Taking A Bath With Your Socks On

Today, this morning especially, I was really irritable when checking some Google local serps I became as grumpy as sin, and for anyone who knows me or has worked with me, I have an over-active grumpy gene which flares up every-now-and-again. Anyway, being absolutely baffled by the results Google were supplying myself, hardly any sleep and it being ‘that time of the month’ for me grumpyitis to kick in, I made the following Tweet on Twitter…

And so the day toiled on, without me really needing the services of a search engine, I had clients work to get on with and one of them was a nice bit of php/mysql that kept me occupied for some time. Then came the blog posts. I like to research before I write, sometimes not at all, but today needed some background info that I wasn’t confident about, so I turned my attention to Bing.

It didn’t take me long to find the info I was after, I wasn’t timing myself against my recent activity with Google against Bing because my search term brought up what I was after in the first page. Even when I was hunting down images for the post Bing served them up to me a treat.

However, I can be a stickler for checking out how my sites (clients) are getting on and I also like to monitor conversions, esp. on ecomm carts. That’s where the whole ‘Give Up Google For A Day’ fell flat on its face. So many of my sites have Google wrapped around them for analytics, data feeds, webmaster tools etc … that my efforts were doomed from the beginning.

I won’t say searching with Bing was like ‘Taking A Bath With Your Socks On’ because it wasn’t, really. Bing delivered! I got my posts out and my research was a doddle. However, my reliance on Google for finding out the data about how the sites were behaving was way too much to ever even contemplate walking away from Google, even just for a day.

All in all, it was a good excercise, that also opened up to myself just how dependent for information, on the day-to-day running of my business do I owe to big G.