I'm in the market for a 50mm f/1.4 lens for my Pentax K10D and, as I often do, I included a Google shopping search to my price-comparing routine.

The cheapest price, by about 12.5% ($25 on $200) is offered by Preferred Photo. Being the highly usable app that it is, Google links not only to customer reviews of the product, but of the vendor. And the overwhelmingly majority of people say that Preferred Photo is untrustworthy. Like not even close.

Here is where reviews of Preferred Photo start, at 10 reviews per page. They're all 1-star reviews (seems you can't give zero stars) out of five stars, until the 49th review on the fifth page. That relatively excellent review begins: "Would not recommend this seller to anyone." From there, it's another stream of 1-star reviews from disappointed and angered customers.

The reviews on Epinions and ResellerRatings mirror those same frustrations.

So why are these crooks still indexed on Google's shopping engine? How could Google not have a system that flags administrators when a merchant receives an avalanche of dissatisfied reviews, and how could it not have a policy to remove that merchant from its shopping index?

Google's products search cannot benefit at all from steering potential customers to shady businesses, and it surprises and disappoints me that it could happen today to an honest person.