what does that offer to the user?

I totally agree, nothing, I've been seeing this for quite some time now for my trade's widgets and it is nearly always the same two Chinese directory sites that Google seems to love listing links over and over again. For one search term the other day about the first 14-15 results were solely for these two sites.

Yes, the pages are actually semi-pertinent for large, wholesale bulk buyers but totally useless for Joe Public or even Joe B&M tradesman.

I have seen crappy results before in Google but this one I think takes the price. I clicked one a search someone made to get to my site from Google, and this is what shows up:
The search had BUY in it so who whows uo in the Adwords? Best Buy, a jewellery store and a hosting company and this has absolutely nothing to do with the search itself.
In the serp you have 2 relevant sites, the rest is Viagra, sites in UK, a shoe brand. Page 2 serps is even worse with tons of viagra and other prescription medicin sites and the list goes on on several pages just adding a few helicopter sites that is totally out of whack...
Getting tired of an advertising company using our copyrighted material as filler to make money :(

Google's results are all over the place since the Penguin updates. I'm seeing many brands showing with 3 listings one after the after.

No wonder Google says it's traffic searches are up, nobody can find what they are looking for.

I'm seeing many brands showing with 3 listings one after the after.

Only 3 :) my record on searchs done today is 4 in #1-#10 and 10 in #11-#20 for the same site.

Purely from a users perspective, it doesn't matter what I search, I'm
Finding it much harder to find what I'm looking for.

In most of my niches I am seeing many searches return up to 4 listings from the same website, one after another. And all pretty much duplicates of themselves.

These updates appear to have done nothing other than shaft webmasters and shatter many lives.

I cannot thus far see any good to come from them. Other than I'd guess Adwords profits are up!

I see some Google queries (with results set to 10 per page) where the number of videos is extreme - in one case, 2 vids on page 1 of the results, 3 vids on page 2, and 10 (yes, you read that right) on page 3. I didn't look beyond that...oh, yes, every one of them off YouTube.
Hey ho.
Madness.

The silly thing about this update is, that I now do optimize my page for google not for users anymore. I did it for users and was catched by this penguin. Former I did explain widgets and has to use keywords a lot, because it descripted the widget. Now this seems to trigger penguin and I do have to write like a little child and don´t use technical terms in fear of getting hit more and more.
I did some inner linking because it was usefull for the user. Now I have to think : is it good for google ?

If you are a highly specialized website around one theme, isn´t it in the nature of things to use keywords related to your theme?

To check some rankings I found one search were google realy presented amazon #3 with a page "Your search does not match any products on amazon" from amazon search!

Seeing some massive shifts in the past hour...

Yes, I saw it too and it is happening. I see it at 1:00pm P.S.T shifted 20% up then hour later shifted 40% down. So I am now 20% down from normal. Is there a major update?

I noticed a shift around 4pm PST, down about 20% as well... how about a little stability... whatever that is anymore...

I was 94% up until 1pm PST, when suddenly I fell and now will probably finish the day 20% down. My traffic on this site does typically fall by about 10% on Fridays compared to Thursdays, but the other 10% I would say is algorithmic.

I lost 25% of my traffic few hours ago. Definitely some algo change.

The silly thing about this update is, that I now do optimize my page for google not for users anymore.

So...What does Google want?

For the first time in my life - I have no idea how Google ranks pages.

Seeing a noticeable change in search result pages this morning (Saturday, USA)

We have a site that we are trying to work back from the Penguin update on April 24th. One of our higher converting 3 word phrases where we used to rank within top-3 for many years (normally fluctuated 1,2, or 3), is showing very odd results. After April 24th Penguin, only our xml sitemap page ranked for this specific phrase, and it was in the mid 50's. It was the same result in Chrome or FF, logged in to Goog services (chrome) or not.

Today, I spotted the 3-word phrase back in the traffic report and checked the serps in Chrome, logged into services. The top 14 results haven't fluctuated much, but our site now ranks in EVERY position from 15th-24th. All 10 spots, all in a row.

I then jumped over to FF, with tracking obfuscated as much as possible (many cookies blocked, never login, etc) and the results are just as weird. Site page ranks 8th-9th, then on page 3, 21st-29th, all in a row.

The very odd part to all of these weird rankings is that the landing page for that 3-word-phrase, is not in the list of ranked pages, they are general content pages that link to it.

Ugh. Down 50% compared to this time last Saturday. It looks like it started roughly 10:00 PM on Friday night.

