How to explain to people in your business that Google.com isn’t really very good at the kind of search they want.
I’m regularly told that people want the google experience at work.
I know what they mean.
They mean “we want to find what we want”.
But Google isn’t actually very good at this when what you want is a specific thing.
Where Google excels is search problems where we can define the search problem as:
Show me something popular.
Show me some information about a thing, I don’t really care where it comes from - just that it’s popular.
Show me some information about a thing, I don’t really care if it’s trustworthy or not, just that lots of people link to it.
Show me some information, I don’t care whether or not it’s findable in a week or a month.
Google solves the problem of finding what’s popular, now.
Business search problems though, are almost always about what’s unpopular, specific and authoritative.
And Google isn’t very good at those.
For what it’s worth, Google recognises that the search it provides isn’t the right search for every situation, it’s why we have Google Scholar.