It's easy to make fun of internet evangelists, especially when the whole business seems to be getting ahead of itself, as it is now. How ridiculous, to fund the 200th online video site! How silly, all these would-be MySpace imitators! How foolish, spending millions on TV advertising to try and get people to use a search engine other than Google!

Yet I was reminded the other day that for all the big problems the internet has helped to solve, there are a whole bunch more in which it has made barely a dent. And some of them are the most obvious things.

Consider this: I need to find a specific type of beach hotel in a specific part of Mexico. My wife has always wanted to see the Mayan ruins and I bought her a trip as a birthday present, but now I have to figure out the details. The plane tickets were straightforward enough, but finding the right hotel has been surprisingly complicated.

The search engines, first of all, yield a confusing mix of helpful (hotel and travel websites) and unhelpful (third-tier aggregator) links. You can spend all kinds of time chasing down all the possible avenues of research, but most of it is wasted and you never get the sense that you've really seen all the possibilities.

The recommendation sites, where travellers supposedly share their experiences, were pretty much bereft of input on the places I was interested in. In the end, nothing I could find on the net was as helpful as a good guidebook.

What I really needed was someone who had been there, who knew the places, and who could tell me which one matched my mind’s-eye view of what I wanted. In other words, I needed a good travel agent.

I'll remember that next time I see yet another online travel start-up.

Here's another one: we're currently hiring at New West, and we need to recruit in a handful of different towns around the region. Where should we post our ads? Craigslist? Well, it's free, but it tends to produce lots and lots of unqualified applicants, which is a pain, and it doesn't really have much traction in a lot of our markets. The big national job sites also don't have that much of a following in a lot of smaller places.

The local newspapers? They are very expensive and a pain to deal with, and will they really pull like they promise? (In some of our markets they won't even let us advertise, but that's another story). And what about all these other sites out there? Something called westernmontanahelpwanted.com advertises incessantly on the radio. We have our own free classifieds on New West, though I'm the first to admit they have not (yet) become a destination for job seekers.

Everybody and their brother, it seems, now offers employment classifieds, but finding good employees is still very difficult.

Remember that next time you see yet another new job site.

If you think about it, this general lesson holds true in a lot of very large markets, including internet search itself: the problems have been solved only very imperfectly. In some areas, such as home-buying and car-buying, the traditional business model still hasn't really changed at all. People do research online, but when it comes time for the transaction the traditional real estate agent and the old car dealer are still the place to go.

That's likely to change at some point, when some entrepreneur has the right combination of fresh thinking and determination to go after one of the really obvious problems. (Just this week The New York Times touted a property site called Redfin as potential breakthrough innovator).

Remember, one of the great businesses of our era was built on the proposition that if you offer people a decent cup of coffee, they'll buy it. Just because it seems too simple to be true doesn't mean that it is.

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming