Wait, you didn’t realize Rick Santorum has a “Bing problem” that’s exactly the same as his well-documented “Google problem,” where a search for “santorum” lists a web page defining that word as the by-product of anal sex above Santorum’s official web site?

He does. In fact, Santorum’s had his Bing problem for months, if not years. It’s just that everyone fixates on Google. Even Santorum does when he gets asked about it, such as telling Politico last year:

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”

It’s A Search Engine Problem, Not A Google Problem

In the wake of Santorum’s win, and no doubt eventual questions in some quarters about why Google still isn’t “fixing” things for him, I thought it was worthwhile to flip things around and discuss his Bing issue.

It’s worth stressing that this isn’t just some gay-loving-Google-liberal-leaning-hates-Santorum thing and more a general problem Santorum has with the major search engines. In particular, it’s a problem that’s ultimately down to Santorum’s anti-gay views.

Santorum & Bing: Just Like Google

Here’s what Bing currently shows for santorum:

You can see that just after the special news area that Bing inserts above the regular results, the first listing that the arrow points to is for SpreadingSantorum.com, with a description that reads:

Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum

Santorum’s own official site, RickSantorum.com, appears third on the list.

Over at Google, which gets all the attention, the same issue happens:

Google’s news box appears further down on the page, probably because of the special election results box that appears at the top. Spreading Santorum, the anti-Santorum web site, appears as the first regular result. The official Rick Santorum web site appears fourth in the regular listings, one further down than with Bing.

By the way, the same thing also happens at Yahoo. Since Yahoo largely depends on Bing’s results, a search on “santorum” brings up the anti-Santorum site first, as it does with Bing — though after Yahoo’s own news units.

The news is better for searches for Rick Santorum’s full name, rather than just the word “santorum.” In that case, his official site ranks tops. Here’s Bing:

And here’s Google:

Does It Matter?

It’s becoming clear that Santorum’s Bing problem, as with his Google problem, isn’t stopping many Republican voters from selecting him over other candidates. So should Google or Bing really worry about trying to somehow fix it, especially when any type of change like that opens them up to accusations about censorship or political favoritism?

Perhaps.

The SafeSearch Solution

The biggest issue to me might be the fact that as interest in Santorum grows, you’ve got more children in schools likely to be searching on his name. Getting a fairly explicit description in their search results talking about “lube and fecal matter” and “anal sex” might not be what a lot of parents want them seeing.

Both Bing and Google have a SafeSearch filter that is set to “Moderate” by default, which means it only filters out explicit images. Setting this to “Strict” will keep the Spreading Santorum site from appearing in text listings. That’s something parents and teachers can use.

It’s Not An Irrelevant “Google Bomb”

How about a manual intervention to solve this problem, which has mistakenly been called a “Google Bomb.” Didn’t Google do something like that for President George W. Bush?

“Liberal leaning” Google did. The Google Bomb fix wasn’t specifically designed just for Bush, who found people were linking to his biography in a way to make it rank tops for “miserable failure.” It was meant to fix any type of case where people tried to make pages rank for odd phrases that they weren’t relevant for. But questions about the prominent Bush listing helped prompt the fix.

The Spreading Santorum site isn’t ranking because of some type of Google Bomb campaign. It ranks because it is entirely relevant for “santorum.” It was created years ago as a protest against Rick Santorum’s anti-homosexual views. Those views are entirely relevant, in fact arguably more relevant the further Santorum advances as a candidate to be president of the United States.

To drop the site, Bing and Google would actually be making the type of political move that Santorum seems to think that Google is already doing (he clearly doesn’t seem to think about or care about Bing).

But How About A Disclaimer?

There is something that Google is long overdue to implement. Consider what it used to show when you’d search for “miserable failure” and got the George W. Bush biography:

See the ad above the listings that the arrow points to, which say:

Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here’s what happened

The ad led to an explanation at the official Google Blog. Google does a similar thing today, for a search on jew, which brings up an anti-Jewish web site:

It’s long past time for Google to do something similar for searches on “santorum.” They are going to confuse some people, who will assume Google’s trying to advance a political agenda with its search results.

I’d say Bing should do the same thing, but Bing’s never even tried to have explanations like this. Maybe it should consider it.

But Spreading Santorum Is Here To Stay

As for Rick Santorum, as I wrote before, the best way to solve his Google and Bing problems would be to change his views on homosexuality or make a donation to a gay marriage-rights group. That’s what Dan Savage, who created the Spreading Santorum site, told Mother Jones in 2010:

Savage has not forgiven Santorum for his seven-year-old comments: “Rick would have prevented me and my partner from being able to adopt my son,” he points out. But Savage does have a deal for the politician. “If Rick Santorum wants to make a $5 million donation to [the gay marriage group] Freedom to Marry, I will take it down. Interest starts accruing now.”

That’s unlikely to happen, so Santorum will have to continue living with the Spreading Santorum site showing up alongside his own.

Related Entries

• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem

Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often wondered if the company would allow users to use their extremely powerful computing infrastructure to analyze their own data along with data sets available on the open web.

Well, they have and that’s what Wolfram|Alpha Pro is all about. As I wrote a few week’s ago, I’m a frequent W|A user and long-time admirer of the company and it’s founder, Stephen Wolfram. I think they’ve scored again.

