Yellow Pages are Dead or Dying
Nov.27, 2009 in
Media, Yellow Pages
It’s interesting to see how Google’s autocomplete suggestions give us a glimpse into the zeitgeist of our economy.
Turning Google upon itself, we see:
Do the results for startribune tell us what people find interesting in the paper these days?
My hope is that the startribune results are an illustration of areas people can’t easily find on the site, so turn to Google for help rather than what they’re primarily turning to the StarTribune for in 2009.
November 27th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
The StarTribune article search page is one of the worst-functioning utilities ever…. On multiple occasions I’ve had a print version of the paper right in front of me but no matter what combination of words or quotes lifted directly from the article will return the article in the search results. And it’s not because the articles aren’t online… because eventually I’ll find the articles online some other way… I don’t bother using the StarTribune search page anymore. Talk about a waste of time….
November 27th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
When I can’t easily find a Strib article with their search, I enter the author’s name and have almost always found the article I’m looking for.
Now if I could just get the darn ads to stop covering up the search field…
December 5th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Perhaps just some wishful thinking on Google’s part Eddie
December 7th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
@kenc, that’s one way to look at it. But that would mean Google’s actually taken the time to manually adjust their yellow pages related suggested search results rather than relying on an algorithm that simply serves up what their software guesses people are looking for based on previous searches.