A searcher’s nightmare from SEO
- February 06, 2015
- Bradley Taylor
I am exhausted! I have been sitting at this computer for 3 hours trying to find what I’m looking for. You would think it would be easy; type in the word in the search box, hit query and TA DA! Well, that was 3 hours ago and many, many, many tries since. I am finding everything but what I need.
Okay, here’s the scenario. I am looking for the name and address of someone who belongs to a cellphone number. I have this cellphone number on a piece of paper in my planner with a note that says “call on Thursday, urgent”. Of course I didn’t write the name or any other information on it; silly me. And of course, there is no answer on that phone. Now I’m stuck in this nightmare trying to find ANY information about it.
Here’s what I’ve done so far. I went to Google and typed in “cell phone lookup”. Wow! It looked like it might actually be easy. I see all kinds of websites; 31,300,000 to be exact, that claim they can tell me just what I’m looking for, for free! Right! Every time I click on a website and try to search it for the name and address, I’m told they have found the person but I have to pay to see it. Not exactly free is it? And I typed in “free”; why didn’t the search engine take me to the free sites? This is frustrating.
I thought I would try another search engine, Yahoo. Again, it’s the same thing. Yahoo doesn’t tell you how many hits it has on “free cell phone number lookup” but I can see there are pages and pages of them. Most of them are the same ones I found on Google. What about Bing? They actually gave me a search called “free cell phone lookup no charge”. I thought I finally had it! Again, nope. Same as the others.
I never did find the name and address of whoever that phone number belonged to. No one ever answered the number either. Whoever it was has a mailbox that has not been set up yet. I did learn one thing, however; those website designers are pretty tricky. The use SEO to bring people to their sites. They stretched the truth a bit, the search for a person WAS free, but finding out the information was not. Well played, well played.