I’ve noticed more and more postings about how best to avoid seeing affiliate search results appearing when you’re looking for something.
Initially I couldn’t see why it was a topic worth blogging about, but then I realized that I’m one of those uptight anally-retentive searchers that usually stuff their search terms with operators. Not a day goes by that I don’t use at least three or four insite:’s or filetype:’s when I’m Googling.
However most people don’t bother with operators, so when “Average Searcher” gets looking for a wireless mouse they will encounter a results page stuffed with affiliate and referrer results from the likes of Kelkoo and Amazon.
While this might not be a problem it can offer so many choices as to make searching a painful process- once you’ve performed the search you still have to filter each result (based on its snippet or the familiarity of the URL, or whatever criteria you may employ) to evaluate if its worth your time clicking through.
There are Google operators that will remove affiliates from the results (e.g. wireless.mouse -site:bizrate.com -site:shopping.com etc.), but these have to be typed into the search, or saved in a bookmark style.
Give Me Back My Google goes one step further with a full web front-end for Google that automatically implements a heap of affiliate-scraping operators- for example see how GMBMG presents the search for wireless mouse- notice the difference?
So, while affiliates can be really lucrative there are plenty of ways for searchers to ignore them- and it seems to be a practice that is growing in popularity.
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