We all look so bad because Google is so good

One thing I passionately appreciate and painfully decry is how bad my web apps stack up to Google's (duh). Most visible in the arena of web-wide searches, I've noticed after analyzing the behavior of those who use my site's search tool (a full-text index-based searech utility I built) that the average user's mean level of comprehension in searching content gets progressively worse over time. I attribute this to the fact that Google's so damn good at what it does.

Google allows us to be lazy, and still works great.

Take for example spelling. Google's intelligent recommendation feature (i.e., "Did you mean...") helps out so many people to the point that users don't place as high an emphasis on accuracy when doing WAIS searches like they did a decade ago. I haven't emulated such functionality in my own utilities...which understandably makes them look inferior due to society's acceptance of Google as the gold standard.

Here's an excerpt from a support e-mail I exchanged with a user who complained that my site's search facilities weren't serving him well enough and needed help. I find it ridiculous that on today's Web I've still got to suggest the following courses of action:

• Watch your spelling – this is the #1 reason people aren’t able to find things, and you can see in our LiveSearch tags (http://www.kuam.com/search/livesearchresults.aspx) people often misspell a name, place or event. Unfortunately, KUAM Search is very unforgiving in this regard.
• Search shorter phrases, not entire sentences – better yet, use single words (i.e., searching for ‘port authority of guam protest in which employees were yelling and joe mesa talked about possible privatization and mentioned contracts’ will just dilute your results and won’t get you anywhere)
• Search for content, not content areas – I’ve seen people trying to search for things like “news from January” or “local news”. This shouldn’t return anything, and if it does, it’ll be useless information having nothing to do with stories we ran
• Use Boolean keywords – make liberal use of terms like AND, OR and BUT NOT to refine your results.
• Wrap quotes around your keywords - search for things like (i.e., “Karch Kiraly” as opposed to Karch Kiraly will be more specific)

What's comical is that after offering a collection of helpful hints to get better, quicker, less diluted search resultsets, I finally gave in and ended the e-mail with "And if that still doesn’t get you the results you’re after, try doing a KUAM.com-specific Google search, by visiting this URL and entering your search keyword: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Akuam.com".