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

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

The ad network analyzed search referrals on “hundreds of millions” of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals — at an average of 4.81 words — came from Ask.com. AOL users are at the other end of the spectrum; their user queries average barely above four words, by far the shortest of the five sites that Chitika studied.

It makes sense that this would be the case, since Ask.com has been refocusing on questions and answers in recent years — and asking questions tends to involve more words than other types of queries.

It would be great to get real search query length data directly from the search engines, but they’ve never made a habit of sharing that kind of information. In May 2010, Google did release data showing that 54.5 percent of queries are more than three words — which falls in line with the Google (and Bing) data that Chitika shows above. But that’s the last time I’m aware of that either Google or Bing shared such information.

Searching For Santorum

Here’s how Google Trends currently looks:

The arrow shows how searches for “rick santorum” are now that second most “hot searches” happening, searches that are occurring far out of the ordinary. Clearly, people are trying to learn more about Santorum. What do they find?

The first link that the first arrow points at leads to Santorum’s official campaign site — or what should be his official campaign site, but I’ll get back to that.

The second arrow points to the now infamous web site that defines the word “santorum” as the byproduct of anal sex, as we’ve covered in detail in our previous story Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?

The same thing also happens at Bing:

The good news for Santorum is that he ranks at the top for a search on his own name at both search engines, which hasn’t always been the case, to my knowledge. The bad news is anyone searching for him simply by his last name still will find the anal sex definition coming first.

Missing On Bing

Indeed, on Bing, the definition comes first and Santorum’s official campaign site doesn’t make the top results at all:

Below The Fold On Google

Over at Google, the definition also ranks top for a search on santorum, but at least Santorum’s official site shows. Twice. And that’s part of Santorum’s problem:

The Santorum Donation Page

Notice the lower arrows linked together. One points at the RickSantorum.com site; the other at donation page run by the Santorum campaign hosted on Transaxt.com. Here’s how that second page looks:

It’s a big, giant donation form, paid for by the Santorum campaign. It doesn’t provide any further information about the candidate, who he is, his background, policy ideas and so on unless you click on the “http://support.ricksantorum.com” link near the top, which isn’t actually a great call-to-action to learn more.

Santorum Removes His Own Site From Google

Surely his official RickSantorum.com site listed in the top results is better, though? Nope. You see, that entire site has been effectively taken down. If you click to ANY page where that site used to be, say one of the over 400 pages that Google still believes exists:

All of those pages just lead back to the donation page. Want to volunteer for Rick Santorum? If you search for that phrase, you’ll get a page from his campaign site promising to tell you how:

But click on that page, and you’re back to the unhelpful donation page.

To Rank Top, You Need Something To Rank

One of the problems Santorum has had in ranking tops for a search on just his last name is that until relatively recently, he didn’t maintain his own dedicated web site about himself, a place independent of his elected office where those who wanted to know about Rick Santorum could discover more.

His campaign web site has helped, but by dropping the web site and pointing everything over to the donation form, it’s as if the Santorum campaign has taken all the “votes” its earned over the past few months and tossed them all away.

The Support.RickSantorum.com site seems to be the new location for all the content that was in the old site. Potentially, someone thought that by launching that new site, they might be able to get both it and the campaign page showing up in Google’s top results, perhaps in hopes of pushing the anal sex definition down or out.

That’s extremely unlikely to happen, even more so now than ever. Given that Santorum hasn’t suddenly embraced concepts like gay marriage, his rise as a candidate is only going to further focus attention from some on his views toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. That protest site becomes more relevant than ever.

Hide-And-Seek Doesn’t Help

But at this point, Santorum’s greater attention now as a leading presidential candidate (for as long as that lasts, given how quickly Republican front-runners get cast aside at the moment), really means that his official campaign web site ought to be ranking at the top of Google and Bing. It’s relevant for it to do so, for most searchers, I’d say.

But the search engines can really only do so much. Santorum’s site isnt following any of the SEO best practices that the search engines would recommend. It is literally playing hide-and-seek with them.

Maybe A Google Notice?

One thing I would like to see Google do. When you search for some things like jew, you’ll get a notice from Google like this:

It’s something Google does in cases where a lot of people might wonder why they’re showing odd and possibly offensive results in response to a search, as happened in the past with the “monkey face” image search results for Michelle Obama.

The “santorum” search certainly falls into this category, and this type of ad notice is probably overdue, even if Santorum’s disappearing web site is making matters worse.

