Friday, September 26, 2008

The Mother of All Search Functions

David Pogue of the New York Times made a point in his e-column today  that reinforces what I've said in earlier posts about search, specifically Google versus Naver .  He begins the column as follows.
"Today's e-column is nothing but a computer tip, but it's a biggie.  It seems obvious in retrospect, but I've got to tell you, it's totally rocked my world:  Use Google search for everything.  Let me explain."
Pogue then goes on to explain why it wastes time and effort to use the search boxes embedded in almost all web sites, when Google has already indexed everything on the web and you can get to where you're going faster by searching directly with Google.  He gives several examples of how it "used to be," before he discovered how Google works.  For example, "Used to be, when I wanted to consult Wikipedia, I'd go to Wikipedia.org, I'd click English; I'd click in the Search box; I'd type 'blu-ray', and click Search. Five steps. . . . . I've been totally wasting my time.  Google blows all of this out of the water."  I agree, and here in Korea the degree to which people begin to use Google, rather than relying only on Naver ,  will be an important indicator of the globalization process.

1 comment:

  1. James,

    I agree with your basic arguments in this and previous posts linked to about the superiority of Google over Naver, and especially that "the degree to which people begin to use Google, rather than relying only on Naver , will be an important indicator of the globalization process", but in my own personal experience Naver seems a preferable choice for image searches, at least for now.

    I use images of Korean advertisements and so forth extensively in my blog, but when I type the (necessary) Korean search terms into Google I tend to get more numerous but often quite superfluous results. Indeed, a great many of the images brought up don't have my search terms in their titles but in the text before or after the image instead, something I wouldn't have noticed but for images on my own blog often being brought up, which I know don't have the search terms in their titles but which do come up in the post the images are in. There really do seem to be some basic flaws in way Google searches things with Korean fonts.

    In contrast, Naver image searches never bring up superfluous results, so for the time being it will remain my search engine of choice for Korean language terms. I imagine that it will be for most Koreans too.

    ReplyDelete