BBC Publishes Something Really Stupid
I’ve just been watching a video published by the BBC about how price comparison sites are making navigation hard for visually impaired users. The problem is the tests were carried out on the wrong websites!
They say they are looking at Confused.com and yet the tester was actually looking at confuse.com with is nothing more than a spam site to catch people who typed the wrong url. Then they look at http://www.compare-and-go.co.uk thinking it is part of GoCompare.com when it’s just an affiliate site which makes money by sending traffic to GoCompare.com – the site even says “We are not part of GoCompare.com” on the homepage.
The BBC has helpfully added a message to say “The following website confuse.com has no connection with Confused.com” so why on earth are they posting a video of it? Basically they have found a useless spam site and come to the conclusion it isn’t easy for visually impaired people to use it.
If I was GoCompare or Confused.com I would be pretty upset about this.
Words fail me.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 22 comments below, or add your own!
OH MY GOD!!!! WTF is that. Who produced that BBC story!?!?! Looks like somebody who’s never been on the internet or used search engines!
Thank god my license is paying for quality journalism like this
That really is shocking, the BBC just keep on outdoing themselves with stupidity.
Patrick,
I totally disagree with your views about the BBC’s intentions. Yes, they were damn stupid to include the wrong price comparison websites (although this could be down to other reasons). But I applaud the BBC – more people need to be thinking about accessibility, and you would know for SEO reasons amongst others.
George I think you have misunderstood me. I agree that accessibility is very important and that sites should adhere to standards. The only stupid thing was including the wrong sites because this just undermines the important message.
Alternatively it suggests that communication to those less able is difficult! Perhaps they were given a list over the phone and asked to find it on the internet.
I do agree that it undermines the whole message – what a shame because if they had gone to the right sites, it would have been quite interesting.
I try not to put people down for moving in the right direction!
The BBC has previous incidents of getting it badly wrong with search engines. Remember http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/bbcbhopal ?
I think the right answer is wider use of human-reviewed directories, both internal (like colleagues’ social bookmarks) and external (like ODP).
George, while it’s good that the BBC is highlighting accessibility issues, I think there’s something very basically wrong with what they’ve done. If I did a site audit on a client website, and then realised that I’d moronically (somehow) done a site audit on what is obviously the wrong site, I wouldn’t then send them the site audit. Or be in business.
Shocking. Trouble is they use this kind of incompetency to lobby for increases in the license fee. If I was confused.com or GoCompare I would be raging.
I’m actually not entirely sure how to take this. In some way it indicates the difficulties a visually impaired user would have knowing whether they had visited the correct site or not.
For us seasoned web-users it is blindingly obvious that she’s on a spam site, but if you can’t see well then it is a lot harder to know.
Clearly some mistakes were made here – namely the editor didn’t check whether the correct sites had been tested – and it would have been significantly more useful to have tested confused.com and gocompare.com, however, the point stands that the lady doing the test was unable to tell the difference between the websites.
I have to agree with matt on this one. Very good point.
Thanks Rick, unfortunately there’s no easy fix to the problem as there is no reliable way to genuinely highlight whether a page is the correct source or not. We can see it from the screen, but if you’re visually impaired, or not particularly web-savvy (and there are plenty of these people using the web!) then it’s difficult to know.
Maybe something like Google’s PageRank could give an indication, but it needs to be turned into a form which is trusted and consumer in nature.
Maybe, a plug-in called “trusted” which just reports back the PR of a site after converting into bands like “Trusted, “Unsure”, “Not trusted”, etc. But the you have the problem of marketing to un-web-savvy people and gaining their trust – which is difficult…
Matt I think you have stumbled onto a big issue here. Perhaps the makers of screen reader software need to build it in to their browsers.
Yep – this seems like the perfect place to add it.
Frankly I can just see the “head in hands” moment when you were viewing that video for the first time!
The BBC seem to be outdoing themselves in the stupidity rankings on a daily basis.
I live in Spain now and the national broadcasting corporation here had a field day with the Ross _Brand cockup .
Mind you I am glad to have access to Britsh tv here because Spanish tv is desperately BAD !!
Regards,
Paull
Confuse.com is just a parked domain. Sometimes journalists have no idea what are they talking about.
Who gets to decide what’s “trusted”? Google gets it wrong depressingly often, else groups like TheYesMen, sploggers and MFA spammers wouldn’t be thriving. Some sort of social bookmarking seems a more fruitful route, but even that could have serious problems.
Hey Patrick,
I am absolutely in favor of your thoughts against BBC’s stupidity. I just hate those people who pretend to have great knowledge of internet but actually don’t have that knowledge.
I am not directly against BBC. Its one of my favorite news channels. I am against that story publisher. I think BBC is very responsible and will take appropriate action.
Congratulations Patrick for the great post.
Regards
Laksh
http://makemoneyonline-withme.blogspot.com/
BBC news is about 40% PR flummery these days, alas. Like all the big news organisations they spend an inordinate amount of time rewriting press releases backed with spurious data. “Linkbait” is what PR companies have been doing since time immemorial. All that “information” sloshing around these days and the pressure for instant comment means journalists can’t even do the most basic fact-checking these days.
Sad, but that’s why I rely increasingly on monomaniac bloggers for my news!
Wow, it’s good to know that we have such good quality journalism out there.
Regardless what comments have said here, this was a stupid action, BBC should have hired someone smarter.
There’s no excuse for major media to make such a mistake. I thought they had unlimited resources? Maybe the recession caused them to hire homeless people for the job. (No offense to homeless people)
Anyone with a slight internet experience should be able to do better than this.
Utter FAIL, great post.
What I don’t get is why is there insurance ads on http://CoNfuSe.com, I think confuse.com domain name is confusing enough, they should just put a confusing blog, it would make a lot of money.