It goes without saying that Google Search is an amazing product, but you really begin to appreciate how good a product it is when in many cases it is a better way to search within a given site than with the site’s own internal search engines.
For instance for the post I just made about Bill Gates in space I couldn’t find the story I read on the BBC earlier this month about Billionaire Charles Simonyi, 58, who led development of Microsoft’s Word, going into space using the BBC’s search engine. However, searching for ‘news.bbc.co.uk space microsoft‘ on Google returned the story I was looking for as the top result.
I’ve noticed that more and more I’ve become frustrated with internal search engines and I started using Google to search sites. I wonder how long it will be before Google starts offering this as a service to companies? I remember when I asked Google 3 years ago when I was signing a deal if I could use their engine to power an internal search engine and they said no, as it wasn’t part of their business model. I’m pretty sure this will change soon, particularly if site owners let Google add sponsored links to results.
