I an earlier post, I asked "How do you make Technology decisions?". According to a recent survey, Google is by far the most used tool by technology buyers (83% ALWAYS use Google). The poll on my post found similar results.
Again Google is the clear leader, but not nearly by the same margin as in the external survey. I am curious if the is partly because the question in the poll was phrased a bit differently.
Instead of guessing why, I decided to ask you. Please vote below on whether you always, sometimes, or never use these different resources when researching a new technology before making a decision on a solution to implement.
| Do you always, sometime or never use Google when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
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| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use another search engine (Yahoo, MSN Live, Ask, etc..) when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
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| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use a vendor blog when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
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| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use an independent blog when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
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| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use a vendor product site when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
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| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use a vendor support site when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
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| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use a third party analyst site when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
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| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use a user group when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
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| Sometimes |
|
| Never |
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| Do you always, sometimes or never use Wikipedia when researching technology? |
Choose |
| Always |
|
| Sometimes |
|
| Never |
|
Posted by 
If you look at it another way, Google and all the other search engines merely provide you with a way to get to the materials relevant (of course your mileage will vary) to your research. In that sense, the survey results reflect the effectiveness of the, well, search results.
The destination of these search results is where you would probably find most of the answers you are looking for, and these could be a vendor's product pages, blogs, forums, reviews and discussion groups, etc. So, by definition, you would always start from a search engine before you ended up at the various destinations, therefore it is not surprising that the search engines score the highest votes in these surveys.
The concept (in general) of Wikipedia is interesting here, as it provides you with a means to search and research the topics at the same time, and invariable with useful external links to narrow down your quest. This sometimes can be a lot more effective than a search engine.