AUG
2009
Like most people I was curious when the much touted search engine Bing was launched earlier this year. Was anxious to try it, which I did soon enough. I quite liked the look and feel, but apart from that there was little that my current favorite search engine Google didn’t offer. And so after a few minutes of exploring the new search engine on the block, I went back diligently to Google searches.
But that was until yesterday when we had a meeting with a client for a flash website design. The client was interested in flash sites but wanted to ‘refine’ his requirements based on the kind of flash sites his competition had. And so I had to create a list of flash websites of companies that operate in the same domain as this client.
I tried searching for them by entering keyphrases with ’download flash player”, ‘requires flash’, ‘view flash site’ prefixed and suffixed to the service the client offers. Most search results led me to page 25 and beyond to see perhaps one or two full flash sites. Most that appeared to be flash sites from the description snippet that shows up on the SERPs, had only a flash header or a flash intro or a flash guestbook and some just the music embedded in a flash file.
And it was frustratingly time consuming to click on a search result listing and find just a flash header. Ready to pull my hair apart after nearly an hour of search, I tried Bing. And voila, locating a full flash site became much easier.
How? Well, when you take your mouse over any search result, there is this neat bullet that appears to the right. And a box that shows the text contents on that page. It also gives some info on the menus that exist on the page linking to other pages on the site.
Highlighted listing is not a flash site, even though it appears to be from the description
How does that help? Well, quite simply, I didn’t need to click on a result to see if that site was a full flash site. I just needed to roll my mouse over the results. If text and menus showed up, it was definitely not a site designed fully in flash.
Does that mean its goodby Google for me? Definitely not! But yes now I know an alternative in case Google doesn’t show me the info I need.
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