life in search dot com

In my previous post, I made mention of a particular set of search results that I found rather disturbing. One of the sites I work with is called the Renewable Planet. It’s a supercool Google mash-up of renewable energy projects that is trying to raise awareness about the critical environmental issues facing the citizens of the world. The editor of site, Katy McEwan, approached me a few months ago with a strange discovery; the site ranking #1 in Google for the query “global warming” appeared to be heavily engaged in a disinformation campaign against global warming activists on behalf of the multi-billion dollar energy industry. The site was called globalwarming dot org (*no links for bad guys*). Check it out for yourself. As of today, the site is no longer ranking; not even in the top 30. And rightfully so!

On some level, I am somewhat disappointed. This was going to be a HUGE story! This was going to be my coming-out story; my first big break as an investigative journalist/blogger! Prior to my discovery, Google announced that it was their intent to make a significant investment in green energy production at their Mountain View “campus”. It was a perfect story! Here, I thought I was in a position to call out Google for discrepancies between their corporate beliefs and their search results! This would have been a Digg-worthy post, make no doubt! But sadly, it wasn’t meant to be. It’s nice to know that certain search engines actually put some effort into providing relevant search results. Which brings me to our friends at MSN…

While I was somewhat let down that this juicy story turned out to be a non-event, there is a positive side to the story. After finding that the site in question was no longer ranking in Google, I decided to check the other engines. Yahoo! was okay; the site was nowhere to be found. MSN, on the other hand, was still ranking this site at #1. My story was still alive! Thank you, Microsoft, for giving me the opportunity to point out your irrelevance in search. For anyone who spends any time studying the serps, this should come as no surprise. MSN has, since it’s inception as a search engine, provided the worst results of the big 3. Whether they are ranking Blogspot splogs using javascript redirects, or simply showing 404 pages in the top 10, MSN seems light years behind the other engines with regards to quality search results. The moral of the story? Don’t always trust the #1 search result to be the most relevant to your query…especially at MSN.