The BBC's search engine
Posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 11:22 pm. #
In this excellent series of posts at the BBC, Martin says “the BBC was accused of artificially inflating the ranking of BBC content within the results.”
I’ve tried to post a reply, but the BBC’s blog infrastructure is creaking at the seams at the moment, and just sits there marked “loading” (and has finally given me an error). It does this from time to time; I think Richard Bacon’s probably breaking it. So, instead, my comment would have been…
Lest we ever forget our mistakes, the BBC search engine (the equivalent of ‘all the web’ today) actually offered you “BBC Radio 3″ when you searched for “Classic FM”; which was explained away to this vulture-eyed reader at the time as a “technical glitch”… – clearly, harrumph, it must have been… 
As someone who now works with the rest of the team who bring you the search stuff, I’m impressed at the work they do – and yes, the attempts they’re making to tweak the results to give you the right information. An “all the web” search for Classic FM now returns the rather amusing phrase “The BBC recommends Classic FM”. Who’d have thought it…
Photo: Michelle Callinan. Used under licence. For the second time…
My original draft for the piece on the internet blog included a bit more about this, citing your old chums at Virgin Radio as another victim – but I had to cut it out for space reasons.
I’ve expanded a bit on how it worked here -
http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2007/11/bbci_search_impartiality.php
It was a feature with unintended consequences, rather than either being a ‘glitch’ or a deliberate policy to exterminate competition from the web search listings.