The service has an introductory rate of $4.99/month with a reduced rate of $2.99/month for students. The company offers pricing for the enterprise. So, what does this initial launch offer?

Wolfram|Alpha Pro: Key Features

• Ability to Analyze Your Own Datasets Input of upload a data set and let Wolfram’s technology automatically recognize and analyze the data. For example, a timeline of your email, your credit card expenses, or a data set obtained from Data.gov.

• Data in more than 60 file formats can be uploaded and analyzed. From an XLS spreadsheet to an HTML document to the audio in a WAV file. Image files (in many formats) can also be analyzed. As you would expect, many science and math formats are also included.

• Access to extended keyboards like the one available with the Wolfram|Alpha mobile apps.

• Visualized and interactive results using the CDF (computational data format) that Wolfram launched last July.

What’s not available today is the ability to publish and compare, comment on or share results. According to Stephen Wolfram, these options are forthcoming.

I’ll can say now that while some of what Wolfram|Alpha Pro has to offer might not be for everybody today it very likely will be in the future as the amount of data available to analyze (personal data and publicly available datasets) continues to skyrocket.

In other words, Wolfram|Alpha pro is getting in on the ground floor of personal data analysis with a powerful but at the same time very easy to use tool that will appeal to everyone as data analysis moves out of the lab and office and into just about everyplace else.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: On February 8th, Stephen Wolfram posted more details about this Pro offering on their blog.

The employee is Jonathan Rockway. Google confirms he’s a new Googler — or Noogler — as new employees are known. He started in early January. Google didn’t explain what his job is, but he doesn’t appear to be involved in Google’s web search listings process.

SEO Isn’t Good?

That didn’t prevent Rockway from making comments about SEO and ads in a discussion on the Hacker News web site. While sticking up for his new employer, and its move to bring more social content and signals into its search results, Rockway said:

If the social features are relevant, though, then users are getting a better experience. And that’s a good thing, even if individual pages get less traffic from Google. Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large.

I’ve bolded the key part. SEO isn’t good for users? As you’d expect, that’s got the attention of some SEOs. Aaron Wall highlighted Rockway’s comments on his SEO Book blog. So did Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable. I’ve also see references to Rockway’s comments making the rounds on social media channels I follow.

Google Says: SEO Isn’t Spam

Google’s official stance is that SEO isn’t bad. The company has repeatedly said this over time. In fact, last October, the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, did an entire video on how Google doesn’t see SEO as spam. You can watch for yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google confirmed to me today that the video above “accurately protrays Google’s position” on SEO, rather than what Rockway said.

Ads For Ranking Well?

Perhaps more worrisome, however, was Rockway’s comments about ads. He said:

If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it’s pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It’s a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn’t be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you’re selling, and, generally, be a “good match” for what the user wants.

Again, I’ve bolded the key part. That comment suggests that Google is working to change things so that if you want to rank well on Google, you need to be buying ads. That’s pretty loaded stuff.

It’s also not something that seems reasonable. Yes, perhaps this new employee managed to slip-up about the grand master plan. Far more likely, he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Ads Don’t Matter

Three days after his original comment, Rockway made a 180 degree turn:

I shouldn’t have mentioned ads here. Position on the results page should only depend on the quality of your content; if your site has the best content on the Internet for the user’s search terms, you should be the top result. You shouldn’t be able to change your position in the organic results any other way, like by exploiting bugs in Google’s ranking algorithm. The specifics of the ranking algorithm may change, but if your site is the best, you won’t have to worry about it.

That took care of the ads issue; it still left SEO looking like some type of exploit.

For the record, Google told me this:

As always, Google search rankings are completely unrelated to Google’s paid advertising services and other partnerships, and there is absolutely no way for a webmaster to pay money to increase search rankings.

When it comes to SEO, many owners of high-quality sites can and do get their site listed well in Google’s search results without any outside help. Some site owners prefer to have someone else check and optimize their sites, and for these folks we’ve published some guidelines relating to evaluating SEO companies.

Overall, I’d agree with Cutts, who commented on Twitter that it’s nice to see more Googlers communicating. But I’d say I want that communication from Googlers who actually know what they’re talking about. That didn’t seem to be the case here.

Commercials Drive Searches

Since the 2009 Super Bowl, I’ve monitored how the ads influence search interest, and every year, the trend has been the same. As people watch the Super Bowl, they search for everything they’re watching: teams, players, performers, and of course, commercials. The trend continues the day after the game as people talk about the commercials and turn to Google (and Bing) to watch them again. Take a look at the spiking searches for February 7th, the day after the game according to Google Trends:

Nearly every search is Super Bowl related, and searchers are clearly seeking out the ads. As you can see from search #8, commercials often cause people to search for the brands directly. Google Insights for Search shows that brands that advertised saw significant search spikes on Sunday. See for instance, the search volume for [bud light platinum].

They seemed to have really liked those ads in Iowa.

Google reported that searches for [super bowl ads] were 122 times higher this week and that the big search winners were Acura, GoDaddy, and M&Ms.

Where Are Advertisers Sending Potential Customers?

As I do every year, I took note of what advertisers included in the commercial. Did they include a web site URL? A Facebook page? Did they seem to even be aware of this crazy new thing called the internet? And then I looked at the advertisers’ search visibility. I was looking for the following flow:

Last year, many only paid attention to a flow like this:

I understand that Super Bowl commercials are about branding, not necessarily instant purchases, and I realize other positive outcomes exist (discussions on social media and the like). I’m just saying that if someone is searching for you, you may as well show up. And if you’ve gotten potential customers to view your commercial, you may as well make it easy for them to view more information about your products.

