I went to see Up with my family this weekend. If a movie is from Pixar, that is enough to recommend it. All we knew about the film was that it somehow involved balloons. The story was classic Pixar – in a way timeless and yet unprecedented.
Of course, you may have seen Up being used in one of the demos for our (Microsoft’s) new search engine: bing. Given that Pixar/Disney obviously named the movie intentionally as a challenge to search engines, I wanted to see what Google did with the query ‘Up’. I guess Google doesn’t like me. After seeing what they did with my previously posted example, perhaps the result for ‘Up’ shouldn’t surprise me:
At WWW2009 in Madrid this year, Tapas Kanungo put together a nice workshop on snippet generation for the web.
Note that though bing’s results are pretty good, the current Live Search results are not too great either. They provide show times near my location (good) but don’t provide a link to the movie home page (bad).
Update – Google appears to have fixed this as well.
bing gave me theaters in the Boston area, but ones that are largely many miles away, when there is a theater 2 blocks from me. Yahoo lists the theater next to me first. I don't know why their location data is more precise, but they beat bing in this case. (Once I explicitly gave bing my location, it does fine though)
Posted by: David | June 01, 2009 at 09:39 AM
bing results above the fold for me:
1. Union Pacific
2. up - Definition of up at YourDictionary.com
3. Up Edu
4. Up - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
5. up.net - We Make All the Right Connections For You
6. Up! (album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
7. up - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Y results above the fold for me:
0. shortcut to up in movies.yahoo.com
1. Up (Movie)
2. Up (2009) - IMDb
3. UP on Yahoo! Movies
4. Up (2009 Film) - Wikipedia
Posted by: FD | June 01, 2009 at 10:06 AM
Bing worked perfectly for me, showing local results and movie times.
Posted by: java | June 01, 2009 at 12:09 PM
Looks like the correct result to me? Seems like more of a problem with Disney's html markup than with Google. Or were you expecting something that didn't remind you of the Pixar/Disney connection?
I like Google's movie pages too, they're extremely simple and well laid out. Once you've used it, movie searches appear as the top match in regular search results too.
Posted by: Tom Carden | June 01, 2009 at 02:47 PM
Bing does not return the Pixar site at all, at least on the first page. And if you look at the page source, there's _no content_ on it, not even meta tags. In fact, the list of states is the only thing you can extract from that page. Which Google did. Kudos to them for properly weighting the URL features in their ranker.
Posted by: Dmitriy | June 02, 2009 at 01:29 AM