A post on John Battelle’s Searchblog today mentioned that a Google search for ‘amazon.com’ was not returning results. I checked this out for myself, as you can see below. Very strange. However, each of the links on the page returns a result that will get you to Amazon. Searches for ‘ebay.com’ and ‘yahoo.com’ returned results normally.

I’m puzzled as to why Google would do this, or if it’s a glitch in the system. A quick look at the Hitwise search engine analysis report for Google shows that for the four weeks ending June 24, 2006 ‘amazon’ was the 31st highest volume search term, with 0.26% of Google’s searches, while ‘amazon.com’ was the 42nd highest volume search term, with a share of 0.20% of Google searches.
The chart below demonstrates that the volume of searches for ‘amazon.com’ sometimes exceeds that for ‘amazon.’ You can also see on the chart a nice upward trend in searches for both terms over the past 15 months – searches for ‘amazon’ were up 34% for the week ending 6/24/06 versus the same week last year (week ending 6/25/06). The chart also shows the dramatic spike in searches for Amazon that coincides with the holiday shopping season. Last year searches for ‘amazon’ and ‘amazon.com’ peaked during the week of December 17, as shoppers rushed to place last minute orders and check order status.
Since we know that ‘amazon.com’ has such a high volume of searches, does anyone have an idea why this might be happening, and why Google would take so long to fix it? Battelle’s entry was posted 8 hours ago.