Now go watch the latest giggle from Jon Stewart over the Santorum search results, from last night:

And hey, Jon, I had that joke about the candidates being like a box of chocolates first :)

Postscript (5:45 ET): Only four hours after this story went up, the Santorum campaign now seems to be reacting. The redirections from www.ricksantorum.com to the donation page have stopped, though I find the occasional redirection error still happens, as you can see below:

However, even with the redirection turned off, there’s a different issues. The support.ricksantorum.com site that was created continues to run with all the same content as with www.ricksantorum.com. For example:

• http://www.ricksantorum.com/pressrelease/santorum-momentum-rolls-new-hampshire
• http://support.ricksantorum.com/pressrelease/santorum-momentum-rolls-new-hampshire

Those are two different URLs, on two different Santorum campaign sites, that lead to exactly the same content. That creates another issue for the Santorum campaign, one known as duplicate content.

As spotted by Search Engine Roundtable, people were asking in Google’s help forums why various searches related to defining English people returned the Wikipedia page about the C-word, as shown below:

The screenshot shows Google listing the Wikipedia page first in a search for define english person. It also lists that page first or in the first page of results for related searches such as:

• define an english person
• what defines an english person
• define english

For the record, Google tells us:

We’re aware of the results for this query, and we don’t like them. As always, we look for algorithmic improvements that will address thousands of searches, rather than manual fixes for just one.

A Google Bomb?

I’ve seen some reports wondering if the listing is being caused by a Google Bomb, but I don’t think that’s the case.

A Google Bomb is where there’s a concerted effort to link to a page with certain words contained within the links themselves, in an effort to make a page rank for those words, even if the page isn’t explicitly about that topic.

For example, when some people were upset with President George W. Bush a few years ago, there was a campaign to get people to link to his official biography with the words “miserable failure” in those links. As a result, the page start ranking for that.

Google later instituted a fix for Google Bombs like this. In particular, since the George W. Bush biography wasn’t explicitly about “miserable failure” nor used those words on the page, it was prevented from ranking for that term. Our stories below explain more about how Google Bombs work as well as the fix:

• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American

Much attention has been focused lately on how a search for “santorum” brings up an anti-Rick Santorum web site. Some have mistaken this as being due to a Google Bomb. It’s not, because while presidential hopeful Rick Santorum might not agree, the page at issue in that search is indeed explicitly about an alternative definition for “santorum” and does use that word.

No, Not A Google Bomb

So how about this Wikipedia page? If it were a Google Bomb, you’d expect to find some origin, to call-to-action somewhere on the web telling people to link to the page with certain words to produce this type of result within Google. After some hunting, I can’t find anything like this.

For example, here’s how the Open Site Explorer tool reports people linking to the page. The most popular text used in the links are for the C-word or involving that. None of the links show things like “english person” in them.

In addition, Google Bombs usually go off on Bing, as well. Do these same search on Bing, and the Wikipedia page doesn’t appear.

All this suggests a problem with Google’s own ranking systems, not due to some type of external internet graffiti attempt. Google told me they are looking into what happened and how to fix this. But with the upcoming holidays, don’t expect an answer or solution probably until the New Year.

Of course, by then, Google may face a new challenge. Thanks to its glitch, that Wikipedia page has now become relevant for searches on that topic. The odd Google search result were even added to the page, though currently, these have been edited off.

(Stock image via Shutterstock Used with permission.)

Related Stories

• How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Removes Offensive Obama Image; Was It Justified?
• Offensive Michelle Obama Image Returns, Google Buys Ad To Explain
• Disturbing Michelle Obama Image Makes A Case For Facial Recognition In Google’s New Image Search
• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• Santorum & Google’s Search Quality Czar Matt Cutts Makes The Colbert Report

Overall Facebook had four of the top 10 search terms for 2011, the same as in 2010. However query volume for the collection of Facebook terms grew 33 percent vs. last year.

Top search queries of 2010 and 2011

What’s noteworthy is that all of the top 10 are navigational queries. Beyond the top 10, Hitwise said that “social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010.”

According to Hitwise, the top 10 websites visited in the US were the following:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Youtube
4. Mail.yahoo.com
5. Yahoo
6. Bing
7. Search.yahoo.com
8. Gmail
9. Mail.live.com
10. MSN.com

The biggest “mover” among the top 10 queries and websites was Myspace, which exited in accordance with its precipitous decline in traffic. There’s more analysis of the year’s top search queries by category in the Hitwise blog post.

Curiously, Facebook doesn’t appear on any of the “top lists” issued by Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL (see below). With Google’s list, at least, it’s based on “rising” queries rather than those most popular overall.

