When Site Search Fails, Google Rocks
As technology advances and search engines become more powerful, it’s almost better to rely on them to find what you are looking for rather than a site’s internal search. I know that if you want to find something on Comcasts site, you are better off using Google.
The other day I was on the phone with a client when they asked me what Comcast’s outgoing mail server was. Unsure, I quickly went to comcast.com to look it up. Much to my annoyance, the site is not user friendly.
The first thing I did was put SMTP in the Comcast search box. It returned one result detailing McAfee VirusScan. I then clicked on the ‘High-Speed Internet’ options on the homepage and found out those were just selling me services. Then I clicked on ‘Demos and Manuals’ under the Customers area and it tells me how to hook up my stuff. How about searching the ‘Demos and Manuals’ area? No luck there either.
I then got smart and searched Google for ‘Comcast SMTP’ and the #1 result held my answer.
The moral of this rant story is that finding things on larger sites can be more of a hassle than it’s worth. You might just want to rely Google or Yahoo and let them do the searching for you.
[tags]Comcast, Google[/tags]
Categories: BloggerDesign, Commentary, Usability
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
Sorry for the late response David. Here is the quick answer. If you want to control the cut off point, use the ’split-posts’ button. It’s to the right of the the tree in the editor. Or, if you don’t care where they cut off, use the Post Summaries plugin.
Does that solve your issues?