I stopped bitching about Google a while back because it was getting repetitive and because I know too many people who work/live there now. But here I go for old time's sake.

First of all, web searches fucking suck because most of what you get are crappy web sites that are ads and other shit pretending to be the information you need.

And now it's just getting silly. People are so overly dependent on Google. For example, google just launch local searches so you can find businesses and things in your local community. Google is just taking advantage of people who instinctively go to Google for anything on the web, instead of going to the site they should be visiting, yellowpages.com.

Then there's froogle. Wow, what a piece. I searched for the camera I just bought, Pentax Optio S4. I got some results in some random order. ok fine. I clicked to sort by price. I got was pages of crappy accessories and things I wasn't interested in. Then I found the camera itself. But how about shipping? and tax? Some of these shitty sites charge $25 for shipping so they can quote a low price on froogle.

Cnet.com and other sites are great for price comparisons, and they include shipping and tax for a true final cost. It's amazing. I paid nearly $200 less for my camera than froogle's first result. Froogle's cheapest stores were about the same as the price I paid, but they were all shady yahoo stores that I would never shop from. Cnet.com also has merchant ratings and reviews.

Basically my beef is people need to go to google.com when they are searching the internet for information. But other great sites are:

yellowpages.com
cnet.com
epinions.com
craigslist.org
my.yahoo.com
maps.yahoo.com (better than mapquest)

Use the tool best suited for the job.