Anytime Google refers me to ask.com or about.com. Those two sites aren’t worth a bucket of shit between the two of them.
That’s largely due to email spammers, telemarketers and people who harvest non-obfuscated contact information to sell to them.
When you enter an exact model number into the search function on a company’s support website, and it returns zero results. Then after a half hour of drilling down through the tree directory structure you eventually find the document, with the model number in both the title and the file name, yet the search function can’t find it…WTF?
Support sites that are designed by the marketing department. When I need a data sheet for say a pressure transducer, I often have to start by guessing what market they intended to sell the things into. It fairly obvious that most of these would love to expand beyond existing markets, yet by organizing information at the top level by existing markets it makes access by anyone outside those markets very difficult.
2 super useful reference sites:
PCI Device database - for getting information on mystery devices in Windows Hardware Mangler.
FCC ID Search - great for networking and telecom gear.
Other than all the sleazy sites capturing your Google searches for drivers, the downloader programs are the worst thing IMO. Why do I need a downloader program to download a driver? Hint: I don’t, the browser can download just fine on its own and a downloader program is probably harmful to security and privacy.
Dear fellow Dopers:
If you are looking for drivers: type “site: [manufacturers website] type, SN downloads support” or simular terms into Google. Remember, if you tell Google what you already know it might even be your friend, if you omit what you already know it will think you need something else than the ati site. Because if it’s so bloody obvious that you need something from a specific site: put that info in the search box. It’s a search engine, not your mother.
On search boxes on manufacturers sites: If they were capable of making a competent search engine the verb would be “to nvidia”, instead it’s “to google”.
On finding people with the exact same question as you, without usefull answers:
Try to imagine what you would call a YouTube-video with a complete how-to of what the heck you’re doing and type that into the search box (look for solutions, not problems).
If your problem is hardware related there is not only an answer somewhere on the internet, there is a YouTube channel and six blogs dedicated to your issue.
These problems are not with the support sites, they’re situated between keyboard and chair.
Whenever someone replies with a LMGTFY link and the entire reason for the question is because Google didn’t yield an answer. Oh really? A search using the world’s most visited website? I obviously didn’t even think of that before I wasted time registering on your shitty forum to post this question!
I feel kinda bad when I’m that guy, then return to the site months or years later to find a few desperate PMs asking how I resolved the problem. Not that I ever posted “Never mind, got it”, but just fixed it on my own and stopped updating the thread if it was slow moving.
Condescend much?
And an outright insult…you’re awesome! :rolleyes:
If you ever try to explain a problem using an email link to the support site, you’ll almost always find that the support wienie will read only the first sentence of your post, and base all answers on that. You can put as many additional items in your email description of the problem, but the only one looked at will be the first one. And that will, nine times out of ten, result in a canned answer.
Totally useless.