dual*ities
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
from glitches to google to gaiman
Today did not start out so well. I was planning to do some major editing on what I’ve written for my thesis so far. But what do you know? My printer just wouldn’t cooperate! Not even when I’ve reinstalled the driver and all. I’ve tried to troubleshoot it, like I always did before. But alas, this time I wasn’t successful. Oh well. Time to call the computer service guy.
Just when I gave up on my printer and decided to use the internet for a bit, I discovered that my bookmarked pages in my browser were all gone! Every single one of them! I don’t know how that happened. I must have accidentally deleted them late last night. Grrrr. *spanks self*
Losing the addresses of my favorite sites was the least of my worries though. I still have most of them committed to memory anyway. What worried me was that there were a lot of online journal articles there that I used for my related literature (for my thesis), and which I’ll still be needing in the next few weeks. And, with a solitary key stroke, they’re all gone…just like that! Tsk, tsk.
So yah, I had no choice but to reconstruct my database of on-line reference materials (whereas it originally took me a couple of months to find good, relevant articles in the internet!). And by the time I found the more important articles, more than half the day was gone. Well, well, so much for efficiency and productivity this day.
Good thing that Google was there to aid me in my task. Well, Google and Yahoo search, that is.
Which brings me to an entirely different topic—that of search engines. For starters, I should say that I am a Google girl. Everything that I don’t have ready answers for, I believe Google can provide answers, or at least “leads,” to. But last week, as I was searching the internet for a topic I was interested in, I, for some reason, decided to check with Yahoo search too. To my surprise, Yahoo gave me more search results than Google did! And so, I tried to think up of random topics and searched them on both engines. In contrast to what I expected, Yahoo often reported more items found than Google. (I also tried other search engines, but none of them came close to the "performance" of the two aforementioned ones.)
To illustrate, here are the number of matches found on some of the items I have searched:
“Altruism” on Google: 821,000 / on Yahoo: 850,000
“Tulong” on Google: 29,800 / on Yahoo: 96,100
“Yoda” on Google: 2,080,000 / on Yahoo: 3,960,000
“The Little Prince” on Google: 218,000 / on Yahoo: 376,000
Yet:
“Grounded Theory” on Google: 197,000 / on Yahoo: 117,000
“Volunteerism” on Google: 1,960,000 / on Yahoo: 1,580,000
Funny how this interesting albeit totally useless “revelation” fascinates me. Teehee. I guess I just assumed all along that the two search engines would share the same database since they belong to the same conglomerate and all. So much for categorically thinking of Google as the “superior” one
Moral of the story? Even if you have already consulted an expert, it would still be a good idea to get a second one opinion. You’ll never know what new things you could learn from the latter. It never hurts to cover all bases. Hehehe.
Oh, and guess who else is concerning himself with a bunch of numbers on hit counters and search engines? Neil Gaiman, on his May 29 journal entry, A Small Sunday Number Ponder. I guess I'm in good company. Harhar.
And while we’re on the subject of Gaiman, here’s the result of one of those tests that I found on the net using one of those search engines:
Which Neil Gaiman Book Are You?
You are American Gods! You are mysterious,
intelligent, and creative. To the rest of the
world you may seem a little standoffish, but
really youre just a quiet person. Youre sort of
bookish and are intrigued by mythology and
fairy tales. You might be Wiccan or Pagan,
either that or you're unreligious. You have a
sarcastic sense of humor and are the kind of
person people like to talk to because youre
such a good listener.
*~Which Neil Gaiman book are you?~*
brought to you by Quizilla
Hmm, interesting result, considering that I found American Gods to be the most "challenging" material among the Neil Gaiman books that I've read thus far. But a significant chunk of the description does sound like me...sort of.:)
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Anyway, going back to my day…it did get redeemed in the end. I got to spend the evening with friends and watch the film A Lot Like Love. It’s not my favored movie fare, but well, at least my friends made it worth watching. So yah, the day turned out to be okay, computer glitches and all.
