is not selling rankings and they are not selling search queries to email marketers. What you are seeing is a result of changes in the algorithm. They are putting less value on exact match anchor texts, less value on low quality links, and probably more value on domain strength. IMDB is one of the strongest domains on the net (they are PR 8 and SEOmoz ranks their domain strength at 100 out of 100), so if they have a page that is relevant to the term they will rank well more often than not. You can disagree with these algorithmic changes and say that they made things worse for users, but that is something completely different than your baseless accusations that they are selling search results. I guarantee that IMDB did not pay Google for that result. A lot of the hate towards Google that I see is not even logical. Google makes the vast majority of their money by selling AdWords. They would increase their AdWords income by ranking the big brands lower and forcing these brands with big budgets to pay for that traffic through AdWords instead, but everyone is always accusing them of intentionally hurting small business instead. It would be in their short-term interest to get more traffic to sites using AdSense, but instead penguin and panda have both hurt made for AdSense sites. Most of the conspiracy theories don't even make sense, for reasons that have already been outlined in this thread.
You call that relevant? the email thing I already took back because its obviously some cookie thing. But they are selling rankings to corporations. There's no reason to have not relevant crap all of the time way up top which just so happens to be all million dollar companies. Google is known to break their own rules to make more money as well as look like stupid idiots. I'll never forget about the huge red arrow pointing at youtube.com on their homepage. Google had their time and they were great but like all companies with huge profit they turned evil and now they are the devil of the internet. I'm looking forward to a few more stupid things like penguin that will destroy their company for good.
I think the reason they push big brands in the SERPs is because they are trusted and most users would expect to see them.
Not even about brands... Just about domains that have a massive amount of links (and other signals). For example this thread is #1 for "google hits low". Not because I paid for any sort of placement or spend more than $0 in AdWords... But Google Webmaster Tools shows ~300,000,000 links to domain (all natural).
Ok, so you say they are not paying them, they are just giving them a free pass. This doesn't make me feel much better. The thing is they didn't always do that so aggressive. It only started after the penguin update. I have 13 pages of -14% to -300% keyword dumps in my webmaster tools. My site dumped from hundreds of the keywords and who is collecting? All corporations and "trusted" sites. Google has gone totally stupid. Actually I just looked again and there is this one site that had stolen some of my content. A worthless piece of trash site that has not been updated in 2 years is ranking everywhere much better than my site which is older, more relevant, unique content, and well...60X larger. Here's something else related: I typed in "hotel breakers" and this was on page two: Notice its the same URL just a diff internal page. For that keyword that site is currently ranked 1st, 8th, 9th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 19th, then to 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, etc, etc 34th. Do any of you still think that google is not a dirty. That looks pretty dirty to me.