I'm really struggling with Google searches right now. Almost every search today seems to be returning pages of stuff to buy. Something's up.
Is it a recent change in Google's search algo, bad personalization or local malware?
For example, I'm looking for photos of attractive women in cocktail dresses as inspiration for a new painting. I search 'women in cocktail dresses' and get pages of department store catalog crap. Even after adding 'candid photo' and other similar qualifiers.
'Office Christmas party' results in pages of crap sites selling DVDs or hosting reviews for some Jennifer Aniston movie of that same title. Yeah, I can see some of that, but pages and pages of this as the top results from Google. Maybe I'm going crazy, but it doesn't feel right.
'women dressed up for night out' is better, but still plenty of Macy's, Nordstrom and similar.
As a test, I tried 'photo of a boy flying kite' with similarly disappointing results. Image hits were a lot of clip-art style drawings and top web hits are mostly stock photo sites.
From my POV, Google has totally sold out.
I realize it's possible that maybe it's trying to customize to my taste (doing a bad job I must say) or maybe I have some sort of malware/adware which is somehow rewriting my searches locally.
Has anyone else experienced this? Where Google's results seem polluted?
In incognito Chrome, I see similar results to what you describe for "women in cocktail dresses" and "Office Christmas party".
I would consider these to both be poor quality results but not terribly surprising.
For term 1 the "women" keyword and the fashion classification are probably leading to a more ecommerce-stilted result.
For term 2 there is probably some sort of "popular media" keyword list, and the search term is the exact name of a recent movie.
For "photo of a boy flying kite", I see mostly stock photo results. I believe this to be a fair quality result.
You should start collecting examples of these with screenshots.