This year, many advertisers simply included their domain name in the ad (33 of the 53 advertisers I tracked did this). This approach can help cut out the search step, although as the response to the Dockers ad during the 2010 Super Bowl showed, advertising a URL causes people to, well, search for the URL. So you can’t always cut out the search step, no matter how hard you try.

Last year’s Super Bowl ads were all about Facebook fan pages (that often were impossible to find; don’t say “find us on Facebook” unless that’s an achievable task). This year, only fourof the ads included a nod to Facebook and all used actual URLs. Pepsi Max even went with an easy to remember redirect to Facebook: pepsimax.com/facebook.

Four commercials advertised Twitter hashtags (last year was the first year for this, and then it was mostly only for movie trailers). I was astonished to find that when a hashtag was included in a commercial, people instantly started using it to tweet about the commercial and the hashtag began trending. (As you can see, even the bands with songs in the commercials started trending.)

Of course, there’s a risk in this strategy. Things may go really well, as Audi found with #SoLongVampires, or very awry as Bud Light found with #MAKEITPLATINUM. (Did people really even use the same capitalization in the hashtag as was used in the commercial? Amazing.)

What began trending on Twitter also tended to show search spikes. For instance, take a look at searches for [echo and the bunnymen]:

So what we talk about, we also search for.

The Future is… QR Codes?

It may have seemed like GoDaddy used the same tired formula as always in their ads (although, apparently sex does sell, so I can’t knock sticking with something that works), but in fact, they tried something new this year: including a QR code in the ad.

The online version of the commercial includes the QR during the entire length of the ad, but when aired during the Super Bowl, it appeared only briefly at the end, so I’m not sure if  anyone managed to pull up the QR code reader on their mobile phone, rush to the TV, and scan it before it disappeared from the screen. Including it in the online version seems even more nonsensical though, as the idea seems to be that you’re watching the ad on your computer, see the QR code, scan it with your phone, and are brought to the godaddy.com site on your phone. I would guess that including a link to the web site in the commercial so that you can simply click and access the web site on your computer would make entering your credit card information for all those domain names quite a bit easier.

Scoring Search Visibility

So how did advertisers do in search? It’s difficult to come up with exact search coverage percentages. For instance, if a brand advertised multiple products and ranked well in search results for one product but not the other does the tick mark for that brand go in the yes or no column for search visibility? What if the product showed up for its name but not for its tagline?

For the purposes of the stats below, I used the following guidelines:

• I counted each brand once, even if they aired ads for multiple products
• If they ranked organically for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the organic search column
• If they had a paid search ad for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the paid search column

In a follow up column, I’ll point out some interesting choices, but for now, let’s just look at how well advertisers thought out web sites, search, and social media.

Of the 53 brands I tracked:

• 33 ended the ad with a URL to the brand site, 4 went with a Twitter hashtag, and 4 sent viewers to Facebook.
• 44 bought a paid search ad
• 51 ranked organically for the brand name (although far fewer ranked for the promoted taglines or hashtags)

Chrysler and YouTube

Last year, Chrysler’s Eminem ad was one of the most popular commercials of the game. I found it odd at the time that although they designed their site’s home page to tie in quite well to the vibe of that ad, they bought search ads to the commercial on YouTube. I felt they lost an opportunity to further interact with potential customers and lost some control of the experience (related videos could easily be to competitors, for instance). Their flow looked like this:

That’s not a bad outcome, but I thought that if they had used paid search to drive visitors to the commercial on their site, they might have been able to better leveraged the opportunity. This year, Chrysler once again had a much-talked-about ad, and they decided to mix things up a bit.

For [chrysler]-related searches, the paid search ad points at their home page, which is a great tie in to the commercial. But for other searches, they’ve once again chosen to promote YouTube.

This time, the YouTube link makes a lot more sense as it’s to the channel, so there are no competitor links and the entire page is focused on getting votes for the YouTube AdBlitz, engaging socially, and even includes an ad for the car featured in the commercial. All in all, I fully support this approach. They keep the branded searches pointing at their home page (after all, not everyone searching for the brand is searching for the commercial), which is tightly-integrated with the campaign, and they send those looking for the commercial to a page designed to specifically engage with them.  What a difference a year makes.

2012 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

2011 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

Acura NSX vs. Bud Light Platinum

We’ve already seen that the #makeitplatinum hashtag strategy both worked and didn’t work for Bud Light (they definitely got it trending, but for perhaps the wrong reasons). What about organic search visibility? Sadly, the brand web site doesn’t appear at all in Google for searches for [bud light platinum] (although they have bought a paid search ad to the YouTube page).

Acura NSX, on the other hand (which was a spiking search on Monday), does an excellent job with organic search, taking the top spot with a page devoted to it. (Although including the commercial on the page would have been a good idea.)

