OxfordWill Posted April 8, 2009 Share Posted April 8, 2009 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? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
noahvail Posted April 8, 2009 Share Posted April 8, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BygonKeaw Posted April 8, 2009 Share Posted April 8, 2009 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! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JetsetBkk Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 ...Thaivisa?? very limited and most of the information is from misguided people... I give you another week - tops. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OxfordWill Posted April 9, 2009 Author Share Posted April 9, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oevna Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OxfordWill Posted April 9, 2009 Author Share Posted April 9, 2009 Good tip. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davejonesbkk Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
henryalleman Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 (edited) 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oevna Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 ...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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OxfordWill Posted April 17, 2009 Author Share Posted April 17, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WinnieTheKhwai Posted April 17, 2009 Share Posted April 17, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siamjj Posted April 17, 2009 Share Posted April 17, 2009 (edited) 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OxfordWill Posted April 19, 2009 Author Share Posted April 19, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mahtin Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 bangkok or nakhon somewehere Personally I go for Nakhon Nowhere Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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