It’s not real. But I sure wish it were, Google going all Kanye West on people searching for Taylor Swift.

In the mockup above you can see Google responding “I’m really happy for you, and I’m gonna let you finish your search, but did you mean: beyonce” instead of the usual “Did You Mean” spelling correction.

The mockup is from the I Am Bored site, which I found via this discussion by Jess Lee on FriendFeed. And while that might entirely fictional (trust me, it is — I’ve tried to reproduce it in various ways. Not. Real.), Yahoo kind of goes all Kanye on its competitors in real life.

Search for Google on Yahoo, and you get this:

Search for Bing, and you get this:

In both cases, Yahoo puts up a box to let you search through Yahoo rather than going directly to its competitors. It’s gonna let you finish going to them, but first….

Kanye’s actually following in Yahoo’s footsteps. Yahoo’s been interrupting searches like this for ages.

Does today’s speech from President Barack Obama to school children across the United States need any more controversy? Having listened to it, I personally can’t see many parents objecting. But I could see one tech company not happy: Microsoft. Competitors like Google got called out as “good” things to aspire to while a Microsoft’s Xbox was something he suggested should be turned off.

From his prepared remarks, which should be pretty close to the exact speech he delivered: Microsoft gets the bad news early:

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

Turn that Xbox off! OK, perhaps some of the time. And you could argue that Microsoft is getting some Obama love here. It’s an Xbox he’s mentioning, not a Sony PlayStation or a Nintendo Wii.

Still, Microsoft probably would have preferred to have the love that Apple got later on in the speech:

Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine.

No one’s putting the Xbox along with accomplishments like saving lives!

There’s more love for Google, as well as Twitter and Facebook:

Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

Google, Facebook and Twitter alongside landing on the moon, fighting a world war or civil rights. Communication changes, true — though made possible by underlying infrastructure changes, that of the internet, not to mention the telephone system itself.

I also found it remarkable that of six brand mentions in total that I spotted (did I miss more?), five of those were tech oriented (the remaining one was the Harry Potter books).

See also related discussion on Techmeme.

Postscript: Video of Obama’s speech is now up on YouTube:

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11th mission where man landed on the moon. To celebrate the anniversary, Google announced the launch of Moon in Google Earth. You can now use Google Earth to explore, fly around and search the moon.

Here is the video blog post explaining this announcement:

The Google LatLong Blog has details on many of the features of Google Moon.

There are some complaints that Google does not have a special logo up for the day, like Bing, YouTube and my blog. To see those logos, go to the Search Engine Roundtable.

Postscript: At 3:30pm EST today, Google has updated their home page to make a Google Doodle for the special day. Here is a picture:

Also, Google’s Street View Man is dressed in a space suit today:

Last week, we covered how a rumor that Jeff Goldblum was dead spread on Twitter and even Google . This week, Stephen Colbert did a great send-up of the rumor, including a visit by Goldblum himself.

The clip starts out with Colbert saying:

“I was on the Twitter this weekend, and I saw a tweetening of the most tragic thing I ever had twattered. According to multiple tweets, friend of the show and of dinosaurs actor Jeff Goldblum passed away on Thursday in New Zealand. Now sure, you didn’t hear about itin the mainstream media. But I don’t see how Delicioushair could get this wrong.”

Goldblum then appears in the studio denying he’s dead. Which Colbert doesn’t believe, so Goldblum tweets to him that he’s alive. “Ladies and gentlemen I have huge news. The dead can Twitter,” Colbert says.

Colbert then plays a clip of Goldblum’s death being reported by a mainstream TV news show in Australia. Goldblum plays along, agrees he must be dead and delivers his own eulogy. Enjoy below:

See also Jeff Goldblum Is NOT Dead (Despite What Google Says) for more background and Jon Stewart Explains Twitter & Stephen Colbert On Wikipedia for some related send-ups.

Ask around and you probably won’t find many people who think the idea of “Internet everywhere” is a bad thing. Thanks to laptops and smart phones, wi-fi and 3G, we can work (or play) at airports, check email during cab rides, and compare prices online from any department store. We can Google anyone or anything from anywhere, and turn around and broadcast what we find on Facebook, Twitter, or our blogs.

Who’s complaining?

Pretty much everyone in the U.S. legal system, at least this week.

The New York Times has coined a new term: the “Google mistrial.” It reflects the growing number of mistrials and legal disruptions caused by the idea of “Internet everywhere” — three cases in just the last two weeks. Jurors are using their cell phones to research defendants, lawyers, and facts of law, often in violation of the judge’s orders about admissable evidence.

“A juror on a lunch or bathroom break can find out many details about a case. Wikipedia can help explain the technology underlying a patent claim or medical condition, Google Maps can show how long it might take to drive from Point A to Point B, and news sites can write about a criminal defendant, his lawyers or expert witnesses.”

