Google, Yahoo, Bing do you want to suggest Iceland Ash Cloud keywords?

Well round two of checking how the search suggest features are performing across the search engines; my previous review was focused on how suggestions compared with UK and USA markets. I then concluded that Google was close to being on form, but Bing and Yahoo were not paying too much attention with localisation, serving information based on USA data for their search suggestions in the UK. The UK is the second largest market for the search engines.

This time I have looked at a more international event, however it affects the EU more than it does America, the Iceland Volcanic Ash Cloud. So first of let’s check the independent BBC news to see what terms are being used to describe the story.

The BBC news is referring to the problem as mainly an issue with “Ash” that is causing the flight delays. Google news is covering a good story the Iceland Volcano and Ash causing flight problems. The top three stories are all focused on the term “Ash” and “Ash Cloud”.

bing news, the top term would be “Iceland Ash Cloud”, second story looks like a PR stunt by the shopping chain Iceland, knowing the term will be in the news all the time, so they have released a positive story about their brand. The first result is again is focused around “Ash Cloud” and “Iceland” terms.

Yahoo news is focused around Iceland Volcano, but still “Ash” is a popular term used. Yahoo seems to prioritise the Iceland brand higher than Bing or Google, not a surprise considering how commercial Yahoo is with advertisements on their homepage. Even an advert to install firefox 4, which I personally have tried and then reverted back to firefox 3 after finding most plug-ins I use are not compatible yet.

At a glance the top terms included in order of priority are:

1.       “Iceland”

2.       “Ash”

3.       “Ash cloud”

4.       “Iceland Volcano”

So let’s see what the search suggestions are when I type in the word “Iceland”, considering the fact that the search engines are constantly focusing on relevancy and preaching that all Pay Per Click and SEO campaigns should be highly relevant.

Google seems to be including volcano, but no mention of ash or any clouds.

Yahoo has volcano but no mention of ash or any clouds, surprisingly or not Yahoo has the Iceland brand as the second option.

With bing, I had to include a full screenshot; what a great background image! That image will make me return to bing again to see what other images they use, ‘thumbs up’ for bing. Their search suggestions are very brand focused, with Volcano as the sixth suggestion and strangely “Weather” as the last option. Maybe bing found some correlation with people checking the weather updates for Iceland or the terms people are searching for are related to the “Weather” category.

So now let’s look at Google Insights to see what is going on with the term “Iceland” for the UK in the last 7 days. Not a surprise really, what I would expect to see, no mention of the Iceland frozen food store, but obviously have they had a successful PR campaign gaining news coverage tagging onto a natural event that is causing many not to fly.

Well, it seems to me that still the suggestions are not correlating with what people are searching for. They are out of date and unrelated to hot topics. I really thought “Search” is what people are using the search engines for and relevancy would be a massive factor to what appears in the suggestion boxes. Are the search engines actually focusing on search? What are they doing instead?

I think the big three engines need to stick to what they know. Providing great search experience for the users so they return, don’t allow brands, especially budget brands to dominate just because they are a brand. It’s not a sign of quality or relevancy.

By all means the search engines should display a brand if it is directly related to what people are searching for, imagine if some decent scientific research has been realised related to the Ash Cloud, would that show up?

The insights for search are showing to me that people are interested in this event. I don’t understand why the search engines are not helping their users find out more about the topics they are interested in?

All the data is available, the newspapers are covering the topic well, the topic itself is so popular it appears the Iceland brand acted upon the opportunity. But our relevant, user focused search engines fail to deliver.

Comments (0)