Simon's Laws of Google

[simont]

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.

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Did you mean: low-cost reconfigurable ponginator?

Oh, of course, how foolish of me.

...

Wtf is a ponginator?!?

[simont]

I wondered who'd be the first to try that :-) It was a photo-finish between you and drswirly, who notified me through other channels.

[senji.livejournal.com]

It was my first thought, but I was at lunch at the time.

Hmm, why have comments stopped being in GMT?

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Too true, all of it. Except that normally the public post will not actually include the phrases you tried in Google and rejected, so as to make you look even more stupid.

On a slight tangent

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

I'm very thankful for the fact that my "incluide anti-googlebot headers in all homepages" tactic seems to work, as well as that I'm vastly eclipsed by the former US Assistant Secretary for Defence. I don't seem to be desperately googleable under either version of my name..

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

So very, very true :)

[tombee.livejournal.com]

... Annoying.

Although it does pose the question of what counts as public, and how does google know? What if you write out the message and then post it to a single confidant? or two? or just your cat? Having brought this matter to the public I feel that you have a responsibility, nay duty to research exactly where the dividing line between public and private actually lies. And get funding. Always get funding.