A search for “car insurance” on Google UK at the moment delivers Confused.com at number one with a server error and yet it is still at number one!

A web search for the term Car Insurance using Google UK currently turns up Confused.com, the insurance comparison site, as the number one result. The number one spot is supposed to be the most relevant website found to match the keywords entered by the user. When Google’s robots last found and indexed Confused.com though, they used the words seen on the home page for the descriptive excerpt on the search results page: “ We are sorry but confused.com is currently unavailable Please try again later . ”

For reference, it’s interesting to see that Confused.com does not make it on to the first page of results for MSN’s Live Search. On Yahoo!, they make it to number six in the search results but with their usual page description of, “ Cheap car insurance quotes comparison service. Compare quotations from all major providers to get the cheapest car insurance in the UK.”

If Confused.com was unavailable or the Google’s bots failed to find a description for the keywords ‘Car Insurance’ when it was last indexed, how and why is it at number one?

If the site was unavailable, how relevant would that have been to a user?

One way a website can appear at the top of a search results page is if they pay the search engine for that privilege. According to their own policies though, “ Google’s search results represent our best estimate of the most relevant web pages on the internet for a given search query. We don’t accept payment for inclusion in our search results, nor do we accept payment for improvement of a site’s ranking.

Sponsored links, in contrast, are targeted, relevant advertising adjacent to our search results. When we show ads, we clearly label them with the heading "Sponsored Links," and we distinguish them visually from our search results.”

Confused.com is not one of the three sponsored links that appear for the search term ‘Car Insurance’, so it couldn’t possibly be that.

Another reason Confused.com could make number one was if it was the dominant website in the car insurance sector since it would be the most relevant result. However, car insurance is a highly competitive market and there are arguably superior sites that would suit a user far more than one that was not even available when Google last checked.

Another potential answer points to a certain laxity in Google’s web search. If a site has suffered a server error, meaning their web page is temporarily unavailable, then the ever-benevolent internet giant grants them a reprieve by not altering their results the first time one of its bots encounters the problem. That’s nice but what does that mean for you, the user who is looking for the most relevant result? You don’t get what you wanted.

Irrespective of which is the right solution to the Confused.com conundrum, it could mean that neither you nor Google will find what you want.