Related Entries

• Google Zeitgeist 2011: Rebecca Black, Lego Alien & Steve Jobs
• 2011 Yahoo! In Review: Top US Searches In 30 Categories
• AOL In 2011: Charlie Sheen #Winning Over Other Celebrities
• Searching For Answers On Ask.com In 2011
• Bieber Tops Bing’s List Of Most Popular Searches In 2011

Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com.

Those in the picture above are included in the “fastest rising searches” category, including Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, iPhone 5, Adele, 東京 電力, Steve Jobs and iPad 2.

Google summed up the year also in this video:

Here is a partial text based list:

Fastest-Rising Toys 1. Lego Alien Conquest 2. Unova Pokedex 3. Fluttershy

Fastest-Rising Costumes 1. Angry Birds 2. LMFAO 3. Flynn Rider

Fastest-Rising Recalls 1. Turkey 2. Bob stroller 3. Stihl

Most Popular Apparel Brands 1. Nike 2. Victoria Secret 3. Zappos

Most Popular Jewelry 1. engagement rings 2. Tiffanys 3. Pandora jewelry

Most Popular Gift Stores 1. Edible Arrangements 2. Oriental Trading 3. Spencers

Most Popular Home & Garden 1. Home Depot 2. Lowes 3. Ikea

Fastest-Rising Gadgets 1. Kindle Fire 2. iPhone 4S 3. Sidekick 4G

Most Popular Cell Phones 1. iPhone 2. HTC Evo 3. HTC Thunderbolt

Most Popular Video Games 1. Black Ops 2. Call of Duty 3. Halo Reach

Fastest-Rising Home Appliances 1. Dyson Slim 2. Foodsaver Vacuum Sealer 3. Kirby Vacuum

Most Popular Coupons 1. Target 2. Lowes 3. Hobby Lobby

For the past year’s Google Zeitgeist, see this page.

Related Stories

• 2011 Yahoo! In Review: Top US Searches In 30 Categories
• AOL In 2011: Charlie Sheen #Winning Over Other Celebrities
• Searching For Answers On Ask.com In 2011
• Bieber Tops Bing’s List Of Most Popular Searches In 2011

Within the the Ultranet of the future, Lisa accesses Google through the Google door:

“Right, it’s Dr. Suess’s birthday,” she says, when seeing the Suessian Google logo over the door:

That’s nod to the real Dr. Seuss doodle that Google ran in 2009.

After entering, she accesses Google itself:

“Google, even though you’ve enslaved half the world, you’re still a damn fine search engine,” Lisa says, as she enters the room.

You can watch the clip below that someone posted to YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even though it’s fair use, it’ll probably get yanked offline soon.

You can also keep an eye for the “Holidays Of Future Passed” episode of The Simpsons, as listed here in Clicker, to see where it might pop-up next online. It’s for sale on iTunes, at the moment. It’s not yet posted to Hulu.

On the incredibly awful official site, you’ll find the episode here and available if you have a magic decoder ring that involves the Dish network, Verizon or other TV providers and enough time has passed. Or in eight days, everyone can watch it free.

Alternatively, you can Google holidays of future passed and enjoy the episode on at least one of the sites listed in the top results that has posted it probably without permission. Google should wipe that out, but of course, yet another site would just spring up.

Bing does a better job of burying infringing sites, but I can’t tell if that’s because its working harder at this type of issue or just doesn’t have enough relevancy. Regardless, Bing does well getting you to sites that that suggest they have the episode but instead just make you click on ads.

Pity you can’t just watch it directly from Fox itself, because that would wipe out pirate sites more than anything.

You Say Austria, Google Says Australia

In a search for Austria’s biggest companies, Google automatically changes the query and searches instead for Australia’s biggest companies:

Forbes spotted the glitch, which is the second major problem like this to hit Google recently.

Romney Can’t Win

Last month, Google gained attention because of how a search for “romney can win” caused Google to suggest, “Did you mean: Romney can’t win,” as shown below

Our previous story, Even Google Thinks “Romney Can’t Win”, covers this more and how it was caused by Google’s spell checker getting confused.

Good Intentions Gone Bad

The Romney problem has since been fixed. The Austria-Australia problem is likely due to Google seeing lots of searches for “austria’s biggest businesses” that get changed by searchers themselves to “australia’s biggest businesses.”

It is easy to accidentally type the wrong name, and if that is happening a lot, then Google might have automatically thought “Austria” was a mistake it was trying to helpfully correct to “Australia.”

