Are you old enough to remember before Google?
There were several search engines, each designed around a specific area of information. When Google came along, it combined all these search engines and you could search for anything. It was great. No matter what you are looking for information about, all you had to do was to check Google.
If you wanted to know about, say, Sacramento, you could type in "Sacramento" and it would bring up a link to a page that has information about Sacramento. But NOW if you type in "Sacramento" it brings up a whole page of links, most of which are from travel agencies who want to arrange tours before you ever get to a link that is about Sacramento...if you can find it.
I saw a recipe for overnight oatmeal on the internet but didn't copy down the instructions, which I knew were quite simple. It used to be you could type "overnight oatmeal, recipe" and get the recipe, but I got several pages, most of which gave me a list of links, each of which took me to the same page, which had no recipe for overnight oatmeal. And if you actually find a page for the recipe you are looking for you have to go through page after page after page of background information before they give you the ingredients.
I wanted to find out what the current price is for a cable car ride and I ended up checking something like six different links before I finally found out the price (on Wikipedia) ... and now when I go onto Facebook a lot of the links offered to me are from tour companies that want to give me a tour of San Francisco.
A pen pal I was writing to requested that mail sent to her have many stamps on it. I have lots of stamps in various denominations but I have so many "forever" stamps that I couldn't remember what the actual postage was (especially since it just increased). I tried EIGHT links and couldn't get the answer. Even going to USPS I had to go to two different sites before I finally found my answer.
A friend just returned from a vacation where she visited the Storm King Art Center. She said the sculptures were amazing and suggested we Google the site. there were twenty two entries for "Storm King Art Center" and none of them took me to the actual site. Not even the supposed link to the address or the hours. I gave up by the time I got to page 2 of links.
Google has obviously learned how to make money selling to advertisers whose links go above the site you are looking for, but in so doing the ease that we found when Google first started is gone and it's almost worse than it was before Google came to exist.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
setting this up for your delivery
people. They will be very grateful.
No comments:
Post a Comment