Finally, I had to try this. I’m pretty rural, and wouldn’t expect to get anything useful without full location hints. I got one column of search results:
- ad, “how to become an auto-mechanic”
- Wikipedia
- YellowPages.ca listing (useless)
- Business Directory for my town, includes mechanics
- local mechanic
- Yelp, for a nearby city, (useless)
- auto mechanic program for a nearby technical college
It kind of goes downhill from there, but for such a non-specific search, I’m actually pleasantly surprised that two out of the top 7 were directly related to getting my car fixed. Wikipedia and the college are arguably useful as well. YellowPages and Yelp are effectively advertisements and not making my life better, but not Google advertising.
If people in these parts thought the web was useful, I would expect to have more directly useful results as well.