There’s a rich irony here. As far back as 2004, CNET reported on a 2002 California Supreme Court decision in which the Justices used Google to help decide a case.

“In the United States and abroad, judges are turning to search engines such as Google to check facts, to look up information about companies embroiled in litigation, and to challenge statistics presented by attorneys in court. Dozens of judges have penned opinions describing Google as a valuable–and sometimes crucial–source of knowledge.”

Lawyers are doing it, too:

• Last summer, a Florida attorney used Google to help defend the owner of a pornographic web site, trying to make the case that the number of sex-related searches done locally can define “community standards.”
• In 2006, lawyers in Wisconsin successfully used Google searches to get a hacking defendant to plead guilty.
• In 2005, prosecutors used Google searches as evidence in a murder case, citing a man’s searches for things like “neck,” “snap,” and “break” shortly before his wife was found dead.

You could make the argument that judges and lawyers are furthering the cause of justice more often than not when they bring search and the Internet into the courtroom.

The problem with people like you and me doing it is that we’re usually getting in the way of justice. In one of the recent cases cited by the NY Times, an eight-week trial — and probably hundreds of hours of pre-trial work — was thrown out when nine jurors admitted to researching the case online. In Arkansas, a judge has to decide if one juror’s use of Twitter is grounds to throw out a $12.6 million judgment. And a Pennsylvania judge recently ignored the fact that one juror in a corruption trial was posting updates on Twitter and Facebook, and allowed the case to continue.

Our appetite for “Internet everywhere” is only going to grow, and search will continue to get more ubiquitous. But it may be up to the legal system to decide how far online conveniences can infiltrate the courtroom. Some judges are amending their jury instructions, and some courthouses are forbidding jurors from bringing cellphones inside.

Meanwhile, I’m scheduled for jury duty next month. I’m planning to bring my iPhone with me when I report.

Like many people, I got a chuckle out of Jon Stewart’s recent send-up of Twitter on the Daily Show. If you haven’t seen it, the clip is below. I also thought it went nicely with the clip from Stephen Colbert on Wikipedia from back in 2006. So enjoy the double feature. Now if we can just get either of them to talk about Google.

Jon Stewart on Twitter:

And here’s Stephen Colbert on Wikipedia and “wikialilty.”

Way back in 2007, an iProspect/Jupiter Research study found that two-thirds of those online are motivated to search online due to an offline channel such as a TV ad. Since 2007 was an eternity ago in internet time and search continues to grow, that number has surely only gone up.

That TV ads cause viewers to search is clear from search data as well. And people don’t just search for brands. They’re just as likely to search for taglines or products. Remember the “It’s Bacon!” Beggin’ Strips commercial from 2006?

Based on the 2009 Superbowl commercials, marketers clearly understand the importance of having an online presence. Nearly all the ads included URLs and many had microsites made specifically for the campaigns. But did these marketers realize the impact their ads would have on searcher behavior? If a brand can’t be found in search for its name, product, or commercial slogan, then it’s losing a prime opportunity for acquisition.

For instance, below is a snapshot from Google Hot Trends in the last minutes of the Superbowl (the arrows indicate queries driven by commercials):

We know many of these brands spent big bucks on producing and airing the Superbowl ads. How did they do with search acquisition?

Search presence scorecard

Below are the brands and dominant slogans of select 2009 Superbowl commercials. As you can see many of them can be found for their brand name (although the asterisks signify significant display issues), but many can’t be found for their slogans. [Edited to remove the Vizio example, as I need to do more research on this.]

In cases like this, buying search ads (at least for the peak search period after airing the ads) could ensure some presence. (That appears to have happened in a few instances. For instance, Castrol Oil aired an ad for their microsite edgemonkeys.com, but it can’t be found at all in organic search on Google or Yahoo. But Castrol did buy paid search ads for the query.

This scorecard also gives a sense of how many brands are still investing in expensive TV advertising, but not in paid search (at least for these queries). I found 9 of these queries in paid search on Google, 12 on Yahoo, and 12 on Live.

The scorecard shows rank alone, however. It doesn’t represent how clickable the results are. In many instances, the results are confusing mix of sites with obsure titles and missing descriptions. Other sites are often more appealing and are more likely to get the click. In the case of [are you venza], for instance, Toyota has poor visibility, but another Superbowl advertiser, cars.com ranks #1 on all three engines with a blog post.

Taking a closer look: microsites and display issues

This was the year of the microsite. Microsites can be a great way to have flexibility in campaigns because you can build them outside of the normal site development cycle. you can tailor them exactly for the campaign without worrying about site constraints. And sometimes they’re the best experience for customers.

But microsites can proliferate and customers can become overwhelmed. Which site should they engage with? The paid search domain often conflicts with the ranking organic result.

