Now that Rage Against the Machine and Killing in the Name have secured their number 1 slot in the UK singles chart, its time to look at the far more important matter of number 1 rankings in the major search engines for the phrase “Christmas”.
This is something that we have looked at over the last couple of years, in 2007 & 2008.
In 2007 the results were as follows:
Google.co.uk – www.northpole.com
Yahoo – Wikipedia
MSN – Encarta Encyclopedia
In 2008, there were some slight changes:
Google.co.uk – Wikipedia
Yahoo – Wikipedia
Live (MSN) – Surviving Credit Crunch at Christmas Video
So, the results in 2009 are now in!
Google.co.uk – Wikipedia
Yahoo – Wikipedia
Bing (MSN) – Wikipedia
How boring! All the search engines are serving up the same result as number 1, and even more tediously, its the good old Wikipedia!
Interestingly, the snippet used as the description for this page differs from engine to engine though:
Google: “In Christianity, Christmas is the festival celebrating the Nativity of Jesus, … Prior to Christmas Day, the Eastern Orthodox Church practises the Nativity …
Etymology – Celebration – History – Controversy and criticism”
Yahoo: “Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday celebrated on December 25 that commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The date of commemoration is not known to be Jesus’ actual…”
Bing “Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual Christian holiday, celebrated on December 25, that commemorates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The date of commemoration is not known …
Etymology · Celebration · History · Controversy and criticism”
Bing and Google both include quick links to specific areas of the page, and both do this in a very similar way.
Whilst these are the top “main” listings in the search engines, there are some slight variations as to what is actually appearing at the very top of the page in each of the search engines.
Yahoo is very informative:
Wow, thanks for the information Yahoo – “Christmas is on Friday, December 25, 2009″. Wish I’d known that sooner!
Bing gives 4 video results, that don’t interest me in the slightest, although in fairness, the search term that I have used isn’t particularly specific:
However, for a UK audience, I’m not sure links to video from CNN of Fox News is likely to induce many clicks.
Google decides that the most important link to go right at the top of the page for “Christmas” is an article about Rage Against the Machine’s triumph in the singles chart (I must confess to having bought a couple of copies of it, spending a massive £1 in the process):
There has been a lot of buzz around this in the build up to Christmas, so I think that this is fairly relevant to the search. What I found most interesting, as was pointed out to me by anaats on Twitter, is that if you do a search with “Christmas” in the term, between the organic and PPC results on the right, Google serves up some festive Christmas lights!
Well, thats the round up from 2009 – hopefully there might be a bit more variation in results next year – though perhaps with Yahoo looking increasingly on the way out, we might have to find some other engines to look at!
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