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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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