My money is on a big Panda update. I'm seeing drastic changes everywhere I look.

Anybody knows what's it ? Next Panda , Penguin or Zebra or what ?

@Sand, I see a drop around the same time as you but not nearly as bad. The diff was about 15% during the overnight hours and has decreased down to about 9% as the morning moves along. Something definitely happened yesterday evening.

My money is on a big Panda update. I'm seeing drastic changes everywhere I look.

Something is definitely brewing. We had huge gains overnight in kw positions. We have more pages in the top 10 than... well, I'd have to pull historical data it's been that long. Lost a portion of our backlinks (5K about 5% of our total) since yesterday. Our traffic is definitely above average so far this morning, but not anything like pre-panda levels. And the most interesting is that googlebot is going crazy on our site. It has already spidered more pages than it does in a normal day, and it's only 9:30am here.

We've lost over 60% of our traffic since Panda 1.0. What I wouldn't give for just even a small recovery at this point.

I’m seeing some of the most screwed up results I have ever seen and I have never said anything about the returned results, ever, until the past month. I actually have two keywords where Amazon has 30 of the top 50 results. A couple of pages have entirely Amazon results. Geez Google puts most of its competition out of business and they literally don’t know what they’re doing. It’s time to start firing the kids and all the cheap labor. Alas, those employees have been living so richly they can no longer see the truth and a very inflated stock.

I really do not know what to make of these bozos any more. How about a keyword1keyword2keyword3 (kw1/2/3) search resulting in the #1 result with:

14X kw1/2/3 in titlebar
6X kw1/2/3 in meta description
8X kw1/2/3 on page
40X kw1/2/3 in footer

Yes, 40 times in the footer, almost kw1/2/3 repeated forty times.

Great Google, I know what to do now since you obviously do not!

@outland88 and everybody else that is seeing lots of weird results, how do you search? Are you logged in to WMC or any other Google account? Do you use their suggestions? Double quotes?
My guess is that people have gotten so lazy that they almost all the time use Google suggestions, because it is easier and that way Google steer people in to what they want us to search for even though it is not exactly what we wanted but they make more money that way. I am also guessing that Google already have readymade results for their suggested search but if you fall outside the box and do your own search then you are on your own with the crappy results we see a lot of time.
To me google is drifting away on their own corporate island distanced from people/their users and livelyhood. They try to mimic Facebook with their G+ which is nothing but a sad copy and will never take off (just look at how many people have plussed this page here (see below!) and they try to copy everybody elses things too but the most popular sites have come from a user movement and not from a corporate. Google was good when it started but when it grew to what it is today, people are shying away, at least I am. They have too much control and they sneak in on your private things and they know more about you then you can imagine. Who knows, maybe they even recorded you when they did the street view of your house...
Anyway, enough of rambling. It would be interesting to know how we search.

@outland88 and everybody else that is seeing lots of weird results, how do you search? Are you logged in to WMC or any other Google account? Do you use their suggestions? Double quotes?
My guess is that people have gotten so lazy that they almost all the time use Google suggestions, because it is easier and that way Google steer people in to what they want us to search for even though it is not exactly what we wanted but they make more money that way. I am also guessing that Google already have readymade results for their suggested search but if you fall outside the box and do your own search then you are on your own with the crappy results we see a lot of time.
To me google is drifting away on their own corporate island distanced from people/their users and livelyhood. They try to mimic Facebook with their G+ which is nothing but a sad copy and will never take off (just look at how many people have plussed this page here (see below!) and they try to copy everybody elses things too but the most popular sites have come from a user movement and not from a corporate. Google was good when it started but when it grew to what it is today, people are shying away, at least I am. They have too much control and they sneak in on your private things and they know more about you then you can imagine. Who knows, maybe they even recorded you when they did the street view of your house...
Anyway, enough of rambling. It would be interesting to know how we search.

