What did I do with my google searches?

Factual Questions
1

Google is not returning any wiki or IMDB sites for me anymore.

I search on “Crozet Islands Wiki” no wiki site.

I search of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off IMDB” no IMDB site

searching on yahoo and bing, I get what I am looking for.

Did I do something to my settings? Or am I living in a cave and did not know that Google is boycotting Wiki and IMDB.

2

If you are actually putting quotes around those searches, that’s what your problem is. Without the quotes, the very first hit on your first one is wikipedia.

3

No, I was not using quotes.

4

Crozet Islands Wiki gave me:

[ul]
[li]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crozet_Islands[/li][li]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Crozet_Islands[/li][li]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fauna_of_the_Crozet_Islands[/li][li]http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Crozet_Islands.jpg[/li][li]http://wikitravel.org/en/Islands_of_the_Southern_Ocean[/li][li]http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Crozet_Islands_nonmarine_fauna[/li][li]http://daviswiki.org/District_de_Crozet[/li][/ul]

  • about 1,210,000 of additional hits

What had you expected?

5

that is exactly what I would expect. that is not what I get though.

My first three hits for Crozet Islands wiki are:

http://www.animalpicturesarchive.com/view.php?tid=3&did=25697

http://alerte.vigilance-meteo.fr/crozet-kerguelen-amsterdam-saintpaul-storm-en.html

6

Did you perform a malware scan? Sometimes malware redirects search requests.

7

Hmmm… looks like this could be an example of Filter Bubbling.

You might want to test this by using ‘duckduckgo.com’ which does not apply any filters to your search based upon your previous searches and/or social networking.

8

If it was a malware infection I would expect links like “one simple trick to enlarge your boobs that CIA doesn’t want you to know”.

These are legitimate search results that would appear on the bottom of the page

9

Okay, so you haven’t done a malware scan just because what you expect of malware isn’t what’s happening? Perhaps you should check anyway?

10

If you want to check that this site is indeed in google, search on:

site:boards.straightdope.com crozet islands

and so on. Searching with “SDMB” in the search key is looking for pages which actually contain the word “SDMB”, which may not necessarily be this site, and this site may not come out at the top of the list.

11

Are you signed in to Google? If so, first of all, check your settings, and then maybe log out, and try your search again. As Gagundathar says, this may well be a personalized filter bubble effect (although it seems like it must be the filters going wrong in some way).