Search arbitrage is annoying and just another reason why professionals are leaving the broad consumer search engines for vertical search.  The Search Anywhere Blog tipped me off this morning to a concise YouTube clip showing how search arbitrage works in Google.  When we hear professionals who use search as part of their daily business complain about the wasted time associated with consumer search, it is things like this and link farming that they are usually most annoyed by.  The video points out that the embedded links are encrypted so the consumer engines do not detect this type of hijacking of results but I think it is far more sinister than just that.  The big engines can’t detect an encrypted link?  And do the ad word driven consumer engines really mind this type of redirecting?  So much so that they are actively changing their algorithms to detect and stop it from happening regularly?  I don’t think so because even this irritating type of search engine marketing and optimization drives ad word revenue for the big engines.  Do they care about quality results more than meeting aggressive ad word revenue targets?  The problem is a chicken-and-egg situation.  The big engines got big with good results.  Now that they are big and the daily users are addicted like rats on crack, result quality as a priority can easily be replaced with revenue targets.  Sadly, it’s all about the ads now at the expense of relevant results.  But vertical search is driven by relevance and authority first which in turn are leveraged to drive a much higher CPM rate to a much more sophisticated demographic.  Quality drives margins up; the rest is just a numbers shell game to hijack your eyeballs for a couple of seconds.