College Kid Prank Outranks Multinational: Welcome to Blended Search

Blended search (aka “universal search“) means that the search engines take video, photos and news items and throws them into the mix alongside traditional text sites when ranking organic results. Better for the searcher? Possibly. But what about for businesses?

At the Search Engine Strategies Toronto conference a couple of weeks ago, the marketing manager of a multinational corporation sat on a B2B panel discussing SEO/SEM tactics. Jim Beretta happily reported that ATS Automation Tooling Systems does very well in its page rankings in Google thanks to his SEO diligence.

But Beretta doesn’t like what he sees happening of late with Blended Search. “It’s pushing us downpage,” he complains of his organic page rankings appearing beneath videos and images he doesn’t consider related.

Prank video outranks global brand leader

For example, one week, Google chose a YouTube video of some college guy’s “MIT Dorm Automation System Party Mode Activation” as more search-worthy than ATS, a corporation that has made more than more than 10,000 automation systems and employs 3,500 people at two dozen locations across three continents!

C’mon, Google… really!

(The top-of-page one ranking really served the MIT kid well: his homemade, 47-second video has garnered more than 642,000 views to date!)

Serving up Google’s favorite desserts

It doesn’t escape Beretta’s attention that it was a YouTube result that Google favored for the automation” term - and that YouTube is owned by Google.

“We have to watch what Google channels are opening up, and offer something to those,” he says. “We need to help Google serve up their favorite desserts.”

Now there’s a slice of reality pie in the new world of blended search.