Overall, I felt brands did a much better job of keeping things simple and driving viewers to interesting, relevant pages that engaged them. Watch for my next post in the coming days for some specifics on what went right and spectacularly wrong.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Related:

• Super Bowl 2012: What Time Does It Start?
• Super Bowl 2011: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2010: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2009: Commercials and Search Visibility

1. High level site previews in search results
2. A multimedia search within a site function
3. A social layer which, among other things, allows Volunia users to share information and connect to one another

My sense is that it is the social layer which will be most appreciated by Volunia users. Let’s look at each.

Volunia Search Result Previews Offer A “Fly-Over” Site View

During his launch presentation, (in Italian, starts at 40 minute mark) Volunia founder Massimo Marchiori described search users as similar to chickens, trapped in cages and incapable of flying.

Users have been forced to choose search results by consulting one of those classic 10 item title, summary and link lists for too long. Wouldn’t it be nice if users were freed from their cages, and not only, were actually able to fly over a site, viewing a visual or a grid map, before committing to visit it?

Volunia, perhaps from volare, to fly, offers two types of high level site map previews, potentially freeing users from commitment tyranny. The first type, a visual map, aims to group areas of a site together in neighborhoods.

Figure 1: Volunia search result site fly-over: visual map

The second site preview map is in the form of a grid, reminiscent of computer folders. The expectation is that this format will be more useful to people searching from devices with small displays, like smartphones.

Figure 2: Volunia search result site fly-over: grid map

Interactive drill-down versions of the maps are also available from a Volunia menu bar which is visible while navigating a site. Site owners can improve the maps using a Volunia provided sitemap editor.

Figure 3: Volunia sitemap editor

Result previews aren’t exactly a new concept – Ask.com introduced their binoculars feature in 2004.

Where Volunia differs is in their choice to show a site map preview instead of a page preview. Many searches are indeed navigational in nature, one reason Google provides their sitelinks for some queries.

Volunia may be on to something.

Volunia Wants To Surface Multimedia Otherwise Hidden In A Site

Initially the primary focus in Web search was on textual documents, particularly the html kind, rich in semantic structure with their glorious title, heading and paragraph tags.

Oh, I didn’t mention the links between documents, did I? Other Web content formats, from PDF files to images and then video posed much greater obstacles to search engine indexing for a number of reasons.

Today, major search engines like Google offer navigation links to enable a user to search just images or video.

Ambitious searchers can usually find an advanced search syntax page which allows them to limit their searches to specific sites and file types, but for the most part major search engines have taken the “don’t make me think” approach, providing searchers with a blend of media types in search results, what Google calls universal search.

Volunia on the other hand wants to make it easy for a user to discover the multimedia richness hidden in sites like NASA by providing a very visible multimedia site search filter.

Figure 4: Volunia's multimedia search filter

The Web Has Come Alive, Says Volunia: Volunia’s Social Layer

It isn’t immediately clear how useful this feature will prove to be: after all, even if we want to follow the “wisdom of the crowd”, there’s no way to know if the site’s current visitors from Volunia are actually happy with their choice, nor would it be clear to what extent one searcher’s expectations for a page align with those already visiting that page.

The same visitor counts are also available as layers on the site navigation maps.

Seek & Meet: Interact With Other Volunia Users

What might arguably be Volunia’s greatest innovation is in letting fellow search travelers to a page interact with each other, what Volunia calls seek and meet, a feature which feels very reminiscent of Google’s now closed Sidewiki, albeit with two key differences. The first is that users can interact in realtime.

Figure 6: Volunia seek and meet interactive site chat

This birds of a feather real time information sharing might prove useful in a number of situations where people are looking for pre- and post- purchase information.

In the pre-purchase phase, a searcher might want to interact with other users to better understand the product or service they’re considering, not to mention to discover what alternatives others are considering.

Sometimes, it’s nice just to have confirmation that we’re making the right choice. In the post-purchase phase, searchers might be able to resolve support issues by consulting with other searchers – potentially reducing a company’s support costs while providing interactive peer to peer support 24 hours a day.

Each Volunia user is able to fill in a personal profile, much like any social network. The matchmaking possibilities are clearly endless, but I suspect it would be best if I don’t go there….

It isn’t rare to see glowing online reviews written by someone with a connection to a product or service, and equally harsh reviews from competitors or ex-employees with an ax to grind. It doesn’t take much to imagine people attempting to scam the system by introducing fake search users to interact with other searchers.

It remains to be seen if “seek and meet” really is something people will take to. Real time search collaboration will well depend on a critical mass of socially oriented searchers congregating on the same sites at the same time, no easy feat for a niche search engine.

Site owners will undoubtedly be pleased with the second apparent difference to Google’s Sidewiki: commenting can be disabled if desired, something Google didn’t allow.

Volunia, The Company, And A Few Volunia Tidbits

According to data published by Italian business paper Il Sole 24 Ore, Volunia was founded in 2008 by Massimo Marchiori and entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, with Pireddu providing €2 million in funding to date. You might not immediately recognize Massimo Marchiori’s name, yet as an academic Massimo has been working on the theoretical issues of Web search for years.

His seminal 1997 paper, The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines, would serve as one of the sources of inspiration for two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who would acknowledge Marchiori’s contribution to their own work, Google.

During Volunia’s beta phase, over 100,000 people are being invited to become “power user” beta testers. The Volunia user interface is in 12 languages but Marchiori said during the launch presentation that the actual index coverage isn’t limited to those languages.

The Volunia team has ideas for Volunia “extensions”, i.e. new functionality, which will be added to the core, the hard part which has already been done. Advertising will be added to the service.

