Wednesday, September 20, 2006

You would think Google never existed

What is wrong with the Telstra web designers? Using the on-line White Pages and Yellow Pages is like going through a timewarp to the bad old days before Google showed the right way to run a search engine.

I'm trying to do a White Pages search for a name, in a known suburb, so I specify the name and the suburb. What does Telstra's search engine do? Totally ignore the suburb and give me results from all over the place. How very useful.

So I specify the name more precisely -- let's call the business "Acme Technologies". Now, anyone with the sense of a little green apple would do what Google does: do an AND search, returning results containing both "Acme" and "Technologies". But not Telstra. They do an OR search, so I get hundreds of results, every business with either Acme or Technologies. Do you have any idea how many companies include Technologies in their name?

Let's just say more than a few.

To add insult to injury, the search page has the gall to say "We have found a large number of results and tried to return the most appropriate." Least appropriate would be more like it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The best part is that when they sell off the rest of it, it'll be yet another effective monopoly providing terrible service and built on taxpayer dollars. Yay!