As I prepared for my move from California to New York, I had to find a moving company to ship all of my stuff. I’ve never lived outside of California before; the furthest I’ve ever had to move was from Oakland to Los Angeles. U-Haul did the trick. This time it was a little different; there was no way I was going to drive a U-Haul 3,000 miles across the country.

I began by searching for “cross country movers” on Google. Google gave me 8,440,000 results, but I only explored the top 5 links and some of the sponsored links. I gathered quotes from about 5 companies to compare prices and they all came out to a little over $2,000. I finally picked one and placed my order. Afterwards, I called a friend and while explaining how I spent all morning looking for a moving company, she asked me if I considered FedEx. I hadn’t. In the past 4 years, she made two coast-to-coast moves and had experience in this area. I immediately got a quote from FedEx and it came out to less that $1,000 for door-to-door shipping.

Our friends have many of the answers we need and are oftentimes more efficient and accurate than search engines. In this case, my friend saved me over $1,000 (I had to pay a $150 cancellation fee). Oftentimes, we don’t leverage the wisdom and experience of our friends because we are afraid to ask for help. Search engines are good for finding facts and information, but we all have questions and curiosities that Google can’t index and web pages can’t answer. Yahoo Answers and Google Answers have tried to crack this case by tapping into the wisdom of crowds, but solutions aren’t universal and no one knows your world like your friends. Next time you consider searching for a solution online, consider using your friends first and search engines second.