Marchiori Says Social Needs To Emerge In Search

In an introductory video, Massimo notes that Volunia stems from an idea he’s harbored for several years, an idea for a “different perspective of what the search engine of the future should be”. In the Il Sole 24 Ore report Massimo said “The Web is a living place, there’s information, but there’s also people. The social dimension, already present, just needs to emerge”.

Bing, which started incorporating social signals from Facebook in 2010, and Google, which launched its social search in 2009, would probably both argue that the social dimension to search has already emerged. So would upstart blekko and to a lessor degree, the Russian Yandex.

Armani, Chianti, Ferrari… And Volunia

Volunia is based in Italy, not in Silicon Valley as one might have guessed. Italy actually has a history of search engine excellence. Google may well power most Italian portals today, but the talent behind a now defunct Italian search engine, Arianna, led Ask.com to locate its European R&D headquarters in Pisa.

The Reality Check: Search Isn’t Easy: Volunia Faces Many Challenges

The basic task of a search engine, finding, indexing and retrieving the world’s information, is a complex one. The size of the Web is immense. There’s the problem of searcher intent: we know what we’re looking for when we type a brief search query, but those few words are often open to multiple interpretations.

Google has conditioned searchers to expect lightning speed and mostly fresh and relevant results. Volunia will have to perform well on all these fronts and navigate thorny issues of privacy.

Many start-ups have nonetheless tried to compete with Google and Bing. Some, like Cuil, ran out of funding before gathering significant market share; others like blekko, with far greater funding, are still working hard to win over hearts and minds. Whether Volunia will be able to pull this off remains to be seen.

Kick The Volunia Tires Yourself!

Volunia has a sign-up form for those who want to try it out. Go kick the tires and support the underdog! From messages that I’ve seen on Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook, very few have actually had a chance to actually use Volunia, credentials are only dribbling out, most likely in an attempt to avoid problems similar to what Google faced when they first opened Google Analytics to too many people at once. I based the considerations made (and images) in this article on demo videos released by Volunia in order to give you a preview of what to expect.

Amazing because every year, football fans flock to search engines searching for the start time, and until now, organizations like the NFL, the playing teams, and the broadcasting station didn’t show up at all in search results because none of their sites answered the question. Seem crazy?

• 2009  Results: In 2009, start-time related searches were among the most popular the morning of the game, but neither the NFL nor NBC were anywhere to be found.
• 2010 Results: In 2010, both nfl.com and cbs.com had significant technical infrastructure issues that kept search engines from crawling and indexing the content. Again, the search results were sad and this time, full of spammers trying to capitalize on the search volume.
• 2011 Results: In 2011, problems continued. But news organizations jumped in, and the Huffington Post in particular ranked well for its article that simply listed all of the various ways people were searching for the Super Bowl start time. (That article was later “edited for clarity”).

This year, things are finally getting better. Even the Huffington Post, while still getting every variation of spelling and tagging in the article for maximum search coverage (“For starters, it’s two words, not one. “Superbowl” is an incorrect spelling.”), has filled out their article a bit with actual information.

The results could still be better. While [Super Bowl start time] has overall higher search volume than [Super Bowl kick off time], the latter is the top search this morning, and NFL.com only ranks for the former (HuffPo does quite well with the latter). Superbowl.com, which redirects to the NFL site, ranks, but as I mentioned in earlier years, this domain 302 redirects to nfl.com. A 301 instead would consolidate the domains (including value signals such as links), which might cause the target URL to do better overall in relevant searches. But still, compared to earlier years, I’d call these results a win for the NFL.

Sadly, NBC, the Giants, and the Patriots, and TV Guide all fail to appear in results once again. Even though both Google Insights for Search and my articles over the years should have prepared them for this year’s search interest.

Why should these sites care about showing up for these searches? They’ve invested substantially in site content and those seeking out the game start time are a perfect audience for that content. Searchers would click for the start time and stay for the fan jam videos and view the ads.

Of  course, Super Bowl viewers will see lots of ads anyway today. But that’s a topic for the next article.

Related:

• 2009 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2010 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2011 Super Bowl Start Time
• 2009 Super Bowl Commercials
• 2010 Super Bowl Commercials
• 2011 Super Bowl Commercials

Most Google users are happy, Singhal said. Of course, Search Plus Your World isn’t perfect, he admits, but it’ll improve. As for including content from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, Google’s open to that, as long as long-term deals can be reached that give Google faith it can build new features that will last.

I talked today with Singhal — the “Google Fellow” who oversees all of Google’s search algorithms — about the reaction to Search Plus Your World. Here’s the Q&A, questions in bold, answers from Singhal indented below them.

What’s been your overall reaction or thoughts as you’ve seen all the debate about Search Plus Your World?

The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term.

We’re clearly not done. The product is not complete. It will improve, and we are going to add more things to it. We — Google — always launch products and learn from our launches.

Let me also add one thing. Here is something that I’ve been noticing. The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere. The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same.

With Universal Search or Google Instant, there were more initial complaints, then even later, people were delighted with it.

NOTE: Earlier this week, I was reviewing Google’s web search support forums myself. There really isn’t any massive outcry as we’ve seen with other launches, such as when Google Reader integrated Google+ sharing last year.

