How Google is handling the UK earthquake
Last night a 5.3 magnitude earthquake hit the UK and this morning millions of people are probably searching Google to find information on the subject.
Google has what’s called a query deserves freshness algorithm that detects when search volume increases and news sources all start writing about a subject.
This algorithm then pushes fresh articles into the top 10 organic results.
Today this doesn’t seem to have kicked in at all so far. There are only 2 news results on Google.co.uk related to this earthquake and none of the natural search results are related to it. Expect this page to change dramatically today as people arrive at work and search volume increases.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 6 comments below, or add your own!
We felt nothing although one of our neighbours said the earth moved and it was quite scary, especially as her husband is away (boom, boom!)
db
My mum and sister woke up during the night due to the earthquake, I however was sound asleep
It woke me up (in Leeds) and the wardrobe and drawers were shaking as well as the mirror on the wall. It then stopped and I fell right back asleep after saying “wow, that was weird” to my wife. When I woke up this morning I just had a quick look at bbc news on my phone who confirmed it was an earthquake. I expected more results from google and was looking for the QDF thing to kick in.
Maybe google didn’t think it was worthy enough unlike the TV Stations who like to sensationalise everything. I did have to laugh when it made the headline news and they showed a shot from a wobbly CCTV camera. If it was anywhere else in the world that camera would have been sitting under a pile of rubble with flames licking round it.
I was one net those who searched for the organic results in google for the news. However the news.google.com search is the best, but everyone wont be using it, and most would go for organic results too. Google should have updated that too.
I was working on my site in Leicester and had to pretty much change my trousers afterwards. The computer monitor fell over and the walls moved a lot. May be I was closer to the epicenter than some of you.
My hair dresser thought It was only local and didn’t cause millions of pounds of damage like it did, according to the BBC anyway.
I suppose if she thought that maybe so did a lot of others and they just didn’t search, thus not making it kick in.
Jaza