When you’re the champ, everybody takes a shot—and sometimes it’s a shot below the belt (the belt being the equator). Yahoo! Australia and New Zealand gives a bloke a second option if, for some strange reason, they want search for Google on Yahoo!.
Of course, it begs the question, why would anybody search for [google] on Yahoo!’s search engine in the first place? But that’s neither here nor there, as Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker and Google insider Matt Cutts point out.
Testing reveals that, sure enough (for Southerners, that’s “show-nuff”), an Aussie Yahoo! search brings back a
second chance search box at the top of the results reading “Try the new Yahoo! Search.” As for MSN, AOL? All seems status quo.
And Ask Jeeves? The search box for [google] disappears and a
promo for Yahooligans is in its place.
“Maybe Yahoo sees searches for Google as a serious competitve area and searches for Ask Jeeves as a minor threat (get it? minor? kids? ba dum dum ching! wacka wacka wacka!),” writes Baker.
Too bad Web technology hasn’t yet evolved to track eye movement so when you reach end of a bad joke, the rimshot is heard instead of spelled. But that may be a hard one to "pound" out. Heh.
Cutts says this isn’t the first time a search engine has hand-coded a shortcut for Google-ish search queries.
“Remember when Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo!) hand-coded the result for [dumb motherf**ker] so that the #1 result was a Google page about its executives? Boy, I do,” recalls Cutts.
AllTheWeb too, according to Cutts, at one time returned the phrase “Google—The Inferior Search Engine.”
While Yahoo!’s search box is just smart marketing below the belt, while the others were below the belt in any hemisphere.
Speaking of down under, how do we know Australia is down under? If you zoom back into space, the solar system, the galaxy…which end of the Earth is right side up? For all we know, Australia faces the west southwest side of the Universe.
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