Thanks to the generosity of Assaf from Paintyourlife.com, a fun, international site that lets you create custom paintings from photos, we’ve been given permission to share the perturbingly strange search results below:
The above screenshot shows Google in the #1 position for the search phrase “paintyourlife.com.” Not only that, but the sitelinks are displaying, suggesting that Google (the search engine) thinks that “paintyourlife.com” is closely connected enough to be a branded search term referring to Google.com.
Google’s not the only one suffering with odd results, though – Yahoo! has some odd ideas about paintyourlife.com as well:
At Yahoo!, searching for “paintyourlife” results in a title and description that comes from the site, but the domain and the referring link will send you to Google.com!
Obviously, we asked Assaf if PaintYourLife.com had recently been re-directed with a 301 or 302 or if some other event like a DNS switch could have caused these issues, but to the best of his knowledge, no such shift had occurred. I suspect that a technical problem of some kind affected the results we see above, but there’s nothing like a search for your domain name resulting in Google coming up #1 to make you feel like the search giant’s taking over everything lately.
Oh, and big props to Live & Ask for getting all of the queries around PaintYourLife.com showing their domain rather than Google’s.
p.s. Here’s a link to Archive.org’s listings for the domain, none of which would suggest anything out of the ordinary.
BTW – Is it just me, or does the idea of having a painting of your house inside your house conjure up a Monty Burns meets MC Escher theme for anyone else? I think I want one…
