Is Google accepting money to weight search results?

what makes you think that google is complicit in this? it looks like old-fashioned search engine spamming to me. Even the somethingawful link attributes the problem to "neglected software", not to payola.

errr...retract that last line above. (note to self: read entire article before pretending to know what it says.)

The weird thing is that this looks like those tricks that were screwing with Yahoo years ago - loading up a page with dozens of unrelated search phrases to get hits for your porn site. But Google has done such a good job of filtering out this trash in the past that it must be a new kind of scam (if it's not payola, which I am also inclined to doubt is the case, jpoulos).

http://www.searchengineguide.com/lloyd/2003/1125_bl1.html Things have settled down somewhat (well, at least for the sites I work with) but not across the board from what I'm reading on other forums.

When you find those crappy marketing sites infiltrating your search terms, do let Google know. They'll work on clearing them out.

I don't get it. Where's the evidence? One user's searches don't really mean much. It seems more likely Google has some fixing to do, either due to the Florida update or MT comment spam or something else. It's not like they perfected searching the web back in aught two and are now selling out 'cause they're overcome by ennui.

Mmm. the burst of commercial shit on google made me look for other search engines for the first time recently. I'm sick of searching for, say, "trees" and getting a page-load of links to sites that then say "your search for trees turned up nowt, but buy this, why don't you." there's definitely something clever going on, because google is somehow indexing search engine *results* pages (or static pages dressed up to look like results pages, I guess) Perhaps the question needs rephrased: are there alternatives to google to use while it sorts its shit out?

Google changed some of their algorthyms recently and there are kinks to work out.

are there alternatives to google to use while it sorts its shit out? Sure. http://www.alltheweb.com/ has been getting positive reviews for a while now.