I was looking for Kaiser Fung’s Numbers Rule Your World on Amazon, and saw that there was no Kindle version. So I figured I’d check with the publisher, McGraw-Hill, if there was perhaps some other kind of e-book (like O’Reilly has for most of its titles).
Googling for the name McGraw-Hill took me to their Corporate Website, which has a convenient little search box in the upper right. So I typed in the title, but only got bogus results. Nothing seemed to match the full title, and the pages were all generic corporate-style stuff.
Turns out there’s a little drop-down box on that search results/refinement page where you can select what you want to search. It defaults to McGraw-Hill Corporate, but it has options like Books and Educational Products. And lo and behold, of course it finds the book once I tell it to search for books.
But why does it search the corporate site first? Isn’t it more likely that people will want to search for your products, rather than your press releases or investor info? You have a lot more customers than investors, so why does your search default to boring corporate stuff?
It’s not that there is an additional step involved here that I can’t be bothered with, it’s the attitude. I don’t care about your org chart or your subsidiaries or whatever. I want information, fast. I want the website that comes up when I search for your name to make sense to 90% of the people. How can you put so much effort into a website and not think about who the visitors are and what they’re looking for?
This is similar to HP’s “license plate” URLs, and I’ve seen IBM do the same (though they seem to have stopped doing it). Don’t tell me your internal structure or your server names. Don’t tell me what you think is important; I don’t care. I care about the stuff that’s important to me. I want a simple URL, I want relevant information.
Is that really too much to ask?
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