I have a tendancy to ramble on endlessly about topics nobody cares about, so I thought it’d be a good idea to check with someone first.
My Observations
Compare the position of SecondLife.com in the “normal” search results
and the accesible search results when searching for “second life” on Google:
- “Normal” Search
-
- SecondLife.com is the first result
- The teen grid site is the 10th result on page 1
- LindenLab.com is the third result
- The forums are on page 2
- The Wikipedia entry is the fourth result
- http://secondlife.com/whatis is the 2nd result
- Accessible Search
-
- SecondLife.com is the 10th result on page 1
- The teen grid site is on page 18
- I went looking for LindenLab.com and found it on page 13
- The forums (along with this page that I can’t make head nor tail of ) are on page 17
- http://secondlife.com/whatis is on the 15th page
- The Wikipedia Entry is the first result
Also note the different ordering between the site specific searches on
the accessible searches and the “normal” searches
End of email transposition (do take into account my observations were made during the writing of the email and the results may have changed by the time this post is read)
So what does this mean ?
- The Wikipedia is more accessible than Second Life
- The Teen Grid site is for some reason significantly worse off than the Main site, despite having significantly less coding errors than it’s Main Grid counterpart.
- Google Accessible Search makes about as much sense of the forums as I do.
- Google Accesible Search prefers the wikipedia over everything else
- Google are still using <font> tags.
- Linden Lab, and possibly a certain Zombie have some work to do if they want their content to have equal or superior weighting to web content as percieved by Google Accessible Search
Using Firefox ?
To use the accessible search for Address Bar searches, load up about:config, search for keyword.URL, and change the value to http://www.google.com/u/accessible?cx=accessible%21&btnG=Search&q= (thanks to Angsuman Chakraborty for this useful how-to)
