Yet another News Corporation (NWS) executive is talking about Google (GOOG), and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages. Which is frightening, since they’re being very vocal about how they’re supposedly wronged by Google. Please, someone, give them a search marketing 101 course.

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After today’s Google (GOOG) search press briefing, where I raised the issue of some poor quality search results in Google at one point, Sergey Brin asked me to demonstrate a few. My pleasure! Below, what we reviewed and comments from Google’s cofounder.

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Google (GOOG) is a scourge to many newspaper executives, who blame the Internet behemoth for taking all their ad money and readers. CEO Eric Schmidt gave another spirited defense of why it’s the Internet, not Google, that is hurting newspapers, and how his company is trying to help.

Google is being unfairly blamed for the declining newspaper-industry revenue resulting from shifting reader habits, Schmidt told Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan in an interview posted over the weekend.

“Because we play such a central role in information, we’ve become somewhat used to being blamed for everything,” Schmidt said. “Imagine if Google didn’t exist. Would the same criticism still exist? You betcha.”

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And then there were two. Make no mistake, Yahoo’s (YHOO) out of the search game. I know the spin. Better user interface, new ways to innovate, a winning play. Let’s not kid ourselves. They’re done. Not today, not necessarily in a year but down the line at some point. Done.

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Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz has been talking a lot over the past two weeks about Yahoo and how it competes against Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). Each time she does, I feel like she’s digging the hole even deeper for Yahoo’s prospects in search.

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When Digg introduced a new toolbar in early April that added a thin strip – known as a ‘frame’ – to the top of pages submitted to Digg, a publisher outcry forced the social media aggregator to back down. It modified the new DiggBar so that only logged-in users would view submitted stories within a Digg frame and Web address, and also offered them the option to turn off the toolbar altogether.

But despite Digg’s move, the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Danny Sullivan, editor of the Web site Searchengineland.com wrote in an article about Digg’s toolbar changes, that Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen argues that “frames break the fundamental user model of the web page.” “All of a sudden, you cannot bookmark the current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of the frameset), URLs stop working, and printouts become difficult. Even worse, the predictability of user actions goes out the door: who knows what information will appear where when you click on a link?”

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The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today [April 20]–and sincere congrats to the hard-working journalists who’ve won those highest of prizes. But with no online-only publications winning–in the first year they were eligible to enter–I wonder if it’s time for an online-only version of the Pulitzers to be offered.

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I told you so. Or I told anyone who cared. I even tried to reach the Obama administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo (YHOO) right now for “miserable failure” and you’ll find President Barack Obama’s page ranking either in the top spot or the second spot. Given a redirect that Obama’s Web team has put into place, he should solidify into that number one spot over time. Eventually, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live Search should reflect that, as well. And over at Google (GOOG), Obama will likely gain a top page listing for a search on failure.
I know. There are bigger issues Obama has to deal with. But then again, this is supposed to be the tech-savvy presidency. It should be search-engine-optimization savvy, as well.

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Few realize that outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush has left behind a unique legacy for future presidents, including Barack Obama–that they are all condemned to rank tops for a search on “miserable failure” in major search engines. It’s my hope that Bush will correct this before leaving office, or that Obama will fix it soon after he’s inaugurated.

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At long last, Google owns DoubleClick. In doing so, the company has done something else that many people would have never believed possible. Become an SEO. That’s right–Google’s in the SEO business now, selling services through DoubleClick’s Performics to people who want to rank well on–um–Google. Conflict of interest? You bet. And worse from an image perspective, the purchase puts Google in the paid inclusion business, something it dissed as evil back in 2004, when it went public. Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with Performics as a company and have good friends that work there. But Google shouldn’t own it. The Google announcement yesterday should have said that Performics was being quickly spun off. Larry, Sergey, Eric, Google! Please do the right thing and make this a priority.

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Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You’d dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you’re just for women, apparently. No more appealing to the “West Coast elite” or “digerati” you say. You can tell yourself that, if it helps. The truth is, you’re dead. You’re about to join the legion of other has-been search engines, some of which you own or power, like Excite and iWon.

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