Comments on: Despite Inauguration, Google & Others Still Think It’s President Bush, Not President Obama

By: Asterix

Asterix — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:54:35 +0000

Yahoo image search seems to be significantly better than the rest for all the examples you quote.

By: VBP

VBP — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:07:31 +0000

That is a great piece of info. It will not be long before the days of instant updates.

By: paisley

paisley — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:17:42 +0000

when u wrote your last article i did some digging and found out Obama’s web team was going to use a CMS system and change all the directory names to start it over fresh. I didn’ty think i was supposed to leak that.. so i didnt.. =)

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:08:37 +0000

But Nate, dude, it’s not right. I mean it wasn’t right! I mean it isn’t right! I mean…

OK, so in terms of what you list number one right now, yep, the Encarta listing is showing Obama as president. But when I wrote this, that wasn’t the case:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/searchengineland/3213162731/

But then the story was really about how everyone’s listing the White House web site. And when I wrote this, you were still showing a description saying Bush was the president. And that’s still the case for both “white house” and “president of the united states.” In both cases, Bush is shown as president right now. In the latter case, he’s even showing that way in the title.

I’m sure it will all be fixed soon when you recrawl.

By: nbuggia

nbuggia — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:19:34 +0000

Danny, why did you not include Live Search in the article? We actually got it right!

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=president+of+the+united+states&go=&form=QBRE&qs=n

nate

By: yowazzup

yowazzup — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:17:06 +0000

I think it’s not entirely Google or Yahoo’s mistakes. White House has not updated its web site as quickly as you have caught them. By right, President George W. Bush is still a president of the United States, just whether it’s “past” or “current”.

Anyway, President Bush is still a failure after the update at number 4, while your site is at number 3.

By: chiropractic

chiropractic — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:49:13 +0000

I’m glad you hold them to a different level of standards than you do your members. I still have 2008 copyright tags to update.

Out of curiosity, “miserable failure” was the first search I made this morning. Your SEL article on the subject came up as the number one result.

By: javaun

javaun — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:24:36 +0000

Nice catches, Danny. Looking at the Google listing for “white house”, they’ve updated the title and snippet, but all of the site links (save “President” and “First Lady” ) redirect to the “Page Not Found” message. But it’s a pseudo 404. According to the HTTP header, they’re 302′ing it. So maybe there is still hope for all of George Washington’s lost link love?

HTTP Header snippet.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.whitehouse.gov/interactive/

GET /interactive/ HTTP/1.1
Host: http://www.whitehouse.gov

HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0