John McCain has an SEO Problem

In our continuing entirely unscientific look at the search result pages for the presidential candidates, we now turn our attention to the presumptive nominee for the Republican party. John McCain has joked that he uses Google during his search for a running mate, so let’s take a look at what we find when we search for him.

If the “Hillary Clinton” search results that we reviewed a month ago could be considered “on message,” with many of her official sites lined up on page 1 and only one mishap on the first two pages (position #16), then John McCain has got an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) problem. It doesn’t help either, we imagine, that some people have deployed “Google bombs” to sabotage his results. The outcome, however, consists of three panics in a row on the very first page of results and two Google bombs on the second. Furthermore, the top 100 results are filled with far fewer “official” sites (24 vs 10).

Below we take a light-hearted look at the top 100 results for “John McCain” on Google. We added the “bomb” icons to the results based strictly on information from a Search Engine Land post, however, it’s entirely possible that, unknown to us, there were people bombing Hillary Clinton’s results as well.

(Note: the “bomb” results are perhaps considered as such not necessarily because of the political stance, but because of the perceived unfavorable slant with which the stance is portrayed.)

Now you’ll be asked to forgive us for demonstrating how our application makes all of this searching stuff better.

With almost 40 million results for John McCain, most of which are probably not relevant to your specific needs, how could you hope to dig through them all? Certainly you could page, page, page, or reformulate your query, but all of this is hard work. Fortunately, Surf Canyon has developed a search application to do the heavy lifting for you.

After you install the software, when you enter a search on one of your favorite search engines (currently Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live and Craigslist) small bull’s eyes will appear next to each result. Click a bull’s eye next to the result you like, or the result itself for that matter, and Surf Canyon will figure out what you’re looking for and then dig deep into the result set (up to page 100!) and find what you need.

Here’s a quick example of what might happen if, using the search above, you click on result #2 (John McCain 2008…) and then the 3rd result recommended by Surf Canyon (McCain Agrees With Bush’s Remarks on Appeasement…):

Once again, with virtually no effort at all, relevant results, based on your actions as you search, are pulled out of the result set. If you would like this to happen for you, download and enjoy our search application.

Please let us know how did! Stay tuned for more…