I was reading my feeds tonight, and I came across a post by Gord Hotchkiss about bad implementations of site search. This made me recall how poor the Search Engine Watch search used to be. Given that they, and the ClickZ network, released their redesign the other day, I thought that it may be worthwhile me giving their site search another go. What to search for? Well, since Danny Sullivan used to be the guy over there, and should probably have more results over there than anyone, why not his name?

So with the first result being a page called null, it’s not looking promising, especially when it says that page has 100% relevance (which in actuality it does, given that it leads to a listing of all of his articles). The second result is even worse, there’s no title displayed. Is the actual page relevant? Who knows because the title is the clickable element that takes you to the page; no title = no href. The third result is his contact form, that’s pretty relevant, the fourth is an interview he did with Barry Diller, again relevant. The fifth result titled “test”? It’s a blank page.

So, to sum it all up, 2 out of the top 5 results are good, the rest… not. Maybe it’s just because it’s Danny, after all he’s not involved with SEW these days. Let’s try searching for some of their current columnists and contributors:- Jessica Bowman, Duane Forrester and Kevin Newcomb…

Well, I guess it’s not just Danny…  it looks like SEW needs to have someone go through their pages and make sure that they all have title tags.  If you want to replicate this, just don’t try the search from their blog (not the best 404 page I’ve ever seen).