I’m inviting folk to share their experiences in which they had difficulty finding something on the internet they thought should have been easy to find.
I was inspired to write this by an experience yesterday. My dtr said her 4 yr old dtr wanted “cars” for x-mas. When my kids were young, I would have been able to drive to Toys R Us, and they woulda had an entire aisle of every kind of car imaginable. I figure I’ll go to WalMart and Target and see what they have.
Nothing specific in mind. Just though normal cars and other vehicles. Maybe a police car, bus, etc. Not 1:64 like Hot Wheels/Matchbox, but not big and clunky like for a toddler. And I was hoping just normal vehicles - rather than from the Cars movie.
Hell, I had all manner of toy cars and trucks when I was young, of all shapes and sizes. But for the life of me, I can’t find them on-line. Tons of Hot Wheels and Matchbox, and a ton of Cars movie product. And larger diecast collectibles. But no just plain toy cars.
I pulled up Amazon and WalMart, and couldn’t figure out how to apply filters to identify what I wanted out of the hundreds/thousands of pages.
Any idea where folk go to buy toy cars these days? Or aren’t such things made any more?
What have YOU had difficulty finding on the wonderful web?
Anything that I already own and love. If something happens to it, I try to find another one just like it and I never can.
There’s a pair of shoes I’ve been trying to find for years. Not a specific shoe, mind you, but one that meets certain criteria, and I’m flexible on some points…but no. The ones on my feet at this moment are the last ones in the world!
There’s still the toy section at our local Target®, Wal-Mart®, BigLots®, etc.
We also have a small time model race car hobby shop. Tons model cars, RC cars, slot cars, etc. Size of a barber shop.
Hotwheels® and Matchbox® are still around, too.
Things I have trouble looking up are related to work. Insurance-specific coding guidelines aren’t on the interwebz because, that would be too easy! Well, more and more of them are going online now so that’s a plus.
Phone numbers for people like the white pages used to provide. The internet should have made that easier and instead it’s cumbersome and unreliable!
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This, IMO, is the biggest difference between dedicated toy stores like Toys R Us versus the toy section at a big box store. Since they were an entire store that sold only toys, Toys R Us stocked nearly every kind of toy imaginable. Whereas the toy sections at a place like Target or Walmart is just a couple of aisles. With less shelf space to devote to toys, they only stock the most popular ones.
A search for “toy cars wooden” brings up lots of small/medium vehicles that aren’t the Matchbox variety. Are those what you’re looking for? Melissa and Doug, Hape, Candylab are some of the brands.
Oddly, also car-related: photos of King Zog of Albania’s Mercedes. (Long story, but my mom has a snapshot that includes what she was told is that car, along with the then-owner and my grandfather, in front of Granddaddy’s service station. My understanding is that it was later purchased by Mills B. Lane and remains part of his private collection, presumably still in the family.)
Thanks. Never woulda thought of the search modifier “replica.” That seems to be a common occurence for me. When searching something on the net, I realize how my mind organizes things does not mesh well with the web designers’.
So I was psyched to score a model of the Supernatural Impala. Start the kiddie off right, no? When I called my dtr to tell her I had it covered, I made the mistake of asking if grandkid had given any hints as to what KIND of car she wanted. She replied, “A PINK car!”
So - back to the drawing board! Luckily, I scored some weird pink racer, that should be GREAT to play with. So she starts her fleet w/ a 67 Impala and some weird pink Frankenstein thing!
Struck me as funny - when I started looking at the “replicas”, I thought the cars looked “odd.” They didn’t look like the toy cars I had when I was young. Took me a second to realize that these were replicas of TODAY’S modern cars, while I was playing with models of modern cars in the 60s! :smack:
I think this is the gist of the OP’s answer. Not the specific search phrase, but the idea that we need to find the right search phrase to find pretty much anything online. Coming up with the right combination of words that describe what you actually need is…almost as hard as programming a computer (do as I mean, not as I say!).
I make myself even more miserable when doing internet searches by choosing to use Duck Duck Go instead of Google. Google may have a better idea of “what you mean” because they track everything you type in, and if you use Chrome, they track where you go, so they have a better idea of what you might want. Duck Duck Go deliberately does not track you or remember your search phrases, so you have to be extremely specific.
Heck, using DDG to find local businesses is annoying because I have to type in the city I live in, every time, and it always initially assumes I live in a different state with the same city name. I guess I asked for it, in exchange for a slight shred of “privacy.”
But for whatever reason, DDG is way better at finding random media stuff. I’ve been looking for an old, poorly-remembered cartoon and couldn’t find any mention of it via google but it was right there on page 2 using DDG. So, I use them both for different things
