Last Friday I decided to see if I could go an entire week without using a major online search engine. Today marks the second day of my quest, which is not only testing my patience, but also the legitimacy of business blogging and search marketing in today's media evolution.
My coworkers have asked me how it's going so far. As a whole, it's not as life changing as I thought. As it turns out, people got along for quite some time without information on demand. And I'm really happy for them.
For major daily work, my browser remembers all the websites I've ever been to (at least within the past few weeks or months or whatever), and I have no problem getting places like Salesforce.com, or Google Analytics, or some of the blogs I follow. But it's really the little things that are killing me. What I am really missing out on are those mindless little searches that provide details, or context to something else.
What I wanted: Nissan Altima
What I got: Nissan Computer Corp
What is that? I don't know, but they make it affordable.
A colleague of mine cashed in his clunker this weekend for a Nissan Altima, and I wanted to find out more about the car, you know, to get a visual. Had I been using online search, i would have typed "Nissan altima" into my web browser's handy search bar. Then I would have clicked on the first link in my results, and bam, I am 99.99% sure I would have been on nissan's site looking at the specs of the Nissan Altima within 2-3 seconds.
But I'm not searching this week, so instead, I tried plugging the following URL into my browser's URL window display: "nissan.com"
As it turns out, http://nissan.com isn't the site I was hoping for. I don't know if I'm spelling "nissan" incorrectly or if the url contains something else in it, like nissanusa.com or nissanauto.com... The beautiful thing about search engines, like Google, is that millions of others have made the same mistakes or presumptions in exact spelling, and you are often given suggestions .. did you mean "________"? Yes, I did.
And a lot of the time in online search, despite spelling errors, I can still find what I was looking for on the very first try. Such is not the case with old school URL guessing, where searchers are often left empty, or in very weird places.
My coworkers have asked me how it's going so far. As a whole, it's not as life changing as I thought. As it turns out, people got along for quite some time without information on demand. And I'm really happy for them.
For major daily work, my browser remembers all the websites I've ever been to (at least within the past few weeks or months or whatever), and I have no problem getting places like Salesforce.com, or Google Analytics, or some of the blogs I follow. But it's really the little things that are killing me. What I am really missing out on are those mindless little searches that provide details, or context to something else.
What I wanted: Nissan AltimaWhat I got: Nissan Computer Corp
What is that? I don't know, but they make it affordable.
A colleague of mine cashed in his clunker this weekend for a Nissan Altima, and I wanted to find out more about the car, you know, to get a visual. Had I been using online search, i would have typed "Nissan altima" into my web browser's handy search bar. Then I would have clicked on the first link in my results, and bam, I am 99.99% sure I would have been on nissan's site looking at the specs of the Nissan Altima within 2-3 seconds.
But I'm not searching this week, so instead, I tried plugging the following URL into my browser's URL window display: "nissan.com"
As it turns out, http://nissan.com isn't the site I was hoping for. I don't know if I'm spelling "nissan" incorrectly or if the url contains something else in it, like nissanusa.com or nissanauto.com... The beautiful thing about search engines, like Google, is that millions of others have made the same mistakes or presumptions in exact spelling, and you are often given suggestions .. did you mean "________"? Yes, I did.
And a lot of the time in online search, despite spelling errors, I can still find what I was looking for on the very first try. Such is not the case with old school URL guessing, where searchers are often left empty, or in very weird places.
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