I think this debate got sidetracked a bit over the last few weeks. But I still maintain that Google wasn’t best serving searchers by originally having the Telegraph 5th (and later 8th). I think your own original data proved this (as it was published when the Telegraph wasn’t 1st, yet people were still flocking to the site).

And Google itself has recognised this now – as the Telegraph is first.

It may be in the future that a different site deserves to be first – I’m not claiming that the Telegraph site is the be all and end all on this subject – and you’d expect SERPS to change over time (EG when I search for the FA Cup now, I want a different result to last year, and the year before etc).

But, at the height of the expenses’ scandal, Google’s main web results for this search term were not very good.

(And I’m not terribly convinced by this result from the BBC being number 5ish right now: “BBC NEWS | UK | MPs’ expense accounts laid bare 21 Oct 2004 … Full details of MPs expenses are published for the first time, allowing voters to check up on their representatives’ claims.”)

I think the point that a number of people have made about the Google search page (SERP) varying constantly and by user is relevant. As you may know, people who use Google for search marketing purposes have access to a ‘clean’ results page that gives them the results regardless of history, etc..

Someopne has already linked to my earlier blog post on the topic in their comments (and I think you may have also, in an ealier post), but I thought I’d provide an update based on last week’s results.

Last week (w/e 13/06/09) the Telegraph picked up 50% of UK traffic from the basic term ‘mps expenses’. For a broader portfolio of expenses related terms (including ‘mps expenses’, but also terms like ‘expenses scandal’, ‘list of expenses’, ‘david camerion expenses’, etc. – 64 in total last week) the Telegraph picked up 36.3%, followed by the BBC (7.8%) and the Guardian (6.5%). Here’s link to a table containing the full top 10:

http://twitpic.com/7gai7

Thanks, Robin

Robin Goad
Research Director, Hitwise

@Andraz – I think Google does tend to reward the first breaker of a story. And often this would be a good idea – getting the source, rather than the rehashed version by some other media site.

@Murray – I agree that there is often no hard and fast answer to what should be the first result. Except in this case, I think there is. Ignoring your hypothetical situations, the Telegraph is the primary source for these stories. The fact it’s what people want is shown by the huge traffic volumes the Telegraph is experiencing. This logic might not always apply – but it does here and now – and the traffic volumes prove it. For Google to put any other site at number 1 is pretty poor – and to put the sites above it when it was at number 8 was utterly ridiculous.

Secondly, with regard to who should be top in the Google results sited, there’s a danger of breaking a cardinal rule of the information economy here.

The simple fact of the matter is that the expenses story doesn’t ‘belong’ to the Telegraph, any more than that it belongs to anyone else – whether they paid for it or not.

Copyright will protect the words (and other means) they used to tell this story, but the story itself is firmly within the creative commons.

But with regards to the practicalities raised here, the fundamental problem of using primacy as a scale upon which to measure relevance is that it still doesn’t deal with the issue of what people might actually want.

Take the first issue – should a simple string like ‘mps expenses’ return as the first results:

- The very first front-page story the Telegraph published on this topic, or
- The most popular (linked to) story in the series, or
- The index page for the whole thing the Telegraph have now created to house the vast number of stories they’ve since published?

And what if the BBC (for example) provided a service (ie searchable database) to allow scrutiny of the data which the telgraph have not, in which would make it relevant to anyone wanting to check their own mps – should this top them all?

There’s so many things a surfer might want from a simple, two-word string.

Say you are intererested in those expense claims of a particular MP (already published – first – by the Telegraph) – and you search ‘mps expenses nadine dorries’ for example.

But what if a local newspaper has taken this story and done a lot more investigating, and in the process uncovered far more interesting info about the individual? Shouldn’t that story be first- it would be more relevant in a qualitative sense?

Tracing back the ‘original author’ is entirely different problem than finding what is the most relevant source right now. Who broke the story is something marketing is concerned about, not readers.

I agree the results aren’t particularly good, but the reasons listed for changing them seem wrong.

bye
Andraz Tori

The Telegraph is – quite rightly – winning hands down.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/05/mps_expenses_update_telegraph.html