I find that searching for product names and model numbers on a general Web search engine can sometimes be useful. But I also find that it can bring up a lot of comparison shopping sites and affiliate plays that are not useful to my research. Give Me Back My Google, at http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ (Here’s hoping they don’t get C&D’d) is an attempt to eliminate those kinds of search results.

I went to the regular Google and did a search for “Coolpix S7c”. I got about 676,000 results. Most of the results on the front page were either from Nikon or they were review sites. Some of them looked iffy. I did the same search on GMBMG. I got over 100,000 less results, and only one or two iffy results on the front page. Looking at the search result page it’s pretty clear what’s happening — some serious use of inurl: syntax to eliminate results. Nice!

If I did a search for “Coolpix S7c” price the results were more dramatic. That search gets about 175K results on Google, while on GMBMG it gets only about 150K. Unfortunately it didn’t eliminate all shopping results — shop.cnet.com was very high on the search results list.

This is an interesting idea, and I’d like to do further experimenting where I searched for several product models at a time — I’ll sometimes do that when I’m looking for product roundups and end up finding too many shopping comparison sites.

I’m also wondering if something like this might be more effective if it was including instead of excluding — specifying large databases of reviews, maybe product archives. Perhaps a framed site that shows results from the regular Google Web search and the Google News archives at the same time?