Many people default to Google when looking for information because it’s habitual or they don’t know where to go to find what precisely what they’re looking for. Google’s Universal Search initiative is intended to get more structured data into search results and prevent the “back and forth” process that has come to characterize so much of search engine usage. Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask all have similar initiatives.
We do Thanksgiving at our house and we have, for the past three years, brined the Turkey. But I’ve lost my recipe so I started to look for one on Google. Here’s what I found for “Turkey brining recipes.”
I looked at a few of them but wasn’t really satisfied with what I saw so I decided to try Yahoo!, thinking that there might be a special Thanksgiving Shortcut. There wasn’t. But there was a more rudimentary Shortcut that took me into Yahoo! Food:
This was perfect, with the ability to compare recipes and user ratings to give me some perspective. I’m going to use a variation on the Wolfgang Puck recipe. While I was at it I also watched a video, preceded by some unfortunate and irrelevant pre-roll on hair products, about carving a turkey from the Food Network (very helpful).
Structure trumps chaos every time.
