Why is Google giving me irrelevant results?

Factual Questions
1

I’ll begin with a tiny bit of personal information: My cell phone service is with AT&T.

Today I received an email whose subject line was “Introducing the new att.com”. Well, it COULD be legitimate, so I open the email (as text-only, so I don’t get infected with anything) and I see that the “From” field says “att@e.att-mail.com” and I am immediately super-suspicious. It’s not enough that “att.com” is suddenly “att-mail.com”, but they also added “e.” as a prefix? I doubt it!

It is quite obvious to me that this is spam, deliberately trying to get me to click on something that I shouldn’t. But I’m curious and want some solid evidence. So I go to Google, expecting to find lots of pages warning me to stay away. This is what I told Google to search for:


+"e-att-mail.com"

My understanding of the way Google works is that the quotation marks tell Google that I want exactly this text, and not something that Google considers similar. The plus sign is not really needed, but I used it anyway. (Where one enters several search strings, Google will return sites that have any of those strings, but the plus sign tells Google that this string must appear in everything. Anyway, I got the same results with and without the plus sign.)

The very first hit was for “AT&T™ Official Site | att.com”, and when I clicked it, it brought me here, which seems identical to the real http://www.att.com/ . But I could not find any reference to “e-att-mail.com” there!!!

This site also came up as #1 when I went to “advanced search”, and selected “Where your keywords show up: in the title of the page”. Also for “Where your keywords show up: in the text of the page”. Also for “Where your keywords show up: in the URL of the page”. (It also shows up in “Where your keywords show up: in links to the page”, but I couldn’t care less about that one.)

So here is my main question: Is there any way to find out why Google returned this irrelevant site? I insist that it is irrelevant, because “e-att-mail.com” does NOT show up in the title of the page, nor the text of the page, nor the URL of the page. Where the heck DOES it appear? If I am looking for “e-att-mail.com”, why does Google think I’d be interested in

(A secondary question would be: Does anyone know if “e-att-mail.com” might actually be a legitimate site connected with AT&T?)

2

PS: By the way, I get this sort of irrelevant stuff from Google a lot. people tell me to learn how the options work, and I think I have done that. But I’m still getting irrelevant hits! And I’m finally upset enough to ask for help.

3

I don’t know if it’s legit, but there’s a typo in your search. You said yourself it’s “e.att-mail.com”, yet you searched for “e-att-mail.com”.

4

You’re right, but it comes out the same either way, because Google never pays attention to what kind of mark separates the strings. A period, hyphen, dollar sign, even a blank space - they are all the same to Google. That’s another of my peeves about it, but not really relevant to this thread, except to answer tellyworth’s point.

5

I only get that result if I leave off the quotation marks. (The plus sign, as you know, does nothing." Are you still getting that result?

THe following URL lists the ways to contact Google, but they do not include anything for faulty search results, but you can at least use the help pages.

BTW, in general, scroll to the bottom of a page and look for a contact link. If you don’t see one, try an about us link. That’s how I found the above.

6

I figured it out. :mad:

A bit off to the right, it is labeled as “Ads”. “att” was in my search screen, and so AT&T paid Google to have their official site returned to me as a hit. I didn’t notice that on the first eleventy-seven times that I tried this. :smack:

Mods can feel free to close this thread if they want to. Many thanks to BigT, without whose post I might not have tried to Google this one extra time.