There are two main changes that Search Plus Your World introduced. One was the ability to search through privately-shared content along with public content. Some have written they dislike this. Your reaction?

Every time a real user is getting those results, they really are delighted. Given how personal this product is, you can only judge it based on personal experiences or by aggregate numbers you can observe through click-through.

Like everything else, we will improve the rankings and so on. But out of the gate, whereas we had limited users to train this system with, I’m actually very happy with the outcome of the personal results.

How about the concerns that Google+ is being favored too much?

Once again, the blogosphere, they’re just judging the book by the cover.

NOTE: I then mentioned there have been some examples of these blogged, such as by John Battelle, Mat Honan and just today, Tom Blue wrote about how personalized results made searches for things like “television” or “knives” seem to have irrelevant listings. Singhal then said….

I wouldn’t disagree that there may be a few examples out there where our system could be better, but there are millions of queries where our system could be better.

But specifically, there are concerns Google+ is being favored too much not in the privately-shared results but rather as suggestions in the search box or in the new People & Pages results.

This goes back to the point we have been making, that we only have access to personal content and personally shared content from Google Plus. We don’t have that access from other companies.

But what about the Don’t Be Evil tool launched this week, showing that you can create People & Pages results that do go beyond Google+ content.

This is where I’m saying most people are jumping to a conclusion based on the first two weeks of the product. We’re designing a product which it will work for all individuals. It will have identities as a fundamental ingredient of search and relationships as another fundamental ingredient of search.

All this debate is centered around these very popular people out there, and what you could have done for them, and what makes the most sense. But when you’re developing a product, you don’t want to develop it for one segment of the population.

I’ve not seen the debate that I have a [personal] friend named Ben Smith, and when I try to search for him, I get bad results. If you actually build a product only for popular people, then it undermines what we are trying to do. You can’t build a product that behaves differently for one class of people then differently for the real relationships that matter for you.

I feel like this point has not been emphasized enough. People have gotten stuck on these very popular names, and no one has been focused on the cool part of the product where you can find people you care about.

But the People & Pages section does seem focused on famous people or big companies right now.

This is the first two weeks of the product. We have designed for the future of the product. We have designed a product not just for how it works for today, and what we really want is for it to work for tomorrow. Going forward, we’d be interested in doing things like if you’re looking for a destination, we’d like to present to you people that you know who may have something to say about that destination.

People are coming to a conclusion about the product today, within the first two weeks, and they’re not fully seeing the potential where we can build this product around real identities and real relationships.

Is what we have now in People & Pages a promotion for Google+ or search results meant to be more than pushing Google+?

What we are thinking about that product is that if you’re interested in something, who are the people you are potentially related to that you should know about? If they have shared things with you, that’s the obvious thing. It’s easier to build the early system with popular people, but that’s just the beginning of the product.

But how about now? Is this more a Google+ promotional unit?

We don’t think of this as a promotional unit now. This is a place that you would find people with real identities who would be interesting for your queries.

Currently, that place I would admit is occupied by really popular people. So what we are trying to do with this product is indeed bring that aspect that there’s this real society out there that you should know about.

Why not show the additional social links there? For example, you show Britney Spears with her Google+ page in a search for “music.” She links to her Twitter and Facebook accounts from her Google+ page. Couldn’t those be listed as alternative links within People & Pages?

If people click on her Google+ page, those links are available on her About page. Once again, this is possible for us [to maybe show alternative links] because we know much more about the real identities on Google Plus. We can’t provide that for other [lesser known] people.

But what if the people I really want to know about are on those other social networks?

Now I go back to watching how people are acting [with Search Plus Your World]. For example, if someone is not active on Google+, indeed, we shouldn’t be showing their very old posts. That’s one big lesson I’ve learned from watching this in the wild. We’re learning how we can improve the product. We’re already starting to launch some of these improvements as we speak.

What do you need from companies like Twitter and Facebook to integrate them into Search Plus Your World?

Fundamentally, what we learned with our great Realtime Search product is that once you build a great product that users love, then someone else can decide the fate of that product [because when the Twitter deal wasn't renewed, the Google's Realtime Search service depended so much on Twitter that it had to be closed].

That was a very bad experience for Google’s users, and it was a bad experience for our teams. They put their heart and souls into building a great product, just to see that go to waste.

We’re very open to incorporating information from other services, but that needs to be done on terms that wouldn’t change in a short period of time and make our products vanish.

What if you got the Twitter firehose of data without needing a deal. Would that work?

The question that comes down to is under what terms all that’s under. I’m just very wary of building a product where the terms can be changed.

But what if you were given all the posts that people make, no deal needed, just full access to the firehose. Would that be enough?

There’s more to it. A good product can only be built where we understand who’s who and who is related to whom. Relationships are also important alongside content. To build a good product, we have to do all types of processing. But fundamentally, it’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content. Anything else trivializes a very hard product.

What about if you were also given a feed about identities and relationships. Who someone is, all their social connections that are made public?

We’re very open to talking to all the parties on what does it take to build a proper identity product for users, with proper relationships managed.

Wasn’t something like the Open Social Graph API supposed to provide this? Or aren’t there these type of standards already?

I wish there were such standards that were widely adopted out there. One problem we already have observed is there are all types of link spam connections on Google Plus. We have to develop sophisticated analysis, say if someone posts with a particular pattern, we can tell they aren’t a real person.

