I'm not Google fan, but I don't believe that they special case "affiliated" sites in search results. That would be an idiotic move on their part. Possibly undermine their cash cow (search) to boost marginal sources of revenue?
Honestly, your claim sounds like most conspiracy theories. It completely falls apart when you assume the participants are even mildly logical and rational.
Here's what's going on there: Google figures, from your query, that your intent is probably shopping. And those are the top 4 results from the shopping corpus. If you click on the "Shopping results for..." link, you can see the full shopping corpus.
I don't really know how the product corpus works, but AFAIK Google is not being paid anything for those results. They're compiled from a bunch of commercial sites across the web. Google gets paid when you click on the ads, which are clearly marked at the top and right hand column.
Comments
I'm not Google fan, but I don't believe that they special case "affiliated" sites in search results. That would be an idiotic move on their part. Possibly undermine their cash cow (search) to boost marginal sources of revenue?
Honestly, your claim sounds like most conspiracy theories. It completely falls apart when you assume the participants are even mildly logical and rational.
http://www.google.com/search?q=nike+zoom+rotational
Shows a whole pile of results from 'google shopping' for me.
Are those really the top results?
Here's what's going on there: Google figures, from your query, that your intent is probably shopping. And those are the top 4 results from the shopping corpus. If you click on the "Shopping results for..." link, you can see the full shopping corpus.
I don't really know how the product corpus works, but AFAIK Google is not being paid anything for those results. They're compiled from a bunch of commercial sites across the web. Google gets paid when you click on the ads, which are clearly marked at the top and right hand column.