The Biggest News Story IN THE WORLD…Brings Back Less Than 800,000 Results On Google

September 10, 2008 by · 19 Comments
Filed under: General Chat 

I think I must be going for the worlds longest post title, how did I do? 😉

Unless you have been living under a rock the past few days, you will already know about the worlds biggest scientific experiment that started today. I’m no scientist, but in short, scientists are going to re-create the “Big Bang” that created the universe. (Allegedly)

Depending on who you listen to, this will either tell us how the universe was formed and lead to better cancer treatments, or it will go horribly wrong and we’ll be sucked into a huge black hole and spend the rest of eternity floating around in “black matter” whilst hungry aliens feast on our humble remains.

Nooooooo

The story is so big that even Google are getting in on the action, if you are reading this post today (Wednesday the 10th September 2008), head on over to the Google home page and take a look at the Google logo.

If you are reading this after the day it was written, here’s a screen shot of the page so you don’t feel left out:

Google love a logo change

The image around the logo isn’t some kinky S&M device, it’s actually an image of the “Large Hadron Collider” (I think) from which the experiment will be run. If you then click on the image on the Google home page, it takes you to the search results for “Large Hadron Collider”.

And this is where my search engine marketing mind kicked in.

This is the biggest news story in THE WORLD today, no matter where you live, if you put the news on TV you will see something about this experiment. So you’d expect Google to be overflowing with millions of organic search results, and loads of Adwords ad’s selling books and DVD’s on related subjects.

BUT on Google there are less than 800,000 results, and even more surprisingly there are ZERO adwords ad’s! (On google.co.uk, .com had 1 ad)

Less than 1m results

The Mac loves adwords

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but can you imagine if you had started to build up a site containing information on the project when this was first mentioned a couple of years ago? With less than 800,000 results on Google, an old website with a good domain name and content would be absolutely overflowing with traffic today.

You could have monetized with Google Adsense or sold related products via the Amazon affiliate program, your main concern would be if your server could handle all the traffic!

I think it’s probably too late now to jump on the LHC band wagon, but you can see how easy it is to miss out on an opportunity. This project has been no secret, yet it seems that very few people had the hindsight to profit from this massive worldwide event.

I for one will be keeping a very close eye on any future worldwide news items!

And to finish off I’ll put your mind at ease by saying that the actual “Collision” that will re-create the big bang isn’t due to happen until mid-October, so there are a couple more blog posts left before the end….and if you want to check the current status of the project to see if it has destroyed the world yet, you can do so here:

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to leave a comment!

Regards,
Dan

P.S. The website link in my closing paragraph is an awesome example of a viral website, just a shame they haven’t monetized, they could have made a killing!