In addition, microsites can sometimes be forgotten when the campaign ends, but the sites remain live on the web and customers continue to find them.

It can be difficult to build up a new site’s search ranking (content, links, and awareness). By using an established site, you can be more confident that searchers can find it. And having multiple sites listed in the search results may seem like a good thing, but it can be confusing for the searcher and might not provide the best experience with your brand.

Hyundai

Hyundai was a dominant sponsor. They ran ads for their Genesis coupe and sedan during the game, as well as sponsored the pregame show. But as a consumer, I’m presented with a confusing array of choices if I do online research about their cars. In just a few moments, I found hyundai.com, hyundaiusa.com, hyundaigenesis.com, thegenesiscoupe.com, and hyundaiassurance.com. The flashy coupe ad promoted edityourown.com (and [edit your own] became a hot search trend soon after):

But edityourown.com was no where to be found for those searchers (since it redirects to hyundaigenesis.com/coupe, only the latter site can be found).

Sprint

Sprint seems to have done fairly well according to the scorecard. But the results themselves paint a different picture. This result for [NFL Mobile Live Sprint] has a vague title and no description at all:

And while Sprint is the third result on Google for [the now network], the snippet could definitely use some help.

Don’t be an asterisk

The latest Ad Council initiative to keep kids from drugs (in this case steroids), stayed on the Google hot trends during most of the game. And the scorecard looks positive. But this is the result searchers see:

Looking through the rest of the Superbowl advertisers shows similar issues: all-Flash sites that aren’t search-engine friendly, a flurry of microsites that cause consumer confusion, and vague and non-compelling titles and descriptions in search results. Sure, these brands will get some acquisition from search, but they could have had so much more. And searchers could be the best customers for these brands, because these are people who saw the ad and actively sought more information.

What can we learn?

Clearly, these issues can’t be solved with a few bullet points. How can marketing departments and advertising agencies work in close harmony with developers and IT departments when each have different production cycles and goals? It can be done, but the solutions are often unique to the situation and are far from easy.

But here are a few things to keep in mind as you consider how to move your organization towards a more integrated relationship.

• Make sure your primary domain can be found for branded searches. This foundational step will help you through any marketing campaign and should be taken care of before you spend a lot of resources on awareness.
• Don’t go overboard with microsites. Consider a strategy that uses subdomains or subfolders of the primary site, rather than a microsite for every campaign. (This can be difficult when site ship cycles don’t match marketing schedules.)
• Use a blog or other format to add content about your various initiatives. Make sure your slogan is somewhere. And don’t just add it as a tagline; xplain why you’re using it to build a connection with potential customers.
• Ranking isn’t enough. Make sure that your site provides a compelling and useful result that compels searchers to click. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools Query Report as one way of finding out what you rank for that searchers aren’t clicking on.
• Use tools such as Google Trends and Google Insights (and any of the other many great keyword research tools out there) to find out how your customers are really searching for you. Many businesses don’t optimize for key slogans and taglines when those might be what people are searching for most.
• If you use Flash, make sure you’re using it in a search-friendly way.

Search is the primary way that people navigate the web these days. Most of us even type domain names into our favorite search engine rather than use the address bar. If you’re investing in an online presence and offline advertising, make sure you make the most of the search acquisition potential.

(For more discussion on Super Bowl ads, see Techmeme.)

Google Hot Trends can be a fascinating look at what has suddenly peaked the interest of Americans, and today everyone wants to know about the Superbowl. 35 of the 100 spiking searches have the word [superbowl] in them, and another 27 are Superbowl-related (including game-food recipes and team details).

So how do searchers fare in finding out what they’re looking for?

Superbowl start time

Google

Searchers are most interested in knowing what time the game starts and what channel to watch it on. The number one search (and the most descriptive) is [what time does the super bowl start 2009]. I hope those searchers weren’t feeling lucky, because the first web result on Google is for an article about the upcoming 2007 Superbowl. A news result appears before that, and it seems to be matched based on grabbing the words “super bowl” and “2009″ at random (and potentially considering “Star” a synonym to “start”). The second web result does in fact have the answer, albeit a bit incomplete.

Yahoo

Yahoo doesn’t fare much better. It lists a page with the 2008 start time as the first result (and that page links to a page about the 2009 start time).

The issue doesn’t seem to be a problem with the freshness of the index, because the Google Trends page that shows this is a hot query is right there at number 10!

Microsoft Live

Searchers on Live might miss the game entirely.

Like Google, Live has news results at the top that aren’t in any way related to the Superbowl start time. The first result that appears it might answer the start question is located all the way at position five. And it looks like it could be the only result on the entire page that would answer the question. Live is also the only engine of the three to show ads above the results, and the relevance of “1 Rule to Lose Your Gut” to the query is questionable.

Where are the official Superbowl sites?

