While search engines of any
While search engines of any kind are much better then before. Be it the search engine used by Google or the one used by Amazon or any other the reality is that they have thier limitations. The big you is being to literal. They are not a person so they have trouble “reading between the lines”. And the basicly don’t “remember” things about you. You LHS owner may remember that you model 1950s Rock Island in N scale, but the typical search engine does not.
The person who invents a truly good search engine will become truly rich. As has historically been demonstrated by say Yahoo then Google. Each generation gets better then the last but thier is lots of room for improvement. As anyone that has spicific non typical requirements for something and shopped on Amazon knows. And if Amazons search engine has issues with it be so important to thier business and with the money they have to develop it then you can be pretty sure that we have a ways to go with the technology.
Still most people don’t know how to get the most out of the search engines we do have. As Joe pointed out thier are ways to focus in on your search. But most folks don’t know them. There is a reason the phrase “his Google-Fu was strong” exists. Because thier are ways of getting better results.
problem is we are used to instant gratification on the internet and we don’t want to take the time to look for things or learn how to do things. Back in the pre internet days most people in this hobby spends days if not weeks or even years traveling around looking into every little store front on the off chance that they may have a store that looked interesting. Once they found an interesting looking store they had to visit and see if the store had anything useful. Those (few) stores that sold something useful would then get a long visit were you spent time combing through the place to see what they actually had. Once that was done then you often had to return just to get to the point you remembered what store G had vs what store T sold. And don’t forget the repeat visits to see if something new was in stock or the blown trips because you forgot which store sold what or worse the store sold out of the item you want. Basically scrounging around was a hobby in and of itself (often a sub set of the “collector”. We all new “that guy” that knew ALL the little stores with the oddball items that when you got desperate you would ask.
And don’t forget the hours spent searching in the Walthers catalog (not the easiest of ways to find something). So it was not exactly easy to find things pre internet and we all probably had an encounter where we or someone we met looked at something and said “I didn’t knowTHAT existed! I just spent 6 weeks kit bashing an alternative to that last year!” Because finding things was a pain.
And no this is not an old guy be crabby. I just thing that at the current level of technology we are expecting to much to fast. We would (and often do) spend hours driving around to different stores searching for the thing we need but we get upset if a 2 minute search doesn’t return EXACTLY what we want. And heaven help the web site that returns a list of 100 items that you have to scroll through, Oddly enough that 10 minutes of scrolling through items is often considered to much work by the same person that used to (or still does) spend an hour reading the name on the side of ALL the blue box kits on the shelf in the hobby shop on the off chance they had something of “interest”.
I actually know a guy just like this. He has the skills and understanding to do internet searches but if it is not in the top 5 lines he will never see it as he gives up because the internet should never take more then 30 seconds but he spends multiple hours looking at every single item in a hobby store that he has been in every single month for the last 10 years. And he has spent half a day in a hobby shop that he has never been in before. Heck one time he drove 6+ hours to a distant hobby shop and spent the rest of the whole DAY looking through the hobby shop stayed over night in a hotel. Returned the next morning for a while then drove home and as far as I know never spent a cent in the place, But to be expected to spend 10 minutes searching the internet? Don’t be rediculus.
Well just some thoughts on the matter.
-Doug M
