The Name of This Article[]
First, the name of the article is how the heuristic is used, so I feel it is justified in using it here. If you disagree, you can use your own heuristic, or write about how "Phillip A. Batz Wiki stinks", and see how well that works. Having taken care of this little bit of introduction, let's move on to the meat and potatos of the subject, shall we?
Searching for reliable and important information[]
In order to use this heuristic, simply open your favorite search engine, and enter "(your subject) sucks" in the search box and hit enter. You will then be provided with a list of links to opinions of various quality as to just what sorts of problems you might encounter in relation to your subject. This is a marvelous way to do an end-run around all the propaganda and PR that might be out there, and by sampling the links you can get a fairly good idea of what is actually true of the company or activity. Also, if you are doing some form of troubleshooting, and you're not sure how to describe or categorize the problem, you may get lucky with this search. Cool, huh?
Everything that exists has a shadow[]
For every combination of user and program, there is a contrast of features and bugs, though for really complex, powerful, and flexible programs, there may not be any agreement as to which is what; one man's feature is another man's bug. There will never be a good thing without some caveats and cautions, not even a five-gallon bucket, so looking for such a thing is a rather fruitless search. But you can indeed look before you leap, and this particular method has continued to prove its worthiness to me -- by not sucking.