Comments on: Updated: Odd – Why Is Google Not Returning Results for "Amazon.com"?

By: tophatsolutions

tophatsolutions — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:13:08 +0000

redirections or it could be a bug than being anti-competitive.

By: stravagante

stravagante — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:17:24 +0000

I wonder if this one honors robots.txt and robots meta tags. Google’s BlogSearch is iffy about that and was particularly bad about LiveJournal blogs when it first came into beta.

By: Sernak Plywood

Sernak Plywood — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 07:37:23 +0000

If you search for amazon.co it gives the correct results is a “See results for:” section (amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and a9.com), but clicking that link gives you nothing again. Strange.

By: Sergiy Kyrylkov

Sergiy Kyrylkov — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 07:27:42 +0000

There is a much bigger problem with Google that surfaced on June 27:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/35023.htm

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:36:24 +0000

Hello everyone,

I have confirmed that there are no PPC ads showing up for the keyword "amazon.com" across Google US, Japan, Canada, and the UK. This was tested over 120 times over a period of 3 days. There are also no natural results other than Amazon.com appearing across any of those regions either.

If there are other keywords you'd like to test, post a comment and I'll run a report on them as well.

-Richard Stokes
President, AdGooroo
http://www.AdGooroo.com

By: Vectorx

Vectorx — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 14:55:56 +0000

I agree with John and Chris. It is hard to see how a technical issue could affect a single domain name unless the search ranking algo contains or refers to domain names, ie. site-unique bias. I think what happened is that Google inadvertently put Amazon on a “bad sites” list. No doubt Amazon’s problem will be immediately fixed. Other sites that are also inadvertently penalized but do not have Amazon’s clout won’t be so fortunate.

By: Ajax

Ajax — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:13:52 +0000

Running amazon.com in the Google search bar in Firefox is yielding one link:

Amazon.com
Departments include books, music, videos, home and garden, electronics, and toys.
http://www.amazon.com/

But clicking through the Amazon link goes to an internal Amazon 404 message. Very curious.

By: Chris Blake

Chris Blake — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:35:59 +0000

'Technical Problem' my *ss.

This is quite possibly another example of Google beginning to use “site-unique bias” to suppress access by their users to sites that are not flavour of the month i.e 'not-a-friend-of-Google'.

There is a very interesting report on this at http://www.searchenginehonesty.com/search_engine_censoring.html

The report quotes the Kinderstart class action case as a typical example.

Site-unique bias is the overlaying of the algo of lists of domain names or other site-unique information ie unique strings. A negatively affected site may still show up in a search for “site:thedomain.com” but will come way down on any other search.

According to this report, Google is moving away from censorship or banning to site-unique bias to avoid direct confrontation and possible legal issues with webmasters/site owners. This way they can remove from view editorially undesirable (and perhaps competitive?) sites.

By: ELLIS

ELLIS — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:41:58 +0000

I looked up
HomeLivingSpaces.com
Found a few results, but nothing link google or amazon.
Do you thing the search engines are blocking my website??

By: Darryl

Darryl — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:12:15 +0000

When you run this one
Find web pages that contain the term “google.com”
Results 1 – 10 of about 187,000,000 for “google.com”.

Now is Amazon going to sue google over this mishap
I get this from amazon.com search
http://www.amazon.fr/