I can't believe it. Here, I've been feeling pretty smug about my Google preference over my wife's Yahoo preference. But this morning, searching for a local heating and AC guy, I tried every combination that I could think of with Google to find it. The name is Cornerstone Heating & AC, and it's in Austin.
Try: Cornerstone Heating Austin -- nope
Try: "Cornerstone Heating" Austin -- nope, etc.
Finally, my wife says, "I found it last week. Let me try." She uses my Google screen, but has gets as far as I had: nowhere. I suggested she try Yahoo.
Try: Cornerstone Heating Austin -- Boom, there it is, first choice.
But that's not the end of it, I notice that Yahoo found it under local.yahoo.com, and I know google has local as well. Attempting to recover a scrap of my (un)dignified smugness, I bring up local.google.com and try: Cornerstone Heating Austin -- nope! Still no go. I couldn't even trick Google into finding me a relevant local result! (UPDATE: Users have apparently known this for a while).
Will I change over to Yahoo? Absolutely NOT! But will I trust Google to get my results? Not for a while. Time to start looking for a new solution. Obviously, Google still does it for me most of the time, but the difficulty of returning relevant local searches is something I've never been able to understand. It's the driving force behind my whole fantasy interface with attention recording, implicit tagging, context management, etc. So, shame me, if you've got a wonderfully powerful or useful solution, just let me know what it is. I promise to let me smugness go.
To Yahoo: why won't I switch to you? Because you try to make your stuff so damn sticky that my eyeballs get callused (calloused?). Fix that, and I'll definitely give you another chance (if you need an example, just remove the oh-so-tempting-to-click news trivia bits that just encourage a nation of rubber-neckers!
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