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I'm not particularly impressed with the Internet's searching capabilities. Oh, I know there's a lot of hype about Google and Yahoo! and the rest of those fancy-schmancy search engines. But why can't they help me find what I'm looking for?
Take socks, for example.
It's Monday morning and my husband's standing over his sock drawer searching for a matching pair. And is the Internet any help? Not much.
I searched Google and found The Bureau of Missing Socks, located smartly at www.funbureau.com. The bureau was quite interesting and warned me about a rare medical condition called "sock-eating syndrome," an ailment that apparently plagues my washing machine. But alas, my husband came no closer to finding a pair of matching socks.
Then there are my glasses. I tend to misplace them. So again I enlisted Google for help. This time I found The Case of the Missing Glasses, a book and game combination sold at www.barnesandnoble.com. But here's my dilemma: If I can't find my glasses, how do they expect me to read the book for clues?
We search for lots of things in our house. My teenage daughter is constantly searching for her car keys, a trait she inherited from her father. I don't lose car keys. I lock them in the car. Frequently. But they're not lost—they're in the ignition.
I tried to help out and went to the Dogpile search engine with a request for "missing keys." I didn't find my daughter's keys, but in an archived story at www.cbsnews.com I learned about 200 keys that went missing from a U.S. nuclear lab a few years ago. I told my daughter about the nuke situation and suddenly she didn't feel so bad about losing her car keys. This launched us into a thought-provoking discussion about the possible whereabouts of the nuclear keys, which led to some speculation about other unsolved mysteries, including the whole Roswell affair. Needless to say, we now believe aliens are responsible for my daughter's missing keys.
My husband and I both enjoy genealogy and have enlisted the Internet to identify missing ancestors. As online resources expand, we're delighted to read military histories, ship records, church documents from other countries, cemetery listings, and more. But there are drawbacks. For example, I wanted to find out where my great-grandfather's sister lived. I had very little information about her, but knew her married surname was Hooker.
I have some advice: Don't try putting that name into an Internet search unless you're prepared to filter through a lot of sites you'd rather not know about!
And how about the perfect gift? Have you ever shopped for that online? I plugged in the term "perfect gift" on the Metacrawler search engine and discovered www.theperfectgift.com, www.gifts.com, www.perfectgiftco.com, and an eBay store called "The Perfect Gift Store." But my favorite was the listing that said "Send the perfect gift—Iowa pork!" Wow! I hadn't thought of that one.
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