Has Penguin and Panda turned google from 31 flavors to a Vanilla only serp site?

[craigmn3]

Google search in my keywords, and also in general results are getting frustratingly monochrome

The top ten pages all feature the same things , products and information.

Penguin in particular seems to have punished the highly motivated optimizers and site owners. I can see see Google's reason,, all the grey hat stuff going on out there, but those same guys are the driven innovators who supply the Cherry Ripple Swirl ice cream, and the odd sizes, and the new things..... Googles announcement that it is going to rank by popular searches also seems like it it is going to narrow it's selection.

In trying to "improve" their results.....have they made them....boring?

[ozsubasi]

I have a page on my site which prior to Penguin was on page one of a search for "Altinkum weather" but is now not in the top 50. I just did a Chrome incognito search, and on the first page there are 10 different sites, which is fair enough. But the sites which are at #1 and #3 between them occupy 9 positions on page 2, and 9 positions on page 3.
In other words, they hold 20 out of the top 30 positions between them. What kind of choice is that giving to users?

[ozsubasi]

I just did another search, "photos of Altinkum". On page one, there is a block of images then 6 search results, and the first 3 are tripadvisor.com or .co.uk.
On page two tripadvisor has 6 out of the 10 results, page three it has 10 out of 10, page four is also 10 out of 10.

So out of the first 36 results, tripadvisor has 29 of them, i.e. 81% are for one company. Also it should be borne in mind that many of the photos are of specific hotels in Altinkum because many of these results are attached to reviews of hotels, they are not photos of the location in general.