Today has been a sad day for the world of music as millions across the world hear about the death of ‘The King of Pop’. Of course in this day and age when a story like this breaks everyone everywhere (Okay bar Iran & China) can get instant access to news and media related to the event in question, and the chances are they’ll probably turn to Google first.

And that’s one of the reasons Google introduced Universal Search relatively recently, to provide visitors with all the ‘types’ of information they want in one place. The idea was simple; lets mix in other media (such as images, news items and videos) in the main Google results, hence providing better & more useful mixed media search results to their visitors. Let’s give visitors a choice. Remember with Google it’s all about the quality of the results that makes them so great, right?

Well I’m here to tell you that Google has failed; it’s still failing, and will continue to fail its UK visitors, at least for music related searches, until it fixes Universal Search here in the UK and removes the irrelevant YouTube results. Most sad of all is its probably failed Michael Jackson too.

Earlier this year YouTube lost the rights to broadcast a whole host of music and music videos here in the UK. They were (in my opinion) deliberately priced out of the market by the record companies, as they look to established their own new online music business models.

When you try to access any of the restricted songs in the UK you are met with the YouTube ‘red bar of death’; ‘This video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions.’ is duely displayed. There’s something about that red bar that makes me feel like I’ve done something very very wrong even when I haven’t…

When this happened many in our office predicted the ‘death’ of YouTube. Beyond the odd funny personal video and network TV copyright violation YouTube had really turned into an on demand MTV for many.

The loss of these music rights was actually almost scary; where am I going to get my on demand music fixes now (Okay there was last.fm back then it was pretty limited IMHO)? To be honest the impact of the loss of music on demand from YouTube has been offset by the launch of Spotify in the UK (smart move there guys…), so all was well for music lovers.

So whilst consumers at large have found a (better?) alternative for their musical needs what have Google been doing? Well not very much it seems. Many months on and Goolge UK results are still littered with irrelevant, out of date, and dead YouTube links. On this evidence alone universal search has failed, it’s not delivering a better user experience, its delivering a highly annoying frustrating experience. Seriously though, if you can’t view those videos from your location then why the hell are Google including them in their search results?

The UK Top 10, a test case

I like music, you probably do too, and my usual course of action is to Google an artist when I first hear about them to try and learn more; well at least that’s what I used to do. You probably do the same (?), so as an example let’s go the UKs top 10 single artists this week and see what videos are available through universal search.

Search Term	Video Result 1	Video Result 2
David Guetta	Alive	Dead
Kelly Rowland	Alive	Dead
Pixie Lott	Dead	Alive
Black Eyed Peas	Dead	Alive
Agnes	Alive	Alive
Keri Hilson	Dead	Dead
Kanye West	Dead	Dead
Dizzee Rascal	Alive	Alive
Daniel Merriweather	MySpace Alive	Dead
Lady Gaga	Dead	Dead
Take That	Alive	Alive
Veronicas	Alive	Alive

In choosing to take a straw poll of the artists currently appearing in the top 10 UK singles I decided to be nice to Google. These artists are currently promoting their work so, in my experience and opinion, are more likely to be openly sharing their music videos in order to promote their single. I wonder what percentage of failure you would get, if say you Google’d a set of more established all time great artists? I don’t know, say someone like Michael Jackson for example…

Helping heal those Michael Jackson wounds

Now unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 24 hours you will have heard that Michael Jackson passed away yesterday. Many (if not millions) in the UK would have awoke to this news and eagerly ran to their computers and Google’d the singers name in the hope of reliving their favourite Jackson music videos of the past.

Clicking on both these videos results in the YouTube ‘red bar of death’. Okay, there is the link for Video Results which gives you more options from Google Video but how many people click on that in comparison to the shiny videos links? Not many, and if they do there going to be mightily annoyed by that point after clicking through two irrelevant results.

Does Google have a conflict of interest?

So why are Google doing this? I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice this today but this has been bugging me for a while. Surely Google with all their algorithmic might would be able to easily weed out the copyright restricted results and replace them with something more relevant? Well you’d think so, though you never know with the Big G (perhaps they’re not that interested in the UK market after all), but let’s assume the answer the yes.

That gets me thinking about how and why I first started using YouTube. Never a big fan of homemade videos, besides the odd copyright infringing Family Guy clip and Star Trek fan montage, I only ever really used YouTube for music videos. And I was drawn in by the embedded Universal search results. The reason Google bought YouTube was due to the sites tremendous success and the amount of eye balls it had. Google mantra is to do no evil and deliver the best quality most relevant search results it can. Conflict of interest anyone?

Are Google afraid that UK users will just ‘forget’ about YouTube if it doesn’t appear in their search results, especially for the thing YouTube became synonymous with, music videos. It’s either that or, and possibly more likely, Google Universal search delivers poor quality irrelevant music related results to its users in the UK.