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Google Top Ten: 4 out of 10 results for the same thingJan 30 2007 | SEO |
I was doing some research earlier and did a search on Google for translation services and was quite dissapointed to see Babel Fish as not 1, not 2 but 4 of the top 10 results returned.

Yes - Babel Fish is an extremely popular service for quick, free translations. Does it deserve to be in the top ten? Sure. Does it deserve to be in the top ten - four different times? No shot.
All of these results (despite having different URLs) all lead to the same exact tool. How does this enrich the searcher’s experience?
Interestingly enough, Yahoo! owned AltaVista’s BabelFish doesn’t show up once in Yahoo’s top 10 results for the same term.
Posted by Chris Winfield at 11:15 am
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January 30th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
I know those Google people are up to something! Its just up to US to figure it out.
Thanks for noting this!
January 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Hmmm… I bet we can change this
January 30th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
doesn’t the indentation typically mean a sub-set (or interior page) of the result directly above it? I would count this as 3 top tens, not 4, for that very reason. But either way, for a search term as broad as this, I wouldn’t expect any one site to gain three or four out of the top 10. That’s somewhat rare and doesn’t seem very “natural”.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Hi Erin -
Yes - it does but the fact still remains that out of that very important top ten results - 4 of them are for Babel Fish (indent or not).
The other point that I didn’t even get into was the fact that Babel Fish isn’t even completely relevant for “translation services” - to me this should be more focused on a professional company that actually provides services (what I was originally looking for when I did this search). Babel Fish is a tool for free, quick ‘n dirty translations.