Fascinating assignment in ByThe Way this weenend, by Krissy Scalzi. Google your pets' names and see what you come up with.
I Googled "Griff" my late dog's name and instantly got 850,000 links. Then I googled "Griffin", and got over half a million more.
When I started working with computers, I wrote programs that searched for "strings", or certain words in documents. It was a laborious and slow process. You compared your target string with each progressive string and noted a match, and then moved on to do it all over again for next string. Just alphabetizing twenty six letters took minutes.
So you see why I am "boggled". I entered five and seven letter strings and got millions of comparisions in seconds, and lists of matches 85,000 pages long.
The computer is impressive, and the internet is even more so, and the search engine is most impressive of all.
Needless to say, I did not make 850,000 connections to see what I had discovered. But on the first two pages, while searching "Griff" I found a designer of web sites, a misc jockey, a musical group and listened to a sample of their music, a folk band in he UK, a city in Geogia, ultra microscopic cartoons, a business man in Minnesota, links to wikipedia encyclopedia, a bar, and two actors named Griff, Griff Furst and Griff Somebody else.
An utterly fascinating assignment.
2 comments:
I'll try my gal sassy out! thanks ! Great info!
Sometimes the results of a Google search are so overwhelming--like having too many choices in the cereal aisle at your local supermarket--that I just give up after staring at the display for a few minutes.
Post a Comment