Although it seems like only a couple of weeks ago since the last series ended, it would appear that Big Brother is back. Yes, in what is now a better indicator of the imminent start of the British summer than washed out test matches, the new series of Big Brother started last night.

Being the search geeks we are, we thought that we would see who was well placed to take advantage of the avalanche of search traffic that is likely to come, especially on the phrase big brother. The results on Google are nothing out of the ordinary - Channel 4 in the top 2 slots, with online magazine Digital Spy reaping the benefit of thousands of links to its specially created Big Brother section, by taking #3.

But the results on MSN for a search on the phrase big brother were a little bit more interesting. In the 1st two positions are what appear, at first glance, to be 2 versions of the same site, but with different URLs. In 2nd position is the official Channel 4 website at www.channel4.com/bigbrother/ whilst the top position was taken by a mirror image of that site calling itself Big Bubble, at the URL www.bigbrother.co.uk (this is no longer the case, which I’ll explain later - but you can see what it looked like here).

This intrigued us as we couldn’t imagine that a company as savvy as Channel 4 would try to pass of 2 versions of the same website in order to capture several positions in the rankings. Looking at the source code of bigbrother.co.uk we found that the content on the site was actually being displayed using frames, with the content being shown in the frames appearing to originate from an address owned by Pulse Global, although there is no record of who actually owns the bigbrother.co.uk domain. The plot thickened as they say…

Pulse Global own the online radio site PulseRated which has no obvious connection with Channel 4 or Big Brother. Yesterday I spoke to someone at Pulse who said that they knew nothing about this, and wasn’t aware that they owned the domain, or had anything to do with the rather strange use of Channel 4’s content. He then said that their IT guy would contact me later.

Further investigation turned up an old Wikipedia article (although it doesn’t appear to be live, as it only sits on a different site) saying that Big Bubble is a parody of Big Brother which swaps humans for fish & the house for a fish-tank - the man credited with the creation of this parody, Rob Clews, also happens to be the IT guy at Pulse Rated! So rather than anything malicious, it turns out that the creator of Big Bubble was simply using the Channel 4 content to populate his site whilst he decided what to do with the URL this year.

Having now spoken to Rob, it turned out that running the gold fish site was just too much work, so he thought that the best thing would be to drive people to Channel 4, and the only connection with Pulse was that Rob used their servers to pull the frame for the couple of days it was live. However, the way in which he did this went against the strict T&Cs that Channel 4 set for links to their site.

Links to this site must be direct to any complete content page (and not any part of a page) within Channel4.com and must not be viewed within the pages of any other site.

This highlights how re-using other’s content can be very contentious (and has similar issues with how people use RSS); whilst Rob thought that he was just driving traffic to the official Big Brother site, the way he was doing it didn’t meet Channel 4’s requirements.

Happily, the site has now been updated and is now almost entirely devoted to one of the official Find Madeleine banner ads, along with a link to the official BB website (in keeping with the Channel 4 T&Cs), and links to a charity which Rob himself runs. So all’s well that ends well. Except for MSN that is.

Because what’s really interesting about all this, is that it once again shows why Google is the most popular search engine in the UK; because it provides the best results (although Rob obviously disagrees with me). Yahoo! also had the official site at #1, but without the integrated news and other features that make Google so much more than just a search engine. And, as is often the case, MSN just didn’t make the search grade. Looks like Bill’s going to have to work a bit harder before he retires..

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