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Google Universal Search Not Loving Obama Skit?
I watched parts of the Democratic debate from snowy Cleveland last Tuesday. One of the more memorable moments came when Hillary Clinton referred to a Saturday Night Live skit that poked fun at her opponent. By utilizing my mastery of the power of contextual inference, I could tell the SNL skit made it seem like Obama gets favored treatment. But because of my older guy lifestyle, I didn’t see the show in question. My first impulse was to run to Google and search for it. However, the Cavaliers were also in a tight contest on another channel. I didn’t get to seach until today. I found something interesting; you can find the video with the right Google search, but it isn’t as obvious as you might think.
I looked for “obama skit’ and got results from Web and News:
The first two organic search results were right on the money as far as Google delivered stories about Mrs. Clinton’s SNL reference during the debate. I guess it is another leap of logic to think my intent was a video. So I refined the search to “snl obama skit”.
Didn’t really change much. I would have thought that SNL might have triggered Saturday Night Live and made the connection that I was interested in the show or video of the show in general and the skit in particular. So let’s try “snl obama video”. That MUST return videos in Google Universal, right?
Nope. I did get News results in a later search, but still no video. Wouldn’t you think that almost any query that includes the term “video” would be enough to trigger video results? Incidentally, the first result does link to the video. It appears before the official NBC SNL page, the NBC page linked here is a backstage tour with Tina Fey. Close, but no cigar. At this point, I wonder if I should just jump right over to Google Video Search. I tried “snl obama video”, not it. Then I reverted to “snl obama skit”.
At long last! Success!
The point of this exercise isn’t to really bash Google. It is more of a reminder that users may have to hunt much harder to find your content than you might imagine. Even when Google brought me to NBC, I still had to navigate further into the site to view what I wanted. And by the way, once I found the video it was funny!
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Comments
1 Comment so farOne Response to “Google Universal Search Not Loving Obama Skit?”
Isn’t it interesting that the first three videos that showed up in are reactions to the skit. It looks like Google still has a lot of work to do.