Chances are, Google will override this in the near future or tweak its algorithm.

Now go watch this classic clip from Crocodile Dundee, which puts the headline in this story into perspective, for those who don’t get it:

Welcome To Search Scandals, Apple

It’s been interesting to watch the Siri Abortiongate scandal blow up in Apple’s face over the past few days. Apple is learning for the first time what it’s like to run a search engine. People hold you accountable for everything, even if you the information isn’t even from your own database.

Google is a battle-scarred veteran in these matters. Why does an anti-Jewish site show up in response for a search on “Jew?” Why did President George W Bush’s official biography rank for miserable failure? Why do you get THAT result for a search on Santorum?

Sometimes, Google’s opens up to explain some of these oddities, which tend to have reasonable explainations. Not always. The company stayed closed-mouthed about why exactly a search for “climategate” was suggested and suddenly disappeared, taking ages to finally explain why. That harmed it.

Inside Siri

The same silence is harming Apple now. Sure, the company has issued a statement to various outlets saying there’s nothing intentional happening, and it’s merely a bug that needs to be fixed. Here’s one of the statements from Apple CEO Tim Cook, given to NARAL Pro-Choice America:

Our customers use Siri to find out all types of information and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want. These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone, it simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks.

Here’s another, given to the New York Times:

“Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want,” said Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Apple, in a phone interview late Wednesday. “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks.”

But opening up on how exactly Siri works would help. It would help a lot. Without that, the speculation continues, as you can see in this article from The Raw Story:

Kerris did not, apparently, explain why Siri, although still in beta, has no difficulty locating escort services, plastic surgeons that will perform breast augmentation procedures or hospitals to direct users if they have erections lasting longer than five hours (a condition known as priapism).

I’ve got no inside knowledge of how Siri works. Heck, we weren’t allowed to attend the launch event of Siri, despite Search Engine Land being the leading news site that focuses on search. But because I’ve covered search so long, I can take a pretty good shot at explaining what’s wrong, why Siri will suggest where you can get Viagra or bury a body but not where you can find an abortion.

It Can Find Viagra, But Not…

Let’s start with the ACLU’s post, which says:

If Siri can tell us about Viagra, it should not provide bad or no information about contraceptives or abortion care.

Personally, I can’t get Siri to search for Viagra. It insists on seaching for “biography” no matter how I speak Viagra. But here’s an example of what the ACLU is upset about, taken from the Siri Failures, Illustrated blog post from Amadi:

But ask for contraceptives, and no luck. Here’s another example from Amadi:

Actually, this isn’t the case. If I ask it for condoms, I get an answer:

Asking for a brand name, like Trojans, however, doesn’t help me.

Siri Doesn’t Understand Many Things

What’s going on here? First, Siri doesn’t have answers to anything itself. It’s what we call a “meta search engine,” which is a service that sends your query off to other search engines.

Siri’s a smart meta search engine, in that it tries to search for things even though you might not have said the exact words needed to perform your search. For example, it’s been taught to understand that teeth are related to dentists, so that if you say “my tooth hurts,” it knows to look for dentists.

Unfortunately, the same thing also makes it an incredibly dumb search engine. If it doesn’t find a connection, it has a tendency to not search at all.

When I searched for condoms, Siri understood those are something sold in drug stores. That’s why it came back with that listing of drug stores. It know that condoms = drug stores.

It doesn’t know that Plan B is the brand name of an emergency contraception drug. Similarly, while it does know that Tylenol is a drug, and so gives me matches for drug stores, it doesn’t know that acetaminophen is the chemical name of Tylenol. As a result, I get nothing:

Conspiracy Or Generally Confused?

Is Siri also against headaches? I don’t think so, but it easy to pursue one line of questioning in various ways, such as everything about abortions, and come away with a skewed view that Siri is pro-life rather than just buggy in general.

Indeed, it can be horrifying. That search for the morning after pill? Siri comes up with an almost mocking sounding “Is that so” response. It’s worse, bone-chillingly worse, when “I was raped” is searched for:

Now search for “I was laughing,” and you get the same type of responses:

What’s happening here? Does Siri really understand that raped means rape and is mocking someone? Or are we seeing a series of responses when it really doesn’t know what you want about anything and instead shifts into a conversational mode that some engineers thought might be funny?

I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. And people did think this was funny. When Siri came out as part of the iPhone 4s, and they would ask it all types of jovial things. It’s not funny when you’re talking about rape, but Siri really doesn’t know you’re talking about that.

