And The Academy Awards Oscar Nomination Goes To … Google & Bing!

When I started seeing tweets about Oscar nominations, I realized the Academy Awards nominee list must be out. Good time to test how well the search engines are doing listing them! Would Google beat Bing? Bing best Google? And how about Blekko, for getting me to a list? It seemed a draw between Google and […]

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When I started seeing tweets about Oscar nominations, I realized the Academy Awards nominee list must be out. Good time to test how well the search engines are doing listing them! Would Google beat Bing? Bing best Google? And how about Blekko, for getting me to a list?

It seemed a draw between Google and Bing. Both of them listed news about the awards at the top of the page. Both of them had the official site listed first:

Oscars Close1

Looking more closely, I wanted to give Bing the nod. It listed the main nomination page from the official site in the first position:

Main Page Bing

Over at Google, it was the Oscar home page listed first, not the nomination page (and within minutes after making my initial review, the nomination page itself started showing in the second position):

Oscars Google1

However, both the home page and the nomination page give you the exact same information, the nomination list:

Oscar List

So, I declare it a tie. Meanwhile over at Blekko:

Nominations Blekko

The service fails to connect you to the nominations at all. What looks like a link to the nominations page instead brings up an error on the official site:

Nominations 404

While that’s partially the Academy Award’s fault, for failing to redirect what’s probably an old location for the list, that still doesn’t excuse Blekko. Google and Bing got it right — Blekko needs to as well, if it’s really going to be competitive.


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About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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