MicroWarehouse Canada (CDW) web site: Dreadful searching capabilities

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 18th, 2004 • 4:39 am

Good grief. I was trying to find an Ethernet PCI card for a friend’s Performa 6400 computer. I went to the MicroWarehouse Canada. What a dreadful web site! Putting simple keywords such as “Ethernet PCI card” gets you absolutely nowhere. The first result is a USB/FIreWire adapter card!

You cannot tell which category an Ethernet card is part of. Is it too hard to provide a “Networking” category?

I went to the Other World Computing web site instead, and of course in two clicks I was on a page with three options for “Network Cards”. I noticed the Asanté FriendlyNet 696 card, and decided to try if I could find it on the MicroWarehouse Canada web site. (The shipping costs to Canada at Other World Computing are very high.)

The MicroWarehouse Canada Power Search page lets you specify a manufacturer, so I selected “Asante” as the manufacturer and “Ethernet” as the key word. Zero results! Yet I know that MicroWarehouse has tons of Ethernet equipment from Asanté for sale.

I ended up putting “FriendlyNet” in the regular search field, and searching manually through the long list of results. Of course, they do have the Asanté card I was looking for. It’s just impossible to find it using the site’s search tools.

It’s a wonder they are selling anything at all!


3 Responses to “MicroWarehouse Canada (CDW) web site: Dreadful searching capabilities”

  1. ben says:

    not saying I don’t agree about http://www.microwarehouse.ca, but…

    > Is it too hard to provide a “Networking” category?
    There is one. Look on the left under “shop by category” on the homepage.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Right… I was looking for it under “Hardware”, silly me. But then look at the subcategories in “Network”. Where do you go if you are looking for a PCI Ethernet card? “Converters”? “Peripheral Sharing”?

    I guess you get the gist of what I am trying to say :).

  3. MacDesigner says:

    Funny. I tried to see how hard it would be to find the card you were talking about on the MicroWarehouse site. I choose the “Networking” under the “Shop by category” on the left side of the page. On the second page the “Networking Sub Categories” were as follows.

    Cables & Connectors
    Central Site Wiring
    Modems
    Networking
    Peripheral Sharing
    Power
    Tools and Testers

    Why is “Networking” a sub category of “Networking”. It makes no sense what-so ever. Plus the sub categories vary from the list presented under the navagation buttons at the top of the page. This is just bad design. To offer differing options depending on which link menu you choose, when the links have the same name, is bad.

    But the asante card was the first in the list of search results when searched from the Networking page. Of course I had a name already, when I used the term “Ethernet PCI card” on the front page I got the USB card also, as you did. When I added the word “mac” to the search I only got a Firewire PCI card. Where in my keywords was firewire listed.

    The PCI cards should appear in a search of both hardware and networking as it falls within each category. It’s a piece of hardware that allows you to network.

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