This week I’ve been doing more testing on Universal Search and the relevancy of its results. Today I decided to Google “Danny Sullivan” to see what results come up in the new Universal Search. Here’s the result I received:

So my question is — who the heck is Danny Hill? And why did his phone book entry in Chittenango, NY come up as the top result? Surely there are at least guys named Danny Sullivan in the phone book in the US…

This just illustrates the point further that Google Universal Search isn’t quite ready for prime time. Sadly, when I Googled Andy, Jordan and me, no interesting phone book entries. In fact, there were no phone book entries for any of us.

I read an interesting article today by, of all people, a venture partner discussing Microsoft’s evolving brand strategy. The article, by James Joaquin, juxtaposes the renaming of MSN Search to “Microsoft Windows Live Search” versus the simple brand structure of Google Search.

Joaquin points out that as Microsoft has grown, it has faced the problem many growing companies face — growing the brand and creating a brand naming structure that supports the parent brand (Microsoft) while allow new products to have their own sub-brands (Windows). By renaming MSN search to “Microsoft Windows Live Search”, Microsoft has created a brand that is three sub-brands deep (Windows, Live, Search), as illustrated in his Microsoft brand diagram:

We finally have more details on the exact nature of the new relationship between Google and Salesforce.com. Formally announced on Tuesday, the new strategic alliance makes it easier for businesses to start up, track, and manage the true ROI from Google AdWords campaigns. According to the Salesforce.com press release:

The newest product resulting from this alliance, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, is a robust offering that combines the power of Salesforce on-demand CRM applications with the Google AdWordsâ„¢ platform to achieve integrated sales and marketing success. This joint solution provides businesses of all sizes with the same tools used by larger enterprises to successfully attract and retain customers.

Poor old Paris Hilton. She just can’t find justice anywhere — not even in the new Google Universal Search Results. Today I tried a search on the term “Paris Hilton” — a very newsworthy person this week. Here are the results of that search:

Appropriately, news does come up as the first entry for good old Paris. But where are Paris Hilton videos? What about Paris Hilton pictures? Are those not worthy of the first page? Ironically, “paris hilton pics” and the like were not even among the suggested “related” searches. The related results were:

Instead, the related searches presented by Google were (according to the Overture term suggestion tool) less searched than image-related terms. The terms in blue represent the searches for the Google list of “related searches”: