What happens when you search for the word ‘labour’ on the world’s leading search engines? The results are as you’d expect from Google and all the rest — with one amazing exception.

What happens when you search for the word ‘labour’ on the world’s leading search engines? The results were, I thought, surprising.
Google produces excellent results. The first four results were the International Labour Organization, the British Labour Party, LabourStart and the Irish Labour Party. Reasonable enough.
Ask Jeeves had a slightly more Canadian orientation — its first results were the ILO and British Labour Party, followed by the Canadian Labour Congress, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and then LabourStart.
AlltheWeb also came up with the British Labour Party and ILO on top, followed by the Irish Labour Party, something called the “Electronic Labour Exchange”, and then LabourStart.
AltaVista starts out OK with the British and Irish Labour Parties on top, but then loses the plot, its next listings being an article on child labour, the Scottish Labour Party, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland. Unions are nowhere to be seen.
Lycos and Excite produce similar results. Okay, this is getting boring.
But here’s the odd one: go to Microsoft’s search engine, http://search.msn.com/, and key in ‘labour’. Here are the first five results:
1 Information-Technology-Jobs.com
Assists job seekers in finding open positions in the information technology sector. Scroll the listings or fill out a profile.
2 Labour Left Briefing
Offers a listing of links to international labor movement, trade union, socialist, communist and related Web sites.
3 US Department of Labor – History of Labor Day
Labor Department offers a history of the labor day holiday and provides brief biographies of the original founders of the holiday.
4 MSN Encarta – Child Labor
Discussion about this term shares an explanation and extensive historical data. Link to articles, photos, documents, and subscription logistics.
5 Love’s Labour’s Lost – Movie Review Query Engine
Access dozens of links to reviews of this adaptation of the Shakespeare play done as a Hollywood-style musical.
No British Labour Party, no Irish Labour Party, no International Labour Organization, no LabourStart.
It’s a combination of two commerical sites, one U.S. government site, one reference to one of Microsoft’s own sites, and the Labour Left Briefing — which would have been, several years ago, a top choice back when there were few labour websites. It’s as if MSN last indexed this part of the web in 1997.
And if you keep scrolling down through the search results, you can reach number 50 and still not find the British Labour Party, the ILO or LabourStart.
Odd, isn’t it, that every other search engine finds the ILO, the labour parties, and LabourStart, but MSN search doesn’t.