[astura]

>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]".

This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the town name because that town doesn't have a post office.

It's usually just not straightforward.

[jawilson2]

So, you call the pizza place and say "Do you deliver to X? No? Oh, but your other location does! Thanks!" Or, go to the company's website and figure it out.

People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.

[astura]

Say you are on the west end of Springfield near the east end of Shelbyville. You don't know that area or what the surrounding towns are.

You Google "pizza Springfield." For a very literal ("stupid computer") search your results are all the pizza places on the east end of Springfield. There's no pizza in the west end of Springfield.

You waste your time calling all the pizza places on Springfield just to find out none deliver to your location.

Your results do not include all the pizza places on the east end of Shelbyville that do deliver to the west end of Springfield.

You go hungry.

This isn't an uncommon situation if you're outside of the downtown. In your example you're going to assume that every pizza restaurant near your location is a national chain that has locations in every town. Completely and totally unrealistic unless you are in a very densely packed suburbia - there is only one chain pizza restaurant within ~20 miles of my house but there's independent ones everywhere.

>People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.

Google provides a useful service. So I shouldn't use it because...? Because why? it's more "manly" not to? Because search should be hard because that's the way nature intended? or... ?

What kind of logic is that? Following that logic nobody should use the web at all because it makes things easier. Or you shouldn't get delivery at all because it's convenient, you should just drive around aimlessly until you find pizza.

[UncleMeat]

Are you kidding? Of course I'd rather have the service tell me directly what pizza places deliver to me. I'd need to call each one and ask individually? How on Earth is that a better service?

[joshuamorton]

It's useful, therefore people use it. You're asking for people to accept a clear decrease in the utility of a service. Because ????

[nludd]

If you're interested in cartographic information that can't be readily put into words, maybe a text-based search engine isn't the best way to find it. A map makes more sense. Query a map (like Google Maps or OpenStreetMap) for "pizza [exact location]".

We've been so conditioned to use Google Search as our one stop oracle that we fail to stop and think whether a text-based query is actually appropriate.

[camiller]

"takeaway pizza near me" Google knows where I am right now after all, I used waze on the drive here, and have an android phone. but even using the employers PC in front of me it knows where it is.

Note: I have hast a few instances where "near me" didn't work as expected.

[TheCoelacanth]

Where else would I be trying to find takeaway pizza? Are you suggesting that if I just search for takeaway pizza Google should point me to the best takeaway pizza place in the world and only if I specify "near me" should it provide me with information that might actually be useful?

[camiller]

Was addressing the suggestion that "takeaway pizza <city name>" would provide less than optimal results under certain circumstances described in other comments in this part of the thread. For example If I lived in Omaha Nebraska on the north side of Harrison street which also is the dividing line between Omaha and Papillion a search on "takeaway pizza Omaha" might fail to include the pizza place I can see across the street in Papillion.

Personally, I would do the search on maps and not include either the city name or "near me", but the discussion was about the regular text search and I was suggesting an alternate phrasing.

[Jtsummers]

Web search is literally the wrong place to try to find something that geographic databases were designed for. When you don't know where you are or what's around, you go to a map.

[mustacheemperor]

And, of course, Google Maps will be quite happy to serve you a litany of personalized advertisements for the restaurants in your area, but is devoid of any real route-planning tools, or information about places not worth advertising to you.