I tried "sun hats" and got the ad from coolibar and only one other result out of ten on the first page. So, I ask for some more facts, not just anecdotal evidence of failure. Do you visit coolibar regularly? were you logged in or incognito? I tried both and got similar results. How many searches did you perform to come up with these anomalies? Have you seen this behavior before or perhaps it was just a bug?<p>UPDATE: It appears we have been spammed. To answer my own question, I think he has been on coolibar. This person is launching a site that is a directory for hats (first link above blog post). His lack of any response says it all. Clever ploy ...
This may be the result of some weird personalization specific to the author, which I suppose may be interesting itself. I do not see similar results at all (one result from coolibar for sun hats and 1 result from amazon for womens sun hats).
Unfortunately, I can't reproduce these results. I'm not saying they are false, but that maybe they have to do with personalized results for the author. Did you try logging out and doing the same searches? There was a maximum of results from the same page that could be shown (I think it was about five), so I'm not sure how you can get this results.<p>Also, there's another issue. Even if you get the same webpages all the time, that doesn't mean that those aren't the same results. Especially when webpages today have a lot of different content. I.e. diversity != quality.
I solved this problem -- I had my search preferences set to return 100 results. If I change it to return 10 results, I no longer get duplication of results. Seems like google really wants to push users to refresh their ads.
gmyachtsman, if you are searching specifically for products, try using Google's shopping search : <a href="http://www.google.com/shopping" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/shopping</a>