Tragic start to Olympic Games in the real world didn’t stop the show to go on and the first five days went on with problems which are purely down to Mother Nature (permanent lack of snow).
Regarding virtual presence Vancouver Games proves to be even more advanced and better served by search engines than Benjing 2008 or any other Olimpics before. Apart from medal leader board we have a great design and usability features on search engines.
GOOGLE – Google’s desire to create out of SERPs (tech: search engines result pages) one stop shops is visible this winter more than ever before
- Schedule for particular day in particular discipline – with info by time zone
- Results for latest events in particular discipline with names of the competitors and scores if apply
Event Schedule Vancouver 2010 Olimpics in Search engines
Vancuver 2010 on Google
Bing – They went all the way with homepage connected with Vancuver events through several links which are dragging people to Vancouver related visual search only one far right bottom link is connected to something unrelated.
Bing Winter Olympics Upgrade - It is all about Vancouver 2010 here
- Full section with Vancouver.com homepage link on the top for general keywords (olimpic games etc)
- Design rich sections for results for winter sports keywords with links to MSN/Bing powered CTV website for olimpics
Yahoo! – declining role of Yahoo! on search engines arena can be now clearly visible in the way Yahoo! covers Vancouver Games. As a portal Yahoo! deal with Eurosport creates situation that all content is fed from this particular site. When you type in “Vancouver 2010″ you are served with Eurosport content all over the place. But this wouldn’t be a problem. The sign that they do not invest any more in Search even on basic scale is visible on other Olympic related queries try “olimpic games” and you will find out that you are served with News Section and set of currently at least important links with Wikipedia ahead of well known Eurosport.
Summary
What couple of these “olimpic” searches shows us is significant and I believe it defines what we can expect from search engines over next couple of years. It shows search engines effort to cover such an event and deliver the best results in a short therm
- All Search engines developed special sections for Olympics
- Yahoo! stopped Search Engine Investments their section is has got very limited visibility
- Google is the only search engine to send people broadly from special section links directly to Vancouver 2010 official webiste
- Bing and Yahoo! both support themselves with partners delivering results for Olympic games queries (CTV and Eurosport
Out of this we can draw only one picture. Even with very heavy presence of AdWords section on the top of search results Google maintained the highest relevancy by sending you to the most relevant page in the world for this year olimpic event http://www.vancouver2010.com results are at least “contaminated” by marketing/advertising deals and offers great deal of information without leaving SERPs. What we wonder for the future is how many of these Google’s “Olimpic real time experiments” will find its way to Google Algorithm
by Krzysztof Kurzydlo
