How the Internet changed the way I shop and buy.

I have a 1978 280ce Mercedes. I’m the 3rd owner. I bought it in 1990 and drove it until the motor went out in ’98. It’s just been sitting in my garage ever since. My wife kept saying, “Why don’t you get rid of that old car?” I was tempted to have it towed to the junkyard; at least I could get $200 - $300 out of it. Maybe less.
I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had rebuilt the transmission and the body is in fantastic shape, so I was very reluctant to part with it. It was worth so little with a blown motor.
I had looked all over trying to find a motor for it years earlier, but no luck except I could buy a new one for $5500 and my wife wouldn’t go for that. Since the Internet came along it has really changed the way I shop for things such as far as finding parts for my old car. I kept searching Yahoo, Google, and Ebay off and on for a couple years. One day typed in Ebay’s search bar Mercedes 1978 280ce. Up popped a photo of the exact motor for my car for an opening bid of $78. I was ecstatic. I jumped up and down. (My wife didn’t share my excitement.) I watched it up ‘til the last minute or so then I bid $79 and no one else bid; so I got it! It would cost $200 to ship it here and my mechanic said he’d take the old one out and put the new one in for $500. So I figured at the most I’d lose was $779. If the engine was no good, I told my wife I’d get rid of the car. She said, “Thank God.”

The seller said the engine ran fine and used no oil and had been running but the body was shot and completely rusted out. We emailed back and forth. (I found it to be very unusual that almost everyone trusts everyone else on Ebay.) He said it had 115,000 miles on it. I believed him. I took the chance and did the Pay Pal thing.
Making a long story longer: The mechanic fired it up and called me to say it ran great: no smoke, and the upper part of the engine had several new parts. Amazing! That at least gave me some hope and also relief that I hadn’t just wasted a lot of time and 779 bucks. My wonderful mechanic, Brian, at Quality Automotive, in PaducahKentucky, said since it ran good; if I wanted to go ahead and “get it in shape it would need a few things”. I said “OK.” It needed a brake master cylinder, an idler arm, a steering damper, a new radiator, windshield washer pump and grommet. It needed front end alignment, an alternator, battery sparkplugs, belts hoses, new stuff put in the old air conditioning unit, a fuel gauge, a fuel pump, license plate lenses and lights, radio antenna, a new gas tank, gear shifter linkage washers and some bulbs. Almost all of which I bought on line.
It had 8 years of sitting and I didn’t realize how much a car goes downhill when you’re not driving it.
The total bill for everything was about $2500. For that I have classy little car in mint shape that is really is FUN to drive. (See attached photo.) This experience and learning curve has a long time horizon; some of those parts were real hard to find. Had it not been for the Internet I couldn’t have done it. It is so unbelievably huge yet so easy to work and find stuff. You just type in what you’re looking for and it comes to your monitor in a couple hundredths of a second.

Now getting to my main point: I had not a clue about keywords, description, meta tag, HTML, how they link one the site to another, how search engines look for things: I never knew or suspected any of that. I was just looking to fix up my old car. Out of the hundreds of sites I found why did I choose to do business with those businesses? That is the subject and my learning curve about Search Engine Optimization raising the ranking of your business on the top four search engines. Yahoo, Google, MSN, and Ask.com
More later on this.
PS. Check out the photo of my little car.

Clay