I was putting together a little search page for a clients Intranet today. Just a simple web page with a search form on it that can submit your query to the search engine of your choice and return the formatted results. Of course I had to test it and decided to use my name as the search string (just to see what the other Murray Neill's of this world are up to, not to see how popular I am or anything... )
It was nice to see that CoffeeWaffle was top of the pops on Google and Yahoo! and I found myself on a list of "Non-Pro Kiwi Photographers on the Net" (with my name spelt wrong but my email right!). Excite also had me as the number one Murray Neill on the web, but I had to wonder why it thought my search for "Murray Neill" might have been a mis-spelling of "Carol Zander"? Go figure. I guess when the search engines find this post Carol Zandor (whoever she is) and I will be erternally and cosmically connected via the great google cosmos! Weird.
Its funny how computers seem to occasionally remind us that they have no intelligence of their own. Like when my CD-writer software ejects the blank CD in the drive, asks you insert a blank CD, then happily writes to that same blank CD when you re-insert it (I think it secretly resents me being one step ahead). Or when your image search on Google for "Castles" returns a picutre of a middle aged man and a lama. These things remind me that although computing has come a long way we've still got a long way to go. In auto-mobile terms we're dealing with model-T ford's here. Imagine what an internet search could be like to 100 years time. Hopefully an educator's dream...
- An after-thought to this post... With all the strange meaningless error messages an operating system dishes up these days, just once I 'd like to see,
"ERROR: I have no idea whats happened, or why... you should probably turn me off now."
It just has that 'honest' ring to it.
8:02:01 PM 
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