What Thailand Specific Things Do You With Google Was Better At Finding?

[OxfordWill]

Have you ever been frustrated with google or other search engines when it comes to finding things which are specific to Thailand or life as a visitor, or expat in this country?

What things do you wish it was easier to find?

For me, I have had problems finding useful information about services such as legal, financial (banking options, what fees banks charge etc and real estate (Thaivisa seems to be the major support here- the sponsors are great and offer expat legal services such as sunbelt asia and the thaivisa classifides has helped me find housing options before).

What other things do we wish it was eaiser to find good info on?

[noahvail]

Have you ever been frustrated with google or other search engines when it comes to finding things which are specific to Thailand or life as a visitor, or expat in this country?

What things do you wish it was easier to find?

For me, I have had problems finding useful information about services such as legal, financial (banking options, what fees banks charge etc and real estate (Thaivisa seems to be the major support here- the sponsors are great and offer expat legal services such as sunbelt asia and the thaivisa classifides has helped me find housing options before).

What other things do we wish it was eaiser to find good info on?

Health info would be nice to have. I had to do a very specific search for myself, spent hours, and found the one place in Bangkok that would serve my needs (I'm in Issan). And yet, when I told my brother-in-law about it, he gave me the name and phone number of a doc in Loei who is exactly the kind I was looking for.

What bugs me even more is the lag time in loading google.co.th. Takes bloody forever. I log in to google.co.nz and get amazingly fast times. Go figure.

[BygonKeaw]

google is great if u know how to use it for searching, (its not rocket sicence)

Thaivisa?? very limited and most of the information is from misguided people.

Google any day of week as you find all the answers!

[JetsetBkk]

...Thaivisa?? very limited and most of the information is from misguided people...

I give you another week - tops.

[OxfordWill]

Thanks noahvail. So often we have to ask a friend or friend of a friend who has experience, and many services in Thailand do have web presences but they are not ranked highly in google etc because, nobody is linking to them and they dont promote / market their site.

As you said a specific doctor near a specific region, etc.

[oevna]

Thanks noahvail. So often we have to ask a friend or friend of a friend who has experience, and many services in Thailand do have web presences but they are not ranked highly in google etc because, nobody is linking to them and they dont promote / market their site.

As you said a specific doctor near a specific region, etc.

I have never needed to search for the subjects that you mentioned. However, I've found that when searching for other subjects and want the results to be Thailand-specific, specifying the search terms in Thai script often narrows down the results. I know this isn't always an option, and requires having a person fluent in Thai around to translate if you can't do it yourself, but it can be useful.

This often requires having an English-Thai dictionary around just to find the right words to use in the search terms.

[OxfordWill]

Good tip.

[davejonesbkk]

I think being able to search for cheap apartments using English language would be useful too. When I first moved to Bkk from Korat in 2004 I dint know anything about BKK and all my Google searches for apartments brought up the very expensive expat type places which were way out of my budget, in the end I had to resort to paying a a taxi driver to take me round the area I wanted to live in to look for places which was a real pain.

Just recently I needed a picktruck to move apartments (only going 1km down the road) all the sites I found it was minimum 1k to hire a van without gas or a driver and needed a 10k deposit but thankfully I got a number off a friend and hired a guy for 300 baht.

[henryalleman]

can find everything about Thailand on Google in a few seconds, difficult findings only a few minutes I use English and Dutch language.

use Google.be

even the most irrelevant information like

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/th_his.html

Some Thai website from hospitals are even in Dutch

http://www.bangkokhospital.com/nl/index.aspx

I have about 100 favourites about Thailand from used cars over BMTA till consumer price-guides

Just type ....... thailand- th., bangkok or nakhon somewehere

Edited April 9, 2009 by henryalleman

[oevna]

...

Just type ....... thailand- th., bangkok or nakhon somewehere

You know, this gave me an idea. You can specify "site:<domain>" in the Google search terms to limit the results to sites in that domain. So I tried searching for "cheap apartments sukhumvit site:th" ("th" is the top-level domain for Thailand). This seems to have produced useful results (although it would be impossible to know without following up on them). Worth a try, though.

You can also limit the domain further to "co.th", "ac.th", "yahoo.co.th" or "craigslist.co.th", etc.

[OxfordWill]

Yea the expensive apartments issue is always there,

oevna thats a good tip, although Id like to see a annotation feature built into google to allow all of us searching for (for example) apartments to be able to comment on a service.

[WinnieTheKhwai]

In a lot of cases I'm not sure the issue is with google, it's with the sites themselves that just may not provide enough information. Remember all Google does is index stuff that's out there.

> What things do you wish it was easier to find?

People. Including their exact location at any given time. Fortunately Google seems to be working on that.

[siamjj]

try a meta search engine like "dogpile".very fast and better results.uses many search engines at the same time,google,yahoo,msn,ask,etc.hope that helps.

Edited April 17, 2009 by siamjj

[OxfordWill]

Thanks siamjj.

Winnie- yes the localisation api is pretty cool stuff, and the google dashboard already has the user interface for reporting and recording locations- wont be long before they can roll it out im sure.

[mahtin]

bangkok or nakhon somewehere

Personally I go for Nakhon Nowhere