I use google all the time, I mean like atleast 20-30 times a day at the minimum, and I do remember that there was a time (somewhere in the past, 4-5 years ago) when things were a little different. I wasn't as reliant on search engines for information (not sure if it was less dependence on the web or the fact that India was still playing catch up with the broadband revolution, leaving me poking along with my 28.8 kbps dial-up modem) but, when I did try to find information "out there" it usually was through a portal called Yahoo!. Now, I am not sure when this switch to a different search engine happened, but I was convinced it was for the best. But, lately, I have been getting some strong indications, that maybe I should consider reverting back?!!
Well, it all started a few weeks ago. I like to keep up with any news/ releases/ blogs about Motorola and so I have this automatic news alert setup with Google News (I think I have had this for about a year now), that sends me an alert whenever it finds a few news articles relating to Motorola (or, to be more specific, articles with occurances of the word "Motorola in them). So, anyway in one of these alerts a few weeks ago, I learnt that Motorola had been awarded the National Medal of Technology by president Bush. I was happy to be notified real fast and automatically, but I wasn't very happy with that particular article (was very terse and lacked photographs) and so I decided to go look for more articles on the same topic "out-there". Snap, CTRL-T on firefox, enter goo (and ofcourse it was on the history list). I enter the phrase "motorola bush award" and I expect to see the Motorola News releases page" in the first few links (if not the very first), but to my surprise I didn't find anything relevant in the whole first page of search results. I figured it was too early to be looking for public articles on the topic (it probably had to do with my strong reliance on google, and that it can never be wrong) and went back to my business. I tried back a few hours later only to be disappointed again. This time, I thought why not give my old pal Yahoo a shot and I was amazed to see Motorola News center page show up as the very first link!
Second instance. This mornings (Saturday, Mar 4th) Motorola news alert had this article in it. The article is titled "Apple and Motorola launch iPod Phone hybrid". I was excited for a moment, thinking that Motorola and Apple finally settled things and decided to bring out a "True iTunes phone with more than 100 songs" (actually, this prompted my previous post as well ;)). All that excitement quickly turned into disappontment when I realized this was an article about the ROKR and that too the very first version of the phone released in Sep '05). I was really surprised why such an old article showed up in the search. Now, I do understand, that this could be because the article was published late and so the website (ilikemusic.com) is the one to blame.
Nevertheless, these occurances have prompted me to re-evaluate my search engine choice!! So much so, that I am seriously considering running comparison searches between Google and Yahoo! from time to time...
PS: And ofcourse, I understand, that at the bottom of it all, these guys (Yahoo, Google and the other gizillian search engines out there) provide us web search for FREE!
2 comments:
Just came across your blog so thought I'd comment. My husband and I battle it out all the time, he likes Google, and I like Yahoo. I think Yahoo is much better.
Thanks for stopping by rusticate. Thats good. Yeah, I've been giving some thought to maintaining a text file with all comparisons I make.
Actually I think the reason for my switch to google had more to do with its (Extremely friendly and simple?) user interface more than anything else. Seems like Yahoo, did realize there are a bunch of people like:
http://search.yahoo.com/
looks a lot like google. Although, I think they would've had a better shot if they called it some like s.y.com (easier typing)
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