Gregg Hilferding

In a recent TV commercial for the Kellogg's breakfast cereal, the call to action for viewers is to search for special k using the Yahoo search engine. Hitwise has talked about how the TV ad affects search volume for the term.

What's interesting about this is that "Special K" is slang for Ketamine a "general dissociative anesthetic for human and veterinary use" that is used as a recreational drug. Why would Kellogg's risk associating their cereal with recreational drug use by inviting their customers to a page which is purported to be an unbiased representation of a search term?

A quick visit to the Yahoo page shows absolutely no results related to Ketamine or recreational drug use. However, a Google search for special k devotes positions 4, 5, 6, 7, and 10 to pages related to Ketamine plus 1 of 7 related searches include a drug reference.

To give perspective, a Google search for "special k" (in quotes) gives 1.33 million results. Removing any references to the cereal using the search "special k" -kellogg -cereal yields 1.17 million results. If 88% of web pages on the internet which mention "special k" are talking about the drug, how can none of Yahoo's top results for the term mention the drug?

This is an example of the culture difference between these two engines that yields a dramatically different result in user loyalty.

Edit: Upon further research, it looks like someone already noted a difference in the search results. (Kocchi just misinterpreted the direction of slant.)

It amazes me to see search pages that so marginalize the actual results. In this example, USA Today's "web search" (actually powered by Yahoo) takes the cake by allocating a mere 659x101 tall area for the results, assuming a window size of 1024x768. That's 66,559 out of the 786,432 pixels on the page or just under 8.5% of the real estate.

So, a visitor searching for custom t-shirts is going to see a page like this (I've highlighted where the organic SERPs show up):

I prefer a search engine result page that is simple and puts the results first. Here's the site search at GetYourShirts.com for the same t-shirt query. Of course, we won't get into a discussion comparing the quality of the results. ;)

"Now you can search for U.S. Patents" says the official google blog. This is exciting news because the official patent search feature at USPTO.gov is lacking. The navigational interface is clunky, practically to the point of being non-usable. The image display interface is not cross-browser compatible and should really highlight the pages that actually contain images. Instead, the user gets to page through the text of the application, even though they typically just read the text of the patent.

Thankfully, Google Patent Search solves the most glaring of flaws in the official search. The interface for a "casual patent searcher" is a breath of fresh air although Bill Slawski's analysis of the patent search indicates that Google has a long way to go before capturing the hearts and minds of professional patent searchers, such as patent attorneys.

Dave is doing a bit of testing on an issue with MSN Live Search. It seems only appropriate to link to Matt's post about url canonicalization tips. :)