It seems like every time I do a search on google my results are altered by something. The results are not related to my search and if they are the link is trying to take to a web site that sells something. For example, if I do a search on Abercrombie it returns “find abercrombie at site ABC”. I check my startup and ran adware and neither worked. Does anyone know what’s up?
Abercrombie gives me this for the first 5 hits:
Abercrombie - Buy Clothing & Accessories on eBay
www.eBay.com______eBay Apparel - Shop by Category - Shop by Brand Sponsored Link
Categories:___ Shopping_>_Clothing_>_Casual__ Business_>_Major_Companies_>_Publicly_Traded__
Abercrombie and Fitch
Description: Men, women, and children's clothing and accessories.
Category: Shopping_>_Clothing_>_Casual
www.abercrombie.com/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages - Stock quotes: ANF
Abercrombie&Fitch
Abercrombie & Fitch is a fast growing clothing store
with authentic quality gear for over 100 years.
www.abercrombie.com/anf/lifestyles/html/homepage.html - 21k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.abercrombie.com ]
Abercrombie & Kent Luxury Travel
... Since 1962, Abercrombie & Kent has been at the cutting edge of travel innovation. ... With
Abercrombie & Kent, the original luxury travel company. ...
www.abercrombiekent.com/ - 13k - Cached - Similar pages
Abercrombie & Fitch
www2.abercrombie.com/ - 4k - Cached - Similar pages
The first link looks to be purchased by ebay; a normal practice at google.
Are your results different?
Try Spybot.
Nope, they look like this:
Womans’ World, Easy Shopping Time!
Womans World, a shoppers paradise with updates frequently. Get all your gifts in one place. Buy for yourself too. Come check us out.
Abercrombie Products- Lowest Prices At DealTime!
Save time & money every time you shop online: DealTime is a free comparison-shopping service that helps you find the Web’s best prices on links to everything from Computers & Electronics to Jewelry, Toys & more.
Abercrombie Apparel and Accessories @ eBay
Why pay department store prices for Abercrombie merchandise? Place your bid and save on hundreds of name brand items today! Men’s and women’s apparel, shoes, accessories and more!
Save Time and Money on Abercrombie & Kent Tours
Abercrombie & Kent tours are a terrific value, worry-free and hassle-free, and easy to budget. See complete itineraries and prices.
Toys on Sale at Amazon.com
Order toys at Amazon.com and Save. We have toys, computer games, baby toys, and toys for all ages! Toysrus is even at Amazon.com, so if your looking for toys, we’ve got it! Toys R Us!
And I get a pop up every time I hit search...
I know something is up because it doesn’t do it on my computer.
Google sells ad space, but the ads are in little particolored boxes above and beside the actual search results. Google does not sell its actual results: Such sales would soon be known (hell, Google would have to advertise it to get any money), and they would send Google’s credibility down the crapper. Google makes money by selling its results (really, selling high-volume and special-purpose access to its engines), so anything that would damage the credibility of its results would lead to Google’s imminent demise.
There are ways to affect the way Google ranks you (search for googlebombing), but Google alters its PageRank algorithm frequently to discourage such efforts.
To be brief: Google sells a few things, but its actual search results are not among them.
You have a ‘helper’ add-on on your copy of Explorer. Have a look at its toolbar and menus. The add-on will be pretending to be, and will have been installed as, an improvment on IE, but it’s really just ad-ware.
Cos people really do need “help” finding advertising on the web, don’t they?
Are you running a search engine that includes Google??
Go to Google.com and search directly from that and see if there is a difference.
ExpressFind, Dogpile, and the like are meta-search engines that do other stuff than if had you used Google only.
I see the same thing as the from time to time. For example, doing a search for “hobby cnc mill” results in the first hit being for a search on what appears to be another search engine, which makes no sense when there are other pages that actually have “hobby cnc mill” all over their pages and I know lots of people (who are interested in hobby cnc milling, of course) link to those pages.
That’s probably not the best example, though, it’s the only one I could remember off the top of my head. Other times I’ll see what appears to be my search on a page, but it winds up selling something totally unrelated to what I was looking for. Whatever I was searching for is almost always on the page, though.
I’m usually running MacOs 10.3 and using Camino as my web browser, or I’m using Linux with using Galeon as my browser. I’m fairly certain that I do not have any spyware. I don’t even allow most cookies to go through. Though just to be sure I’ll monitor my net traffic while doing google searches.
I think it’s just googlebombing. People have figured out how Google generates page ranking and take advantage of that. It’s just part of using the internet. If it gets too bad, Google will either adapt or people will start using another search engine.
In addition to the manipulated results, I have noticed that key words are underlined in green on web pages. When I put my cursor on them they are links. Whatever helper I have on this system, it is serious. I’ll look to see if there is a helper installed on IE. Thanks guys/gals…
There are a couple more reasons why google results change. First, Google is not one computer or one website, but many. There are something like 10 different core google sites. At any point in time there is a possibility your search may go to a different site. The results are not always the same across all sites, particularly either when google is updating it’s rankings (the ‘google dance’, used to be once a month) or when google changes its ranking algorithm. In late November '03 Google switched to a new algorithm called ‘Florida’ and ‘all hell broke out’ to quote some folk. Top ranked sites completely dropped off for days at a time, then reappeared at wildly diffent rankings.
For more info go to www.webmasterworld.com or subscribe to the newsgroup alt.internet-searchengines.
Another word in favor of Spybot Search & Destroy. I’ve had to turn off the notification feature in Spybot because it seems as if every webpage now floats ads which attempt to insert the Avenue A cookie.
Oops…that’s alt.internetsearch-engines.
Above quote from this website; hopefully this will at least point you in the right direction. (My computer was invaded by these unwanted links last year~~ I feel your pain).
Hey guys, thanks for your help. I used Search&Destroy. It worked the second time I used it. I’m not sure if it had an impact, however, the second time I used S&D I disabled Norton’s. Thanks again 