In the last two summers of internet ad campaign maintenance, keyword list generation, and extremely succinct (70 character) ad writing, I’ve come to use Google as my personal website launcher.
I, like everyone else, use Google to research things I’m unfamiliar with, or to find a new Chicago-based blog to read because I’m bored at work. There’s no doubt it’s a great tool for finding things I didn’t know existed.
But it’s also a great tool for finding things I know to exist, and even know where to find. For instance, today, I wanted to read the Wikipedia article on Meigs Field, the ex-airport on the Chicago lakefront. Easy. Here’s how most people probably accomplish that:
- click the address bar
- type in wikipedia.org
- press enter
- click the search field
- type “Meigs Field” into the search field
- click the go carrot or press enter
Six steps, and pretty easy at that. (Alternatively, you could remember the syntax for Wikipedia’s URLs, type it in exactly, and reduce this to three steps. But who does that?)
I didn’t do it that way, though. Instead, I:
- clicked the Google search field in Firefox
- typed “wiki Meigs Field”
- pressed enter
- clicked the first link
It was two steps less in this case (and fewer keystrokes to boot. Yes, I know this is trivial. I don’t care, it really is how I always find a Wikipedia article unless I’m already on the site). In situations where you get referred to a Wikipedia “disambiguation” page (where your search query turns up more than one possible match), it saves another click because the page of Google results is just a giant disambiguation page, with all of the most popular matches right there for you.
I use Google like this a lot. Instead of navigating to The New York Times and trying to find where they stashed the link to the Freakonomics Blog today, or remembering that it’s permanent address is freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com and typing that in correctly, I just type “freakonomics” into the Google field in my browser, click enter, and click the top link. Google knows what I want. (Before you ridicule me for being in love with Google, stfu. You love it, too. I’d just rather write about it at work than compile another keyword list… for use in Google. Or optimize a website… so Google ranks us higher. God, Google already owns my life. I might as well work there so I at least get some perks.)
Do you use Google like this?