Google Shopping search is a scam

Microsoft has been pointing this out for a while as a marketing campaign for Bing, whose shopping results are uncompensated: http://www.scroogled.com/

Large but (mostly unjustly) hated company points out major flaw in competitor's product: everyone ignores it. Cool, hip blogger points out the exact same thing a month later: front page.

sigh

Odds are that yes these results were presented to you based on a click purchase on the term you inputed 'coffeemaker' but there are other variables in play here. In order for something to be entered into the google shopping page it must be submitted by the companies/sales sites. In this process definitions, tags, meta data, seo scores, etc are all thrown into play to come up with the most accurate and popular results. With Keurig being on of the biggest and most popular coffe maker producers in the US it makes sense that there is more traffic and requests around that particular coffee maker.

Wow, I was hoping Google could avoid the anti-trust stick but this was a horrific mistake on their part. What's funny is that so few people use Google Shopping but the behavior is so strongly strongly rooted in the anti-competitive and misleading categories that it'll probably kill them when everything goes to trial.

It's a scam you discovered based on information that Google told you about how their site operates.

I'm not saying this is the best experience but "scam" isn't accurate either.

They used to have a big honking announcement on the top of the google shopping page explaining this...

Another reason to stick to Amazon. Still, you'd hope Google would be better than this...

How else are they going to grow their quarterly revenue?