Google outsmarted

This past weekend, two friends of mine threw a birthday party. The joint nature of the celebration meant there were two very different groups of friends, twice the festivities and twice the debauchery.

At some point amid all the revelry, some of the people I was talking to and I happened to begin a discussion on inner space. Discussing infinity as it applies to the outer reaches of space is so last century. Instead, we all blabbed our own half-baked versions of theories we had read but only half understood. Much pontificating and mid-air finger-stabbing ensued.

Of course, as these conversations do, ours turned to discussion of the best sites on the Web for illustrating our various points or reading further about the topic that we, as dilettantes, had only kind-of grasped.

The usual suspects, New Scientist, NASA, Slashdot, all came up, along with the unanimous assertion that Google`s ability to turn up salient information on any topic far outweighed the reach of any one site.

I thought that since I obviously wasn`t speaking a language that Google could understand, I would try speaking to Yahoo, and see if that was any more successful.

Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

And then the trouble started. The perfect site to illustrate our discussion popped into my memory through an alcohol-induced haze. Someone had sent me the link years back. It takes the viewer, by zooming in by the power of 10, from the farthest reaches of the known universe to our galaxy, solar system, earth, and then (unavoidably) the American East coast.

But it doesn`t stop there. Instead, it continues its journey into the leaf of the tree, enlarging its cells, right down to the very matter that forms the building blocks of the atom. It`s a pretty impressive site, guaranteed to give you that funny feeling in your tummy as you play around with the different enlargements, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

My friend, fortunately, possesses an ADSL connection at home, so we all trouped through to his PC and began entering appropriate search terms into Google.

Unfortunately, all permutations of "zoom, factor 10, galaxy, universe, earth, tree, leaf, cell, atom", stubbornly yielded too many results for it to be worth anyone`s time to spend sifting through them.

Except for stubborn old me. I continued long after my most devoted observers had trickled away. And still nothing.

After about half an hour of determined searching, I had a brainwave. I thought that since I obviously wasn`t speaking a language that Google could understand, I would try speaking to Yahoo, and see if that was any more successful.

I entered in the Yahoo.com URL, my fingers aching at the unfamiliar keystrokes, and typed in my string of search terms. To my eternal (and I use this term well-researched) astonishment, there, as the first result returned, was my Web site.

I skipped delightedly out to tell my friends, who had reconvened once more on the outside porch, despite the unsummery weather we`d been having. They were impressed with the fact that I had managed to find such an elusive Web page, and one guy asked what search criteria I had finally used.

"I used the same words," I said. "I just used Yahoo."

They were suitably gobsmacked. While I am still a Google devotee, the lesson I learnt from this little escapade is that there is definitely still some value in lesser-used technology, and just because one has been labelled as "better" doesn`t mean it is always so.