My husband and I have taken a trip to the small island of Kauai recently and I was reminded yet another time about my dependency on Internet, Google, and the iPhone. All three barely work on Kauai – and except for myself, nobody seemed to care. While Internet and iPhone connectivity issues may be common even for certain parts of big metro areas, the part with Google surprised me the most. Judge for yourself:
1. Local search is beyond bad.
You may not know or believe it, but it rains a lot in Hawaii (and Kauai felt like home to me for this reason). Yet, there’s little indoor entertainment. On one of those crappy, rainy days, we decided to go to the movies. Since there was no mention of a movie theater in any of the tourist brochures we had, we turned to Google for answers. And Google had them:
Since Lihue was a bit too far from where we were, we decided to go to Sunset Cinema – only to find an empty piece of land near the mountains in Kauai countryside. Must have been a temporary cinema while Spielberg filmed nearby, my husband joked. What a bummer, I thought.
No, we did not go to the movies that day. By the time we got to sunset cinema, the only thing left to do was watch the actual sunset for we had wasted a good three hours of time.
2. Google could not care less about Kauai content in their index
I am pretty sure that out of all fifty american states, Kauai is about the only place where people do not google things all the time (I suspect some may not even know what Google is). For the first time in years, I was better off with the phone book (yes, the cinema thing taught us it’s a good idea to call first): most places had no presence in Google SERPs.
Did you know that the state of Hawaii does not allow bonfires on any of its beaches? Well, it took me about 30 searches and 2 phone calls (one to the department of natural resources and one to the local fire department) to find out. Apparently, there’s very little content about Hawaii bonfires within the Google index.
What makes it more impressive is that even rural China is better presented within the Google index – we were in the south of China last year and had no problem googling things and getting the answers.
With all that said, I can’t say that I enjoyed the lack of Google presence in my life. I am way too used to being able to ask the questions and get accurate, timely answers. And I am still considering contacting a couple of local Kauai businesses and pitching them SEO and AdWords. Trust me, they need both pretty badly.
