Am I the only one my age who doesn't use search engines constantly?

[sniffnoy]

It seems like lots of people use Google for every damn thing on the web, as their first source of information on a topic. Whereas to me, the broad nature of a search engine makes it the tool for when you have no idea what else to try. Certainly I use web search a good amount, but it's not something I use even every day; usually I have at least some idea where I might look something up.

Admittedly, for general things, this means I start by checking Wikipedia, which is arguably not much different. Just doing a straight-up search will not only get you the Wikipedia page if there is one, but also give results if there isn't one, and what to check next if there is. So that may actually be a better way of doing things. I'm just kind of uncomfortable with starting off by whacking at a problem with the most general hammer available.

-Harry

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Google is a broad hammer, yes, but it's also a very precise one. If I want the wiki page for something, I use Google because I generally rely on it to always give me the Wikipedia page as either the first result or something near it.

I think in this day and age it's misleading (though not necessarily incorrect) to call Google a "web search tool"; it has enough semantic understanding of what a query is looking for that it isn't really "searching the web" so much as "finding results that give you what you're looking for".

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

That does suggest I'm thinking about this the wrong way, yes. One thing I've noticed is that whereas using a question as a search query was once a classic noob mistake, it now works pretty well, and I even do this occasionally when there doesn't seem to be any nice set of keywords that will naturally suggest the question.