Most of the time you can type in any sort or question or query and an online search engine will give you relatively useful results in the first page or two. Sometimes though what you get back is absolutely nothing like what you were thinking of.
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’d like to think of myself as a relatively Internet savvy kind of guy. Over the years though I’ve run into a few search queries that no matter how I try and tweak them I just can’t seem to find what I’m looking for.
How to stop a clock from ticking loudly
We’ve got a clock at home that ticks exceptionally loud. I wanted to try and find out if there was a reasonably easy way to help muffle the noise from the clock without affecting it’s time keeping abilities. Needless to say, I don’t think that a bunch of blogging women who are afraid of when their internal clock will stop ticking will be able to help me much.
Universe
Sure, most people who want to know something about the universe will be a little more specific in their astronomical searches, but there’s also a lovely piece of software called Business Objects which has a component in it call “The Universe.” Thanks a lot guys. Couldn’t you have given your product a more specific and unique name?
And then there’s the real winner…
LaTeX
Back when I was in college, one of our Chinese grad students was asked to research the technical markup language LaTeX (pronnounced /ˈlɑːtɛk/). Of course, you can only imagine what he came back with when all he put into Google was “latex.” We heard some very interesting noises coming from that side of the lab until he finally called us over to ask for help.
Fri, May 15, 2009, by Grebo
Search Engines