Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don’t make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin’-scratchers just keep on itchin’.
I’ve collected these ten over the past couple months and figured I’d share them on the blog with the hopes of getting greater group intelligence to participate in the guessing game:
#10 – Google’s Favorite University
Apparently, it’s the U of…
Arizona? I’ve seen some strangely biased sitelinks in the past, but this one is a serious enigma. Whatever the sitelinks algo is that triggers results like this, someone needs to turn down the knob.
#9 – Wikipedia as Safe Search
Try a query for guido, and note the “related searches” returns a single result – guido wikipedia (which I have a tough time imagining is a popular secondary query, but OK). Now perform that search – guido wikipedia – and note that the Wikipedia page describing the slang term has been replaced by two others for less derogatory uses of the word (and less exact matches). Bizarre, indeed…
#8 – Jobing for Unrelated Domains
I’ve purposely moved results 8, 9 and 10 to the top of the screenshot to illustrate result #10 – I’m not sure how Google ascribed that title to a page/domain that has no content, save the word “hello.” Looks like several years ago, it contained some related content, but it’s been a long time and Google’s still giving an empty page front page billing.
#7 – YouTube: The 1st and 2nd Most Important Site on the WWW?
A search for inurl:www inurl:com site:com brings up an interesting listing of important domains, nearly all of which are extremely high PageRank with lots of important links, except…a weird YouTube result, the kind that normally only shows when there’s a relevant YouTube video in position #2. Looking at the content and the links, I can’t figure out what it’s doing there. A conspiracy theorist might suggest it’s evidence of Google’s favoring of YouTube content, but I’m wondering if the lack of keywords in the query just brings out some odd behavior.
#6 – Sarah Jessica Reminds Us That Google Bombing is Still Alive & Well
The next time someone tells you Google-bombing is dead and gone, show them the obligatory “click here” example, but don’t forget about Sex & the City’s star, who’s apparently “lovely,” no matter what the keywords say:
I was hoping they were reading the text in the Flash file, but as that appears to be purposefully inaccessible, I’m guessing they just paid lots of attention to all that “lovely” anchor text. 🙂
#5 – Your Site Isn’t Here
Search for “Your Site Here” in quotes and find another disturbingly brazen example of pages ranking for a phrase that doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. The weird part is not one of the top 10 results contain that keyword phrase:
It isn’t until you get to result #13 that you finally find a URL containing a text match. To be honest, I’m surprised the results don’t look something more like this – it’s as though they automatically append an -allintitle: parameter to your query.
#4 – Gotta Love the Domain Match
I think I must have mistyped “qualit”y when I stumbled across this query for – quali. When I performed the search last month, the #1 result was for www.quali.com, which contains no content, has fewer than 5 followed links pointing to it and last featured content in 2001 (when it was, apparently, for sale).
p.s. Sadly, it’s now slipped to result #13 – poor quali.com.
#3 – Where to Get Properly Hitched
I’m a busy man, and I need to rustle up a wedding pronto, so naturally I searched for marriage license seattle, wa.
Having just stopped by the government building recommended by this map, I can say that it is the proper place to acquire a marriage license in Seattle. However, why no address is provided (even clicking the map, you can’t get an address) and why the link points to the wrong page (the correct URL is on Seattle.gov or Metrokc.gov) is something I can’t quite figure out.
#2 – One of these Domain Queries is Not Like the Others
I’m not sure why Google’s giving the query about.com the URL information treatment.
Virtually every other domain query from seomoz.org to cnn.com to porcupineliteraryarts.com gets the standard search results, most of them with sitelink. Since domain queries are also very popular searches, I suspect there’s a lot of confused individuals out there wondering why About gets such odd results.
#1 – Math & the Beatles
Now, I’m well aware that a week technically contains seven days, but sometimes, that’s just not enough time, particularly when you’re in love. Hence, the Beatles gave us Eight Days a Week…but Google’s got something strange to say about that:
I believe that’s 8 divided by 7, but why it’s in the calculator I can’t say. I do know that it works for other numbers of days in a week as well – ten, four, eighty-one. Maybe it’s just their way of being geeky.
Feel free to share your own bizarre search results in the comments, and for our US readers, welcome back from the Labor Day holiday; I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend.