@outland88 and everybody else that is seeing lots of weird results, how do you search? Are you logged in to WMC or any other Google account? Do you use their suggestions? Double quotes?
My guess is that people have gotten so lazy that they almost all the time use Google suggestions, because it is easier and that way Google steer people in to what they want us to search for even though it is not exactly what we wanted but they make more money that way. I am also guessing that Google already have readymade results for their suggested search but if you fall outside the box and do your own search then you are on your own with the crappy results we see a lot of time.
To me google is drifting away on their own corporate island distanced from people/their users and livelyhood. They try to mimic Facebook with their G+ which is nothing but a sad copy and will never take off (just look at how many people have plussed this page here (see below!) and they try to copy everybody elses things too but the most popular sites have come from a user movement and not from a corporate. Google was good when it started but when it grew to what it is today, people are shying away, at least I am. They have too much control and they sneak in on your private things and they know more about you then you can imagine. Who knows, maybe they even recorded you when they did the street view of your house...
Anyway, enough of rambling. It would be interesting to know how we search.

if a SE is unable to provide half decent results for the way the VAST amount of people search ie putting keywords into a search box, then they have failed -

It is not about whether people are lazy or not its about the fact that these multiple displays are making the serps a joke and the sooner G realises this and does something the better.....only problem is how will Google display lots of Amazon pages if it can only deliver one result per url

@tigger, I agree but with lazy I meant that when you see suggestions being listed you tend to select something that is close from the suggestions instead of typing in what you intended to search for. That way Google is steering you away from your thought to what they think you wanted and I am guessing that it is to a path where Google makes more money.
I don't see any reason at all for Amazon to show up in the search Why would you go to Google to find something on Amazon? It's the same as Ebay. There is no reason to show ebay in search results.
It has got to be really hard for any SE to give someone the first 10 spots. I know we all want to be there and there can be tons of pages that are almost the same or rather have almost the same triggers (keywords, links etc) that could potentially be there. Maybe that's why we see tons of crappy results so Google can sort it out after a while.

I don't see any reason at all for Amazon to show up in the search

Because a lot of people still don't realize all the products Amazon sells.

Because they have as much right to a shot in the SERPs as the rest of us.

Because they do provide a better user/shopping experience than 99% of the websites out there.

That's a few reasons.

Amazon has every right to rank in the search results. I don't know why everyone thinks they have every right to be outranking major brands with sub par pages. I think a lot of people feel that google owes them something just because they are a smaller company.

Amazon product pages rank so high not just because they are a high authority website, but because their individual product pages offer real value. Their product pages almost always offer user submitted images (which is more than most sites that only offer the default product images offered by the manufacturer). Not to mention a percentage of the products also have user submitted videos of the product. Not to mention all the helpful user reviews amazon has to help potential buyers make an informed decision.

Combine this with the fact that amazon offers free shipping, competitive prices and they are a 100% trustworthy retailer, that is why amazon ranks high for a lot of product related searches.

Of course nobody expects the average online retailer to have the kind of useful content amazon has. Amazon sells a ton of products so all you have to do is focus on a smaller sample of products and focus on beefing up your product pages to offer more to your visitors to help them make a good buying decision. Go above and beyond what the manufacturer offers you and maybe provide your own review of the product, a video of the product in action etc.

I am so tired of people complaining how they cant rank for some shopping terms when they over price the products, do not offer anything constructive, and are usually only providing details which are copied straight from the manufacturer.

@netmeg @brinked
I don't think that was what the comments were about

as @outland88 said

I actually have two keywords where Amazon has 30 of the top 50 results.

Not whether they SHOULD rank, as thats obvious, but should they rank showing 10 items on a page which is what we are seeing today for this and other corporates.

@johnhh, @netmeg, @brinked
The reason I asked if Amazon even should show up in the SERPs was that people know to go to Amazon anyway, don't they? You don't go to Google to search for something in Facebook or even Ebay? What I am saying is that there is a point when it is pointless to show big brands like that, when they are so well known for everything that they don't need Google anymore? Lowes? Do you go to Google to find a thing you need at Lowes?
So @brinked, if we could copy whatever Amazon has done with their pages, would we be up there too or is it just because it is Amazon? I agree that there are a lot of people whining about their pages/web sites and when you look at it, they don't deserve to be on the first 10 pages in Google. They ask in Google groups saying "My site disappeared, I used to have 5 unique a day but now I am lucky if I get one a week..." We all want to be on the first page, but if you have 10 big brands like Amazon that you are competing against or just one brand with 10 pages showing, where would your site be and how can you compete?

Gehrlekrona I never log into Google properties to search and I haven’t for years. I also never use G suggestions either. I’d say 50% of my searches are now in Bing. The reason why is on March 31st Google killed off my search box storage for past searches. Since this is only true of one property Google I can’t blame it on Windows 7 or Browser. It might relate to Norton 360 blocking so many Google cookies.

Johnnn that was my exact point.