The reason does have to do with relevancy somewhat. I find that Google does indeed do a better job of filtering out the results that are somewhat less than relevant to me.

For example, I'm finding that rather than strictly matching text, it's getting better at returning solutions to my problems.

Take my most recent project, for example.

I wanted to build a PVR. But I wanted to do it on a budget and I didn't want to get tied into something like Microsoft's Media Center.

I don't have a problem with the Media Center OS, but I felt I could do better by building my own system that I could customize.

So I scraped together some money to buy a cheap but powerful barebones computer, large hard drive and cheap DVD rom.

But because I went so low end, I found I had to do some customizations to the flavor of Linux I chose to run this system.

For one thing, my new but dated TV Out video card wasn't fully supported by Fedora, so I had to find drivers that would allow me to output the computer display to the TV.

After some searching I came across a few sites that had the drivers I wanted, but they were woefully lacking in implementation instructions. While I am getting adept at installing Linux software, when the instruction says 'build as usual' I'm at a loss, because I don't know what 'the usual' is.

When I was searching Google for these drivers, it did present me with the sites that were most useful to me. In fact I relied on the top 5 results to help guide me through the installation process.

It turns out that while the #1 and #2 sites had the drivers I needed, it was the #3 site that presented instructions on how to implement the changes. My problem was that the instructions were very limited. But in the end I got it to work much more simply than the instructions let me to believe.

So, Google did help me solve my video card problem in a sense. After all, it pointed me in the right direction, but it wasn't able to provide me with the 'do this first, and then this'instructions that I was looking for. But after pouring through numerous Linux forums I found that such instructions do not exist.

Therefore this was no fault of Google's but the web in general. FYI if you are linux developer, please please please try to improve your documentation. I know most of the documentation out there is incredible, but remember that there are newbies out there who just don't understand 'make make install.'

Next was the TV capture card. Again because I went budget, it wasn't properly supported by Linux however a search on Google returned a forum posting that had complete instructions on installing the PVR software included with instructions for finding and installing the capture card software.

From this point I didn't need Google anymore as the 67 page instruction manual found on the forum walked me through the rest of the process. In fact, it even started from the very beginning telling me how to partition my drives and what standard Linux software to initially install. But since I had already done this I skipped to where I needed to be.

The long and short of it is that I was able to build a Linux PVR with little experience but with lots of help from Google. Granted it took me about 2 weeks longer than I would have liked, but again that wasn't the engine's fault. It did tell me what I wanted to know, but the web page with the information was almost cryptic in its explanation of the how.

I guess the morale of this story is this: The engines are getting better. In fact, in most cases I've found that the search engine usually is right. You may just not know it yet.


Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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