Father's Day SEO

A quick experiment led me to this topic this morning. I'm terrible with holidays, birthdays, etc. As such, I'll often do a quick Google search to bring myself up to speed with upcoming holidays. This led me to my morning SEO experiment: Father's Day SEO.

My goal was to find out, as quickly as possible, when Father's Day is. I used the search term "when is fathers day" and checked across 4 search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Wolfram Alpha. The first 3 you've heard of. If you're unfamiliar with Wolfram Alpha, it's a "computation engine" that is meant more for math equations, but it is very comprehensive and good at things like dates as well.

The results are as follows:

Google: For our specific search term, Google did NOT return a clear answer for what I was looking for. The first result was a link to a page that had multiple years of Fathers Day dates, however the actual upcoming 2009 date was not visible in the search results. To find that out, you had to actually visit the web page. Google did, however, display what I was looking for when I added the year in the search. "when is fathers day 2009" returned the actual answer, telling me that it was Sunday, June 21, 2009.

Yahoo: Their answer was evident right away. Right above the first search term, in bold, read "Father's Day is on Sunday, June 21, 2009". Accurate and quick, that's what I was looking for.

Bing: Microsoft's new search engine has been receiving a lot of attention, some of it organic and some of it driven by tv commercials. Using the same search term, Bing not only told me when it was, but threw in that it was 12 days away. That's great. I got the info I wanted, AND useful info that I didn't know I wanted. It's the first gold star Microsoft has gotten from me in a LONG time.

Wolfram Alpha: This was the odd engine out of the group. Wolfram was created to do computations with variables, but a date is simply a variable. Wolfram Alpha not only told me the date, but gave me WAY more info than I needed. I now know that Fathers Day is 172nd day in 2009 in the 25th week. I know that sunrise is at 6:20am that day. So I got my info, plus WAY more than I needed. Too much info is not what I need for a simple query, though, in all fairness, Wolfram Alpha is probably not the place to make simple query.

Winner: Microsoft Bing

Loser: Google

The result surprised me, but I'm growing to like Bing. If they take an active role in making additional info available in addition to relevant search results, maybe it's not such a bad thing after all. My initial skepticism was fueled by the thought of them augmenting search results with things that Microsoft wanted. I don't think that these little touches will get them much market share from Google, but they may persuade me to use Bing more than I ever used Live.com in the past.