Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search

The debate about what should — and shouldn’t — show in a Google search result for “santorum” has been well-documented, at this point. But I’d like to use this now famous search to illustrate something else: how it appears Google is taking its eye off the ball of being a search engine.

Searching For Santorum: A New Surprise

I did a search for santorum a few minutes ago, and this is what I got:

See the YouTube link showing up there? It helps illustrate all that I think many people are feeling is wrong with Google right now. It’s a pretty bad result, and it’s also something getting there probably because Google’s not catching some potential old-school search engine spamming.

Universal Search Picked This?

The video result is showing up as part of Google Universal Search. That’s a system that blends content from Google’s various “vertical” or specialized search engines into its regular search results. It’s only supposed to inject this type of specialized content if it’s deemed especially relevant to the search topic.

Certainly, you can imagine that there’s video content relevant to a search on “santorum” from across the web. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report alone have over ten different Santorum comedy clips that might all be relevant.

Beyond comedy, there are news reports from across the entire web. The same search at Binggives some examples of this, of how video content from Bing Video, as well as Fox News and CNN is inserted into its own search results for “santorum,” as you can see here:

Out of 20,000 potential matches on YouTube, out of 21 million potential video matches across the web, what does Google’s supposedly sophisticated Universal Search algorithm pick out to display as the top video content to be shown within the top search results?

A cartoon created by a company pitching its SEO software on YouTube as a way for Santorum to solve his Google problem. Wow.

You Couldn’t Have Picked….

That’s the most relevant thing that Google can show? I think most people would agree it’s not. I mean seriously, it’s better than these?

• Any of the Colbert Report or Daily Show clips
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum arguing with a student on gay marriage
• Dan Savage explaining how his campaign against Rick Santorum ultimately caused searches on Google and Bing to show a definition as “santorum” being related to anal sex

You Couldn’t Have Caught A 65% Like Ratio?

It’s embarrassing for Google to be doing this. And it’s worse when you look at the views the video has received: only about 2,000, at this point. That’s nothing compared to some of the other clips relevant to santorum, if you’re considering views to be one possible ranking factor. How does this video get such a boost?

Well, there’s another clue when you look at the number of likes the video has received: about 1,300, at this point. That means about 65% of people who viewed the video also liked it, a ratio that is hugely out of proportion to what you normally see.

For example, the classic Honey Badger video — which is hilarious — has a like ratio of 0.5%. How about the classic Double Rainbow video? Hey, 0.5% again. The Bedroom Intruder song? A tiny bit better, 0.6%.

Either this SEO tool video is something like 130x more likeable than any of these other videos or something abnormal is happening — something that you’d think Google’s spam detection systems would have flagged.

Can I Haz My Relevancy Back?

In this particular example, the poor relevancy isn’t caused by any of the ongoing Google+ification of Google. This result is what anyone would see, even if they are logged out of Google. It’s not caused by Search Plus Your World or anything like that.

But Google has spent so much time and energy shoving Google+ into seemingly every nook and cranny that it can find that this type of relevancy screw-up feels like another bit of evidence that Google’s original core mission, delivering awesome search results, is being forgotten.

Dash, Google’s Alternative to JavaScript

An internal Google document from October 2010 provides some information about Google’s strategy for the future of JavaScript. Google will continue to work on improving JavaScript and adding new features to ECMAScript Harmony, but it will also develop a new language called Dash that will try to solve JavaScript’s problems, while offering better performance, the ability “to be more easily tooled for large-scale projects” and better security features.

The goal of the Dash effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform. We will proactively evangelize Dash with web developers and all other browser vendors and actively push for its standardization and adoption across the board. This will be a difficult effort requiring finesse and determination, but we are committed to doing everything possible to help it succeed.

While Dash is catching on with other browsers, we will promote it as the language for serious web development on the web platform; the compiler allows such developers to target other browsers before those browsers implement Dash.

The Dash language effort will be driven by Lars Bak and his team in the Aarhus office.

Google also develops a cloud IDE called Brightly that will probably the first app written in Dash. The Dash VM and Dash Cross Compiler could be available later this year, according to the document.

“Our approach is to make an absolutely fantastic VM/Language and development environment and build great apps that fully leverage it in order to help other browsers see the wisdom in following. Once Dash has had a chance to prove its stability and feasibility, we are committed to making Dash an open standard with involvement from the broader web community,” explains Google.

Now Google Showing Three-Line Ad Site-links

We’ve seen reports and are also seeing some AdWords ads displaying with three lines of sitelinks, and Google has updated its help documents to indicate that “up to six” and “three-line” Ad Sitelinks are now being displayed.

Previously, Ad Sitelinks were only displayed in one-line, two-line and embedded formats. Generally speaking, the multi-line AdSitelinks are only displayed when the ad is deemed an ideal match for the user’s search query, and is usually triggered by a query that includes a brand name.

Sitelinks are an AdWords extension that permits advertisers to include up to 10 direct links to internal pages on their sites, and Google then chooses which of those to display for a particular query. Google also recently expanded the number of Sitelinks that display in organic search results, as well.