When Not to Use Google Search

Posted at September 30, 2009

I think Google is awesome, and I use it every day. However, there are times when I get really frustrated with it. There are searches I run and no matter how I seem to change the words I use, I still get a bunch of crap. The crap is usually in the form of results that are trying to sell me something, when I’m either (1) looking for something free or (2) looking for a specific piece of information.

I’ve talked about using delicious a couple years ago, I use it for saving website links, but more and more I’m using the delicious community to help me find things I’m looking for. I’m not aware of other major communities like delicious, but I’m sure there are several or many out there.

To me, this is just like deciding to (A) look in the phone book or (B) to call your friend for a recommendation. There are times when the phone book is perfect (use Google), and then there are times when you want that friend of yours to tell you who to call (Use delicious or a community search). Here are a couple of situations when I use delicious to search instead.

1. Looking for Software

The delicious community is pretty technical (as you can see from their popular page), and it is a great resource when you need it. Recently, I was updating my resume, and I wanted to convert it from a Word file to a PDF file. I didn’t have the software for that, but I thought I’d try searching for it. Using Google to search (“convert Word to PDF”), I found several ads, and the first choice was a software download. I have no idea if this software is safe, stable, how many people use it, etc. I could research it if I wanted, but that’s more time. Here is a picture of the search results from a delicious search for “Convert word pdf”

Notice how on the left is the title of the website, and below it the actual website address. On the right the dark blue squares show How many people have saved this site. This box on this right is what I’m looking at. All of those boxes are dark blue because more than 1000 people have saved each website. Looking at this list, I make a conclusion that all of these first few are pretty popular, but there is one clear leader with almost 40,000 people who have saved the link. This clear winner is not on the first page of the Google results, so I probably would never have found it.

Even though this case produces an easy choice, in less obvious searches I can still quickly and easily see what a technical community of web users are using for different software applications.

2. Looking for “Free” things

Using the word “Free” on Google is usually like putting a target on your back. There are lots and lots of companies trying to sell you something, and they all know if they use the word free they are going to get a lot more traffic. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes it’s just nice to find the free thing you are looking for with a minimum amount of BS.

I am currently preparing to take the GMAT, and I’ve been looking for free test questions that I can take to practice for the exam. If I use the search term “GMAT prep” in Google I get a who’s who listing on the first page. All the most legitimate companies who make a living preparing people for the test. If you add the word “free” to your search the results don’t get any better.

Using the delicious search things are different. Actually, there’s not 1 top link in common with the results page from Google. There are a few companies selling here (as you can see from the titles), but there are also a couple of blogs and forum websites. These are the places that I shouldn’t have to spend money, and I can find free test questions / tips pretty quickly this way.

So, there are some examples of when I think there’s a much better choice than Google for search. The other nice thing about using delicious search is the information below the blue boxes on the right side (they are in grey, and the words I used are highlighted in grey). I can see the most common words other people are using to save the websites. If I’m having a hard time knowing what words to use to search, I can look here and get some new ideas and see what other people are using.