Microsoft's Presidential Search Failure

While watching the history making events of the 44th President's Inauguration, I wanted to see how the search engines performed for this ground breaking event.

I performed this search: "44th President"

Google and Yahoo searches returned a variety of sources: wikipedia, news sites, barackobama.com, and also one souvenir buying page on Yahoo.

MSN/Live returned predominantly souvenir buying sites, in fact 8 of the top 10 were souvenir buying sites. It will be interesting to track the evolution of these rankings on Live/MSN as time moves on. I find it curious that these sites were able to get top ranking over the top of reliable news sites and other "trusted" sources.

If someone else has done this search a few weeks ago on Live/MSN I would love to get some historical data as what the top 10 sites were before inauguration day. This will help to see how MSN/Live justifies their high ranking. See picture below