Past Tense, Different Word

But wait, what about this:

If you’re really looking hard for some smoking gun, then maybe this is one. As Amadi post said, this is proof that Siri does know what rape is.

Sure, it’s proof that it knows that the exact word “rape” is linked to sexual abuse treatment centers. It’s not proof that Siri understands “raped” — which is a different word from rape in spelling — has the same meaning, only in the past tense.

Humans easily know this stuff. For search engines, it’s hard. It’s perhaps harder for Siri, ironically, because is tries to make life easier for people by not requiring them to be direct.

In Google Voice Actions for Android, if you wanted rape resources, you would literally says “search rape resources,” and you’d get web search results. You can do exactly the same with Siri, if you want to be literal. But because it tries to be helpful, it can also be limiting.

No Abortion Clinics, No Tool Stores….

Meanwhile, as for not finding those sexual abuse centers, I’m guessing that’s because there were simply none nearby that expressly defined themselves that way. That leads me to the now infamous inability for Siri to find abortion clinics:

Guess what? It also cannot find hardware stores, when I try to find them by asking for a tool store, even though there are plenty of hardware stores near me:

In both cases, Siri understands this is a local search that I want to do, which means that it should do my search over at Yelp, the partner it uses for local listings.

But Yelp Has Them!

If I search at Yelp for abortion, I get plenty of matches — one of them a local Planned Parenthood clinic:

Why is Siri deliberately suppressing this information? Notice all the bold mentions of “abortion” in those listings. Those are from comments people have left. They’re not the names of the businesses.

Siri’s not finding abortion clinics because Planned Parenthood and other places that perform abortions don’t call themselves that, not in their names, nor have they been associated with a category for that. That’s the best guess I have in this.

Planned Parenthood is in the “Medical Center” category, and while Siri may have linked businesses in that type of category to a variety of medical procedures, for whatever reason, abortion isn’t one of them.

Similarly, for whatever reason, Siri hasn’t linked “tool” to the “Hardware Stores” category. The reason, as is the case with abortion, is almost certainly not because of a conspiracy against tools.

But You Do Get Abortion Clinic Listings

It’s almost good that Siri isn’t able to tap into the Yelp comments to help extend its search, because some might be annoyed to get a match for a car service or a Japanese grill. Others might see a church listing coming up first and assume a further attempt to push a pro-life agenda.

Indeed, one of the things that kicked all this attention on Siri and abortion searches off was an article at The Raw Story where a search in Washington DC yielded “abortion clinics” that really were pro-life centers. From the story:

Woah. What’s going on there? I don’t know. It’s especially weird in that to even find these companies in Yelp, you have to hunt and hunt for them. In fact, nothing I could do brought up the first listing, but I did find the second.

Looking at that, I note that it’s not assigned to any particular category. Nor is the word “abortion” mentioned on the page. It makes me wonder if Yelp, lacking good first-hand information about this business, has instead pull information in off its web site — which includes terms like abortion – to help classify it.

In some other cases, Siri — depending on Yelp information — does seem to get it right. From a comment on the story at The Raw Story:

I highly doubt it was intentional, probably more to do with places not listing the word “abortion” in their titles. i just tried it and she pointed me right to the nearest clinic in boston, for whatever that’s worth.

And another:

I was unable to reproduce the problem here in rural Texas, not far From Austin.  The first listing that Siri came up with was to the Killeen Women’s Health Center, the web link for which took me to the site for the Austin Women’s Health Center, a legitimate clinic offering a full range of reproductive choices and services.

In some cases, Yelp is clearly passing along information to Siri that it has things it believes to be abortion clinics. But that information is pretty limited, it seems.

Confusing Human & Computer Results

I’ll end with one more thing. How can Siri dumb enough not to list an abortion clinic near that CNN reporter yet clever enough to suggest that if you want to bury a body, try dumps and swamps:

That’s again down to programmers thinking this would be funny. They’ve hard linked this type of query to react that way, and it was funny. That’s probably the case with the searches for escort services that do work.

But now, when a serious issue like abortion searches come up, it causes confusion between the things that Siri can figure out automatically (with a lot of weakness) and the things it seems incredibly clever about (with some human help).

No doubt Apple will fix things so that searches for abortion clinics will bring back relevant resources. No doubt there will be plenty of other things that remain buggy — and even when it comes out of beta, you can expect that. That’s the nature of search. Just ask Google.

Now have a chuckle. Stephen Colbert did a wonderful send-up on the whole Siri/abortion issue last night:

For related news, see coverage from around the web at Techmeme.