It was beautiful, and I'm so jealous I didn't think of it first.
So with that funny story firmly planted in my mind, we got an enquiry at SearchMasters coming from the search term "search engine". Because we are optimised for "search engine optimisation", by default we are optimised for "search engine" as well.
As I normally do, I went out and scoped out the SERPS to see what was happening...
SERPS on Google for search engine
Above: SearchMasters outranks google.co.nz for the term "search engine"Outranked!Funny how SearchMasters and others are beating Google for this phrase. Maybe if Google applied some of the SEO suggestions recommended in the above link, they could rank top for this term :)
Clearly there isn't any bias being applied here - Google's homepage isn't optimised for this term, and it's not ranking top as a result. Great to know we are (at least sometimes) operating on a level playing field.
Update
So after thinking it through, I thought it a little unfair to pick on Google over this one, so I decided to check out Yahoo and MSN as well.
SERPs on Yahoo for search engine
SERPs on MSN for search engine
Nuff said really. Out of the 3 major engines, Google is ranking itself best. Even Yahoo is listing Google as the first result, which says all kinds of things really. I kept these results to NZ only for consistency with the original Google result, but upon thinking about it, MSN probably doesn't have a NZ site and could well be filtering itself out of the results. Yahoo on the other hand is branded as Yahoo Xtra, so one would assume this is a New Zealand site, or at least it should be.If you search the worldwide versions of these phrases, you get all kinds of funny results. MSN lists every major search engine you can think of, except itself, on the top 10 results.
Source : http://www.ragepank.com/articles/140/google-in-need-of-seo/
