Google blocks access to the Biased BBC blog via search
This one probably needs filing under "D'oh! The humanity", but at the moment on Google, if you search for Biased BBC, the top result leads you to a blank page on the Blogspot domain rather than the blog itself.
I noticed it after I made one of my increasingly rare forays over onto the blog earlier this week. A thread caught my eye which mentioned the shortcomings of the BBC Search engine, and I left a comment to correct an inaccuracy in the comments - where it was stated that the BBC had 'written their own' search engine rather than use commercial products.
This is not the case, since although the BBC technical team work on the templates and configuration of the software they use, the software is supplied either by Microsoft Live Search for web search, or Autonomy for bbc.co.uk results. Both of these are commercial companies who won the contracts after a tendering process.
That isn't to say there are no shortcomings with the search results you get from the BBC. Not least as far as I'm concerned, as I mentioned last week, the fact that a search from the BBC News site is not restricted to news content. That was partly my motivation in making the BBC OpenSearch plugins for IE7 and Firefox last year.
I made one for the BBC News scoped search, and one that searches Google but only returns results from news.bbc.co.uk. You can install both in your browser (or use the Google Toolbar versions I made) to do easy comparisons between the sets of results.
BBC News and Sport [Add this search to your browser]
Google BBC News and Sport [Add this search to your browser]
So, it was quite amusing, after a thread extolling the virtues of Google search over search from the BBC, to find that Google should have made an apparent error in indexing the Biased BBC site, which is of course hosted on the Blogger platform that Google themselves own.
For some reason, the homepage has been indexed by Google with an extra 'www.' in front of the biased-bbc.blogspot.com domain. The full-stop character isn't allowed in Blogger domain names, and so clicking the link on Google takes the user to a blank page. The full Google re-direct query string being generated clearly includes the unnecessary www prefix
I did wonder whether it was some kind of personalised result from Google specifically to prevent me visiting the site for, probably, the mutual benefit of us all, but it happens regardless of whether I am logged in to Google or not.
At least this is one search result glitch that can't be blamed on the commercial or political machinations of the BBC.
Or can it?
http://www.biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ works for me
Oh that's odd - it wasn't working for me from 9pm last night.
Interestingly, I also note someone is squatting http://www.biased-bbc.blogpsot.com
I'd be very interested to know how Autonomy search works, at Rentokil Initial we use a Google Mini for all our searching which we own and control ourselves. Although on the standard package the number of pages that can be indexed is limited, larger licenses are available. We find it to be extremely effective and highly configurable.