POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Just ask Google : Just ask Google Server Time
29 Jul 2024 02:19:55 EDT (-0400)
  Just ask Google  
From: Invisible
Date: 16 Jul 2012 05:50:13
Message: <5003e3d5$1@news.povray.org>
Fact: Google does not answer questions. Actually, it generates lists of 
web pages containing words similar to the ones you typed in.

Due to this, certain kinds of question are very easy to answer with 
Google, and certain other kinds of question are almost impossible to answer.

For example, type in the model number of just about any piece of 
computer hardware, and Google will find the product page for it, if one 
exists. (Hell, it can probably still find it even if it no longer exists 
today, so long as it /once/ existed. Various sites cache this stuff, 
after all...)

Historically, various names involving unusual punctuation were quite 
hard to search for. (E.g., C, C#, .NET and so on.) Presumably Google 
have now individually special-cased every single one of these into their 
search engine.

But some things are not so easy to search for. For example, suppose I 
want to find companies that offer service X. Well, that's pretty easy. 
But now suppose I want companies that offer service X, having properties 
A, B, C, D, not E or F, and property G. How the hell do I do that?

The only way I can think of is to use Google to find companies that 
provide service X, and then manually review every individual one, by 
hand, one at a time, to determine which ones (if any) have the required 
properties. In other words, "do the search manually".

I literally can't think of any way to get Google to figure this out 
automatically.


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