I just read this pretty funny article on SI.com about the Buffalo Bills regretting not picking Jay Cutler in the NFL draft. The entire story is made up, but it has this quotation:
“Wow, I had no idea he was that good….I didn’t even know what school he
was from. Then I decided to Google him and found all this information
about how awesome he was in college. Huh. I guess I should have done
that before the draft. I also should have Googled Donte Whitner,
because apparently he isn’t very good.”
Googling is everywhere. When we need to find out what time the movie starts, we google. When we need to get the phone number to the pizza place, we google it. Google is pretty good at providing a lot of information.
It is not the only option, though. Google the Buffalo Bill’s Donte Whitner and you end up with mostly information about him as an NFL prospect. A bunch of stats.
The last link on the first page (today at least) is a little different. It is a link to Donte Whitner information at www.topix.net. Click on that link and you get a whole bunch of interesting, current information about Donte Whitner.
Topix only looks at several thousand news sources instead of indexing everything on the internet. Putting that filter in place dramatically cuts down on all of the noise and can give much more relevant information. It seems to help bring out the stories of the people better.
That filter does come at a cost. Type your own name in. Unless you are a lot more famous than me, I’m going to bet it did not return any information about you. Put in your website. Probably the same result. The more filters in place, the more likely entire subsets of information are going to be lost.
Search engines are tools. Just like you have to look at the situation to know which kind of saw to use, you also need to make sure you use the right search engine for the information you want to find.
Google will remain my search engine of choice for any quick and dirty search.
Topix.net has recently become my search engine for when I want to dig a little deeper and actually do some research. I have also been using the RSS feature of Topix.net to track topics that I am interested in watching. The local news that I am regularly finding is amazing. Mixed with the feeds for my topics I blog about and just like to read about, Topix.net is better than newspapers, magazines, and Google all mixed in one.
At least until I need to find out what time Menard’s closes.
Technorati Tags: search engines, google, topix
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[...] Mike Miller asks Is Google the best way to search for information? posted at Webby Thoughts. A post that tells us how to find information in other ways (on the internet) besides using the big search engines. [...]