Does Google Find It Difficult To Search Its Own Website?

In a post titled “Why Is It Easier To Search The WWW Than A Single Website?”, we’d cited the examples of TechCrunch and a couple of other third-party websites to conclude that it’s generally tougher to search a single website compared to the entire world wide web – even when we use the same Google Search Engine to conduct both searches.

When we wrote this post, we never imagined that our conclusion would apply to a website owned by Google itself. Looks like it does! Cut to the recently released Clik smartphone app.

On the back of the huge media buzz that followed the app’s launch a few weeks ago, the company counted some 100K downloads of the iOS version of its app on Apple’s AppStore. However, the Android version of Clik saw absolutely no traction on Google Play (new name for Android Market). Reason? The app was totally invisible to searches done there. Apparently, when you search for Clik on Google Play, the Google Search Engine there assumes that you made a typo and searches for “click” instead – hence search results are topped by “1-click cleaner” and not Clik.

In this TechCrunch post, the company’s CEO Ted Livingston says laconically, “It’s pretty ironic — the king of search can’t do search”. I think he missed adding, “on its own website”, out of politeness or caution.