Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem.
I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.
This is a great way to describe it. Google still gives me good results for the common stuff, but really fails me when I'm looking for something in the "long tail".
There is, use a different search engine. I've even found something as new as Andisearch good for finding research papers and Qwant good for general searching. There are many more and they keep up with Google pretty well now without the trash.
More than a decade ago, Google had some special-case logic for these "navigational queries". Lee Kai-Fu (head of Google China at the time) said that navigational queries were particularly prevalent in Chinese search traffic.
Though, there's also a use case for people trying to find third-party information about various websites, particularly in trying to figure out if the website itself is a scam. You really want to have the navigational result up at the top unless you have a very high degree of confidence that the site is a scam, but in all cases you want high quality reviews of the site to follow up the navigational link.
I wish I could find forums with my answer instead of a multitude of websites and blogs that do not answer my query. I guess I could add 'forum' or something but when I am already searching a specific query and particular piece of hardware I don't need the first page to show me retailers of said hardware.
Tried it, blog spam mentions finding or not finding stuff in forums way too much and it basically didn’t help unless I started getting into weird Google fu like including strings from the copyright footer of various forums in an advanced search using the OR operator and multiple quoted sections … at which point I was like “why am I working this hard on making Google better when they don’t fucking pay me”
I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.