Finding what you need on the internets Wayne Rodgers

Search engines, namely Google, (supposedly) make it easy to find information about anything you need. Google continuously searches the internet and indexes information from every corner of the web. All the information is there, and yet some people can’t seem to find anything. These poor souls include my wife, parents, brother and sister. They also have a habit of double clicking on links and have evidently never noticed that one click gets the job done.

There’s no doubt that being a good internet searcher takes a little bit of abstract thinking. The key, I’ve found, is to put yourself in the shoes of the person who would potentially be writing about what you want to know about. If you can guess who might be writing about a subject and in what context it tends to help narrow down your keywords. If you can’t even render a guess, you can start with broad searches with common keywords until you catch a whiff of what you’re looking for and then start over at page 1 with a fresh group of keywords.

Several months back I heard someone around the office talking about Mahalo, a human powered search engine, and how that is where search engines are headed. Mahalo operates on the belief that Google just brings back way too much irrelevant information, and all of the search results from Mahalo are hand sorted, by humans, so that you don’t get any of the fluff that you see with Google. I personally don’t feel the need for this helping hand, but I can see how this would be valuable to a less than savvy searcher of the internets.

I decided to blog about this subject after months of seeing the silly ways that people around the world get to my personal home-improvement blog, Howsed. I review the stats every couple of days, and I’m able to see what keywords they typed in to find my blog. Most of them are logical, if less than savvy.

I shall now rate the idiocy of the most common “mistakes” (they obviously found what they were looking for, but they really should be given a stern talking-to):

Level 1, Dumb: I see a lot of questions typed directly into Google to come across my blog (ie. “How do I install a dishwasher?”). This obviously isn’t necessary, and they could have gotten the same or better result with “install dishwasher”. Regardless, if they put themselves in the shoes of the person writing the article, it wouldn’t be “how do I install a dishwasher”, it would be “how do you install a dishwasher”, or “how to install a dishwasher”, right? These people must think Google is a robot sitting in a chair answering direct questions about anything they want to know.

Of course these people could be guessing that someone on the internet has asked that exact question in a forum, but the fact that they all end with question marks leads me to believe that they actually think they are asking the magic robot a question.

Level 2, Dolt: I see a shocking number of people that start their search with “www” (ie. “www how do I install a dishwasher?”). Seriously?? The internets are that confusing?

Level 3, Braindead: Every once in a while I’ll see people start their search with “google” (ie. “google how do I install a dishwasher”). I can just imagine someone believing that by adding that word ‘Google’ they’ve been “hearing the kids talk about” is the key to finding what they need.

The sad part about knowing all of the keywords and phrases that lead to my blog are those where the information isn’t actually at my blog because I haven’t written about it. I know what they’re getting at, they probably really need the information, I could point them in the right direction if I knew who they were, but I can tell by the way that they’re searching that there is no way they’ll find it.

Maybe my coworker was right in that search engines are headed in the direction of Mahalo. Google does bring back a lot of irrelevant information, and if you can’t sort through it yourself it’s useless (or at least very time consuming). Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let someone else do some of the legwork for you.

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