The NBC and NFL sites were nowhere to be found in the top ten of any of the search engines. That’s not entirely the fault of the search engines, as both sites are hiding all of their potential content in Flash (and in the case of the NFL are adding the further obstacle of a 302 redirect from superbowl.com). Since search engines want to provide the best possible results and Adobe wants web developers to keep using Flash, this poor searcher experience just supports the notion that both should continue to improve Flash’s crawlability.

But it also reinforces the advice that site owners have to be aware of the limitations of technologies such as Flash. The fact is that if you want your site’s content to be found by searchers, you have to make sure you’re building it in a search-friendly way. You can’t rely on the search engines to sort things out.

What about [superbowl]?

Do the search engines do better at finding the official sites for a more generic search? We can see by the Google Trends data that searchers aren’t looking for just [superbowl] alone, but let’s give the engines an easy query for comparison.

Google

Google does pretty well, returning the official NFL page as the top result (despite the redirect and the Flash). However, since Google can’t read any text in the Flash and the page doesn’t have a meta description, Google has to resort to the dmoz.org description of the page for the snippet, which doesn’t mention the Superbowl at all, and that makes the result seem less relevant to searchers. It also has a pretty irrelevant ad above the results and that third result (”Arizona Super Bowl”) is another example of Flash and other multimedia causing searchability problems. The snippet is literally the only text Google could find on the page.

Google has substantially better results for the query [superbowl 2009].

Yahoo

Yahoo’s results are far better. The ad is pretty relevant, the Yahoo! Shortcut that shows up at the top of the results provides the game’s date and time (this would have been an ideal result for the previous query), and the first web result is for superbowl.com with a great snippet. (The rest of the top 10 are much more relevant than Google’s as well.) Unlike Google, Yahoo isn’t following the 302 redirect from superbowl.com to nfl.com/superbowl, and on quick glance, I’m not sure where they’re getting the snippet. (Updated to add: they’re pulling it from the Yahoo! Directory.) The Wikipedia result, enhanced with SearchMonkey, also helps the relevance of the results.

Microsoft Live

Live search has the right results, but to be honest, they’re kind of a mess. The ad above the results is completely irrelevant, the first result is an Instant Answer from Encarta that takes up too much room and provides details that are too vague. The first web result is the NFL site, followed by another Instant Answer from Stats Inc. that actually provides a pretty helpful result (the date, time, and teams). This is followed by a set of news results. All in all, there’s a lot going on here, and it’s difficult to sort out what’s a web result and what’s something else.

Live search has an odder Instant Answer for the second hottest query (according to Google Trends, pulling in details from “Holiday Origins”.

Will searchers find the Superbowl?

Searchers will undoubtedly try a few query variations and scan the result page enough to find what they’re looking for. But it’s clear both that events and questions drive people to search, and that search engines and sites still have a lots of room to improve in order to connect with those searchers.

Happy Superbowl viewing!

(By the way, in case you’re having trouble finding the details in your favorite search engine, the pre-game starts around 4pm Eastern on NBC and the kick-off is around 6:20pm Eastern.)

We’ve seen Google’s Street View cars capture a variety of interesting scenes, such as a house on fire or car accidents, but this is a new one. Apparently, one hit a deer and then captured a photo of the poor thing lying dead or dying afterward.

The Daily What has the before screenshots, reprinted above with permission. Want to see them now? Sorry, if you try, you’ll see a message saying that Street View is unavailable “due to high demand” or that “This image is no longer available.”

Postscript: Reader Tim Cohn sends news of funnier capture out of Street View, two guys apparently caught having an archaic battle with shields and sticks.

Postscript 2: Google’s working up an official blog post on what happened but tells me that the image was removed because of several requests from users using the Street View image removal option.

Postscript 3: Google’s blog post is now live:

The driver was understandably upset, and promptly stopped to alert the local police and the Street View team at Google. The deer was able to move and had left the area by the time the police arrived. The police explained to our driver that, sadly, this was not an uncommon occurrence in the region — the New York State Department of Transportation estimates that 60,000-70,000 deer collisions happen per year in New York alone — and no police report needed to be filed.

See also discussion on Techmeme.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has come out with a fairly comprehensive look at generations and internet activity, called “Generations Online.” The report segments users by age categories (i.e., X, Y, Boomers) and looks their online activities. The data were drawn from responses by thousands of users to surveys conducted by Pew researchers between 2006 and 2008.

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

While activities such as IM, online video or social networking appeal to younger users and e-commerce or online banking are disproportionately used by Gen X and Baby Boomers, email and search are almost equally used by all groups across the board:

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

There’s a great deal more in the data and it’s worth a closer look if you’re a marketer or just an interested bystander and curious about empricial confirmation or debunking of perceptions of what users do or don’t do online based on their age.