Google is the benchmark

Last week the DominionPost had a story about Peter O’Hara leaving Fairfax. He was formerly the Editor-in-Chief. I only met Peter a few times during my time at Trade Me, but was impressed each time. He will be missed, I’m sure.

I went looking for a link to the article this afternoon on Stuff.

A search for “Fairfax” on Stuff returned only one result: “Fairfax Magazines Terms & Conditions“.

Not very helpful!

A search for “Fairfax site:stuff.co.nz” on Google on the other hand returned about 415,000 results (in 0.32 seconds no less!)

An on the first page, this article: “Fairfax Media’s editor-in-chief leaves“.

With “Fairfax” in the headline and repeated several times in the article you’d expect this to have been in the site search results.

How is it that Google can index Stuff better than Stuff can index themselves? Stuff only has to index Stuff. Google has to index the whole web. And still they do a better job.

Including search functionality on your site is very important, but unless it works you may as well just refer people to Google.