Derek Mabie   Jul 18 2012   Flag

this link shows a "personalized" search performed for hotels nyc Expedia dominates first 5 listing. http://screencast.com/t/Bj2otPZXG Not so shocking because I literally just booked a hotel, plane and car via expedia last week and use it pretty regularly. http://screencast.com/t/QmrTyCWWpKfz this link shows a non or less personalized result w/o log in. This is the trend I have seen personally, no research, just my own searching. My interest is sparked to see if this a personalization battle we are facing vs. overall repetition? Think about how they can leverage paid visitors to the big brands now!!! $$$$ This correlates w/ the organic pane pixels decreasing by the day.

Tanner C   Jul 19 2012   Flag

This is sadly showing up more and more for various industries.

John Doherty   Jul 19 2012   Flag

I don't see how this is a good search experience. It's definitely a search bubble.

Alistair Lattimore   Jul 20 2012   Flag

John, It's a horrible experience for users, no diversity at all. This isn't just happening with filtered results as suggested in the article either. Stayz who are an Australian holiday home website have root level folders for every holiday home listing. I can't find the query I used to generate the listing but I commented to a colleague at work a fortnight ago that they had 35 of the top 50 results - which is completely insane. So far, I have only seen this happen to very powerful domains. Does anyone have an example where a smaller less powerful website has that outcome? Al.

David McClellan   Jul 20 2012   Flag

I've seen this happen with smaller domains too. Here is a page one screenshot that I took about a month ago for one SERP that had 6 DMCA warnings and the other 4 results were from the same domain which was a smaller, lesser known domain. https://twitter.com/HesDave/status/210967691991846912/photo/1/large. Since then, it has corrected itself but, I'm seeing a lot of domain crowding recently. In some SERPs it is out of control.