There’s a lot more. It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl.

Moving Forward

That’s the interview. On a personal note, I’ve viewed the debate around Search Plus Your World as perhaps an opportunity to break the stalemate that’s existed between Facebook and Google for years over sharing data, as well as resolve the loss of Twitter data that happened last year.

Both Facebook and Twitter have real reasons to fear that Google — with its own Google+ social network — might use their data in a way that would threaten their own businesses.

However, both Facebook and Twitter also have good reasons for wanting to be better included in Google’s search engine. Similarly, Google’s search engine would benefit by having more social content within it, as well as a better understanding of social relationships.

That also means I think Google’s search engine would benefit if it could socially connect with any social network, not just Google Plus. I especially want to see the Google search engine continuing to do what I’ve depended on it to do, list the best content from across the entire web, regardless of where it is located.

I covered the strange balancing act Google has to walk between its social network and its search engine at the end of my article about the Don’t Be Evil tool from Facebook and Twitter that launched this week.

As for the balancing act Facebook and Twitter face with Google, I covered more about that — and some potential solutions — in my other post from earlier this this week: A Proposal For Social Network Détente.

Please consider reading both of those articles to understand more about these issues. There’s also related background reading below.

Related: Twitter-Google Deal

• Google Launches Real Time Search Results
• As Deal With Twitter Expires, Google Realtime Search Goes Offline
• Google Realtime Search & The Aftermath Of The Google-Twitter Split
• Twitter Renews Deal With Bing; Google Deal Remains MIA

Related: Facebook-Google Data Dispute

• Facebook On Social Search: ‘We Want To Work With Everybody’
• Facebook: You’ve No Right To Export Email Addresses (Unless It’s To Yahoo & Microsoft)
• Google & Facebook: If You’re So Smart, Work It Out!
• How Facebook Enables The Google Social “Scraping” It’s Upset About
• Google To Close Social Graph API, Not OpenSocial

Related: Google’s Search Plus Your World

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Schmidt: Google+ Not Favored, Happy To Talk Twitter & Facebook Integration
• Twitter Cries Foul Over Google “@WWE” Search, But Google Still Beats Bing
• “Don’t Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Shows Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Can Go Beyond Google+
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• A Proposal For Social Network Détente

I saw reports over the past week or so of webmasters commenting about their rankings. Most were complaining that they lost rankings, but some said sites that were originally hit by Panda regained their traffic levels pre-Panda. This would explain the data refresh, where Google ran the algorithm and updated the sites that should or should not have been touched by Panda.

Google Panda 3.2

Google said this happened about a week or so, so I would place this Google Panda 3.2 update as happening on January 18, 2012.

Why 3.2 and not 2.x? Well, I spoke with a Googler back in late November, they expressed that one of the 2.x updates we labeled as a “minor” update, should have likely been named as a major update and thus labelled a 3.0 update. I personally believe that was an October Panda update, that we did not cover here, but I do not have confirmation on that. In fact, Google does not number their updates, so it is hard to nail down.

The 3.1 update was likely the the minor update from November and now this being a basic “data refresh,” we’d label this as a minor update as well, and call this the 3.2 update.

There was a long gap between this update and the update from November because Google promised us no Panda updates during holidays.

Previous Panda Updates

Here’s the Panda update schedule so far, as we’ve tracked and had confirmed by Google:

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
• Panda Update 3.0 : ~October 19, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 3.1 : November 18, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 3.2 : ~January 18, 2012 (about 2 month gap)

We are waiting to hear back from Google on exact dates and will update our story with those dates if and when we hear back. But Google has indeed confirmed a Panda data refresh as a week or so ago.

Related Articles

• Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”
• They’re Back! Google Issues Weather Report For Panda Update
• Google Panda 2.5: Losers Include Today Show, The Next Web; Winners Include YouTube, Fox News
• Confirmed: Google Panda 2.5 Update Arrived This Week
• Google Panda Update 2.4: Panda Goes International, In Most Languages
• Official: Google Panda 2.3 Update Is Live
• Can You Dig Out Of Your Google Panda Hole By Offloading To Subdomains?
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update

Beyond Blame, Believing In Cooperation

Let’s set aside blame, because blame isn’t going to move anything forward.

Let’s also assume that all the players can be taken to some degree at their word, that they do indeed want to work together in some ways.

What does everyone want?

The Wants & A Game Changer

Google has wanted its own social graph for some time. By social graph, I mean a way for it to see how people are interconnected, which could potentially improve Google’s search results. Better ways to target ads, new “sticky” content where people spend huge amounts of time are other things it wants, but let’s focus on the search aspects.

Twitter has wanted, well, clearly money along with other non-disclosed things for what is mistakenly assumed to be its most valuable asset, its “firehose” of tweets. What’s really Twitter’s most valuable asset is actually its sharing activity, but I’ll get back to that.

Facebook has wanted, well, I don’t know — maybe to be the best social network out there. Don’t laugh. If Google once had a laser-like focus on being the best search engine out there, Facebook can have the same focus on social. That’s a vision that Facebook probably doesn’t want ruined by Google encroaching on its territory. A vision that, of course, makes Facebook plenty of money by tapping into social actions.

We also now have something new that both Facebook and Twitter say they want — to be better represented in Google’s search results. It’s not as if they haven’t been there. But releasing today’s Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet — which alters the Google’s Search Plus Your World service — was a game changer in these Cold War years between the search and social superpowers.

