Search Engines

Posted on April 25, 2012 by treshabarger

Google’s search engine is famous for its results and the secrecy surrounding the search algorithms. I appreciate that the results it lists are actually related to what I typed in. That is not always the case.

Take my local library’s web site. When I enter “Jon Winokur” and select the “author” category (looking for Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights), the first two results listed are for James Garner. Then it includes nine entries for Jon Winokur, none of which are the book I want.

When I search for “Ruth Hayden,” the author of Mrs. Delaney: Her Life and Her Flowers, one result is returned: Sue Grafton’s Writing mysteries : a handbook by the Mystery Writers of America.

I have no idea how they arrive at these “matches.”

It’s not just books where I have search problems — fabric can be just as elusive. I had a jellyroll of Moda’s Summer Breeze II fabric and decided that I wanted yardage of one of those fabrics. I went to my usual super-duper online fabric web site. And when I searched on “Moda Summer Breeze II” (the specific name of the fabric line), I got 2,370 matches with the overwhelming majority of the results having nothing to do with that line of fabric. I wasn’t about to page through 2,370 line items, some of which weren’t even fabric.

So, thank you Google. When I search for Georges Seurat, I get “about 181,000” results and at least the ones on the first page are all related to George Seurat.

The Sensitive Plant

Posted on April 24, 2012 by treshabarger

A sensitive plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light,
and closed them beneath the kisses of night.

~ by Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1820

A wildflower growing inside a cinderblock

Bloom where you are planted

Try Again

Posted on April 23, 2012 by treshabarger

I was surfing the web yesterday, perusing some quotes about the sun. The weekly photo challenge for this week is “The Sun” and I wanted to find a quote to accompany my (upcoming) photo.

A survey box popped up and instructed me to answer the questions as a requirement to continue looking at the list of quotes. It said there were two questions. Two questions wasn’t bad, I thought, so I took the survey.

Question 1: Was I a health professional? No.
Question 2: Did I prepare most of the meals in my house? No.

Two questions, two answers and I expected to be on my way.

No.

The survey pop-up box remained visible and all the subsequent quotes were still grayed out. The message the survey box gave me? Try again.

I guess it didn’t like my answers. I left that web site and found another one with quotes, a web site that would let me read its content even though I didn’t prepare most of the meals in my house.