A query for Paul McCartney tickets comes up with some bizarre results. I did an investigation as of why and found out the following:

1- Go to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Paul_McCartney&diff=prev&oldid=321356937
2- You will see the “edit” on the right hand side has added a Seatwave link.
3- If you look at the contributor, you will see is an IP : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/80.169.189.187
4- If you check who is that IP, you will see the name that comes is Seatwave. http://toolserver.org/~chm/whois.php?ip=80.169.189.187
5- Very obvious but seatwave is trying to alter the search results.

Is this the sort of webspam Google looks after?

1) people using marquee=1 to hide heaps of links to their spammy sites on high quality sites that they must control, have access to, or hack

2) chinese website spamming – it seems that most of the ecommerce searches nowadays turn up chinese websites (pretending to be legit and selling counterfeit goods) that when you check their backlinks it is all spam on other chinese sites – why can’t you devalue links from non-english sites when a search is done in english from an english region?

I have a Question….. I have noticed that when I do a Google search on my machine at home that the results tend to be fairly relevant to me.
When doing the same search on my Mother’s machine this is not the case, which I am assuming is because her “Cookie” and search history are different than mine.
The search results seem to be more relevant to her, which I also assume is the goal, Tailored Search results. If this indeed the case, is this type of search algorithm used across the board? I ask this because I noticed a disturbing trend. When I search on political issues most if not all of the results are of the Left leaning type which I admit are relevant to me. Doing the same search on my mothers machine the results are mostly of the far right bent and are relevant to her. These types of results while great for durable goods and services seem detrimental to the public in search of balanced discourse. My mother ( “Who is not at all computer literate” ) thinks that the search results are the totality of what’s on the Net and I am sure that there are a great many people just like her. There seems to be some sort of positive reinforcement loop thing going on where ” I’ll only tell you, what you want to hear. “. When so many people today use Google as their primary way to gather News I just wonder if the ” I’ll only tell you, what you want to hear. ” type of results is “aiding and abetting” the divisions in our country. I also wonder about the unintended consequences of this sort of “BUILT-IN” Media Bias?

Quorumforum * “Some Assembly Required”

Thanks
Sandi

What is meant by “backlinks to this URL”? I thought I didn’t need to worry if spammy websites were linking to me? Could you maybe address this in a Google Webmaster Central Channel video?

Q: I think the criticism is: Where’s the money in those [non-search/ads parts of Google]?

Matt, I’m can make nosense of that question. Surely the ONLY answer is, the money comes about when users click the ads?