[amitp]

I tried googling "What is the fifth book in the wheel of time series" and got

1. Wikipedia - The Fires of Heaven

2. Amazon - The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, Book 5)

3. a bunch of videos which I skipped over

4. Wheel of Time Wiki - The Fires of Heaven

5. Macmillan Publishers - The Wheel of Time, Books 5-9

6. Goodreads - The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, #5)

7. Novelnotions - Book Review: The Fires of Heaven (maybe this is spam?)

8. Esquire.com - Wheel of Time Books in Order (not specific to book 5)

9. FictionDb - Wheel of Time Series in Order (not specific to book 5)

10. Barnes And Noble - The Fires of Heaven

I am wondering how different everyone's results must be. [Also, I don't know how to format a list on HN…]

[creato]

There is (browser?) malware out there that hijacks the google search results to show junk instead of what you are actually looking for. At one point I got bitten by this, it only sometimes replaced the results so it was a bit subtle and took me a while to pin down.

I wonder how many people on HN are infected by such malware and don't realize it? A lot of the complaints about search results are clearly not this, but when someone complains of outright spam for reasonable queries, I do wonder...

[malfist]

Weird, last week when I googled it, all I got was liscicles about "the best order to read WoT" and other blogspam. Just googled it now and it seems fine.

[david_allison]

Google put one of my accounts into a spam blackhole in Jan 2022 for about a month (almost all results were obvious low quality spam).

Result quality can be significantly different

[Moru]

I got something similar.