CNN.com site search

Over the weekend, there was a high speed boat race in Mission Bay, which is a couple of blocks from where I live in San Diego. A friend of mine told me to go to CNN.com and type in “san diego boat crash video”. I saw that their site search is powered by Google and was expecting some really relevant results.  After I typed in my search query, I was amazed that cnn.com was showing web results outside of cnn.com.

It makes no sense for a publisher to direct their engaged traffic to another site.  Most publishers, like nytimes.com, wsj.com or even foxnews.com keep their internal search traffic on their site. I’m baffled that they would send traffic else where.

CNN.com does offer results for their site, but they are not by default. Even when you do click on the cnn.com site search results, results for other sites appear in the right sidebar.

Actually, I think that CNN.com is using the free standard edition Google site search account. Way to go CNN on returning the advertising value!