Simon's Laws of Google

Dec 02, 2004 11:52


Simon's First Law: If you are searching for a particular type of thing, and you Google for various phrases and none of them comes up with anything particularly helpful, and you eventually give up and post on a public forum with a question along the lines of

Does anybody know where I can find a low-cost reconfigurable sponginator? I've looked everywhere. I tried Googling for ‘sponginator configurable’, ‘sponginator cheap’ and ‘sponginator flexible’ but didn't find anything.

you will invariably find that the phrase you used to describe the item in your question (here ‘low-cost reconfigurable sponginator’) was the one phrase you hadn't tried feeding to Google. Furthermore, when you try it as a last-ditch effort immediately after posting publicly, it will turn up the thing you were looking for as the first hit.

Simon's Second Law: Even if you compose one iteration of your question and don't post it publicly, and instead copy and paste the description out of it in the hope of foiling Simon's First Law, you will mysteriously happen to choose a different wording again when you make your real public posting, and the First Law will still bite you.

Grrrrrrr.
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