i think it's an automated thing, search queries for photo, picture, royaltyfreephoto, stockphoto all generated the same thing. search queries for flickr, veer, and shutterstock did not.

...of course it's automated:

A person tweaks the script - and the script tweaks the serps. My handcoded sites work in a similar way :-)

I bet we're gonna see more and more of this tpye of "targetting" shortly. It'll take a while before Google is an Answer Engine rather than a Search Engine, but we're getting there....

PS: it still doesn't show for me. Must be the cookie I ate (or didn't eat)

Woohoo! It's a bait Matt Saturday! [mattcuttsphoto] (all one word) brings up the same tip, so it's just looking for the substring photo in the query. [mattcuttsimage] and [mattcuttspicture] work too.

So the answer to the question in your headline, "Google Hand Tweaking Istockphoto Search Results?" is no. IIRC, we've been doing this for a long time, because many people don't realize (or they forget) that we have a delightful image search as well.

So that makes the competitive encroachment all better? So it's not news that Google is using the SERPs to compete directly with the commercial web sites indexed? This is not news because it's not just istockphoto, but all photo sites and photo searches?

Last I checked there was some debate about Google image caching images and presenting them... but maybe I'm just remember the old way of the world. Maybe I'm confusing Google with Yahoo!, an affiliatein travel, real estate, movies, etc. My bad (?)

I'd sooner get them off Google images than having a nice, licensed, copyright violation free image from somewhere like iStockPhotos

He, he, he. This is the only problem I have with it. After all, SEs have been inserting links to their own properties at the top of the SERPs since, well, I really can't remember when it started. (Extra credit to whomever can come up with the first to do so.)

If it were disclaimed, "By the way, we really don't know why we have this function here as you probably can't really use any of these photos because somebody else holds the copyright. But we think it shows something neat we can do, so we're keeping it," ehh, then maybe I'd be fine with it.

Search on pages and what do you see?

Do a URL reference search for "www.superpages.com/" and you see about 6 million results.

Do a similar search for "pages.google.com/" and you see about 84,000 results.

I'm impressed.

I removed Google's own references to its pages sub-domain and got the number down to about 82,000.

The same trick for SuperPages got their number of references down to about 2.8 million.

All I can say is that it's good to be the Google.

Curiously, you get a similar fantastic placement for labs. Woohoo! Well, they have about 183,000 inbound URL references and Adobe only has about 87,000 references.

But wait, campers. Number 3 for 'labs' is Abbott.com with 220,000 URL references.

Reuters only has 947 URL references. Is that why the SERP breaks off to talk about Labrador Retrievers before showing us Reuters' listing?

But that's not all! Bell Labs shows 1.6 million inbound URL references.

Who says you MUST rank on links alone?

No screens were captured in the production of this message. Labrador retrievers may bite the hand that feeds them if they are playing rough. Bell Labs is no longer the mighty powerhouse of innovation it once was. Your mileage may vary. Tax, tags, and title not included. Offer void where prohibited by law, cookies, or Mom's stern rules.

Michael, are you asserting that Google somehow gave pages.google.com or labs.google.com a boost in our rankings? Is that a serious claim?