The Bill Of Social Data Rights

Can everyone get what they want, all succeeding in their own ways, without further banging of virtual shoes in outrage?

I think they can. Or at least, I think there are some ways forward, some common ground that has emerged. I’ll lay these out in what I’ll call a Bill Of Social Data Rights. I’m open to better names, believe me — that name I know has been used for other things than I’m covering. But hopefully you get the point.

1) Public Is Public

If someone posts something public on a social network, that’s public for any search engine to index. It’s not up to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ to decide if Google or Bing get to index it through some special deal. The content of what was written belongs to the person who wrote it. If that person publishes publicly, then search engines can spider what they find.

Posts are, after all, web pages. People who create them can choose to block them from search engines if they want. People can choose to withdraw public posts after they’ve been published and know that, like with any web page, the posts will eventually be dropped from search engines.

Social networks have lots of content. Search engines like Google and Bing could bring them to a halt, if they tried to grab everything without special arrangements. So make the “firehose” arrangements, and make them on behalf of the users, who might actually want to find their own content in the search engines of their choice.

This helps solves, by the way, the concerns that Facebook and Twitter have raised about not being included enough in Google. Much of their content is included. Much more of it could be included, if deal making was set aside in favor of the Public Is Public principle.

2) Profiles Are Meta Data

If someone creates a public profile, certain types of information from that profile should be expressed in an easy, machine-readable format. Any social network should provide the profile’s name, the number of followers, the number of people being followed, as well as a flag to indicate if a profile is somehow verified or trusted. A trusted way to link that profile to other profiles or web sites should be implemented.

Search engines need this type of information, so that they really know who someone is, in order to return search results. That’s true even if the person is using a pseudonym. You still want to know that the pseudonym account that comes up is the right one, not some faker.

Providing meta data abut profiles will help. Search engines won’t have to guess where to scrape for key information such as follower counts, which can be used to tell if an account might be real or not, in the case of celebrities. Cross-linkage can help avoid problems that both Google and the Don’t Be Evil tool have, where Larry Page gets listed with Facebook and Twitter profiles that aren’t really his.

If Facebook and Twitter really want better inclusion in things like “People & Pages” listings at Google, this type of data will help. Similarly, if Bing wants to include Google+ profiles, it could use the information as well.

3) Your Friends Are Yours

If I have friends on one service, I should be able to import those friends in some machine-readable format to another service. That doesn’t mean a list of text names, as Facebook’s tool will kick out for me.

It might mean email addresses, as Facebook will give me for Yahoo or Microsoft but not for Google.

It really means some way that the geniuses at our social networks can concoct, I’m sure, so that if I want to find my Twitter friends at Google+, I can. If I want Path to know a particular Google+ circle of friends I have, I can do that. If Pinterest wants to know my Facebook friends, they are my friends to take — not Facebook’s to decide.

What is there really to fear, by allowing this? Even if I take my 50 friends to a new social network, if that social network is crap, no great victory has been won. Heck, taking the names doesn’t mean any of the 50 will actually follow me over.

4) Social Shares & Social Actions Are Proprietary

The real gem each of the social networks has isn’t our posts, isn’t our profiles, isn’t our friends. It’s knowing what we do, how we interact with our friends, how we interact with content.

That’s where the walls should remain. Facebook and Twitter, for example, have real reasons to fear that handing over streams of data to Google might allow it to better understand how people are acting on their services.

So don’t. Make content public, yes. But find a way to agree that the actions — the number of tweets, the number of likes, whatever — are declared off-limits for use by other search engines. If things like robots.txt and the nofollow attribute can work for search, the social networks can figure out their own mechanisms.

Moving Forward

Does everyone get what they really want with this?

Google already has a social graph that’s building in Google+. It really doesn’t need to be worried about getting social shares or actions from the other services — though if they want to offer this, that’s their option. But giving Google the additional information I’ve outlined will allow it to do a better job of exposing content from these other services in search.

Twitter doesn’t get some big payday for its feed, but it’s not getting that now. What it does gain is people who stop complaining they can’t find their own tweets. It gains the chance that with decent meta data, Google will rethink the Google+ification of its search results and return to the idea that search results can be social using anyone’s network. And Twitter’s content gains more exposure, important for a service that more and more talks about itself as being a content play.

Facebook gets even more exposure within Google than it has now. Opening up keeps pressure on Google, as with Twitter, that there can’t just be some Google+ification with the excuse that Google has no choice, because Facebook won’t do a deal. And Facebook potentially avoids the anti-trust critics that almost certainly will come for it in a few years, just as they’ve come for Google now, claiming that Facebook is staying to closed and using its market dominance to keep others out.

I know these proposals may sound naive. Some of what I describe might already exist. But we do need a way forward. Search and social have been colliding, but we don’t need a collision. We need a collusion, and not in the negative sense but a collusion where the users really are being served best by the services they depend on. That can happen, even supporting healthy competition, but without the social superpowers going to war.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

Related Stories

Looking to understand more about some of the issues in the data war between Google, Facebook and Twitter? See especially the first two articles:

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• “Don’t Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Shows Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Can Go Beyond Google+

Early bird rates for Search Marketing Expo – SMX West expire this Saturday, January 28. Register now and save!

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