Searches.....website vs Google

[kaneohe]

My experience reinforced by another episode today: Google is better than a lot of website searches. Today I was trying to find a tutorial on our DMV website which I had accessed before. The previous link wasn't working for some reason......some error message appeared saying the prior link was no good.
I spent a fair amount of time on the site using their search tool and came up empty-handed even though the words suggested that some new links should
find the tutorial.

A simple Google search found the desired page immediately even without using the site name. Just something to keep in mind............

[drb391]

I've found many sites where what looks like a local search turns out to be Google anyway

[photoguy]

I frequently use the site: operator in my searches although just including the site name also works well.

A search on a website is likely going to be using a generic and relatively poor method built into their database or some open source method. Thus I strongly prefer using Google where they have thousands of people working on their algorithms.

My exceptions are: large sites like Amazon where you know they have the resources to devote to search and sites like craigslist where the delay in crawling means it's better to use the websites search.


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[easysurfer]

Well, Google has a detailed record of your search history to refer to .

That said, I use Google as I too have had better success. Plus, I like the interface (Google reminds me of what Yahoo was, before Yahoo did too much new and improved ) more than other "safer" sights such as DuckDuckGo.

[SumDay]

Interesting. I was on a w*rk call today, and someone was gritching about how poor our intranet search is, and how everyone just expects search to perform like Google.

Our IT person said that no search will never perform like Google. Google has 55,000+ employees, and while not all of them are dedicated to improving search, they have to have more people than we do (8) tweaking and refining algorithms and logic. I'd never thought about it like that. You can do a lot of stuff with the collective minds of over 55,000 folks.

[photoguy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by easysurfer Well, Google has a detailed record of your search history to refer to .

It's too much of pain to keep logging out of my google services, so i've gotten in the habit of running a private window all the time so google doesn't track me.

Quote:

That said, I use Google as I too have had better success. Plus, I like the interface (Google reminds me of what Yahoo was, before Yahoo did too much new and improved ) more than other "safer" sights such as DuckDuckGo.

Yeah I'm hoping some other companies can do better and grab search market share. I don't think it's healthy that google dominates.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SumDay Interesting. I was on a w*rk call today, and someone was gritching about how poor our intranet search is, and how everyone just expects search to perform like Google.

I'm actually getting dissappointed with google -- too often I get spam results or results from mega-sites that are popular but often deal with a topic in very cursory manner.

Quote:

Our IT person said that no search will never perform like Google. Google has 55,000+ employees, and while not all of them are dedicated to improving search, they have to have more people than we do (8) tweaking and refining algorithms and logic. I'd never thought about it like that. You can do a lot of stuff with the collective minds of over 55,000 folks.

Well google has millions of spammers trying to beat their search algorithm which shouldn't be an issue for an internal search function. But google has a lot more data (e.g. web links which don't really have an analog for internal search) and a lot more engineers.

[clifp]

I'm constantly amazed by how good Google searches are. Even when you have only vague ideas of what you are looking for Google can find the answer.

I think it is pretty silly for a website to try and do their own searches, when they can just license Google's search engine