A few months ago this cute little flash site was wafting around the internet making IT nerds giggle with delight. It has a little animation that would type out your search term and submit it to google. It didn’t really strike me until yesterday that simply searching something doesn’t mean that you’ll end up with good results.

Lets say your printer all of a sudden stopped working and your computer wasn’t giving you an error, what would your search terms be to troubleshoot? Broken printer or printer doesn’t work something like that perhaps? You’ll probably end up with terrible results that offer no real suggestions on how to fix your problem. At this point I think most people give up and go directly to the tech dude or their tech friend. That tech friend will then probably google search something like HP 4240n doesn’t print which will provide vastly better results simply because it includes the model of the printer.

So how do you get people to use better search terms? Well I’d say thats like trying to teach that old dog new tricks. I think this problem will get better as newer generations get older and search engines get smarter. We’ll probably even develop new ways of speaking because of search, much like how text-speak invades regular speak these days.

I’ll tell you, I can’t wait for the day when I can ask someone on the street this and they’ll know what i’m saying: SELECT *.restaurants FROM this.neighborhood WHERE type = “italian”;