London Car Bombs: The Big Fat Search Failure

I was in London last night right smack in the area where a large bomb was defused this morning. Naturally, I was curious about what exactly had happened. I hit the news sites, but then I wondered what would happen for those searching generally for information using search engines. Both Google and Ask.com in particular […]

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I was in London last night right smack in the area where a large bomb was
defused this morning. Naturally, I was curious about what exactly had happened.
I hit the news sites, but then I wondered what would happen for those searching
generally for information using search engines. Both Google and Ask.com in
particular have promised that their new search interfaces should naturally get
us relevant news information. Both failed, as far as I’m concerned. Let’s take a
look.

To test, I looked for [london bombs]. I think that’s a reasonable way many
people would be seeking information about what happened today. I did try to see
if there was a spike for this query via
Google Hot
Trends
for today, but nothing showed at all. I assume this is due how How
Trends filters out
some hot queries, which I assume in particular tries to keep news related
queries from overwhelming the trend reports. There’s nothing at all related to
London showing right now, which I find hard to believe (I’m sure people are
looking for this information out of the normal pattern). It also makes Hot
Trends seem lame.

Google’s new Google
Universal Search
is supposed to magically make news results appear when
appropriate. Well, nothing newsworthy makes it onto the page currently. Consider
these results for london
bombs
:

Google & London Bombs

I can’t say enough how these results underscore the importance for a universal
search or blending search system that actually works. The results are dominated by references to the
London bombings that happened two years ago. Right now, at this moment, those
bombings are NOT what I’d wager most people searching on Google for [london
bombs] are after. They want to know about today’s bombs — and Google doesn’t
deliver. The most relevant thing on the page is an ad for Ask.com, which
ironically leads to

these
results at Ask UK which also aren’t on target, except for easily
overlooked references to video clips.

Let’s dive in more formally to Ask. The
Ask3D interface was
rolled out with great fanfare earlier this month and just drew
rave reviews from
Walt Mossberg over at the Wall Street Journal. I love it too, but it fails to
help much in this case. It’s better than Google but well below what Ask has
promised. The results for
london bombs:

Ask & London Bombs

The main results in the middle column, like Google, are all about the past
bombing. Unlike Google, Ask has an entire area designed to help you narrow in or
expand your query. Perhaps [london bombs] isn’t the right way to find what I’m
looking for. How about those options?

Ask & London Bombs

Under Narrow Your Search, the

London Bombs Today
link really leaps out, as does

Latest News
. But for the first, the results are just as off-target except
for

one
single result (the purple link) in the image below:

Ask & London Bombs

So Ask has nice query refinement options, but who cares if they don’t bring back
relevant results (compare to Ask.com’s news

results
for the same query to see what it should have done).

As for the Latest News link, that works better at least in getting
information at the top of the page, like this:

Ask & London Bombs

Great, finally a good, relevant result right at the top, that "Latest Top
Headlines" option. But the rest of the page has listings for general places to get
"latest news," not necessarily the latest news about the London bombs. That was
the promise for the refinement option that I selected, remember — to narrow my search to the latest
news for London Bombs (years ago, by the way, refinements at Ask worked exactly
this way).

At least Ask gets some bonus points for the vertical search results over in
the right hand side of the page:

Ask & London Bombs

In the images, the two screenshots of TV news reports help somewhat. Much better
are the video clips that talk about today’s bomb attempt. The most relevant info
are the
blog results. But that begs the question. After
hyping how smart the Morph algorithm
is that’s supposed to check various databases —
including news
why weren’t news results included as one of the selected resources and put at
the top of the panel?

After Google rolled out Universal Search, Yahoo made a big deal of talking to
the media about how it, too, already has been blending results from various
search databases. So how about it, Yahoo? For
london bombs, I got:

Yahoo & London Bombs

As with Google and Ask, the main results are locked in the past. News
results? Nothing. After trying some various queries, I finally got news results
to pop up for london
bombings
:

Yahoo & London Bombs

Now news results make it to the top. And notice how they say "London Bomb –
News Results." That tells me someone at Yahoo likely assumed there would be searches for london
bomb, so figured a special news unit should be linked to those words (they
are
) as well as [london bombing]. But [london bombs] was overlooked — so
much for some sophisticated algorithm that should have picked that up.

In fairness, london bomb
at Google gives me this at the top of the page:

Google & London Bombs

And for Ask, it does
trigger news results in the third panel:

Ask & London Bombs

But remember — there’s been misunderstanding whether it was one bomb or two
that was planted. To me, it’s reasonable that a search for [london bombs] should
have worked as well as [london bomb]. Moreover, the insertion of a single
element hardly dramatically reshaped the relevancy of these search pages. The
bulk of what they offered, on a search being driving out of an event today, was
a look at material from two years ago.

How about Live? The search for
london bombs
there gives:

Live & London Bombs

Again, old material. The related searches suggestion of
London
Bomb Plot
simply leads to more old material. And switching to a search for
london bomb
doesn’t improve anything.

Perhaps the humans over at Mahalo can do it better. Let’s see, for

london bombs
:

Mahalo & London Bombs

No help. Mahalo basically just gives you Google matches. The same is true for

london bomb
. Interesting, about an hour after I first looked at Mahalo
(8:45pm UK time versus 9:30pm), a new link had been added to the home page in
the news section about today’s incident:

Mahalo &amp

Selecting that

That link brings
up
some very good results:

Mahalo & London Bombs

So kudos to Mahalo for eventually getting there, though frankly it feels like
it was simply noting that Wikipedia
added a page and then raiding that for
links. But big failure for still apparently taking so long to get there and when
you do, not having the algorithmic intelligence to understand how other searches
might relate to it.

Out of curiosity, I headed over to Hakia, which I’ve promised before to
cover more about how it works to make use of some natural language processing
(and yes, I’ll be covering Powerset in the very near future, too). Pick your
query: london bombs or
london bomb, neither
gets me current information. Instead, I’ve got to step up to
london car bombs
to get even a few news results. That’s nice, but that same search
at Google brings
up dramatically more relevant news material, (at
Yahoo
it somewhat improves things; at
Ask
, it’s mainly about car bombs in Iraq;
at
Live
, there’s no improvement.

I have great hope for the promises of universal or blended search. It’s been
great especially to see both Google and Ask move further in this direction. But
it is amazing that looking at today’s incident doesn’t make me feel they’ve come
far at all in routing people to specialized search results such as news compared
to how they were back after the terrorist actions of September 11. I illustrated
the failures of search back then
here.
Nearly six years later, not much feels to have changed.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

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

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